Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/268

Rh the midst of a chaos of confused tendencies. Therefore progress on this planet for a few thousands or millions of years indicates nothing about any true harmony between nature and morality.

Let us call attention to one aspect, well-known, yet often neglected in recent discussions of a few familiar facts. Modern science is justly sure of physical evolution, but is no less sure that evolution on this planet is a process that began at a period distant by a finite and in fact by a not very great time from the present moment. That our planet was a nebulous mass at a date at most somewhere between twenty millions and one hundred millions of years ago, we have all heard, and we have also had explained to us some of the proofs of this fact. Our planet is still imperfectly cooled. At a comparatively recent period in the history of this stellar universe, this little point of it was a spheroid of glowing vapor, from which the moon had not yet been separated. The present heat of the earth is an indication of its youth. Furthermore, what our planet is to become in time, the moon itself tells us, having cooled, by reason of its small size, more rapidly than we have done. Cold and dead, waterless, vaporless, that little furrowed mass of rock desolately rolls through its slow days, looking with passionless stare at our stormy, ardent earth, full of motion and of suffering. What that mass is, our earth shall become. And progress here will cease with the tides. All these are the commonplaces of popular science. Progress then, as we know it here, is a fact of transient significance. Physical nature