Cosmological argument

“ To set limits to speculation is treason to the future.
But the weaving itself requires discipline. It has to be kept in some relation to the general facts of this epoch. Cosmology is the effort to frame a scheme of the general character of the present stage of the universe. The cosmological scheme should present the genus, for which the special schemes of the sciences are the species. The task of Cosmology is twofold. It restrains the aberrations of the mere undisciplined imagination. ”

“ Yet such theories were only an attempt to regulate the universe by celestial intelligences like our own, and by standards within our reach. It required the discovery of an all-pervading law, universal throughout all space, to enlarge the thoughts of men, and one which, while it widened the conceptions of the universe, reduced the earth and solar system to true dimensions. ”

“ But cosmology shares the imperfections of all the efforts of finite intelligence. The special sciences fall short of their aim, and cosmology equally fails. Thus when the novel speculation is produced a threefold problem is set. ”

“ Here also we have experience only of a single case, that of the world in which we live, but that this is inhabited we know absolutely, and without possibility of doubt. Now if on this evidence any one were to infer that every heavenly body without exception, sun, planet, satellite, comet, fixed star or nebula, is inhabited, and must be so from the inherent constitution of things, his inference would exactly resemble that of the writers who conclude that because volition is the efficient cause of our own bodily motions, it must be the efficient cause of every thing else in the universe. ”

“ Heaven and earth are simply contained in the great whole of the infinite Universe. How, he asks, can we know that there is not a larger Cosmos, over and above the manifestation of Cosmos that we can see? ”

“ For we have seen that, by means of a subtle though perfectly logical argument, Cosmic Philosophy has evolved this conclusion—that all phenomena as presented in consciousness are manifestations of a not improbable Single Self-existing Power, of whose existence these manifestations alone can make us cognisant. ”

“ Yet have we every reason which analogy can afford to believe that even the development of a whole universe such as ours should be regarded as but a minute local phenomenon of a universe infinitely higher in order, that universe in turn but a single member of a system of such universes, and so on, even ad infinitum. ”

“ We live on this planet of ours, but what entitles us to draw a line or fix a limit as to the possible or impossible in this endless, this infinite series of worlds with which we are here confronted? If we could descend on to one of these atoms, our bodies diminished in proportion, might we not, would we not, find there another earth grouped with its companion-atoms into a stellar system of perhaps wondrous regularity? That world in which a conscious being exists is determined by the kind of this consciousness, and by the character of the impressions which it is capable of receiving. ”

“ The finite universe of matter would eventually become uniform and deterministic but for the combined presence of mind and spirit. The influence of the cosmic mind constantly injects spontaneity into even the material worlds. ”

“ In the cosmological, we have taken it for granted that the world of phenomena as it appears to our intuition proceeds from these unknown reciprocal actions of ‘Things.’ Finally, at the conclusion of the Cosmology, demands of the mind were stirred that are to be prospectively satisfied only by means of an insight into that actual nature of things which constitutes what corresponds to the formal conditions of Ontology and Cosmology. ”

“ In no realm of nature is the principle of cause and effect more conspicuous than in astronomy; and we fall into the habit of thinking of its laws as not only being unchangeable in our universe, but necessary to the conception of any universe that might have been substituted in its place. ”

“ Sun-principle and moon-principle, embracing through the æons, could never by themselves propagate one molecule of matter. The hailstone needs a grain of dust for its core. So does the universe. Midway between the two cosmic infinites lies the third, which is more than infinite. This is the Holy Ghost Life, individual life. ”

“ And assuredly, as in the firmament that simple law of gravitation reigns supreme—making it indeed a kosmos—majestic, orderly, comely in its going—ruling, and binding not the less the fiery and nomadic comets, than the gentle, punctual moons—so certainly, and to us moral creatures to a degree transcendantly more important, does the whole intelligent universe move around and move towards and in the Father of Lights. ”

“ Cosmic mind, when not associated with either energy or spirit, is subject to the gravity demands of neither material nor spiritual circuits. Pure mind is subject only to the universal gravity grasp of the Conjoint Actor. Pure mind is close of kin to infinite mind, and infinite mind (the theoretical co-ordinate of the absolutes of spirit and energy) is apparently a law in itself. ”

“ Thus may the cosmic race, whose aggregate census makes up the stellar universe, be perpetuated—individual solar systems, such as ours, being born, and growing old, and dying to live again in their descendants, while the universe as a whole maintains its unified integrity throughout all these internal mutations—passing on, it may be, by infinitesimal stages, to a culmination hopelessly beyond human comprehension. ”

“ Why did you not reflect that the matter of which the celestial bodies are formed must have had an origin, that the revolutions of those bodies cannot be ruled by an abstract law, and that their enormous distances, as well as the expanse of their orbits through the immensity of space, compel the admission of an infinite being ranging infinitely above matter and necessarily prior to it? You should not have overlooked the fact that the heavens proclaim God's existence by their immensity far more eloquently than by the revolutions of the celestial bodies. ”

“ Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonise, refashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things. It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence xin shaping our cosmological scheme. Its business is to render explicit, and—so far as may be—efficient, a process which otherwise is unconsciously performed without rational tests. ”

