John William Draper

“ Nor does the development, the metamorphosis, end here; it requires many years for the body to reach its full perfection, many years for the mind. A culmination is at length reached, and then there is a decline. I need not picture its mournful incidents—the corporeal, the intellectual enfeeblement. Perhaps there is little exaggeration in saying that in less than a century every human being on the face of the globe, if not cut off in an untimely manner, has passed through all these changes.
Is there for each of us a providential intervention as we thus pass from stage to stage of life? ”

“ Is the world, then, governed by law or by providential interventions, abruptly breaking the proper sequence of events?
To complete our view of this question, we turn finally to what, in one sense, is the most insignificant, in another the most important, case that can be considered. Do human societies, in their historic career, exhibit the marks of a predetermined progress in an unavoidable track? Is there any evidence that the life of nations is under the control of immutable law? ”

“ Since all the motions that we witness taking place on the surface of the earth soon come to an end, we are led to infer that rest is the natural condition of things. We have made, then, a very great advance when we have become satisfied that a body is equally indifferent to rest as to motion, and that it equally perseveres in either state until disturbing forces are applied. Such disturbing forces in the case of common movements are friction and the resistance of the air. ”

“ He was the first to give clear ideas respecting gravity. He says every particle of matter will rest until it is disturbed by some other particle—that the earth attracts a stone more than the stone attracts the earth, and that bodies move to each other in proportion to their masses; that the earth would ascend to the moon one-fifty-fourth of the distance, and the moon would move toward the earth the other fifty-three. He affirms that the moon’s attraction causes the tides, and that the planets must impress irregularities on the moon’s motions. ”

“ If, on physical principles, we account for minor meteorological incidents, mists and clouds, is it not permissible for us to appeal to the same principle in the origin of world-systems and universes, which are only clouds on a space-scale somewhat larger, mists on a time-scale somewhat less transient? Can any man place the line which bounds the physical on one side, the supernatural on the other? ”

“ A periodical sun would act as a mere perturbation in the gradual decline of heat. The perturbations of the planetary motions are a confirmation, not a disproof, of gravity.
Now, such a decline of temperature must have been attended by innumerable changes of a physical character in our globe. Her dimensions must have diminished through contraction, the length of her day must have lessened, her surface must have collapsed, and fractures taken place along the lines of least resistance; the density of the sea must have increased, its volume must have become less ”

“ But this conclusion is the essential principle of Stoicism—that Grecian philosophical system which, as I have already said, offered a support in their hour of trial and an unwavering guide in the vicissitudes of life, not only to many illustrious Greeks, but also to some of the great philosophers, statesmen, generals, and emperors of Rome; a system which excluded chance from every thing, and asserted the direction of all events by irresistible necessity, to the promotion of perfect good; a system of earnestness, sternness, austerity, virtue—a protest in favor of the common-sense of mankind. ”

“ Since it is demonstrably certain that lifeless Nature has in the lapse of ages undergone vast modifications; since the crust of the earth, and the sea, and the atmosphere, are no longer such as they once were; since the distribution of the land and the ocean and all manner of physical conditions have varied; since there have been such grand changes in the environment of living things on the surface of our planet—it necessarily follows that organic Nature must have passed through destructions and transformations in correspondence thereto. ”

“ But if we admit that the substance of which the solar system consists once existed in a nebulous condition, and was in rotation, all the above peculiarities follow as necessary mechanical consequences. Nay, more, the formation of planets, the formation of satellites and of asteroids, is accounted for. We see why the outer planets and satellites are larger than the interior ones; why the larger planets rotate rapidly, and the small ones slowly; why of the satellites the outer planets have more, the inner fewer. ”

“ May we conclude that, in society, as in the individual man, parts never spring from nothing, but are evolved or developed from parts that are already in existence?
If any one should object to or deride the doctrine of the evolution or successive development of the animated forms which constitute that unbroken organic chain reaching from the beginning of life on the globe to the present times, let him reflect that he has himself passed through modifications the counterpart of those he disputes. ”

“ Thus he thought that each planet is the seat of an intelligent principle, and that there is a relation between the magnitudes of the orbits of the five principal planets and the five regular solids of geometry. At first he inclined to believe that the orbit of Mars is oval, nor was it until after a wearisome study that he detected the grand truth, its elliptical form. An idea of the incorruptibility of the celestial objects had led to the adoption of the Aristotelian doctrine of the perfection of circular motions, and to the belief that there were none but circular motions in the heavens. ”

“ It is impossible that so many coincidences could be the result of chance! Is it not plain that there must have been a common tie among all these bodies, that they are only parts of what must once have been a single mass? ”

“ It throws itself into fantastic shapes, it gathers a glory from the sun, is borne onward by the wind, and, perhaps, as it gradually came, so it gradually disappears, melting away in the untroubled air. ”

“ It was proved that the moon is retained in her orbit and made to revolve round the earth by the force of terrestrial gravity. The genii of Kepler had given place to the vortices of Descartes, and these in their turn to the central force of Newton.
In like manner the earth, and each of the planets, are made to move in an elliptic orbit round the sun by his attractive force, and perturbations arise by reason of the disturbing action of the planetary masses on one another. Knowing the masses and the distances, these disturbances may be computed. ”

