THE STRUCTURE OF THE UNIVERSE 387 



None the less he conceives the sidereal creation as finite, 

 and he invites the reader to imagine a vast gulf or medium 

 everywhere extended like a plane, and enclosed between two 

 surfaces, the whole of it spaced with stars. To an eye situated 

 anywhere near the middle point of this plane, it is evident that 

 towards the poles there would be an apparent promiscuity ; 

 but that looking across the plane in either direction the stars 

 would seem crowded together, and thus might readily produce 

 the appearance of the Milky Way. In other words, he con- 

 ceived that the arrangement of the stars may be that of a huge 

 heavily flattened globe, or, as we have since come to think 

 of it, in the shape of a grindstone. He, of course, regarded 

 the sun as the centre of this system ; from it proceeds " that 

 mystic and paternal power productive of all life, light, and 

 the infinity of things." 



These ideas of Wright were caught up by the young Kant, 

 to form, as we shall trace hereafter, the basis of his cosmical 

 theory. A few years later, and quite independently of either 

 Wright or Kant, came the Cosmological Letters on the 

 Arrangement of the World- Structure, from the pen of Johann 

 Heinrich Lambert, contemporary worker in the fields of Laplace 

 and Lagrange. It was beyond doubt a remarkable book. 

 Lambert was at once a mathematician and a poet, with an 

 imagination which outran that of all his predecessors. Even 

 yet our knowledge is quite insufficient to estimate the value 

 of his grandiose conception. It was that of a universe made 

 up of wheels within wheels. His ideas might readily have been 

 suggested by an attentive study of the arrangements of our 

 system. He simply conceived it as the image of the whole. 

 The beginning, that is, the first order, would be that of the 

 planets with their satellites or moons. Next after this would be 

 the sun with its planets. Our sun, with others like it, he 

 imagined as turning about another centre, this in its turn, 

 with others, around yet another ; and so on until the mind, 

 reeling beneath the immensity of such conceptions, will no 

 further go. 



Just as in each of the smaller systems there is a central 

 body grander far than all the rest, so Lambert believed that 

 for all of the larger orders there exists a central orb of corre- 

 sponding magnitude. No such central point, no such massy sun, 

 about which our sun may be turning, was at hand. Lambert 



