Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/138

132 well as they do now. But there are hundreds of planetary bodies now known that were then not known. So a few hundred worlds more of ours won't make any difference. La Place knew of about only thirty bodies in this solar system: about six hundred are recognized now What are the discoveries of geology and biology to a theologian?

His formulas still work out as well as they ever did.

If the Law of Gravitation could be stated as a real utterance, it might be a real resistance to us. But we are told only that gravitation is gravitation. Of course to an intermediatist, nothing can be defined except in terms of itself—but even the orthodox, in what seems to me to be the innate premonitions of realness, not founded upon experience, agree that to define a thing in terms of itself is not real definition. It is said that by gravitation is meant the attraction of all things proportionately to mass and inversely as the square of the distance. Mass would mean inter attraction holding together final particles, if there were final particles. Then, until final particles be discovered, only one term of this expression survives, or mass is attraction. But distance is only extent of mass, unless one holds out for absolute vacuum among planets, a position against which we could bring a host of data. But there is no possible means of expressing that gravitation is anything other than attraction. So there is nothing to resist us but such a phantom as—that gravitation is the gravitation of all gravitations proportionately to gravitation and inversely as the square of gravitation. In a quasi-existence, nothing more sensible than this can be said upon any so-called subject—perhaps there are higher approximations to ultimate sensibleness. Nevertheless we seem to have a feeling that with the System against us we have a kind of resistance here. We'd have felt so formerly, at any rate: I think the Dr. Grays and Prof. Hitchcocks have modified our trustfulness toward indistinguishability. As to the perfection of this System that quasi-opposes us and the infallibility of its mathematics—as if there could be real mathematics in a mode of seeming where twice two are not four—we've been told over and over of their vindication in the discovery of Neptune.

I'm afraid that the course we're taking will turn out like every other development. We began humbly, admitting that we're of the damned

But our eyebrows

Just a faint flicker in them, or in one of them, every time we