The mystery of being; or are ultimate atoms inhabited worlds? By
Nicholas Odgers.[332] Redruth and London, 1863, 8vo.
This book, as a paradox, beats quadrature, duplication, trisection,
philosopher's stone, perpetual motion, magic, astrology, mesmerism,
clairvoyance, spiritualism, homoeopathy, hydropathy, kinesipathy, Essays
and Reviews, and Bishop Colenso,[333] all put together. Of all the
suppositions I have given as actually argued, this is the one which is
hardest to deny, and hardest to admit. Reserving the question--as beyond
human discussion--whether our particles of carbon, etc. are _clusters_ of
worlds, the author produces his reasons for thinking that they are at least
single worlds. Of course--though not mentioned--the possibility is to be
added of the same thing being true of the particles which make up our
particles, and so down, for ever: and, on the other hand, of our planets
and stars as being particles in some larger universe, and so up, for ever.
"Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so _ad infinitum._
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on."[334]
I have often had the notion that all the nebulae we see, including our own,
which we call the Milky Way, may be particles of snuff in the box of a
giant of a proportionately {192} larger universe. Of course the minim of
time--a million of years or whatever the geologists make it[335]--which our
little affair has lasted, is but a very small fraction of a second to the
great creature in whose nose we shall all be in a few tens of thousands of
millions of millions of millions of years.
All this is quite possible, and the probabilities for and against are quite
out of reach. Perhaps also all the worlds, both above and below us, are
fac-similes of our own. If so, away goes free will for good and all;
unless, indeed, we underpin our system with the hypothesis that all the
fac-simile bodies of different sizes are actuated by a common soul. These
acute supplementary notions of mine go far to get rid of the difficulty
which some have found in the common theory that the soul inhabits the body:
it has been stated that there is, somewhere or another, a world of souls
which communicate with their bodies by wondrous filaments of a nature
neither mental nor material, but of a _tertium quid_ fit to be a
go-between; as it were a corporispiritual copper encased in a
spiritucorporeal gutta-percha. My theory is that every soul is everywhere
_in posse_, as the schoolmen said, but not anywhere _in actu_, except where
it finds one of its bodies. These _a priori_ difficulties being thus
removed, the system of particle-worlds is reduced to a dry question of
fact, and remitted to the decision of the microscope. And a grand field may
thus be opened, as optical science progresses! For the worlds are not
fac-similes of ours in time: there is not a moment of _our_ past, and not a
moment of _our_ future, but is the _present_ of one or more of the
particles. A will write the death of Caesar, and B the building of the
Pyramids, by actual observation of the processes with a power of a thousand
millions; C will discover the commencement of the Millennium, and D the
{193} termination of Ersch and Gruber's Lexicon,[336] as mere physical
phenomena. Against this glorious future there is a sad omen: the initials
of the forerunner of this discovery are--NO!