THE SOURCE OF COSMIC AL ENERGY 15 



that of a struggle, still largely internecine rather than 

 co-operative, for a miserably inadequate allowance of 

 energy. He looks back across the gulf of time from 

 the day of the nameless and forgotten savage, who 

 first discovered the art of kindling a fire, to himself, 

 his logical descendant, master of a world largely 

 nourished by the energy of fuel, and humming with 

 the music of inanimate machinery. He turns his 

 thoughts downward into the earth and wonders how 

 long the source of his new life will hold out. He 

 looks up once more at the unchanging stars and 

 realises, as one who before has been but blind, that 

 the immeasurable interval that separates him from 

 the hidden sources which bear the universe along, is 

 no immeasurable interval of space, whatever it may 

 be of future time. The main stream sweeps past his 

 doors, and the great gulf that yawns between him and 

 the consummation of his emancipation looks small 

 enough compared with the gulf that yawns behind. 



No better illustration could be chosen of the spirit 

 of absolute detachment from practical affairs, in 

 which the highest and most practical knowledge is 

 won, than the familiar history of the march of events 

 which, in the closing decade of the nineteenth century 

 and the opening years of the twentieth, revealed the 

 immanence and accessibility of cosmical energy. To 

 spend a feverish life in the attempt to transmute 

 base-metal into gold, or to discover the secret of 

 perpetual motion, would be to tread a well-trodden 

 highway leading nowhere. But to exhibit a divine 

 curiosity in an abstruse phenomenon, such as the 

 rays given out by fluorescent substances, and whether 

 any of them, like the X-rays, are able to penetrate an 

 opaque material, to follow nature rather than to lead, 

 and to win a grain of knowledge for the communism 

 of science, is to stumble upon secrets such as these 

 unawares. 



