Our solar system, with its
harmonies, is seen now as but one passing case of a certain sort
of moving equilibrium in the heavens, realized by a local
accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds where no life can
exist. In a span of time which as a cosmic interval will count
but as an hour, it will have ceased to be. The Darwinian notion
of chance production, and subsequent destruction, speedy or
deferred, applies to the largest as well as to the smallest
facts. It is impossible, in the present temper of the scientific
imagination, to find in the driftings of the cosmic atoms,
whether they work on the universal or on the particular scale,
anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing,
achieving no proper history, and leaving no result. Nature has no
one distinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible
to feel a sympathy. In the vast rhythm of her processes, as the
scientific mind now follows them, she appears to cancel herself.
The books of natural theology which satisfied the intellects of
our grandfathers seem to us quite grotesque,[334] representing,
as they did, a God who conformed the largest things of nature to
the paltriest of our private wants.
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