FROM A SUBURBAN BALCONY

Evening Star, Issue 21090, 30 April 1932, Page 2

FROM A SUBURBAN BALCONY

OUR BUBBLE UNIVERSE I I have been interested recently, like many others, in reading the discoveries and speculations ot Eddington, Jeans, Smuts, and other astronomers and philosophers. Eddington has a streak of imagination in his make-ilp—an element not too common in scientists. .Writing not long ago in a London paper, he gave a suggestive picture ot what our universe might be like to a ccsmic being watching us through the millions of years of its future destiny. He would see it gradually shrinking up —the earth, animals, plants, even the galaxies all sharing the same contraction. Then be would notice that the actors in the drama of life, while they grew smaller and smaller, moved at a more rapid pace. Is that the significance of the mad passion for rushing about that at present seems to possess the world? People everywhere are contriving on ways and means to go faster and faster. The very children seek to get off their feet into some sort of contraption that will enable them to move more rapidly. We are losing the power to sit still for an hour. We must be up and away in soiqo sort of a machine that will carry over earth and sea, or up into the heavens. Home has been defined in America as a place where one sleeps for a couple of hours to let the car cool. Every day crazy cranks, are gambling with their lives in the effort to ily swifter than another over the face of the earth or sea, or through the skies above us. Once man had only his legs to depend upon to carry him about. Then began the evolution of motion of various kinds, by means of animals, horses, bicycles, motors, aeroplanes, and so on. Man is now beginning to lose his bodily powers. The senses of hearing and smelling and sight are gradually disappearing. Once • every man was an athlete; now the athlete is a thing so rare that you have to pay to see him. So is going the use of legs and arms. Nature stopped her work on man’s body when she gave him hands. Now she is threatening to take away from him his Jegs, since he is ceasing'to use them. Are we thus preparing the stage for the coming last act of the drama, when, according to Eddington, “the curtain rises on midget actors rushing through their parts at frantic speed, smaller and smaller, faster and faster, one last microscopic blur of intense agitation, and then—nothing.” The bubble has burst. • « ♦ * Put not so fast. It is not going to burst, and why? Eor the best of ail reasons: it has already done so. That part of the drama is over. The bubble has burst. That’s, the meaning of all the star-sown spaces of the heavens. We look up at the myriads of them with our eyes or through a telescope, and they amaze and bewilder us. There are multitudes and multitudes of them. Some of them are so distant from each that light, which travels at the rate of 180,000 miles a second, takes a million years to get from one to the other. And perhaps the most astonishing thing is that many of them arc moving away from us—whither? We do not know, but that fact alone gives a new conception of the vastness of space, of the illimitable regions that lie beyond, where our telescopes and calculations cannot reach. But now Jeans, the great astronomer, tells us the drama of the universe is marching to a close. What wo are witnessing is not the opening act, but the final one; not the rising of the curtain before the play, but rather the burning out of candle-ends on an empty stage on which the drama is already. It is true the burning out of these candle-ends may last a long, long time. But the end is inevitable, as far as science to-day can see. The burning out, the disappearance of suns and stars, is gradually going forward—they are dissolving into radiation. “The glory of the morning must fade into the light of common day, and this in some far distant ago will give place to evening twijight, presaging the final eternal night.” The poet’s vision hundreds of years ago foresaw what the slow fact of science has only now attained; The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, * The solemn temples, the great globe itself, ■ Yea, all which it inherits, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded Leave not a wrack behind. • * • • Well, well, if it must bo so, then so it must be. But our doomed universe has by the grace of science a good many millions of years yet in which to consider its latter end, and many things may happen within the

limits thus allotted to it. In fact, even now an evolution is in process that may completely alter the aspect of this dark and dismal end. The philosophers appear upon tho sceno to try their skill upon these depressing facts of the physical scientist. General Smuts put their view—or at least the view of some of them, and those among the greatest —in his address as president of the centenary meeting of tho BritishAssociatiou a few month's ago. Ho accepts the lacts of tho physical scientist regarding tho ultimate evolution of the material universe. But he painted out that, though tho latter is on the down grade to extinction, there is in the heart of it u deeper reality that holds a prophecy of ever new beginnings as the old vanishes away. There is no doubt about this. Professor Morgan, in his ‘ Emergent Evolution,’ and later in his ‘ Mind at the Crossways,’ has demonstrated it as far as any mental conception is capable of demonstration. He shows that evolution is a series of stages in which something new appears —life, intelligence, language, reason, science, morals, art, etc. Nature seems to be aiming at something; at each new level a new something emerges which is effective in determining the “go of events ” from that stage on. So General Smuts says that on the stage of evolution which we have now reach::! “ life and mind appear as products of the cosmic decline, and arise like the phoenix from the ashes of a universe radiating itself away.” So they are not necessarily involved—not, indeed, involved at all—in the perishing of the material organism from which they have emerged. He thinks therefrom that in this evolution of life and mind we are witnessing the greatest event in history—the “ birth of a new world out of the macroscopic physical universe.”

“ The human spirit is not a pathetic wandering phantom of the universe, but is at home and meets with spiritual hospitality and response everywhere. Our deepest thoughts, emotions, and endeavours are. but responses to stimuli' which come to us not from an alien source, but from an essentially friendly and kindred universe.” But the question has to be put: What is the nature of the power that is behind or within the emergent process? If we think of Nature as a whole as a process of serial creation, with life and then mind, consciousness, society, 'literature, science, philosophy, religion as its goal, what is the creative something that emerges at every stage of the process? Various names have been given to it—activity, creative will, vitalism, and suchlike. These are names that do not seem to get us anywhere. Most of us perhaps will be inclined to agree with Professor Morgan in applying to it the oldfashioned name of God. He writes: “ For better, for worse, while I hold that the proper attitude of naturalism is strictly agnostic, therewith I for one cannot rest content. For better or worse I acknowledge God as the nisus through whose activities the emergents emerge, and the whole course of emergent evolution is directed. Such is my philosophic creed, supplementary to my scientific policy of interpretation.”- « « » * Is not all this very like what was told us in an old-fashioned book written well nigh twenty centuries ago? One of its writers says: “ The heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat; and the earth also and the works that are therein shall bo burnt up.” This writer, in his vision, skips tho intervening process, and gives us the final issue. Science has traced out the process and arrives at the same conclusion. But this ancient writer adds something of which science gives us no assurance. He says that with this final catastrophe begins a new evolution. A new world appears, “ a new heaven and earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.” Science does, indeed, hint to us, as wo have seen, that mind, personality, the last result of the emergent evolution, does not vanish with the cosmic decline. It survives it, and outers upon a new career, in a new heaven and earth where righteousness is the dominating and eternal element of society. Of this science mere reason can give us no certainty. Neither Nature, nor human nature, nor the course of history, nor the heart of man supplies any sufficient data on which to build tho hope of the extinction of evil and the co-ordination of righteousness in the present dispensation. “ If these declare one fact more clearly and more uniformly than another,” writes tho late Archbishop Magee, “ it is that evil, whether moral or physical, is natural—is an inherent, inseparable clement iu all forms of crcaturo life; and that to talk of final deliverance from it is not to believe but to contradict the Bible of Nature.” The hope of it lies in God, in Christ, or nowhere. Ron.