Complete Essays, Literary Criticism, Cryptography, Autography, Translations & Letters
limits of mere Nature — that is to say, of Secondary Cause — a solution of the phenomenon of tangential velocity. This latter they attribute directly to a First Cause — to God. The force which carries a stellar body around its primary they assert to have originated in an impulse given immediately by the finger — this is the childish phraseology employed — by the finger of Deity itself. In this view, the planets, fully formed, are conceived to have been hurled from the Divine hand to a position in the vicinity of the suns, with an impetus mathematically adapted to the masses, or attractive capacities, of the suns themselves. An idea so grossly unphilosophical, although so supinely adopted, could have arisen only from the difficulty of otherwise accounting for the absolutely accurate adaptation, each to each, of two forces so seemingly independent, one of the other, as are the gravitating and tangential. But it should be remembered that, for a long time, the coincidence between the moon’s rotation and her sidereal revolution — two matters seemingly far more independent than those now considered — was looked upon as positively miraculous; and there was a strong disposition, even among astronomers, to attribute the marvel to the direct and continual agency of God; who, in this case, it was said, had found it necessary to interpose, specially, among His general laws, a set of subsidiary regulations, for the purpose of forever concealing from mortal eyes the glories, or perhaps the horrors, of the other side of the Moon — of that mysterious hemisphere which has always avoided, and must perpetually avoid, the telescopic scrutiny of mankind. The advance of Science, however, soon demonstrated — what to the philosophical instinct needed no demonstration — that the one movement is but a portion — something more, even, than a consequence — of the other.
For my part, I have no patience with fantasies at once so timorous, so idle, and so awkward. They belong to the veriest Cowardice of thought. That Nature and the God of Nature are distinct, no thinking being can long doubt. By the former we imply merely the laws of the latter. But with the very idea of God, omnipotent, omniscient, we entertain, also, the idea of the infallibility of his laws. With Him there being neither Past nor Future — with Him all being Now — do we not insult Him in supposing His laws so contrived as not to provide for every possible contingency? or, rather, what idea can we have of any possible contingency, except that it is at once a result and a manifestation of His laws? He who, divesting himself of prejudice, shall have the rare courage to think absolutely for himself, cannot fail to arrive, in the end, at the condensation of laws into Law — cannot fail of reaching the conclusion that each law of Nature is dependent at all points upon all other laws, and that all are but consequences of one primary exercise of the Divine Volition. Such is the principle of the Cosmogony which, with all necessary deference, I here venture to suggest and to maintain.
In this view, it will be seen that, dismissing as frivolous, and even impious, the fancy of the tangential force having been imparted to the planets immediately, by “the finger of God,” I consider this force as originating in the rotation of the stars; this rotation as brought about by the in-rushing of the primary atoms, towards their respective centres of aggregation; this in-rushing as the consequence of the law of Gravity; this law as but the mode in which is necessarily manifested the tendency of the atoms to return into imparticularity; this tendency as but the inevitable reaction of the first and most sublime of acts — that act by which a God, self-existing and alone existing, became all things at once, through dint of His volition, while all things were thus constituted a portion of God.
The radical assumptions of this discourse suggest to me, and in fact imply, certain important modifications of the Nebular Theory as given by Laplace. The efforts of the repulsive power I have considered as made for the purpose of preventing contact among the atoms, and thus as made in the ratio of the approach to contact — that is to say, in theratio of condensation.12 In other words, Electricity, with its involute phenomena, heat, light, and magnetism, is to be understood as proceeding as condensation proceeds, and, of course, inversely, as density proceeds, or the cessation to condense. Thus the Sun, in the process of its consolodation, must soon, in developing repulsion, have become excessively heated — incandescent: and we can perceive how the operation of discarding its rings must have been materially assisted by the slight incrustation of its surface consequent on cooling. Any common experiment shows us how readily a crust, of the character suggested, is separated, through heterogeneity, from the interior mass. But, on every successive rejection of the crust, the new surface would appear incandescent as before; and the period, at which it would again become so far incrusted as to be readily loosened and discharged, may well be imagined as exactly coincident with that at which a new effortwould be needed, by the whole mass, to restore the equilibrium of its two forces, disarranged through condensation. In other words, — by the time the electric influence (Repulsion) has prepared the surface for rejection, we are to understand that the gravitating influence (Attraction) is precisely ready to reject it. Here, then, as everywhere, The Body and The Soul walk hand in hand.
These ideas are empirically confirmed at all points. Since condensation can never, in any body, be considered as absolutely at an end, we are warranted in anticipating that, whenever we have an opportunity of testing the matter, we shall find indications of resident luminosity in all the stellar bodies — moons and planets as well as suns. That our Moon is strongly self-luminous we see at her every total eclipse, when, if not so, she would disappear. On the dark part of the satellite, too, during her phases, we often observe flashes like our own Auroras; and that these latter, with our various other so-called electrical phenomena, without reference to any more steady radiance, must give our Earth a certain appearance of luminosity to an inhabitant of the Moon, is quite evident. In fact, we should regard all the phenomena referred to as mere manifestations, in different moods and degrees, of the Earth’s feebly-continued condensation.
If my views are tenable, we should be prepared to find the newer planets — that is to say, those nearer the Sun — more luminous than those older and more remote:— and the extreme brilliancy of Venus (on whose dark portions, during her phases, the Auroras are frequently visible) does not seem to be altogether accounted for by her mere proximity to the central orb. She is no doubt vividly self-luminous, although less so than Mercury: while the luminosity of Neptune may be comparatively nothing.
Admitting what I have urged, it is clear that, from the moment of the Sun’s discarding a ring, there must be a continuous diminution both of his heat and light, on account of the continuous incrustation of his surface; and that a period would arrive — the period immediately previous to a new discharge — when a very material decrease of both light and heat must become apparent. Now, we know that tokens of such changes are distinctly recognizable. On the Melville islands, to adduce merely one out of a hundred examples, we find traces of ultra tropical vegetation — of plants that never could have flourished without immensely more light and heat than are at present afforded by our Sun to any portion of the surface of the Earth. Is such vegetation referable to an epoch immediately subsequent to the whirling-off of Venus? At this epoch must have occurred to us our greatest access of solar influence; and, in fact, this influence must then have attained its maximum, — leaving out of view, of course, the period when the Earth itself was discarded, the period of its mere organization.
Again:— we know that there exist non-luminous suns — that is to say, suns whose existence we determine through the movements of others, but whose luminosity is not sufficient to impress us. Are these suns invisible merely on account of the length of time elapsed since their discharge of a planet? And yet again:— may we not — at least in certain cases — account for the sudden appearances of suns, where none had been previously suspected, by the hypothesis that, having rolled with incrusted surfaces throughout the few thousand years of our astronomical history, each of these suns, in whirling off a new secondary, has at length been enabled to display the glories of its still incandescent interior? To the well-ascertained fact of the proportional increase of heat as we descend into the Earth, I need of course, do nothing more than refer; it comes in the strongest possible corroboration of all that I have said on the topic now at issue.
In speaking not long ago, of the repulsive or electrical influence, I remarked that “the important phenomena of vitality, consciousness, and thought, whether we observe