Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/486

478 the conviction, apparently implanted at the origin of things, of some real 'First Cause/ of some necessary beginning of our time, space and life, and a conviction that what we call eternity affords time and the universe space for all the evolution of higher life that imperfect human nature aspires to. It will be admitted that, as Goethe says:

 'By eternal laws of Iron Rules, Must all fulfil the cycle of their destiny'

All can see that

 'The times are changed, old systems fall, And new life o'er their ruins dawns;'

yet, as in all past times, new interpretations and adjustments of the beliefs and the creeds of the fathers will be found to reconcile fundamental principles in religion and in morals with the older inspirations and the newer readings of the Book of Nature, and we may unquestionably hope that, in the future as in the past, the newer readings will tend toward evolution of higher thought, nobler life, more perfectly ideal and spiritual philosophy. We may all go with Haeckel and the greatest interpreters of the laws of Nature, and yet may find it possible to look beyond the limits of things seen into 'The Unseen Universe' with no loss of the spiritual.

Haeckel is one of the few, even among scientific men, who accept the necessary, or apparently necessary, conclusions coming of his logic to the very extremity and, in this case, he finds them carrying him to the deduction that there can be no immortal life of the individual soul. Whether this conclusion must follow or not, he is more far-reaching in his deductions relating to physical phenomena, as consequences of the 'Law of Substance,' than any among his predecessors; for he accepts the conclusion that there cannot be a dead eternity and that there must be some return from that swing of the pendulum which, with Sir William Thomson (now Lord Kelvin), left a cold and still universe to eternal death. This he finds absurd and admits the probability that the backward swing will come, during the eternities, through the occasional collision of suns, suns and planets, planet with planet, of binary systems and meteoric masses and star-dust, such as have been actually, not infrequently, seen during our own historic period, by the astronomer at his telescope, and by his ancestor, the astrologer, and even occasionally by the unobservant people of all times. Such a collision is sufficient in its development of thermal energy to reduce the colliding bodies into vapor and to disperse it throughout space in nebula and meteoric matter, and to renew the cycle.

As Haeckel says: The law of the persistence of force proves, also, that the idea of a 'perpetuum mobile' is just as applicable to, and as significant for, the cosmos as a whole, as it is impossible for the isolated action of any part of it. Hence the theory of entropy is likewise