PAUSING- ON THE BRINK. 
139 
tion wounded and seized upon him. If Pascal saw an imaginary abyss 
opening before him, what would happen to this Dutch Pascal, who saw 
the real abyss and the limitless profundity of the unexpected world ? 
It was not a matter of a decreasing scale of abstract greatnesses or of 
inorganic atoms, but of the successive envelopment and prodigious 
movements of beings which are the one in the other. For the little we 
see, each animal is a tiny planet, a small world inhabited by animals 
still more diminutive, which in their turn are inhabited by others very 
much smaller. And this, too, without end or rest, except from the 
powerlessness of our senses and the imperfection of optical science. 
All men now began to fathom, and incessantly toil in, that infinity 
which the hand of Swammerdam had opened up to them. From that 
time Europe laboured therein with diverse aims. Leuwenhoek, pre¬ 
cipitating himself upon it, discovered and conquered new worlds. The 
Italian positivist, Malpighi, showed perhaps the highest boldness. He 
proved that the insect has a heart—a heart which beats like man’s. 
Some venture even to endow it with a soul. Swammerdam, who 
was living then, was terrified by the fact. He drew back affrighted 
from the declivity; he wished to keep his footing, and was fain to 
doubt the existence of the heart. 
It seemed to him that the science to which he had given the first 
impulse, which he had launched on the flood of his discoveries, was 
conducting him to something great and terrible which he shrank from 
seeing: like one who, adrift on the enormous sea of fresh water which 
dashes headlong in the Niagara Falls, perceives himself impelled by a 
calm but invincible and mighty movement—whither ? He will not, 
and he dare not, think ! 
