Cosmology

“ And these three partial approaches to the reality of the cosmos must eventually become harmonized by the revelatory presentation of religion, philosophy, and cosmology which portrays the triune existence of spirit, mind, and energy proceeding from the Trinity of Paradise and attaining time-space unification within the Deity of the Supreme. ”

“ The Object of the lectures is to indicate those elements in our experience in terms of which such a cosmology should be constructed. The key notion, from which such construction should start, is that the energetic activity considered in physics is the emotional intensity entertained in life.
Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains. ”

“ But God has computed the mutual perturbations of millions of suns, and planets, and comets, and worlds, without number, through the ages that are passed, and throughout the ages which are yet to come, not approximately, but with perfect and absolute precision.
8. The universe is in motion,—system rising above system, cluster above cluster, nebula above nebula,—all majestically sweeping around under the providence of God, who alone knows the end from the beginning, and before whose glory and power all intelligent beings, whether in heaven or on earth, should bow with humility and awe. ”

“ Hence men imagined gods, and attributed those mighty phenomena of nature—earthquakes, tempests, lightning and thunder, and dire eclipses of sun and moon, to the vaguely visible powers which they imagined they saw. There was indeed a soul or spirit of the universe, as there was a soul or spirit of every individual thing that constituted it. But this was only a finer system of atoms after all. All else is convention or dream; the only realities are Atoms and Emptiness, Matter and Space. ”

“ From the great central mass, heat may again be summoned to exhale nebulous matter; chemical forces may again produce motion, and motion may again generate systems; but, as in the recurring catastrophes which have desolated our earth, the great First Cause must preside at the dawn of each cosmical cycle; and, as in the animal races which were successively reproduced, new celestial creations of a nobler form of beauty and of a higher form of permanence may yet appear in the sidereal universe. “Behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former shall not be remembered.” ”

“ I have to present to you first of all the idea that the universe is composed of suns and that the planets which may be in it are less than nothing. But as I foresee your wish to make an objection, I’ll reply to it beforehand. The suns, you want to say, put themselves out in the course of centuries and by that also change into mud. No! is my reply; they keep themselves alive by means of comets which they attract and which fall on them. It is the dwelling of true life. The planets and this our earth are but the abode of ghosts. Such are the verities of which I have to convince you. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The several parts of the universe having always existed with it, we may say the same of the parts of these parts; thus the sun, the moon, the fixed stars, and the planets have always existed with the heavens; animals, vegetables, gold, and silver with the earth; the currents of air, winds, and changes from hot to cold, from cold to hot, with the air. Therefore the heaven, with all that it now contains; the earth, with all that it produces and supports; and lastly, the whole aërial region, with all its phenomena, have always existed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Of the works of creation which occupied so much of his thoughts, the Professor's views may be had by reading the following concluding remarks found in his "Physical Astronomy:"
"Whatever doubts may hang over all speculations respecting distant events, either of past or future time, we have reason to believe that our universe will ever exhibit great and useful operations throughout its extensive domains. From the ruins of some celestial bodies others will rise to act a part in the drama of the physical creation in future ages. ”

“ Looking beyond the moon, into the length and breadth of the universe, we find countless celestial globes with every conceivable variety of temperature and of constitution. Amid this vast number of worlds with which space is tenanted, are there any inhabited by living [Pg 106] beings? To this great question science can make no response: we cannot tell. Yet it is impossible to resist a conjecture. We find our earth teeming with life in every part. We find life under the most varied conditions that can be conceived. ”

“ Let us say: there it is, an objective world of moving matter, subject to certain laws. All the powers are but manifestations or forms of matter in motion. Planets revolve, comets come and go, tides swell and fall, clouds rise and rivers flow to the sea, lightning flashes, volcanoes are active, living beings are born, live, and die, all exemplifying certain universal principles, that are discoverable by experience, that are capable of being used to predict the future, and that are related to one another in such a way as to show us a vast connected whole, the natural universe. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is a swift and continuous band, an endless chain, a mighty ligament of light and life and power constantly passing between heaven and earth, and earth and heaven, between sun and planet and planet and sun. These are the countless pathways between suns and stars, the mighty and everlasting highways of eternity which God hath built to span the silent ether of space between suns and worlds, and bind the universe in one harmonious whole. ”

