ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE 



hour other forms emerge, till man himself emerges 

 as the culmination of a long line of lowly forms, 

 many vestiges of which still cling to him. But the 

 world is no more for man than for the mice and ver- 

 min that pester him. It is for all. 



The mystery back of all — what shall we say of 

 it? And the good and the evil that are so inextricably 

 blended with it — what of them? 



VII. BAFFLING TRUTHS 



The grand movements of Nature, both in the heav- 

 ens and in the earth, are on such a scale of time and 

 distance that without the aid of science we could 

 get little or no hint of them. Immeasurably slow and 

 slight they are, according to our standards. The 

 stars are fixed points in the sky to our unaided 

 vision. Throughout the whole historic period they 

 have shown little or no change in their relative posi- 

 tions, though they are moving in varying directions 

 at the rate of many miles a second. Come back in a 

 thousand years and there is no change; in thirty or 

 forty thousand years, and changes of place might be 

 barely perceptible to an unaided eye. Not till hun- 

 dreds of thousands of years would Orion, or the 

 Big Dipper, have become noticeably distorted, and 

 probably not till millions of years would the heav- 

 ens present combinations of stars forming new con- 

 stellations. The Pole Star will after millions of years 

 probably drift far from its present position, and the 



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