THE COSMIC ACCURACY

Evening Star, Issue 18093, 7 October 1922, Page 2

THE COSMIC ACCURACY

Wb borrow the title and some suggestions in what follows from one of the -acutest, of our essayists. Many of our readers will have been following with interest the efforts of scientists in connection with the recent eclipse of the sun. ,It is expected that their observation and study of that event will throw much needed light on several obscure problems. Amongst others there is the Einstein theory. If.it be confirmed it may prove a revolutionary discovery in the world of thought and things. But wo are not at present concerned with these uncertain) possibilities. We remit them 'to those whose business il is To deal with them. And while we await the verdict of the astronomers and philosophers on the abstfneer problems connected with the eclipse, there is one remarkable certainty which the man in the street may understand and profitably ponder. And that is the Cosmic Accuracy. •x # * * It is surely an astonishing thing to think that the exact time when this eclipse should occur could have been calculated years beforehand. And still more astonishing to find that it '.arrived punctually to the iminuto. And we are told that it will not occur again for a certain definite number of years. What makes this Cosmic Accuracy so amazing is the vast,ness of the scale on which it takes place. At some of the great railway station's of the world—London, for instance, or New York—a mere onlooker gets bewildered as ho watches the scores and scores of trains running in and out andi across, and about. But when one thinks of the starry heavens, with their countless hosts of .planets and suns flying with inconceivable velocity here and there, ho may he inclined to echo Carlyle’s -words to a friend, as they gazed up to the midnight sky: “ Man, it’s just dreadful. At a busy railway station, with trains darting hither and thither, we wonder nob that there are many accidents, but that those are so few. And ■when wc look up through the telescope at the myriads of stars and suns whirling through space we are amazed that this tiny little globe of ours has escaped destruction through the millions of years of its existence. Let us think of this wonder a little more minutely. * * * * . We wrote recently regarding the ‘ Wonder of the Spatial Universe.’ Dr Trumper, of the Lick Observatory, told a Wellington audience that there are certain giant stars from which it takes Ijghfc to travel to us from 36,000 to 200,000 light years, and when you remember that light flies at the rate of about 11,000,000 miles a minute this will give us some idea- of the immensity of space. And this space is crowded with suns and planets in swift, incessant movement. We walk about upon oiu earth and think it is steady and motionless ; but it is driving ahead, at an enormous pace. It is flying through space at the rate of some eleven 'and a-half million miles, and with a velocity five times as swift as a cannon ball. But that is nothing to the velocity of some of the other stars. Aroturus, for instance, does his 1,600 million miles a year, and another star is approaching us at the raie of over three million miles a daj - , yet its brightness does not seem to increase any more than Arcturus, which, at the end of 2,000 years, hardly seems to have changed its place on the .astronomical chart. But to return to our earth. “It sweeps, with all its cities and seas, in its spiral curve round the course of the sun at the rate of 66,000 miles an hour, never passing twice through the same space; so that we are falling—or rather climbing—into the infinite in a series of spirals which are continually changing. And the sun itself is moving at a speed of nearly 500 millions of miles every year towards a point in the heavens .marked by. the constellation Virgo; so that, in company with it, we are leaving ‘the starry latitudes where Sirius sparkles ’ and rushing towards the point where shine the stars Lyra and Hercules,” Our earth is shaken, astronomers tell us, by eleven distinct motions—the rotation of its own arsis, its flight round the sun, that mystery of flight we call the precession of the equinoxes, the swing of the ecliptic, the displacement of tho perihelion, etc. And the amazing,thing is that not only our earth but the sun and the whole myriads of tho planetary system move in perfect order. Their coming and going can be calculated to the minute, and they can be depended upon to arrive punctually on time. Moreover, they arc all so delicately adjusted to each other that the very daisy by the wayside can trust them, Our earth may go upon its whirling course and the vast forces of the sun stream upon us in their immensities of power, but (hey are all so exquisitely poised that, while they can pile up with ease avalanches that grind the rocks to powder, they arc yet tender enough to draw the grass blade from the soil and give its matchless tints to “the little .Speedwell’s darling blue.” It may steady us, therefore, in those days of drift and lawlessness to put our hacks against the undeviating order and lawabiding character of the Cosmos. # -A- TV But it is when we pass from the'majestic uniformity of the Cosmos to ourselves that wo find the contrast. Man is a part of .the Cosmos, and ho may be said to be the only part that mysteriously breaks away in dislocation and disorder. In tho sphere of humanity we come on a world in up-’ •heaval and revolt—a, world that seems at times to be reduced to hopeless disorder and primeval chaos.' And yet this is only a surface view of the situation. Law is as inexorable and unerring amid this seeming disorder as among the suns and stars. That is really the significance of the upheavals which sometimes dismay ns. It is the effort of Nature to right itself, tho urge of law to recover its balance and authority. It is true that in this higher sphere w r e have to do with a totality different kind of force from that which prevails in matter. • We have to do with mind .and will. And wo cannot apply either to the interpretation of these or their ordering the same powers with which

