From the swinging of the bronze lamp in the nave of Pisa Cathedral
Galileo caught the idea of measuring Time by the pendulum; by the
telescope he made at Padua he mapped Space. Within a decade of the
burning of Giordano Bruno the heavens were opened up to show the
infinity of worlds, and the heliocentric teaching of Copernicus was
confirmed by the revelation of Jupiter’s satellites. What the _Sidereus
Nuncius_ of Galileo announced was the end of an era. By this terrible
book and his terrible telescope the poor little earth was pushed out of
the centre of the stage. The moon—no longer _teres atque rotunda_—lost
her beautiful spheric smoothness, her very light was a loan—unrepaid.
Great _Sol_, himself, the old lord of creation, gradually sank to the
obscure coryphæus of some choric dance veering towards and around some
ineffable pivot in a measureless choragium. The ninefold vault
engirdling Dante’s universe was shrivelled up. The cosy cosmos was
replaced by a maze of solar systems, glory beyond glory, of milky ways
that were but clouds of worlds, thick as a haze of summer insects or a
whirl of sand in the Sahara. The poor human brain reeled in this simoom
of stars, and to complete its confusion, the philosophers hastened to
assure it that with the universe no longer geocentric, man could no
longer flatter himself to be its central interest.
“So many nobler bodies to create,
Greater, so manifold, to this one use,”
appeared disproportionate to Milton’s Adam. _Homo_ could not be the
Master-Builder’s main concern—the great human tragedy was a by-product.
A sad conclusion, and possibly a true—but a conclusion utterly
unwarranted by these premises. More sanely did the beneficent and facile
Raphael remind the doubting Adam,
“Whether heaven moves or earth
Imports not.”
The noble astronomic questionings in the eighth book of “Paradise Lost”
testify to the ferment among the first inhabitants of the new
cosmos—Milton was born in the same year as the telescope and met
Galileo at Florence—but despite the poet’s half-hearted protests, man
has swallowed too humbly the doctrine that our earth is not the centre
of the universe. Pray do not confound me with those pious pundits whose
proofs of the flatness of the earth are still the hope of a lingering
sect, and a witness to the immortality of human stupidity. I am no
Muggletonian whose sun is four miles from the earth. I have no lance to
tilt against the mathematicians and their tubes. But I fail to see how
the mere broadening out of our universe can displace _Terra_ from the
centre. Till we have the final and all-inclusive chart of the
heavens—and worlds immeasurable are still beyond our ken, worlds whose
light speeding to us at eleven million miles or so a minute is still on
its way—how can any one assert conclusively that our earth is not in
the exact centre of all the systems? That it goes round the sun—instead
of being the centre of the sun’s revolution—is nothing against its
supremacy or central status. The fire exists for the meat, though the
_spit_ revolves and not the fire.
And if the earth be not in the centre of the systems, it assuredly
remains at the centre of Space. For by that old definition of Hermes
Trismegistus to which Pascal gave currency, every point of an infinite
area is really its centre, even as no point is its circumference. And in
a psychological sense too, wherever a spectator stands is the centre of
the universe.
But grant the earth be not the centre of Space or the systems! What
then? How does it lose its lofty estate? Is London at the globe’s
kernel? Did the axis pass through Rome? Kepler wasted much precious time
under the current philosophic obsession that the orbits of the planets
must be circular—since any figure less perfect than a circle were
incompatible with their dignity. Hence the cumbrous hypotheses to
explain their apparent deviation from perfection, hence was the sphere
girt
“With centric and eccentric scribbled o’er,
Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb.”
The same fallacy of symmetry surely underlies the notion that the earth
is dethroned from its hegemony of the stellar system merely because the
lines drawn to it from every _ultima Thule_ of the universe are unequal.
’Tis a confusion of geometric centre with centre of forces. It may be
that just this asymmetric station was necessary for the evolution of the
universe’s crowning race.
