Recreations in Astronomy eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 235 pages of information about Recreations in Astronomy.

Recreations in Astronomy eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 235 pages of information about Recreations in Astronomy.
the great earth feels that power in gravitation, tides, rains, winds, and all possible life—­every part is full of power.  Fill the earth’s orbit with a circle of such receptive worlds—­seventy thousand instead of one—­everyone would be as fully supplied with power from this central source.  More.  Fill the whole dome, the entire extent of the surrounding sphere, bottom, sides, top, a sphere one hundred and eighty-five million miles in diameter, and everyone of these uncountable worlds would be touched with the same power as one; each would thrill with life.  This is only the D of the alphabet of power.  And glancing up to the other suns, one hundred, five hundred, twelve hundred times as large, double, triple, septuple, multiple suns, we shall find power enough to go through the whole alphabet in geometrical ratio; and then in the clustered suns, galaxies, and nebulae, power enough still unrepresented by single letters to require all combinations of the alphabet of power.  What is the significance of this single element of power?  The answer of science to-day is “correlation,” the constant evolution of one force from another.  Heat is a mode of motion, motion a result of heat.  So far so good.  But are we mere reasoners in a circle?  Then we would be lost men, treading our round of death in a limitless forest.  What is the ultimate?  Reason [Page 252] out in a straight line.  No definition of matter allows it to originate force; only mind can do that.  Hence the ultimate force is always mind.  Carry your correlation as far as you please—­through planets, suns, nebulae, concretionary vortices, and revolving fire-mist—­there must always be mind and will beyond.  Some of that willpower that works without exhaustion must take its own force and render it static, apparent.  It may do this in such correlated relation that that force shall go on year after year to a thousand changing forms; but that force must originate in mind.

Go out in the falling rain, stand under the thunderous Niagara, feel the immeasurable rush of life, see the hanging worlds, and trace all this—­the carried rain, the terrific thunder with God’s bow of peace upon it, and the unfailing planets hung upon nothing—­trace all this to the orb of day blazing in perpetual strength, but stop not there.  Who made the sun?  Contrivance fills all thought. Who made the sun?  Nature says there is a mind, and that mind is Almighty.  Then you have read the first syllables, viz., being and power.

What is the continuous relation of the universe to the mind from which it derived its power?  Some say that it is the relation of a wound-up watch to the winder.  It was dowered with sufficient power to revolve its ceaseless changes, and its maker is henceforth an absentee God.  Is it?  Let us have courage to see.  For twenty years one devotes ten seconds every night to putting a little force into a watch.  It is so arranged that it distributes that force over twenty-four hours.  In that twenty

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Recreations in Astronomy from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.