“ But how if I attempt to think of such a series as antecedent to all actions throughout the universe—to the motions of the multitudinous stars throughout space, to the revolutions of all their planets round them, to the gyrations of all these planets on their axes, to the infinitely multiplied physical processes going on in each of these suns and planets? I cannot think of a single series of states of consciousness as causing even the relatively small groups of actions going on over the earth's surface. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But I would ask, where do we get this experience of heavy and light bodies? and how is our knowledge on these subjects extended so far that we can reason with certainty concerning the centre of the whole universe? Is not the only residence and home of all the things which are heavy and light to us, the earth and the air which surrounds it? and what is the earth and the ambient air, with respect to the immensity of the universe? ”

“ Since I presented Worlds in the Making and Life of the Universe as Conceived by Man from Earliest Ages to the Present Time to the public—which received them with far greater interest and appreciation than I could foresee—I have had repeated occasions to treat new questions of a cosmological nature, questions largely arisen from new discoveries and observations within the scope of astronomy. ”

“ Imagination is wholly taken captive by the stupendous revelation of the God-force which modern conceptions of the Cosmos furnish. Through the whole universe beats the one life-force, that is God, controlling every molecule in the petal of a daisy, in the meteoric ring of Saturn, in the remotest nebula that outskirts space, as though that molecule were the universe. In each molecule and atom God lives and moves and has His being, thereby sustaining theirs .... ”

“ Everything that is created is subject to destruction. And further, since the Cosmos exists by the goodness of God it follows that God must always be good and the world exist. Just as light coexists with the Sun and with fire, and shadow coexists with a body.
Of the bodies in the Cosmos, some imitate Mind and move in orbits; some imitate Soul and move in a straight line, fire and air upward, earth and water downward. Of those that move in orbits the fixed sphere goes from the east, the Seven from the west. ”

“ Here we behold the operations of a Being whose power is illimitable and uncontrollable, and which far transcends the comprehension of the highest created intelligences—a power, displayed not only in the vast extension of material existence, and the countless number of mighty globes which the universe contains—but in the astonishingly rapid motions with which myriads of them are carried along through the immeasurable spaces of creation,—some of those magnificent orbs moving with a velocity of one hundred and seventy thousand miles an hour. ”

“ Has the universe always existed, or had the Cosmos, with its changes and constants, its forces and laws, its forms and relations, a Beginning? Is its present condition but one link in an endless chain, one phasis in a series of changes, which had no beginning and shall have no end? Is the universe limited both in space and duration, or is it unlimited, unbeginning, and endless? ”

“ And this is only natural, for the trend of recent research has made clear the fact that one of the three greatest problems of modern astronomy and astrophysics, ranking with the structure of the universe and the evolution of celestial bodies, is the constitution of matter. ”

“ Thus the key to the physical conception of the Universe is to be found, and alone found, in that beauty of order, and harmony of motion, which are so inseparably associated with the varied forms of matter, graduating through a series of units or atoms, each with its dual nature complete in itself, through a series of minor entities termed elements, which in their aggregations form meteorites, satellites, planets, suns and stars, and systems of stars and oceans of suns and stars, until all are united into one ultimate unity where all are blended into one complete and perfect whole ”

“ If I were called upon to convey, within the compass of a single sentence, an idea of the trend of recent astronomical and physical science, I should say that it was in the direction of showing the universe to be a connected whole. The farther we advance in knowledge, the clearer it becomes that the bodies which are scattered through the celestial spaces are not completely independent existences, but have, with all their infinite diversity, many attributes in common. ”

“ We now see that all the various forms of cosmic energy, such as matter, thought, force, intelligence and so forth, are simply the manifestations of that cosmic intelligence, or, as we shall call it henceforth, the Supreme Lord. Everything that you see, feel, or hear, the whole universe, is His creation, or to be a little more accurate, is His projection ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is a Cosmic Life which permeates, penetrates, and fills the interspaces of the universe, being in and through all things. This Life is not merely a vibration, or form of energy; it is a Living Substance. All things are made from it; it is All, and in all.
This Substance thinks, and it assumes the form of that which it thinks about. The thought of a form, in this substance, creates the form; the thought of a motion institutes the motion. The visible universe, with all its forms and motions, exists because it is in the thought of Original Substance. ”