EVOLUTION THE MASTER-KEY 



disproved save by the lapse of infinite time during 

 which no disturbance attributable to them was 

 observed in ours. To say that our macrocosm is 

 to die when it may be no more than an atom in a 

 greater whole, to which it is of no more account 

 than a constituent atom of one of your blood cor- 

 puscles is to you, would surely be madness. In- 

 deed, we may venture to say while not forgetting 

 the many instances in which apparently similar 

 assertions have been falsified, as when Comte de- 

 clared that we could never tell whether gravita- 

 tion acts among the stars, or of what they are com- 

 posed that even if the life of the All be finite, we 

 shall never be able to prove it. Radium clocks 

 have been made that will go for a million years; 

 but I believe that the universe was never made 

 and will go forever. 



Herbert Spencer, arguing not from physical 

 facts, but rather from certain principles at which 

 he had arrived such as that of the universality 

 of rhythm declined to accept the view that the 

 cosmos is doomed. This, indeed, goes without say- 

 ing, for such a view of the world-process is quite 

 incompatible with Spencer's First Principles, and, 

 if it be true, evolution is a dream. We may fair- 

 ly inquire, therefore, into such reasons as Spencer 

 can give us against the acceptance of this appalling 

 sentence provisionally pronounced and -already 

 being provisionally withdrawn by contemporary 

 physics. 



After demonstrating the fact that dissolution 

 310 



