472 The Possibility of a Future Life. (October, 
IV. THE POSSIBILITY OF A FUTURE Liaee 
Cea even in this self-applauding nineteenth cen- 
tury, is the amount of man’s ignorance, and over 
much that he is supposed to know there brood not a 
few clouds of difficulty and doubt. Still it cannot be denied 
that we have made some progress. In certain directions at 
least we have been able to trace out the limits within which 
the knowable is included. Even concerning the origin 
of things,—confessedly one of the most difficult of all 
imaginable questions—if we have not come to the ex- 
act truth we have been able to narrow the number of con- 
ceivable hypotheses and to strike out for ever not a few 
errors. A century ago it was still possible for any one 
so disposed to maintain that the earth and the sun as we 
now see them had existed from all eternity, and would con- 
tinue such as they are for ever and ever. His views would 
of course have been denounced by theologians as heretical, 
and as opposed to the Christian code of Revelation, but on 
purely scientific grounds and by purely scientific methods he 
could not have been fairly confuted. Now, from our re- 
searches into the attributes of Force, no less than from 
geological investigations, all this is changed. We know that 
neither sun nor earth can have existed from all eternity. 
That both had an origin in time, and that both, in time, 
must come to an end, are truths as firmly grasped by men of 
science as is the rotation of the planets. We can no longer 
conceive of the sun as an infinite source of force which can 
go on for ever pouring light and heat into space without 
being exhausted. Nor have we now any longer a warrant 
for regarding it, according to the clever device of some literal 
interpreters of the Mosaic cosmogony, as a mere light- 
bearer—as a body dark and cold per se, but specially invested 
some time after its coming into existence with a luminous and 
thermic external stratum, or ‘‘ photosphere.”’ Nor if, leaving 
earth and sun out of the question, we turn our attention to 
the distant stars, do we fail there also to recognise marks of 
a beginning and an end. We see stars of a pure white 
lustre, others which, like our own sun, burn with a dimmer 
and yellower fire, and others darker still, which pour out a 
radiance coppery-red or greenish-blue. We have even within 
the short space of our scientific annals records of stars 
which have grown less bright, or which, like the lost Pleiad, 
have become invisible. We read of stars which have 
* The Unseen Universe; or, Physical Speculations on a Future State. 
London: Macmillan and Co. 
