COSMIC EXCHANGE OF MATTER AND LIFE 435 



it would possibly continue to grow and grow. Large bodies 

 might thus be built up. 



If this be the secret of the meteorites, and the meteorites in 

 their turn are the nuclei of planets and suns, we possess then a 

 complete picture of the round of the cosmic exchange. We 

 perceive that there is in the universe nothing constant, nothing 

 stable. There is incessant motion, incessant aggregation, in- 

 cessant disaggregation. Conceivably in the coming years the 

 advance of our ultra-physical knowledge will give us an insight 

 into the creation and the concomitant annihilation of what in 

 our present ignorance we term matter. 



Not a little in the recent extensions of physical theory, at 

 the hands of Professor J. J. Thompson, Sir William Ramsay, 

 Rutherford, and their co-workers, suggests that the problem of 

 the creation and annihilation of matter is not transcendent, as 

 up to three or four years ago it was supposed to be. The para- 

 doxical performances of radium, the general phenomena of 

 radio-activity as well, indicate that the process may be in- 

 cessant, and furthermore observable ; what is still more, that 

 its full delineation is at hand. 



This conceivable creation and dissipation of matter would 

 be then, in our present phraseology, a function of energy. The 

 cosmic exchange of matter, alike in large masses and in very 

 small, would be in larger view but a part of that cosmic exchange 

 of energy which was a commonplace before more than the 

 vaguest conceptions of energy had been framed. To the most 

 primitive mind it was evident that every form of earthly life, 

 vegetable alike as animal, was in some sense progeny of the 

 sun. Possibly we may widen the conception to look upon the 

 sun and all its myriad kind, as in some sense centres of projection 

 of a creative energy whose evanescent manifestation is that 

 material world in which we live and part of which we are. 



Our account of the universe in terms of substance and force, 

 the irreconcilable and unescapable antinomies of our human 

 thought, would then be closed. Aside from the ever-interesting 

 details of their interworkings, there would be nothing left for 

 speculation save the everlasting and implacable inquiry of 

 Voltaire doubtless, too, of the Voltaires of thousands of years 

 gone his ironical and impertinent 



" Why is anything ? " 



