Chapter VII: Baffling Truths

The grand movements of Nature, both in the heavens and in the earth, are on such a scale of time and distance that without the aid of science we could get little or no hint of them. Immeasurably slow and slight they are, according to our standards. The stars are fixed points in the sky to our unaided vision. Throughout the whole historic period they have shown little or no change in their relative positions, though they are moving in varying directions at the rate of many miles a second. Come back in a thousand years and there is no change; in thirty or forty thousand years, and changes of place might be barely perceptible to an unaided eye. Not till hundreds of thousands of years would Orion, or the Big Dipper, have become noticeably distorted, and probably not till millions of years would the heavens present combinations of stars forming new constellations. The Pole Star will after millions of years probably drift far from its present position, and the Milky Way be found in another part of the heavens. When viewed from the extreme points in space one hundred and eighty millions of miles apart which the earth’s orbit around the sun gives us, the fixed stars remain fixed, they show little or no parallax. To touch but the skirts of the Infinite exhausts our powers.

The geological changes upon the surface of this earth--mere mustard-seed in space that it is--are on such a scale of time that only an unfaltering scientific faith can take them in. The mountains and the valleys seem eternal, but to the eye of the geologist they are as flitting as the summer clouds. Look upon a Catskill landscape with its long, flowing mountain-lines curving over summits three or four thousand feet high, and its deep, broad, cradle-like valleys checkered with fertile farms and homesteads, and try to think of it as all the work of the slow and gentle rains and snows--geologic time stroking them almost as gently as a mother caresses her baby. Tried by human standards we live in a stable universe; change stops with the hills and the stars; but, tried by geologic and astronomic standards, it is as unsubstantial as the snows of winter or the dews of summer. Perpetual flux and transition mark even the stars in their courses. Astronomers calculate the weight of the earth in terms of its own tons, something like six sextillion tons, but in and of itself it weighs nothing; its weight is the pull of some other body, in itself pound balances pound; it is only by detachment from it that bodies have weight. As we approach the center, a pound would be less and less; halfway down it would weigh eight ounces only; at the center weight would disappear, the pull of matter on all sides would be equal, there would no longer be up or down. Gravitation is not a demon at the center of the earth, pulling all things toward him; it is a force in every atom, pulling and being pulled in every direction. Seek the center of the pulling, and all power vanishes.

The globe is on such a scale of size with reference to our lives and powers that by no effort of the imagination can we adjust ourselves to the contradictions presented. It is not by experience, nor by living and acting, that we know it as a sphere, but by thinking and speculating. Even if we travel round it, we get no other impression than that it is an endless plain. We find no under side; it is all top side. The practical inferences we draw from looking at the moon are all contradicted by our experiences here. The lower limb of the moon is not lower, as we should find if we were to go there, and the under side of the earth is also the upper side.

Our astronomy is sound, but our actual life gives us no clue to its truths. Only when we turn philosophers do we know the tremendous voyage we are making, and then we only know it abstractly. We never can know it concretely. The swift turning of the planet under our feet, and its enormous speed in its orbit around the sun, are not revealed to our sense as motion, but as changes from night to day and from one season to another. Slow, soft, still, the moon and the sun rise and drift across the heavens, and the impassive earth seems like a ship becalmed. No hint at all of the more than rifle-bullet speed through space. It is all too big for us. The celestial machine is no machine at all to our senses, but its vast movements go on as gently and as easily as the falling of the dew or the blooming of the flowers, and almost as unconsciously to us as the circulation of the blood in our hearts.

We are in the heavens and are a part of the great astronomical whirl and procession, and know it not. It is symbolical of our lives generally. We do not realize that we are a part of Nature till we begin to think about it. Our lives proceed as if we were two--man and Nature--two great antagonistic or contrary facts, but the two are one; there is only Nature. We can draw circle within circle, and circle around circle, but we cannot circumscribe Nature. That is the fact over all.

As struggling human beings we diverge from one another, oppose one another, defeat one another. All our differences and antagonisms arise from our need of action and of living. The lesson of the sphere is hard to learn, hard to state. Our powers of detachment are hardly equal to it. Our lives are rounded by the great astronomic curves. The contradictions which the intellect reveals, the unthinkable mysteries that surround us, the heavens over us, the earth under us always--the relativity of all things--thus does thought set us adrift on a shoreless sea.