Hence we must regard the hosts of glittering stars as a conflagration that has been simultaneously lighted up in the heavens.  The enormous (to our ideas) thermal energy of the stars resembles the scintillation of iron dust in a jar of oxygen when a pinch of the dust is thrown in.  Although some particles be burnt up before others become alight, and some linger yet a little longer than the others, in our day’s work the scintillation of the iron dust is the work of a single instant, and so in the long night of eternity the scintillation of the mightiest suns of space is over in a moment.  A little longer, indeed, in duration than the life which stirs a moment in response to the diffusion of the energy, but only very little.  So must an Eternal Being regard the scintillation of the stars and the periodic vibration of life in our geological time and the most enduring efforts of thought.  The latter indeed are no more lasting than

“... the labour of ants In the light of a million million of suns.”

But the myriad suns themselves, with their generations, are the momentary gleam of lights for ever after extinguished.

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Again, science suggests that the present process of material aggregation is not finished, and possibly will only be when it prevails universally.  Hence the very distribution of the stars, as we observe them, as isolated aggregations, indicates a development which in the infinite duration must be regarded as equally advanced in all parts of stellar space and essentially a simultaneous phenomenon.  For were we spectators of a system in which any very great difference of age prevailed, this very great difference would be attended by some such appearance as the following:—­

The aupearance of but one star, other generations being long extinct or no others yet come into being; or, perhaps, a faint nebulous wreath of aggregating matter somewhere solitary in the heavens; or no sign of matter beyond our system, either because ungathered or long passed away into darkness.[1]

Some such appearances were to be expected had the aggregation of matter depended solely on chance encounters of particles scattered through infinite space.

For as, by hypothesis, the aggregation occupies an infinite time in consummation it is nearly a certainty that each particle encountered after immeasurable time, and then for the first time endowed with actual gravitational potential energy, would have long expended this energy

[1] It is interesting to reflect upon the effect which an entire absence of luminaries outside our solar system would have had upon the views of our philosophers and upon our outlook on life.

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