28 FROM NEBULA TO NEBULA 



sun. No argument can refute them, because they have not the 

 requisite learning to comprehend it, which is no disgrace, but 

 which should make men modest enough to have faith in those who 

 excel them immeasurably. Hence it is the policy of most scien- 

 tific institutions to avoid entirely discussions of these subjects 

 with such correspondents. 



Since the initial publication of this work, in March, 

 1912, many of the ideas therein for the first time present- 

 ed to the world have reappeared in the public prints, but 

 always fugitively, in strange uniforms, and impressed 

 into the service of alien doctrines against which I have 

 taken up arms. This state of affairs leads me to empha- 

 size the truism that a system of philosophy or science, 

 such even as my own, like an automobile or any other 

 complicated mechanical contrivance, is useful and valuable 

 only as an assembled whole. What I have aimed to do, 

 and what I venture to believe I have succeeded in accom- 

 plishing is, in Emerson's pregnant phrase, to reveal the 

 universe "as a transparent law, not a mass of facts"; or, 

 in concreter terms, as an eternal, self-energizing, self- 

 regulating entity, coordinated throughout by a single 

 (necessarily single) underlying dynamical principle 

 GRAVITATION. Some, indeed, may say that I have cast my 

 net too wide ; that I have presumptuously attempted to 

 solve too many problems at one stroke. I myself do not 

 think so ; not, indeed, that I presume to insinuate that my 

 offered solutions are conclusive and final, but because the 

 very nature of my undertaking involves comprehensive 

 treatment. A globe-map of the earth, however slightly 

 filled in, is quite as essential to a correct knowledge of 

 geography as a full complement of scattered maps of de- 

 tail. In this book I seek to compress the universe about 

 us into a single concept, a sort of mental universe-map, as 

 it were, in which the sum of creation may be apprehended 

 as the automatic unit that our intelligence tells us it must 

 be in order to exhibit the infinite harmonies it does. 



The process of building up a science such as astron- 

 omy has often been likened to that of erecting a great 

 cathedral. The resemblance is palpable enough, but there 

 is a contrast which here more deserves our notice. In the 



