254 THE UNIVERSE 



is the telescope of futurity and the microscope of 

 past centuries. 



I am a great believer in imagination or ideality 

 as the highest gift of Deity, and accept Napoleon's 

 statement that "imagination rules the world." I 

 believe no man can be a great astronomer without 

 it, and the tallest and broadest enlightened imagina- 

 tion will naturally have the best conception of the 

 complicated motion and grandeur of the universe. 

 Tyndal in an address at Liverpool in 1870, said, 

 " There are tories even in science who regard imagi- 

 nation as a faculty to be feared and avoided rather 

 than to be employed. In fact, without this power 

 our knowledge of nature would be a mere tabula- 

 tion of coexistence and sequences ; the soul of force 

 would be dislodged from our universe; casual re- 

 lations would disappear, and with them that science 

 which binds the facts of nature to an organic 

 whole." 



This is nobly and truly said, for all progress is 

 heralded by theorization ; which is an intelligible 

 explanation of things, and serves to relate cause and 

 effect. It distinguishes the human being from the 

 animal, the civilized from the savage, the wise and 

 learned from the ignorant and foolish. Herbert 

 Spencer said, "In the formation of a theory we have 

 the highest condition of the human mind." And 

 Holder, in his life of Darwin, says, "Darwin was 

 greater than others, because he had the genius of 

 scientific hypothesis." Therefore I am proud of Prof. 

 Newcomb's hypothesis of the cause and manner 

 of the death of the solar system, though I do not 

 accept his theory or his conclusions. I am glad he 

 is not one of those scientists, who said in the New 



