IMAGO MUNDI 7 



be that some future historian, chronicling the stages of human 

 development, will write : 



" It was at about the beginning of the twentieth century 

 that man attained at last a true picture of the world came 

 to know, in brief, the cosmos as it is. It was at about this 

 time that he came to perceive the eternal round of matter in 

 the universe the coalescence of vague and formless nebular 

 masses into suns and satellites, their slow refrigeration into dark 

 bodies, with the transient appearance of life, their dissipation 

 again into primitive nebula through the incessant collisions to 

 which they are subject. 



" It was then that he came definitely to conceive the whole 

 scheme of world formation as a mechanical process, following 

 simple and well-understood laws ; likewise that the incessant 

 destruction of worlds is the result of a larger but still purely 

 mechanical process. 



" It was at about the same time that he came to recognise 

 that the germs of life are being driven each whither from one 

 planet and one world system to another, under the pressure of 

 light that it is in this manner that sterile planets are fertilised ; 

 that the varied life of these vast globes springs up under 

 appropriate material conditions and in response to simple 

 physical or chemical stimuli ; that the races of intelligent beings, 

 with all their attendant creations of civilisation, their art, 

 literatures, sciences, institutions, are part and parcel of this 

 same mechanical or physical process, and like the hills or the 

 suns, like worlds or atoms, are the fleeting and mysterious 

 manifestations of that eternal we-know-not-what, that under- 

 lying reality which is back of all phenomena, whose nature it 

 is not given to the conscious intelligence, part and product of 

 it like the rest, to know. 



" In larger phrase, it was at this period that the more in- 

 structed among men came definitively to regard the universe as 

 a cyclic process that is to say, as an unceasing machine, with 

 no beginning and without an end. 



" This result came as the culmination of a period of un- 

 paralleled intellectual activity, dating from the discovery of the 

 New World and the appearance of a work by a Polish astronomer, 

 wherein the true character of our immediate solar system was 

 first adequately set forth. The accidental discovery of the 

 telescope following shortly after placed in the hands of the 



