Nihilism had no
bottom. For thousands of years every philosopher had stood on the
shore of this sunless sea, diving for pearls and never finding
them. All had seen that, since they could not find bottom, they
must assume it. The Church claimed to have found it, but, since
1450, motives for agreeing on some new assumption of Unity,
broader and deeper than that of the Church, had doubled in force
until even the universities and schools, like the Church and
State, seemed about to be driven into an attempt to educate,
though specially forbidden to do it.
Like most of his generation, Adams had taken the word of
science that the new unit was as good as found. It would not be
an intelligence -- probably not even a consciousness -- but it
would serve. He passed sixty years waiting for it, and at the end
of that time, on reviewing the ground, he was led to think that
the final synthesis of science and its ultimate triumph was the
kinetic theory of gases; which seemed to cover all motion in
space, and to furnish the measure of time. So far as he
understood it, the theory asserted that any portion of space is
occupied by molecules of gas, flying in right lines at velocities
varying up to a mile in a second, and colliding with each other
at intervals varying up to 17,750,000 times in a second. To this
analysis -- if one understood it right -- all matter whatever was
reducible, and the only difference of opinion in science regarded
the doubt whether a still deeper analysis would reduce the atom
of gas to pure motion.
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