XIX
THE UNIVERSE AS AN ORGANISM
[Footnote: Address before the Astronomical and Astrophysical
Society of America, December 29, 1902]
If I were called upon to convey, within the compass of a single
sentence, an idea of the trend of recent astronomical and physical
science, I should say that it was in the direction of showing the
universe to be a connected whole. The farther we advance in
knowledge, the clearer it becomes that the bodies which are
scattered through the celestial spaces are not completely
independent existences, but have, with all their infinite
diversity, many attributes in common.
In this we are going in the direction of certain ideas of the
ancients which modern discovery long seemed to have contradicted.
In the infancy of the race, the idea that the heavens were simply
an enlarged and diversified earth, peopled by beings who could
roam at pleasure from one extreme to the other, was a quite
natural one. The crystalline sphere or spheres which contained all
formed a combination of machinery revolving on a single plan. But
all bonds of unity between the stars began to be weakened when
Copernicus showed that there were no spheres, that the planets
were isolated bodies, and that the stars were vastly more distant
than the planets.
Pages:
374
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398