OUR PLACE IN SPACE 367 



are as strictly conditioned and as strictly ordered as the march 

 of the planets or the flash of a shooting-star in the skies. 



Let him who revels in the sense of his importance, or him 

 who believes that in the face of the larger concourse of nature 

 our human efforts are more potent than Joshua before the sun 

 as it rose over Gibeon, observe a little the slow turning of the 

 cosmic wheel. Let him learn that his delusions, like those of 

 Joshua, are conditioned in his darkling ignorance and the 

 childish simplicity of his mind. 



Mention has been frequent of the cosmic order and the 

 cosmic structure always, be it understood, with due recogni- 

 tion of the present limitations of our knowledge. Within a 

 few decades a new and larger chapter of astronomy has been 

 opening that may wholly transform our ideas. Its very name 

 is half a paradox ; it deals with worlds unseen, perhaps never 

 to be known to us save as an inference. 



The wonder of the starry realms is not yet dead. 



