If we cannot solve the problems of the present existence of worlds, how little can we expect to fathom the unsoundable depths of their creation and development through ages measureless to man! Yet the very difficulty provokes the most ambitious thought. We toil at the problem because it has been hitherto unsolvable. Every error we make, and discover to be such, helps toward the final solution. Every earnest thinker who climbs the shining worlds as steps to a higher thought is trying to solve the problem God has given us to do. [Page 179] IX. THE NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS. "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep."--_Genesis_ i. 2. [Page 180] "A dark Illimitable ocean, without bound, Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height, And time, and place are lost."--MILTON. "It is certain that matter is somehow directed, controlled, and arranged; while no material forces or properties are known to be capable of discharging such functions."--LIONEL BEALE. "The laws of nature do not account for their own origin."--JOHN STUART MILL. [Page 181] IX. _THE NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS._ The method by which the solar system came into its present form was sketched in vast outline by Moses. He gave us the fundamental idea of what is called the nebular hypothesis. Swedenborg, that prodigal dreamer of vagaries, in 1734 threw out some conjectures of the way in which the outlines were to be filled up; Buffon followed him closely in 1749; Kant sought to give it an ideal philosophical completeness; as he said, "not as the result of observation and computation," but as evolved out of his own consciousness; and Laplace sought to settle it on a mathematical basis. It has been modified greatly by later writers, and must receive still greater modifications before it can be accepted by the best scientists of to-day. It has been called "the grandest generalization of the human mind;" and if it shall finally be so modified as to pass from a tentative hypothesis to an accepted philosophy, declaring the modes of a divine worker rather than the necessities of blind force, it will still be worthy of that high distinction.