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Updated: May 27, 2025
It was like an aurora borealis, a continuous cosmical phenomenon, filling a cavern of sufficient extent to contain an ocean. The vault that spanned the space above, the sky, if it could be called so, seemed composed of vast plains of cloud, shifting and variable vapours, which by their condensation must at certain times fall in torrents of rain.
What this basis of cosmical unity may be in itself, we know not we cannot discover from the idea; we merely know how we ought to employ the idea of this unity, in relation to the systematic operation of reason in the sphere of experience. But, it will be asked again, can we on these grounds, admit the existence of a wise and omnipotent author of the world?
Of the enormous and much-dreaded globe there remained nothing but these fragments carried in all directions, now become asteroids in their turn, some flaming like a sword, some surrounded by a whitish cloud, and others leaving behind them trains of brilliant cosmical dust.
We believe the contradiction receives its explanation in the synthesis already suggested, that above the two processes, the cosmical and ethical, there is another, that of absolute intelligence or mind, energising through them both from first to last, but in widely different ways. In the cosmos, by ways which we describe as non-moral; in us by law, which we recognise as moral.
He was seeking to combine together the facts observed up to that time, when a new incident recalled him briskly to reality. This incident was more than a cosmical phenomenon; it was a threatened danger, the consequence of which might be disastrous in the extreme. Suddenly, in the midst of the ether, in the profound darkness, an enormous mass appeared.
No chance decides what units shall form the planetary core, or what shall feel the sun; what shall be locked in granite and basalt, or shall multiply in plant and in animal. So far as reason can venture to infer from analogy, the cosmical history of every ultimate unit, psychological or physical, is determined just as surely and as exactly as in the Buddhist doctrine of karma.
It had to be proved scientifically, and this Quetelet of Brussels succeeded in doing in December, 1836. A second meteoric revolving system was thus shown to exist. But its establishment was at once perceived to be fatal to the "cosmical cloud" hypothesis of Olmsted.
We have thus seen that the Theory of Cosmical Development is a mere hypothesis, incapable of experimental or historical proof; that the recent progress of scientific discovery has tended to disprove the fundamental assumption on which it rests; and that, even were it admitted as a possible, or, still more, as a plausible explanation of the origin of planets and astral systems, it would not serve to destroy, and scarcely, if at all, to diminish the evidence of Theism.
In general, it will aid the reader to recall that, so far as possible, we hold always to the same sequences of topical treatment of contemporary events; as a rule we treat first the cosmical, then the physical, then the biological sciences. The same order of treatment will be held to in succeeding volumes.
The first great cosmological speculation which has been raised quite above the plane of guesswork by making no other assumption than that of the uniformity of nature, is the well-known Nebular Hypothesis. Every astronomer knows that the earth, like all other cosmical bodies which are flattened at the poles, was formerly a mass of fluid, and consequently filled a much larger space than at present.
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