FOR many thousands of years man has believed in and sought for the
impossible. In chemistry he has searched for a universal solvent, for
some way in which to change the baser metals into gold. Even Lord
Bacon was a believer in this absurdity. Thousands of men, during many
centuries, in thousands of ways, sought to change the nature of lead and
iron so that they might be transformed to gold. They had no conception
of the real nature of things. They supposed that they had originally
been created by a kind of magic, and could by the same kind of magic
be changed into something else. They were all believers in the
supernatural. So, in mechanics, men sought for the impossible. They were
believers in perpetual motion and they tried to make machines that would
through a combination of levers furnish the force that propelled them.
Thousands of ingenious men wasted their lives in the vain effort to
produce machines that would in some wonderful way create a force. They
did not know that force is eternal, that it can neither be created nor
destroyed. They did not know that a machine having perpetual motion
would necessarily be a universe within itself, or independent of this,
and in which the force called friction would be necessarily changed,
without loss, into the force that propelled,--the machine itself causing
or creating the original force that put it in motion. And yet in spite
of all the absurdities involved, for many centuries men, regarded by
their fellows as intelligent and learned, tried to discover the great
principle of "perpetual motion."
Our ancestors studied the stars because in them they thought it possible
to learn the fate of nations, the life and destiny of the individual.
Eclipses, wandering comets, the relations of certain stars were the
forerunners or causes of prosperity or disaster, of the downfall or
upbuilding of kingdoms. Astrology was believed to be a science, and
those who studied the stars were consulted by warriors, statesmen and
kings. The account of the star that led the wise men of the East to the
infant Christ was written by a believer in astrology. It would be hard
to overstate the time and talent wasted in the study of this so-called
science. The men who believed in astrology thought that they lived in a
supernatural world--a world in which causes and effects had no necessary
connection with each other--in which all events were the result of magic
and necromancy.
Even now, at the close of the nineteenth century, there are hundreds
and hundreds of men who make their living by casting the horoscopes of
idiots and imbeciles.
The "perpetual motion" of the mechanic, the universal solvent of the
chemist, the changing of lead into gold, the foretelling events by the
relations of stars were all born of the same ignorance of nature that
caused the theologian to imagine an uncaused cause as the cause of all
causes and effects.
The theologian insisted that there was something superior to nature, and
that that something was the creator and preserver of nature.
Of course there is no more evidence of the existence of that "something"
than there is of the philosopher's stone.
The mechanics who now believe in perpetual motion are insane, so are the
chemists who seek to change one metal into another, so are the honest
astrologers, and in a few more years the same can truthfully be said of
the honest theologians.
Many of our ancestors believed in the existence of and sought for the
Fountain of Perpetual Youth. They believed that an old man could stoop
and drink from this fountain and that while he drank his gray hairs
would slowly change, that the wrinkles would disappear, that his dim
eyes would brighten and grow clear, his heart throb with manhood's force
and rhythm, while in his pallid cheeks would burst into blossom the
roses of health.
They were believers in the supernatural, the miraculous, and nothing
seemed more probable than the impossible.