“ So, too, of reptiles, the characteristic type of life of the Secondary period. As we see in a dissolving view, out of the fading outlines of a scene that is passing away, the dim form of a new one emerging, which gradually gains strength, reaches its culmination, and then melts away in some other that is displacing it, so reptile-life doubtfully, appears, reaches its culmination, and gradually declines. ”

“ Creation implies an abrupt appearance, transformation a gradual change.
In this manner is presented to our contemplation the great theory of Evolution. Every organic being has a place in a chain of events. ”

“ D’Alembert, in the Introduction to the Encyclopaedia, says: “The universe is but a single fact; it is only one great truth.”
Shall we, then, conclude that the solar and the starry systems have been called into existence by God, and that he has then imposed upon them by his arbitrary will laws under the control of which it was his pleasure that their movements should be made? ”

“ There is a solemn grandeur in the orderly progress of Nature which profoundly impresses us; and such is the character of continuity in the events of our individual life that we instinctively doubt the occurrence of the supernatural in that of our neighbor. The intelligent man knows well that, for his personal behoof, the course of Nature has never been checked ”

“ Evidences of the control of law in the construction of the earth, and in the development of the animal and plant series.—They arose by Evolution, not by Creation.
The reign of law is exhibited by the historic career of human societies, and in the case of individual man. ”

“ First, we must be satisfied whether there is any solid evidence for admitting the existence of such a nebulous mass.
The nebular hypothesis rests primarily on the telescopic discovery made by Herschel I., that there are scattered here and there in the heavens pale, gleaming patches of light, a few of which are large enough to be visible to the naked eye. Of these, many may be resolved by a sufficient telescopic power into a congeries of stars, but some, such as the great nebula in Orion, have resisted the best instruments hitherto made. ”

“ The hypothesis of Laplace has thus a firm basis. In such a nebular mass, cooling by radiation is a necessary incident, and condensation and rotation the inevitable results. There must be a separation of rings all lying in one plane, a generation of planets and satellites all rotating alike, a central sun and engirdling globes. From a chaotic mass, through the operation of natural laws, an organized system has been produced. An integration of matter into worlds has taken place through a decline of heat. ”

“ If we examine the introduction of any type of life in the animal series, we find that it is in accordance with transformation, not with creation. Its beginning is under an imperfect form in the midst of other forms, of which the time is nearly complete, and which are passing into extinction. By degrees, one species after another in succession more and more perfect arises, until, after many ages, a culmination is reached. From that there is, in like manner, a long, a gradual decline. ”

“ In the phases of existence of all, so far as those phases are completed, there are common characteristics, and, as like accordances in individuals point out that all are living under a reign of law, we are justified in inferring that the course of nations, and indeed the progress of humanity, does not take place in a chance or random way, that supernatural interventions never break the chain of historic acts, that every historic event has its warrant in some preceding event, and gives warrant to others that are to follow.. ”

“ On the principle that all bodies attract each other with forces directly as their masses, and inversely as the squares of their distances, Newton showed that all the movements of the celestial bodies may be accounted for, and that Kepler’s laws might all have been predicted—the elliptic motions—the described areas the relation of the times and distances. ”

“ It had been supposed that continuous movements, such, for instance, as those of the celestial bodies, could only be maintained by a perpetual consumption and perpetual application of force, but the first of Galileo’s laws declared that every body will persevere in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, until it is compelled to change that state by disturbing forces. ”

“ Such considerations, then, plainly force upon us the conclusion that the organic progress of the world has been guided by the operation of immutable law—not determined by discontinuous, disconnected, arbitrary interventions of God. They incline us to view favorably the idea of transmutations of one form into another, rather than that of sudden creations. ”

“ The hot-blooded animals could not exist in an atmosphere so laden with carbonic acid as was that of the primitive times. But the removal of that noxious ingredient from the air by the leaves of plants under the influence of sunlight, the enveloping of its carbon in the earth under the form of coal, the disengagement of its oxygen, permitted their life. As the atmosphere was thus modified, the sea was involved in the change ”

“ If, then, it be fired from the cannon, though now it may be projected some thousands of feet in a second, the effect of gravity upon it will be precisely the same as before. In the intermingling of forces there is no deterioration; each produces its own specific effect.
In the latter half of the seventeenth century, through the works of Borelli, Hooke, and Huyghens, it had become plain that circular motions could be accounted for by the laws of Galileo. Borelli, treating of the motions of Jupiter’s satellites, shows how a circular movement may arise under the influence of a central force. ”

“ All the planets and their satellites move in ellipses of such small eccentricity that they are nearly circles. All the planets move in the same direction and nearly in the same plane. The movements of the satellites are in the same direction as those of the planets. The movements of rotation of the sun, of the planets, and the satellites, are in the same direction as their orbital motions, and in planes little different. ”

“ If such be the cosmogony of the solar system, such the genesis of the planetary worlds, we are constrained to extend our views of the dominion of law, and to recognize its agency in the creation as well as in the conservation of the innumerable orbs that throng the universe. ”

“ There is evidence, geological and astronomical, that the temperature of the earth and her satellite was in the remote past very much higher than it is now. A decline so slow as to be imperceptible at short intervals, but manifest enough in the course of many ages, has occurred. The heat has been lost by radiation into space.
The cooling of a mass of any kind, no matter whether large or small, is not discontinuous ”