For if the Universe has not its aim and centre in man, pray to what
other end all this planetary pother? If man is but a by-product of the
cosmic laboratory, what is the staple? Till this question is answered,
we may safely continue anthropocentric.
Man abased forsooth by this whirl of mammoth worlds! Nay, ’tis our
grandeur that stands exalted, our modesty that stands corrected. We did
not dream that our facture required such colossal machinery, that to
engender us a billion billion planets must be in experimental
effervescence. A fig upon their size! Do we rank Milton inferior to the
megatherium? Can a man take thought by adding a cubit to his stature?
The ant is wiser than the alligator, and the sprawling saurians of the
primal slime may have their analogue in the huge weltering worlds that
have never evolved a human brain. And had the earth swollen herself to
the gross amplitude of the sun, her case were no better: she would still
be—in the infinite wash of Space—a pebble, even as a pebble is a
stellar system in miniature. There lies the paradox of infinity. Nothing
in it is large enough to be important—if quantity is the criterion of
importance. To be in one spot of Space is as dignified or undignified as
to be in another. Why, I wonder, has position in Time escaped this
invidious criticism. As well assert that nothing important can happen or
nothing that happens can be important, because everything must happen at
a mere point of Time, which is not even Time’s _central_ point. It was a
truer sense of values that made Christendom and Islam boldly place their
foundation at Time’s central point, up to which or back to which all the
ages lead. The year One begins with Christ’s birth, with Mohammed’s
Hegira. In the same spirit, though with a more literal belief, did the
old cartographers draw their world round Jerusalem as a centre. Position
in Time or Space is not the measure of importance, but importance is the
measure of position in Time or Space. Where the highest life is being
lived, there is the centre of the world, and unless a higher life is
lived elsewhere, the centre of the universe. Not, where are we in Space,
but are we on the central lines of cosmic evolution? That is the
question.
Theology, then, stands where it did, wherever _Terra_ stands. Not the
mythical theology of sacred books, but the scientific theology of sacred
facts. The expansion of the universe from a mapped parish to a
half-uncharted wilderness of worlds cannot shake religion—a Deity is
more suitably lodged in infinity than on a roof-garden—but it did shake
the Church, so recklessly committed to a disprovable cosmogony. And the
Church burnt books and men with its habitual consuming zeal, denying the
motion of the earth as it had denied the Antipodes, clinging to an earth
surrounded by menial planets, as it had clung to the flat plane of
“Christian Topography.”
But is there nothing to be said for the Churchmen? Were they mere
venomous obscurantists? Nay, they were patriots fighting for their
father-world, for the cosmos of their ancestors, _pro aris et focis_.
They saw their little universe threatened by the rise of a great stellar
empire. They saw themselves about to be swallowed up and lost in its
measureless magnificence. And so in a frenzy of chauvinism they gagged
Galileo and burned Giordano Bruno, those traitors in the camp, in league
with Reason, emperor of the stars.
But despite the Church’s defeat, our little globe still maintains a
sturdy independence. And until you bring me evidence of a superior
genus, I shall continue to regard our good red earth as the centre of
creation, and man as the focus of inter-celestial planetary forces.
Millions of spiritual creatures may walk the earth unseen, as Milton
asserts, and millions more may be invisible in Mars and the remoter
seats of the merry-go-round, but _de non apparentibus et de non
existentibus eadem est ratio_. It is William James who of all
philosophers in the world would argue our fates regulated by superior
beings with whom we co-exist as with us our cats and dogs. The analogy
has not even one leg to stand on. The cat and the dog have solid proof
of our existence, they see and hear us, and we share with them a large
segment of existence. Our anatomy and theirs are much of a muchness.
They divide with us our food and our drink and bask at the same fire,
nay, it requires a vast conceit to look them in the face and deny our
kinship. But who save Gulliver hath beheld a bodily Superman or partaken
of his meals? Even with our spiritual superiors, with our Shakespeares
and Beethovens, we have a substantial basis of identity. The range of
thought which circumscribes ours must at the same time partially
coincide with it, and though our thoughts be not wholly their thoughts,
their thoughts must needs be partially ours.
