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Page 52
The outer planets would cool off first, become inhabitable, and,
as the sun contracted and they radiated their own heat, become
refrigerated and left behind by the retreating sun. Of course the
outer planets would move slowly; but as that portion of the sun
which gave them their motion drew in toward the centre, keeping
its absolute speed, and revolving in the lessening circles of a
contracting body, it would give the faster motion necessary to
be imparted to Earth, Mercury, and Vulcan.
The four great classes of facts confirmatory of this hypothesis
are as follows: 1st. All the planets move [Page 184] in the same
direction, and nearly in the same plane, as if thrown off from one
equator; 2d. The motions of the satellites about their primaries are
mostly in the same direction as that of their primaries about the
sun; 3d. The rotation of most of these bodies on their axes, and
also of the sun, is in the same direction as the motion of the
planets about the sun; 4th. The orbits of the planets, excluding
asteroids, and their satellites, have but a comparatively small
eccentricity; 5th. Certain nebul� are observable in the heavens
which are not yet condensed into solids, but are still bright gas.
The materialistic evolutionist takes up the idea of a universe of
material world-stuff without form, and void, but so endowed as to
develop itself into orderly worlds, and adds to it this exceeding
advance, that when soil, sun, and chemical laws found themselves
properly related, a force in matter, latent for a million eons in
the original cloud, comes forward, and dead matter becomes alive
in the lowest order of vegetable life; there takes place, as Herbert
Spencer says, "a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity,
into a definite, coherent heterogeneity, through continuous
differentiation and integration." The dead becomes alive; matter
passes from unconsciousness to consciousness; passes up from plant
to animal, from animal to man; takes on power to think, reason,
love, and adore. The theistic evolutionist may think that the same
process is gone through, but that an ever-present and working God
superintends, guides, and occasionally bestows a new endowment
of power that successively gives life, consciousness, mental,
affectional, and spiritual capacity.
Is this world-theory true? and if so, is either of the [Page 185]
evolution theories true also? If the first evolution theory is true,
the evolved man will hardly know which to adore most, the Being that
could so endow matter, or the matter capable of such endowment.
There are some difficulties in the way of the acceptance of the
nebular hypothesis that compel many of the most thorough scientists
of the day to withhold their assent to its entirety. The latest, and
one of the most competent writers on the subject, Professor Newcomb,
who is a mathematical astronomer, and not an easy theorist, evolving
the system of the universe from the depth of his own consciousness,
says: "Should any one be sceptical as to the sufficiency of these
laws to account for the present state of things, science can furnish
no evidence strong enough to overthrow his doubts until the sun
shall be found to be growing smaller by actual measurement, or the
nebul� be actually seen to condense into stars and systems." In
one of the most elaborate defences of the theory, it is argued that
the hypothesis explains why only one of the four planets nearest
the sun can have a moon, and why there can be no planet inside of
Mercury. The discovery of the two satellites to Mars and of the
planet Vulcan makes it all the worse for these facts.
Some of the objections to the theory should be known by every thinker.
Laplace must have the cloud "diffused in consequence of excessive
heat," etc. Helmholtz, in order to account for the heat of the
contracting sun, must have the cloud relatively cold. How he and
his followers diffused the cloud without heat is not stated.
The next difficulty is that of rotation. The laws [Page 186] of
science compel a contraction into one non-rotating body--a central
sun, indeed, but no planets about it. Laplace cleverly evades the
difficulty by not taking from the hand of the Creator diffused gas,
but a sun with an atmosphere filling space to the orbit of Neptune,
and _already in revolution_. He says: "It is four millions to one
that all motions of the planets, rotations and revolutions, were at
once imparted by an original common cause, of which we know neither
the nature nor the epoch." Helmholtz says of rotation, "the
existence of which must be assumed." Professor Newcomb says that the
planets would not be arranged as now, each one twice as far from the
sun as the next interior one, and the outer ones made first, but
that all would be made into planets at once, and the small inner
ones quite likely to cool off more rapidly.
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