222 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE 



ocre investigator. The kingdom of science, then, cometh 

 not by observation and experiment alone, but is completed 

 bj fixing the roots of observation and experiment in a 

 Tegion inaccessible to both, and in dealing with which we 

 are forced to fall back upon the picturing power of the 

 mind. 



Passing the boundary of experience, therefore, does 

 not, in the abstract, constitute a sufficient ground for cen- 

 sure. There must have been something in my particular 

 mode of crossing it which provoked this tremendous 

 *' chorus of dissent." 



Let us calmly reason the point out. I hold the nebular 

 theory as it was held by Kant, Laplace, and William Her- 

 schel, and as it is held by the best scientific intellects of 

 to-day. According to it, our sun and planets were once 

 diffused through space as an impalpable haze, out of 

 which, by condensation, came the solar system. What 

 caused the haze to condense? Loss of heat. What 

 rounded the sun and planets? That whicb^ rounds a tear 

 — molecular force. For eons, the immensity of which 

 overwhelms man's conceptions, the earth was unfit to 

 maintain what we call life. It is now covered with visible 

 living things. They are not formed of matter different 

 from that of the earth around them. They are, on the 

 contrary, bone of its bone, and flesh of its flesh. How 

 were they introduced? Was life implicated in the nebula 

 — as part, it may be, of a vaster and wholly Unfathomable 

 Life; or is it the work of a Being standing outside the 

 nebula, who fashioned it, and vitalized it; but whose own 

 origin and ways are equally past finding out? As far as 

 the eye of science has hitherto ranged through nature, 

 no intrusion of purely creative power into any series of 



