To what passes with the anchored vermin, we have little clue: doubtless they have their joys and sorrows, their delights and killing agonies: it appears not how. In two main shapes this eruption covers the countenance of the earth: the animal and the vegetable: one in some degree the inversion of the other: the second rooted to the spot the first coming detached out of its natal mud, and scurrying abroad with the myriad feet of insects or towering into the heavens on the wings of birds: a thing so inconceivable that, if it be well considered, the heart stops. But none is clean: the moving sand is infected with lice the pure spring, where it bursts out of the mountain, is a mere issue of worms even in the hard rock the crystal is forming. This vital putrescence of the dust, used as we are to it, yet strikes us with occasional disgust, and the profusion of worms in a piece of ancient turf, or the air of a marsh darkened with insects, will sometimes check our breathing so that we aspire for cleaner places. This stuff, when not purified by the lustration of fire, rots uncleanly into something we call life seized through all its atoms with a pediculous malady swelling in tumours that become independent, sometimes even (by an abhorrent prodigy) locomotory one splitting into millions, millions cohering into one, as the malady proceeds through varying stages. All of these we take to be made of something we call matter: a thing which no analysis can help us to conceive to whose incredible properties no familiarity can reconcile our minds. We behold space sown with rotatory islands suns and worlds and the shards and wrecks of systems: some, like the sun, still blazing some rotting, like the earth others, like the moon, stable in desolation. Consideration dares not dwell upon this view that way madness lies science carries us into zones of speculation, where there is no habitable city for the mind of man.īut take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our senses give it to us. Symbols and ratios carry us and bring us forth and beat us down gravity that swings the incommensurable suns and worlds through space, is but a figment varying inversely as the squares of distances and the suns and worlds themselves, imponderable figures of abstraction, NH3 and H2O. There seems no substance to this solid globe on which we stamp: nothing but symbols and ratios. Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports many doubtful things and all of them appalling. The human race is a thing more ancient than the ten commandments and the bones and revolutions of the Kosmos, in whose joints we are but moss and fungus, more ancient still. In the harsh face of life, faith can read a bracing gospel. Our religions and moralities have been trimmed to flatter us, till they are all emasculate and sentimentalised, and only please and weaken. It is not strange if we are tempted to despair of good. The canting moralist tells us of right and wrong and we look abroad, even on the face of our small earth, and find them change with every climate, and no country where some action is not honoured for a virtue and none where it is not branded for a vice and we look in our experience, and find no vital congruity in the wisest rules, but at the best a municipal fitness. Our frailties are invincible, are virtues barren the battle goes sore against us to the going down of the sun. We look for some reward of our endeavors and are disappointed not success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to do well.
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