4 THE UNFATHOMED UNIVERSE 



the seas of ignorance, so many the straits, that there was 

 as yet no discernment of the coherent continents of 

 knowledge. 



Gradually, however, Man came to himself and grew in 

 knowledge of the empirical order of I^ature. It was a great 

 step when he first recognised the year with its object-lesson 

 of recurrent sequences — a basis from which to observe other 

 practically important uniformities. What a momentous be- 

 ginning the Chaldseans made who first discerned that the 

 multitude of the stars was " not a confused crowd wander- 

 ing at random, but rather a disciplined army '^ ! It was a 

 working knowledge of natural processes, rather than an 

 understanding of them, that was in the first instance built 

 up, and it was correlated, on the one hand, with a still very 

 imperfect mastery of the forces of Nature, and, on the other, 

 with a belief in magic and in the possession of things by 

 spirits — imaginative constructions which are perhaps analo- 

 gous, as Prof. W. E. Ritter suggests, to the materialism and 

 animism of later days. 



§ 2. Growing Recognition of a Scientific Order. 



The empirical order was gradually replaced by a scientific 

 order. Some practical need pressed a question home; im- 

 agination found a clue; measurement or some other form 

 of accurate registration furnished reliable data ; a regularity 

 of sequence was discovered and tested ; a law was formulated. 

 Especially after the foundation-laying work of Galileo, did 

 the scientific reconstruction of the physical world proceed 

 apace. There was a period of the discovery of the ' Forces 

 of Nature ' and of the ^ Laws of Nature ', and a growing 

 clearness. " God said. Let Newton be, and there was 

 light.'^ 



