The world now knows—at least, the scientific part of it
knows—that these things are not true, that they are but the solemn
fancies of honest but simple-minded ancients who did the best they
could in that twilight age to explain to their inquiring instincts
the wilderness of phenomena in which they found themselves. The
universe is a process. It is not petrified, but flowing. It is going
somewhere. Everything is changing and evolving, and will always
continue to do so. The forms of life, of continents and oceans, and
of streams and systems, which we perceive as we open our senses upon
the world to-day, are not the forms that have always existed, and
they are not the forms of the eternal future. There was a time, away
in the inconceivable, when there was no life upon the earth, no
solids, and no seas. The world was an incandescent lump, lifeless
and alone, in the cold solitudes of the spaces. There was a
time—there must have been a time—when life appeared for the
first time upon the earth, simple cellules without bones or blood,
and without a suspicion of their immense and quarrelsome posterity.
There was a time when North America was an island, and the Alleghany
Mountains were the only mountains of the continent. The time
was—in the coal-forming age—when the Mississippi Valley, from
the Colorado Islands to the Alleghanies, was a vast marsh or sea,
choked with forests of equisetum and fern, and swarming with
gigantic reptiles now extinct. There was a time when palms grew in
Dakota, and magnolias waved in the semi-tropical climate of
Greenland and Spitzbergen. There was a time when there were no Rocky
Mountains in existence, no Andes, no Alps, no Pyrenees, and no
Himalayas. And that time, compared with the vast stretches of
geological duration, was not so very long ago, for these mountains
are all young mountains. The time was when Jurassic saurians—those
repulsive ruffians of that rude old time—represented the highest
intelligence and civilisation of the known universe. There were no
men and women in the world, not even savages, when our ape-like
forefathers wandered and wondered through the awesome silences of
primeval wilds; there were no railroads, steamboats, telegraphs,
telephones, typewriters, harvesters, electric lights, nor sewing
machines; no billionaires nor bicycles, no socialists nor
steam-heat, no ‘watered stock’ nor ‘government by
injunction,’ no women’s clubs, captains of industry, labour
unions, nor ‘yellow perils’—there was none of these things on
the earth a hundred years ago. All things have evolved to be what
they are—the continents, oceans, and atmospheres, and the plants
and populations that live in and upon them.
There will come a time, too, looking forward into the future, when
what we see now will be seen no more. As we go backward into the
past, the earth in all of its aspects rapidly changes; the
continents dwindle, the mountains melt, and existing races and
species disappear one after another. The farther we penetrate into
the past, the stranger and the more different from the present does
everything become, until finally we come to a world of molten rocks
and vapourised seas without a creeping thing upon it. As it has been
in the past so will it be in time to come. The present is not
everlasting. The minds that perceive upon this planet a thousand
centuries in the future will perceive a very different world from
that which the minds of this day perceive—different arts, animals,
events, ideals, geographies, sciences, and civilisations. The earth
seems fixed and changeless because we are so fleeting. We see it but
a moment, and are gone. The tossing forest in the wrath of the storm
is motionless when looked at by a flash of lightning. The same
tendencies that have worked past changes are at work to-day as
tirelessly as in the past. By invisible chisels the mountains are
being sculptured, ocean floors are lifting, and continents are
sinking into the seas. Species, systems, and civilisations are
changing, some crumbling and passing away, others rising out of the
ruins of the departed. Mighty astronomical tendencies are secretly
but relentlessly at work, and immense vicissitudes are in store for
this clod of our nativity. The earth is doomed to be frozen to
death. In a few million years, according to astronomers, the sun
will have shrunken to a fraction of his present size, and will have
become correspondingly reduced in heat-giving powers. It is
estimated that in twelve or fifteen million years the sun, upon
whose mighty dispensations all life and activity on the earth are
absolutely dependent, will become so enfeebled that no form of life
on the earth will be possible. The partially-cooled earth itself is
giving up its internal warmth, and will continue to give it up until
it is the same temperature as the surrounding abysms, which is the
frightful negative of something like 270 centigrade degrees. These
are not very cheerful facts for those who inhabit the earth to
contemplate. But they that seek the things that cheer must seek
another sphere. No power can stay the emaciation of suns or the
thievery of enveloping immensities. Old age is inevitable. It is far
off, but it is as certain as human decay, and as mournful. In that
dreadful but inevitable time no living being will be left in this
world; there will be no cities nor states nor vanities nor creeping
things, no flowers, no twilights, no love, only a frozen sphere. The
oceans that now rave against the rocky flanks of the continents will
be locked in eternal immobility; the atmospheres, which to-day drive
their fleecy flocks over the azure meads of heaven and float sweet
sounds and feathered forms, will be, in that terrible time, turned
to stone; the radiant woods and fields, the home of the myriads and
the green play-places of the shadows, will, like all that live,
move, and breathe, have rotted into the everlasting lumber of the
elements. There will be no Europe then, no pompous philosophies, no
hellish rich, and no gods. All will have suffered indescribable
refrigeration. The earth will be a fluidless, lifeless, sunless
cinder, unimaginably dead and desolate, a decrepit and pitiful old
ruin falling endlessly among heartless immensities, the universal
tomb of the activities.
The universe is an evolution. Change is as extensive as time and
space. The present has come out of that which has been, and will
enter into and determine that which is to be. Everything has a
biography. Everything has evolved—_everything_—from the murmur
on the lips of the speechless babe to the soul of the poet, and from
the molecule to Jehovah.