THE END OF THE MACHINE 465 



It may be that the human race has yet a long time to run, 

 compared with the relative brevity of its past. It may be that 

 human achievement has hardly begun. Be that as it may, it 

 will one day be finished. 



So far as we can now perceive, human civilisation is but a 

 flutter of consciousness amid the wide cycle of life that sweeps 

 through from lichea and bacterium to saurian monster and 

 back again. And the cycle of life is but an evanescent moment 

 in the history of the globe. The history of the globe is in its 

 turn but an evanescent moment in the cycle of the stars ; suns 

 glow for a little time, and planets bear their fruitage of plants 

 and animals and men, then turn for aeons in a drear and icy 

 lifelessness. We may change the moving lines of the poet 

 slightly :- 



" The earth hath bubbles as the water has, 

 And life is of them." 



Such is the cosmic order so far as the Book of Revelation is 

 complete. That revelation has dissipated our childish dreams, 

 it has shattered our childish faiths. So far as the outer world 

 is intelligible to us, the immediate portion in which we live our 

 lives is simply a machine, so orderly and compact, so simple in 

 construction, that we may reckon its past and gauge something 

 of its future with almost as much certitude as that of a dynamo 

 or a water-wheel. In its motions there is no uncertainty, no 

 mystery, save the eternal mystery which will for ever shroud the 

 underlying reality. This is the first fact which modern science 

 has to offer to the philosophic mind. 



Accepting cosmos as a machine, dominated by simple 

 mechanical laws, we still pursue our lives as if human destiny 

 were the subject of human control. We may accept the 

 mechanical necessity of day and night, the change of the seasons, 

 the variations of climate throughout long periods. They are 

 the inevitable results of the planetary mechanism. To this 

 much of the idea of mechanism we are accustomed, and in- 

 sensibly reconciled. 



But the wind bloweth where it listeth, the rains cometh, 

 tribes and kingdoms rise and fall. The perception of order in 

 these more intimate phenomena is as yet incomplete. In a 

 volume to follow, I purpose to review the advance of our insight 



2 G 



