The railways alone
approached the carnage of war; automobiles and fire-arms ravaged
society, until an earthquake became almost a nervous relaxation.
An immense volume of force had detached itself from the unknown
universe of energy, while still vaster reservoirs, supposed to be
infinite, steadily revealed themselves, attracting mankind with
more compulsive course than all the Pontic Seas or Gods or Gold
that ever existed, and feeling still less of retiring ebb.
In 1850, science would have smiled at such a romance as this,
but, in 1900, as far as history could learn, few men of science
thought it a laughing matter. If a perplexed but laborious
follower could venture to guess their drift, it seemed in their
minds a toss-up between anarchy and order. Unless they should be
more honest with themselves in the future than ever they were in
the past, they would be more astonished than their followers when
they reached the end. If Karl Pearson's notions of the universe
were sound, men like Galileo, Descartes, Leibnitz, and Newton
should have stopped the progress of science before 1700,
supposing them to have been honest in the religious convictions
they expressed. In 1900 they were plainly forced back; on faith
in a unity unproved and an order they had themselves disproved.
They had reduced their universe to a series of relations to
themselves.
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