DISSOLUTION. 



Evolution in detail, advance towards complete quiescence? 

 Is that motionless state called death, which ends Evolution 

 in organic bodies, typical of the universal death in which 

 Evolution at large must end? And have we thus to contem- 

 plate as the outcome of things, a boundless space holding 

 here and there extinct suns, fated to remain for ever with- 

 out further change? 



To so speculative an inquiry, none but a speculative 

 answer is to be expected. Such answer as may be ventured, 

 must be taken less as a positive answer than as a demurrer 

 to the conclusion that the proximate result must be the 

 ultimate result. If, pushing to its extreme the argument 

 that Evolution must come to a close in complete equilibrium 

 or rest, the reader suggests that for aught which appears to 

 the contrary, the Universal Death thus implied will con- 

 tinue indefinitely, it is legitimate to point out how, on 

 carrying the argument still further, we are led to infer a 

 subsequent Universal Life. Let us see what may be as- 

 signed as grounds for inferring this. 



It has been already shown that all equilibration, so far 

 as we can trace it, is relative. The dissipation of a body's 

 motion by communication of it to surrounding matter, solid, 

 liquid, gaseous, and ethereal, brings the body to a fixed 

 position in relation to the matter that abstracts its motion. 

 But all its other motions continue. Further, this motion, 

 the' disappearance of which causes relative equilibration, is 

 not lost but simply transferred. Whether it is directly 

 transformed into insensible motion, as happens in the case 

 of the Sun; or, whether, as in the sensible motions going 

 on around us, it is directly transformed into smaller sensible 

 motions, and these into still smaller, until they become in- 

 sensible, matters not. In every instance the ultimate result 

 is, that whatever motion of masses is lost, re-appears as 



foregoing chapter. While substantially the same as before, the argument 

 has been in some places abbreviated and in other places enforced by addi- 

 tional matter. 



i 