Nature works in the material Cosmos.

Nevertheless, there is no lesson we need so badly to learn as this doctrine of accu-

rate and unerring law. Wo need not enter on the knotty problem of determinism—of whether or not we are captains of our souls, or only Helpless pieces of the Game He plays Upon the chequer-hoard of Nights and Days, Hither and thither moves and checks and stays, And one by one back in the Closet lays. Our point just ijow is that life in its higher reaches, as well as its lower, is governed by laws as unerring and uniform as those which guide the planets in their courses. Everything has its price attached to it, and the Veiled Power that rules tho world insists on payment to the uttermost farthing. Road Emerson’s famous essay on ‘ Compensation ’ if you would have a vivid vision of this groat truth. Nature does not act with amazing uniformity in all her ‘lower spheres and then thug loose and become unreliable ini the highest of all. No; here as w'dl as everywhere else law rules uniform and inescapable. It is not true because it is in the Bible that “your .sin will find you out.” It is true because it is in yourself. It is an element in the nature of things. But so will your goodness. “The Ten Commandments do not foozle any more than tho multiplication table ” or the movements of tho planets. If Nature is precise and unerring and about atoms and suns, we may depend upon it she will not be less so about man, her last product, with “such splendid purpose in, his eyes.” fr # » ® As Emerson has pointed out, this conviction has run itself deep into men in every age. The Eastern doctrine of Kama is a dim groping after it. So arc the ancient fables of Nemesis and the Furies. Tho proverbs of ages embody it—tit for tat, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, give and it shall be given you, curses come home to roost, the Devil is an ass, if you put a chain round the neck of a slave the other end fastens itself around your own, and so on. “No harm ran come- to tho just man,” said Plato; or, as Justin Martyr more fully puts it: “We reckon that no evil can be done us unless wc ho convicted as evildoers: you can kill hut not hurt us.” “Men,” writes Emerson, “ admit tho accuracy and law of tho planets and the chemical laboratory and the multiplication table, but they somehow think that chance or luck or dodgery often plays tricks upon them in moral and spiritual things.” It is all a tragic delusion. The same power that is at work keeping order and'attaching consequences to causes in tho material sphere is still more watchfully at work, if that wore possible, in the moral and the spiritual. “It is as impossible for a mary to bo cheated by anyone but himself as for a thing to be and not bo at the same time. There is a third silent party 'to all our- bargains. The nature and soul of things takes on itself the guaranty of the fulfilment of every contract so that honest service cannot come to loss. If you serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put God in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. Tiio longer the payment is withholden the better for you; for compound interest on compound interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer.”- * ft

And that gives us our last word. A great deal of this doctrine of law and equivalence of payment must be taken on trust. We do not sec it operating fully in this world. And its apparent failures, inevitably, postulate the continuity of life. The sublime Cosmic Accuracy in the sphere of matter vindicates itself fully in the spiritual domain when we realise that wc sec only a partial fulfilment of it in this higher plane of being. But we see enough to give us abundant prima facie evidence that the complete fulfilment of it is a certainty. It is remorselessly true that we reap what we sow, both in quantity and quality; and yet it is not the whole truth. Nature is surprisingly generous. You give her ono seed, she will give you back twenty in return; and, moreover, she gives us “shadow and blossom and fruit that spring from no planting of ours.” She is a strict ledger-keeper, this Nature with which we have to do, and yet she is also generous to a fault. "We are building now the spiritual house in which wo shall dwell. The structure will reveal the strictest arithmetic. - Its size, proportion, materials will be according to what wc put into it: and yet behind all will appear a larger arithmetic than our own—the reckoning of that calculus whose terms are the Infinite Grace and the Eternal Love.”