“ In the vast area of its action, which opens before the eye of the mind, we see a power spanning all space, and linking together every one of those myriads of worlds which spangle the robe of the Infinite, and we are compelled to pause. Is this principle of gravitation a property of matter, or is it a power higher than the more tangible forces, is the question which presses on the mind. If we regard it as a subtile principle pervading all space, we compel ourselves to look beyond it for another power yet more refined ”

“ These scientific, moral, and spiritual insights, these cosmic responses, are innate in the cosmic mind, which endows all will creatures. The experience of living never fails to develop these three cosmic intuitions; they are constitutive in the self-consciousness of reflective thinking. ”

“ Applying, then, this axiom of identity to the efficient of natural phenomena, the unity of the great Cause becomes at once apparent. Everywhere we behold the same laws of mathematical harmony. The identical principle of gravitation, which we have proved to be the effect of a sublime rationality, carries us away to the utmost limits of the solar system, and shows us one sovereign efficient, one pervading force, that we may henceforth call God, all over those immeasurable fields of infinite azure. ”

“ But does the universe exist in God? If we but imagine for a moment the aspect of the universe to resemble a huge machine of infinite proportions, eternally active in all its vast proportions, the idea of the universe existing within a God will appear equally childish and simple.
“All phenomena are the results of energy co-existent and inseparable from matter. All cosmic motion, change, and life may be traced to this physical and chemical energy pervading all nature—never to a God. ”

“ From very remote periods, even of Greek philosophy, discriminating analysis is compelled to discover that the question is not so much of a creation, as of a rational conception of the creation—not of the fact, but of the method.
Religious faith does step in, where science fails, to say how the Cosmos began, and is ordered and sustained in perpetual harmony. Physical science, of course, has nothing to do with first and final causes, and therefore answers: "We cannot tell whether the Cosmos is eternal, or began in time." ”

“ His grasp here of cosmical principles is astonishing, and the vast swing of his logic carries the reader irresistibly on, sweeping majestically across the whole cosmos in many different directions, until everything is compassed in a universal scheme. ”

“ Natural knowledge tends more and more to the conclusion that "all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth" are the transitory forms of parcels of cosmic substance wending along the road of evolution, from nebulous potentiality, through endless growths of sun and planet and satellite; through all varieties of matter; through infinite diversities of life and thought; possibly, through modes of being of which we neither have a conception, nor are competent to form any, back to the indefinable latency from which they arose. Thus the most obvious attribute of the cosmos is its impermanence. ”

“ There are in the first place astronomical reasons which give a certain probability to this view, but there are also general reasons derived from the application of modern physics to problems concerning the structure of the universe which seem almost inevitably to lead to the conclusion that the universe must be finite in space, though probably not in time. ”

“ Here, too, we are at the beginning of a vast change in the basis and modes of thought upon man—a change even more striking than that accomplished by Copernicus and Galileo, when they substituted for a universe in which sun and planets revolved about the earth a universe in which the earth is but the merest grain or atom revolving with other worlds, larger and smaller, about the sun ”

“ Most philosophical thinkers will, I believe, agree with me in concluding that a sound reply to it will solve the great mystery of the everlasting radiations of our sun and all the other suns of the universe. So long as we regard these suns as the sources of continually expended forces of light and heat, their everlasting and unabated renewal becomes a mystery utterly inscrutable to the human intellect, since the creation of new force, or any addition to the total forces of the universe, is as inconceivable to us as any addition to the total matter of the universe. ”

“ We may fairly write the Universe in either way, thus: Atoms-producing-consciousness; or Consciousness-produced-by-atoms. Atoms alone, or consciousness alone, are precisely equal mutilations of the truth. If, without believing in a God, I still continue to talk of what the world 'essentially is,' I am just as much entitled to define it as a place in which my nose itches, or as a place where at a certain corner I can get a mess of oysters for twenty cents, as to call it an evolving nebula differentiating and integrating itself. ”

“ Let it be supposed that the property of attraction was impressed upon all the particles of matter in the universe, and then that the Infinite Power, abstaining from all farther action, and without forming and arranging the bodies of the solar system upon any intentional plan, left all that plan to be worked out by that property of matter; what reason have we to conclude that the law of gravitation would, as the sole efficient cause, have produced just exactly this complex piece of mechanism, so wonderfully adjusted? ”

“ Questions as to the nature and origin of Life upon our planet, the nature of Force or energy, the problems of Substance and of Cause, the questions of the Absolute and Infinite, all centre in this, are all the several ways of expressing it from the point of view which the questioner occupies, 'What is the ultimate principle of the universe, the ἀρχὴ of all existence?' Speculative philosophy and science deal proximately, it is true, with the problems of finite existence, existence as presented to us in the surrounding universe, and the laws which regulate it ”

“ But suppose matter could be dowered, that worlds could have a gravitation, one of two things must follow: It must have conscious knowledge of the position, exact weight, and distance of every atom, mass, and world, in order to proportion the exact amount of gravity, or it must fill infinity with an omnipresent attractive power, pulling in myriads of places at nothing; in Page 255 a few places at worlds. Every world must exert an infinitely extended power, but myriads of infinities cannot be in the same space. The solution is, one infinite power and conscious will. ”

“ When man analytically inspects the universe through the material endowments of his physical senses and associated mind perception, the cosmos appears to be mechanical and energy-material. Such a technique of studying reality consists in turning the universe inside out. ”