APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

Hokitika Guardian, 7 January 1932, Page 1

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

•lodging by contemporary literature, there are numbers of highly cultivated and -indeed superior persons to whom the material world is altogether contemptible; who can sec nothing in a handful of gulden soil. or a rusty nail 1 , but types of the passive and the corruptible. To model:: sc cnee these assumptions are as much out of dale as the equally venerable’ errors, that the sun goes round the earth every four-and-twenty hours, or that winter is an elementary body. The handful of soil is a factory thronged with swarms ol busy workers; the rusty nail is an aggregation of tnfllions of particles, moving with inconceivable velocity in a dance of infinite complexity yet perfect measure; harmonic with like performances throughout the solar system. If there is good ground for any conclusion, there is such for the beliel that the substance of these particles has existed and will exist, that the energy which stirs them has pel's stod and will persist, without assignable limit, either in the past or the iutwre. Surely, as Meraeleitus said of !us kitchen with its pots and pans, “Here also are the gods.” Little as we have, j even yet learned of the material universe, that little makes for the belief’ that lit is a system of unbroken order and perfect symmetry, of which the fonn incessantly changes while the substance and the energy are imperishable.