God may be infinitely more than man, but He is not finitely less. Even a
God without humour would be—to that extent—man’s inferior. Matthew
Arnold’s gibe of the “magnified non-natural man” is groundless. I do not
become a magnified non-natural dog because I have attributes in common
with my terrier. The God of theology is already divested of man’s
matter; deflate Him likewise of man’s spirit, and what remains? In
robbing their Deity of all human traits the de-anthropomorphic
philosophers have overshot the mark and reduced Him to a transcendental
nullity who can neither be comprehended by His creatures nor comprehend
them.
Or if they allow Him ideas and passions, they neutralise and sterilise
them in a frenzy of scholastic paradox. “_Amas, nec æstuas_,” cries St.
Augustine, “_zelas et securus es; pænitet te et non doles; irasceris et
tranquillus es_.” God repents, but without regret; He is angry but
perfectly tranquil. To evade the limitations of any attribute we endow
Him at the same time with its opposite, as who should say a white negro.
But such violent assaults upon the unthinkable yield no prize either of
understanding or of satisfaction.
If “the love that moves the sun and the other stars” be not that same
love which a noble man may feel for his fellow-creatures of every order
of being, if it be a love that is at the same time indifference, or even
hate, then it may equally be expressed as “the hate which moves the sun
and the other stars” (and which is at the same time love). Or it may
find far honester expression as the agnostic’s unknowable—the X that
moves the sun and the other stars. If God’s justice be not man’s
justice, then it is no justice. It _must_ be our justice—if it is
justice at all—our justice, only occupied and obscured by innumerable
pros and cons to us unknown, and extending over times and spaces beyond
our ken, so that were we placed in possession of all the evidence we
should applaud the verdict. The philosophers do but narrow their God
under illusion of broadening Him—or rather they broaden Him so
tenuously that He becomes an infinite impalpability, whose accidental
evaporation would scarcely be noted. It was a more consistent mystic who
said: “God may not improperly be styled nothing.”
So that our circumnavigation of the infinite brings us back to our noble
selves and our own door-step. The sun is still there to give us light by
day, and the moon and stars still shine to give us light by night. Nor
is it less their function to nourish us with beauty and with mystery.
“When Science from Creation’s face
Enchantment’s veil withdraws,
What lovely visions yield their place
To cold material laws!”
Campbell, who thus complained, was no profound poet. The laws are
neither cold nor material, nor do the lovely visions yield their place.
Their loveliness is as abiding as the laws which produce them. ’Tis true
that at first Galileo seemed to have profaned Cynthia, the “goddess
excellently bright.” The moon, the beautiful moon of poets and lovers,
lay betrayed—a dead planet, a scarred desolation, seamed with arid
ravines and pitted with a pox of craters. Is then the moon of the poets
a delusion which science bids us put away like a childish toy? No, by
her own heavens, no. A more scientific science restores the glamour. The
moon has all the beauty she appears to have. The loveliest woman’s face,
viewed through a magnifying glass, appears equally scarred and seamed
and pitted. But here ’tis the lens that is accused of falsification,
’tis the ugliness that is pronounced the delusion—a face was meant to
be seen at a certain distance and with the natural eye. Even so—and the
moon chose _her_ distance with admirable discretion.
The synthesis of everyday reality is always man’s central verity. The
peering unnatural scientific vision of the moon has the lesser truth, is
but a spectral rim of the whole-orbed reality. ’Tis the poet’s moon that
is the full moon. But the poet were as foolish as the astronomer if he
in his turn imagined himself dealing with absolutes, if he forgot that
in logic as in landscape all views depend on the point at which you
place yourself. It is only from the true point of view that the earth
remains the centre of the universe.