BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 1379 



tributory) explanations of the vast solar output of energy, which 

 were offered by Kelvin and his contemporaries, are inadequate ; and 

 that we have now to conceive the enormous disintegration of solar 

 and stellar matter into the energic torrents of radiations which all 

 these suns so demonstrably, and so far measurably, emit; so that 

 Kelvin's "dissipation of energy" reappears in a fresh form, with 

 dissipation of matter as well. 



Enough, however, of these stupendous transformations, even 

 transmutations, of what seemed well-established science, which 

 have been and still are in progress in this current century; with 

 reinterpret ations of our Universe, alike on vastest and on minutest 

 scale, and these in fresh and surprising inter-relations; and on 

 principles revolutionary throughout wellnigh our whole range of 

 past conceptions. It seems time therefore to be facing the cor- 

 responding human and personal question— that of the significance 

 of all this transformation of our ideas regarding the physical world, 

 in relation to our ordinary thought and life. What are the bearings 

 of these, and what may be their effects? How far have we now to 

 readjust — if not even re-form — our long-current ideas of life, and 

 this not only organic but also psychic, not only individual but 

 social? Since every historic religion has been associated with a 

 cosmogony, and these alike have to be considered by philosophy, 

 so again, to the religious mind and to the philosophic alike, this new 

 cosmogony of the mathematical physicists and astronomers is 

 insistent and even clamant for consideration. 



These pages are indeed being written the day after the close of a 

 ten days' symposium (one of the notably active "Decadis" held each 

 long vacation at Pontigny) , in which a series of masterly expositions 

 by an eminent astro-physicist and mathematician, peculiarly at 

 home in the above-indicated fields of inquiry and progress, and 

 supported by mathematical and other expert colleagues, have been 

 eagerly and actively discussed: and this especially by humanists, 

 from historians of thought in its changes and controversies, to 

 philosophers of kindred interests, and from thinkers on comparative 

 religion, to teachers who have to meet the varied inquiries of their 

 students, by turns touching all these fields, cosmic and human. 

 Each and all of us have thus been united in the common desire of 

 attaining some consistent and comprehensive conception of the 

 Universe — an "Imago Mundi" — and of discerning its bearings on 

 the life and thought of our times. A difficult matter, yet one which 

 no healthy and active mind can be content to abandon to mere 

 negation, or to indifference. Hence the slow and difficult acceptance 

 of the Copernican theory, and of the teaching of Galileo, was care- 

 fully discussed, and with fresh historic light. The last century's 

 difficulties of readjustment, in face not only of the rise of geology, 

 and the proof of the antiquity of man, but also the doctrine of 



