THE OVERCOMING OF APPEARANCES 31 



afternoon. These are the nebulae, the fire-mists, from which 

 new worlds are born the spawn of cosmos ! Could we stand 

 by, and time for us stand still awhile, then here within these 

 primal wombs we might watch the slow gestation and parturi- 

 tion of a race of Suns and Saturns, Nep tunes, Jupiters, Mars, 

 and earths perchance the next cosmic generation to our own. 



We reach here the astronomer's last word ; the Book of 

 Revelation, for the moment, ends. But what visions it con- 

 jures what a distance from Chaldea we have come ! Weird 

 welter of worlds and races and terms and times, could we con- 

 ceive of some vast being to whom our globe would appear but 

 a mote floating in the air, and seen only in the pathway of a 

 sunbeam, what a curious spectacle the universe would offer to 

 his view ! A chaotic, whirling, wildly dancing swarm of fire-flies 

 the suns would seem, each glowing its little turn and dropping 

 away, while another lights its lamp ; swarms and swarms and 

 never an end ; no heaven above, no solid earth below, no foot- 

 hold in infinitude. 



So in the world of thought the soul of man. Visions of 

 science ? 'tis a nightmare rather, like that vertigo of dreams 

 wherein we seem falling through some vast abyss, and pale and 

 trembling wake to find our horror but a figment of the mind. 

 So we may wake. 



Led thus by slow and stumbling steps to the summit at 

 last, whereon he looked out, as it were, upon a universe of un- 

 ceasing motion, without apparent bounds in space or time, man 

 could but feel as we feel still, a profound and depressing sense 

 of his littleness, his nothingness. Yet may he still reflect, with 

 Pascal, that it is he who sees, he who is conscious of the wonder, 

 and not the wonder itself ; that the universe seems mindless, 

 blind, and dumb ; in a way this world about him, so inimitably 

 vast, is but the creation of his own senses. If he like, he may 

 dream with good Bishop Berkeley that it is all a dream. 



Yet comforting as may be the legerdemain of an idealised 

 idealism, there are still few among us who, whatever they may 

 think regarding the problem of the external world, doubt that 

 they themselves exist ; and it needs no long pursuit of the 

 will-o'-the-wisps of the Ich and non-Ich to assure oneself that 

 in the unguarded moment we assume that we ourselves have 

 a personality and a being, we let in the whole procession of 

 appearances which come of the six gates of the senses. The 



