56 FROM NEBULA TO NEBULA 



conservation of moment of momentum. It harnesses bul- 

 lets with horses, and pits finite moments against creative 

 gravity. It pretends that an arc is as long as its tangent, 

 that the moon is falling to the earth's limb instead of to- 

 ward its center, that persistent is a synonym for inertial, 

 and that the whole minus an infinite number of times all 

 its parts is still equal to itself. 



Then why, you may ask, has the theory held sway so 

 long! The answer is simple and lies in the nature of man 

 himself, who finds in faith of some kind intellectual as 

 well as religious repose. Just as many honest souls be- 

 lieve in this or that theological dogma under the mis- 

 taken conviction that denial thereof involves a denial of 

 the Christian's God, so do men believe in this inertial 

 theory under the hallucination that to deny it is to sacri- 

 fice the great cosmic principle of Gravitation itself. My 

 system calls for no such sacrifice. 



