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Page 72
Le Sage's theory of gravitation by the infinitive hail of atoms
cannot stand a minute, hence we come back as a necessity of thought
to Herschel's statement. "It is but reasonable to regard gravity
as a result of a consciousness and a will existent somewhere."
Where? I read an old book speaking of these matters, and it says
of God, He hangeth the earth upon nothing; he upholdeth constantly
all things by the word of his power. [Page 254] By him all things
consist or hold together. It teaches an imminent mind; an almighty,
constantly exerted power. Proof of this starts up on every side.
There is a recognized tendency in all high-class energy to
deteriorate to a lower class. There is steam in the boiler, but it
wastes without fuel. There is electricity in the jar, but every
particle of air steals away a little, unless our conscious force is
exerted to regather it. There is light in the sun, but infinite
space waits to receive it, and takes it swift as light can leap. We
said that if the sun were pure coal, it would burn out in five
thousand years, but it blazes undimmed by the million. How can it?
There have been various theories: chemical combustion, it has
failed; meteoric impact, it is insufficient; condensation, it is not
proved; and if it were, it is an intermediate step back to the
original cause of condensation. The far-seeing eyes see in the sun
the present active power of Him who first said, "Let there be
light," and who at any moment can meet a Saul in the way to Damascus
with a light above the brightness of the sun--another noon arisen on
mid-day; and of whom it shall be said in the eternal state of
unclouded brightness, where sun and moon are no more, "The glory of
the Lord shall lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof."
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.
To see the impossibility of every other solution, join in the long
and microscopic hunt for the ultimate particle, the atom; and if
found, or if not found, to a consideration of its remarkable powers.
Bring telescopes and microscopes, use all strategy, for that atom
is difficult to catch. Make the first search with the microscope:
we can count 112,000 lines ruled on a glass plate inside of an
inch. But we are here looking at mountain ridges and valleys, not
atoms. Gold can be beaten to the 1/340000 of an inch. It can be
drawn as the coating of a wire a thousand times thinner, to the
1/340000000 of an inch. But the atoms are still heaped one upon
another.
Take some of the infusorial animals. Alonzo Gray says millions
of them would not equal in bulk a grain of sand. Yet each of them
performs the functions of respiration, circulation, digestion,
and locomotion. Some of our blood-vessels are not a millionth of
our size. What must be the size of the ultimate particles that
freely move about to nourish an animal whose totality is too small
to estimate? A grain of musk gives off atoms enough to scent every
part of the air of a room. You detect it above, below, on every
side. Then let the zephyrs of summer and the blasts of winter sweep
through that room for forty years, bearing out into the wide world
miles on miles of air, all perfumed from the atoms of that grain
of musk, and at the end of the forty years the weight of musk has
not appreciably diminished. [Page 256] Yet uncountable myriads on
myriads of atoms have gone.
Our atom is not found yet. Many are the ways of searching for it
which we cannot stop to consider. We will pass in review the properties
with which materialists preposterously endow it. It is impenetrable
and indivisible, though some atoms are a hundred times larger than
others. Each has definite shape; some one shape, and some another.
They differ in weight, in quantity of combining power, in quality
of combining power. They combine with different substances, in
certain exact assignable quantities. Thus one atom of hydrogen
combines with eighty of bromine, one hundred and sixty of mercury,
two hundred and forty of boron, three hundred and twenty of silicon,
etc. Hence our atom of hydrogen must have power to count, or at
least to measure, or be cognizant of bulk. Again, atoms are of
different sorts, as positive or negative to electric currents.
They have power to take different shapes with different atoms in
crystallization; that is, there is a power in them, conscious or
otherwise, that the same bricks shall make themselves into stables
or palaces, sewers or pavements, according as the mortar varies.
"No, no," you cry out; "it is only according as the builder varies
his plan." There is no need to rehearse these powers much further;
though not one-tenth of the supposed innate properties of this
infinitesimal infinite have been recited--properties which are
expressed by the words atomicity, quantivilence, monad, dryad,
univalent, perissad, quadrivalent, and twenty other terms, each
expressing some endowment of power in this in visible atom. Refer
to one more presumed ability, an ability [Page 257] to keep
themselves in exact relation of distance and power to each other,
without touching.
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