Isaac W. Heysinger

“ When we see the tail of a comet occupying a volume thousands of times greater than that of the sun itself, the question naturally suggests itself, ‘How does it happen that so vast a body can sweep through the solar system without deranging the motion of every planet?’ Conceding even an extreme tenuity to the substance composing so vast a volume, one would still expect its mass to be tremendous. ”

“ Instead of confusion, we find order; instead of complexity, simplicity; instead of discord, harmony; and through all we see the orderly progress of nature with uniform step, from stage to stage, higher and higher, until at last she stands triumphant, the handmaid of creative power, in the very center of the arch of the universe. We have taken the simplest operations which we find in progress around us, and have extended them to larger operations, constantly keeping in view their relevancy and the facts which form their sole support. ”

“ While solar systems may afford in their circling planets a possible dominion for finite life, and in their suns their daily bread; in the infinite and all-embracing realms of space, filled with the potentialities of all created forms, thrilled with the impulses of all creative force, is to be found the unfailing source of all, the dominion of the eternal architect, before whom nature bends the obedient knee, waits to hear his mighty voice, or swiftly runs to do his royal bidding. ”

“ In more rugged and virile form this was precisely the old Mosaic philosophy, the philosophy of the arcana of the Egyptian temples, and of the Vedaic age of the Aryans of India. Where was the radiant center of this unfailing search-light which has poured its broad belt of dazzling brightness down to our day from those old, prehistoric ages?
So De Jouvencel, in his “Genesis according to Science,” says, “We should not place the works of nature on one side and nature on the other. Nature is a work and not a person.” ”

“ The moon, too, and each planet must have its electrosphere, and around the sun’s core we can see the solar electrosphere in its visible glory. Thus, all our planets rotate upon their axes and revolve around the sun, each surrounded by an enormous electrosphere, just as an electrical induction machine is surrounded, when in operation, with an electrosphere of its own, and which, by breaking connection with the conductor which carries away its current, becomes, when shown in a darkened room, clearly visible. ”

“ If, however, we consider, as is generally believed to be the case, the sun itself to be the sole prime source of its visible energy, nothing but difficulty and vague speculation can be looked for on every hand; but by relegating the solar orb to its proper place, and taking as the starting-point the true source of all energy,—to wit, the hidden forces embodied in the vapors or gases of interstellar space,—the whole process and mode of action will logically follow, and obscurity and difficulty together disappear. ”

“ One swift glance into these boundless truths is better for the human soul than the slow passage of whole hopeless centuries, which leave as their inevitable legacy on earth a vast and final catastrophe, in which everything that gave us light and heat and being must perish forever. ”

“ It is like a crowd surging forth in flight from the doors of a building; as the speed of those in front increases to a run, others follow more slowly in the mass, and as these gain speed others continue to follow, while the great mass of laggards still trails along in a lengthening line to the rear. The perception of light is itself merely due to the constitution of the optic apparatus of the observer, which only takes cognizance of vibrations radiated from the middle portion of the scale, just as the ear does with sounds, and not to any actual difference in their mode of production. ”

“ We have found that the “course of nature,” the eternally youthful mother, is the same, whether in spinning a tendril in the garden, in weaving a whirlwind in the atmosphere, or in elaborating from the universal vapors of primordial space a solar system or a galaxy. And it is not a convulsive, spasmodic [348] nature that we find; we do not love to associate great explosions, cataclysms, the destruction of worlds, or the extinction of suns with our ideas of nature. ”

“ Industriously our planets gather their mighty energies from the surrounding springs of space, as one dips water from a crystal stream; we hand it over to our sun, and he, the royal high-priest, sprinkles it in glittering diamond-sprays over all those countless suns and their subject worlds, and they are baptized with an eternal baptism into our common brotherhood and we into theirs. ”

“ Suddenly, with a mighty leap, the pent-up currents would flash across to their opposite electric pole, the auroras would gradually die away, and instantly the molecules of hydrogen would begin to sift out at the solar and those of oxygen at the planetary terminals. The electrical currents driving their furious pathway through the rapidly gathering hydrogen envelope, the sun would first begin to faintly flicker with hazy, nebulous light; the light would gather intensity, and soon flash and glow with energy ”

“ Our familiar planets, Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, the earth, and even our little moon, seem to raise their voices and take actual part in the councils of almighty power, to move about as perpetual benefactors, gathering and spreading beneficence abroad, instead of cowering, a hapless few, like [251] storm-stayed travellers, around the dying embers of our poor old sun, passive recipients of the light and heat and life which we have been taught to believe are slowly sinking into ashes and fading away in eternal darkness and death. ”

