Page:John Uri Lloyd - Etidorhpa.djvu/136

 planets, and has he not verified predictions concerning their several motions?"

"Yes; but this is simply a study of passing events. The astronomer is no more capable of grasping an idea that reaches into an explanation of the origin of motion, than the chemist or physicist, from exact scientific data, can account for the creation of matter. Give him any amount of material at rest, and he can not conceive of any method by which motion can disturb any part of it, unless such motion be mass motion communicated from without, or molecular motion, already existing within. He accounts for the phases of present motion in heavenly bodies, not for the primal cause of the actual movements or intrinsic properties they possess. He can neither originate a theory that will permit of motion creating itself, and imparting itself to quiescent matter, nor imagine how an atom of quiescent matter can be moved, unless motion from without be communicated thereto. The astronomer, I assert, can neither from any data at his command postulate nor prove the beginning nor the end of the reverberating motion that exists in his solar system, which is itself the fragment of a system that is circulating and revolving in and about itself, and in which, since the birth of man, the universe he knows has not passed the first milestone in the road that universe is traveling in space immensity.

"The mathematician starts a line from an imaginary point that he informs us exists theoretically without occupying any space, which is a contradiction of terms according to his human acceptation of knowledge derived from scientific experiment, if science is based on verified facts. He assumes that straight lines exist, which is a necessity for his calculation; but such a line he has never made. Even the beam of sunshine, radiating through a clear atmosphere or a cloud bank, widens and contracts again as it progresses through the various mediums of air and vapor currents, and if it is ever spreading and deflecting can it be straight? He begins his study in the unknown, it ends with the unknowable.

"The biologist can conceive of no rational, scientific beginning to life of plant or animal, and men of science must admit the fact. Whenever we turn our attention to nature's laws and nature's substance, we find man surrounded by the infinity that