“ What principle of conservation of energy is it possible to apply to the vast quantities of light and heat which constantly disappear in the interstellar realms of space? How to account for this enormous emission of solar energy during the long period of time requisite for the development of the earth during its past geological ages. How to explain why the moon always presents the same face to the earth. Why, if the law of gravity prevails there, there are no visible traces of atmosphere or moisture in the moon. ”

“ The principle is that wherever life is possible there we may expect to find life; and surely life is, or has been, or will be possible, not only on the moon, so far as our knowledge of physical conditions can go, but also on some of the other planets. Of course each planet has its life stage, but this applies not only to the earth, but to all the other planets as well, and not only to the planets of our own system, but to those of all other solar systems. ”

“ Everything we know points to the law that energy is as indestructible as matter itself. The heat scattered from the sun exists at least as ethereal vibration, if in no other form. But it is most assuredly true that this energy, so copiously dispensed, is lost to our solar system. There is no form in which it is returned, or in which it can be returned. The energy of the system is as surely declining as the store of energy of the clock declines according as the weight runs down. ”

“ As such a comet in its progress across the heavens passes between us and the stars, those stars are often seen twinkling brilliantly right through the many thousand miles of cometary matter which their rays have to traverse. The lightest haze in our atmosphere would suffice to extinguish the faint gleam of these small stars ”

“ But if we could conceive that all atmospheres, solar and planetary, were suddenly blotted out and forever annihilated, so that these great orbs thenceforth rolled along as they do now, but only as black globes in an ocean of space of Stygian darkness, new atmospheres would at once begin to be formed, and these would soon again surround the sun and planets, precisely like those which now exist. ”

“ We have found that all these theories are alike, in that they recognize the sun itself as the only source of his energy, that his enormous emission of light and heat is almost entirely wasted in empty space, and that this will go on with the same frightful waste until he has squandered his whole patrimony and ends his melancholy career in the poor-house or the dungeon. ”

“ We shall find in the processes concerned with the development of living things the workings of a similar great law, perhaps the same. Wherever there is the possibility of life, there we find life. There seems to be an all-pervading vital tension, so to speak, an energizing force, which drives the evolution and ascent of life forward and upward by successive leaps, as it were, from type to type, from race to race, and even from nation to nation. ”

“ They are rigidly fixed in this position of unstable equilibrium, one balancing the other; but let a single molecule be displaced,—a fragment so tiny that the eye can scarcely see it,—and the molecules, thus thrown out of mutual support against each other, must now rearrange themselves from the ruptured rigid mass, and, like a row of stood-up bricks, each of which thrusts the other forward, with a sudden explosive force the molecules assume their true position of stable equilibrium, but it is at the cost of the whole structure. ”

“ The answer is, that it is not less universal than the law of gravitation and no more so. There is a prevalent popular fallacy that the force of gravity is such that the movements, not only of solar systems, but of whole galaxies, and of all the illimitable systems of galaxies, are under its effective control, and that the whole universe of boundless space acknowledges its overwhelming sway. ”

“ It would be hopeless to attempt expressing in ordinary language the vast distance at which these clusters of stars are situated from us. If we were to reckon it in miles, or even in millions of miles, figures would pile upon figures till in their number all definite idea of their value was lost. We must choose another unit to measure these infinitudes of space,—a unit compared with which the dimensions of our own solar system shrink into absolute nothingness. The velocity of light is such that it would flash fifteen times from pole to pole of our earth between two beats of the pendulum. ”

“ That this enormous mass of attenuated matter should ever have been made to rotate as a whole by any force of attraction, repulsion, or rotation, with a tenuity so great that, if measured by an equal volume of hydrogen gas,—the lightest substance known to us,—it would have furnished material for four hundred thousand such systems as ours, presupposes a resistance so slight that the planets themselves, when coagulated out of such a mass, could never in any conceivable time exhibit retardation from such a source ”

“ If the sun shall ever cease to shine, then it must be certain that there is a term beyond which human existence, or indeed organic existence of any type whatever, cannot any longer endure on the earth. We may say once for all that the sun contains just a certain number of units of heat, actual or potential, and that he is at the present moment shedding that heat around with the most appalling extravagance.” Quoting from Professor Langley, he says, “We feel certain that the incessant radiation from the sun must be producing a profound effect on its stores of energy. ”