Science and the Infinite; or, Through a Window in the Blank WallKlein, Sydney T. (Sydney Turner)
Religion
Science and the Infinite; or, Through a Window in the Blank Wall
Klein, Sydney T. (Sydney Turner)
Religion and science
We can do all these things, but how ignorant we still are in the
commonest doings of Nature! By giving up our whole lifetime, and
spending millions of pounds, we could never make a grain of wheat or
an acorn, and wherever we turn we find ourselves confronted with
mysteries beyond our power to explain from a finite material
standpoint; even in material vibrations we meet a mystery almost
beyond our power to comprehend. Take for instance those small insects,
of the family of Grasshoppers, which make the primaeval woods of
Central America give out a noise like the roaring of the sea, a
wondrous sound never to be forgotten by those who have heard it. By
means of a kind of rasp one of these insects creates a sound which
Darwin states can be heard to the distance of one mile: these insects
weigh less than the hundredth part of an ounce, and the instrument by
which the noise is made, weighs much less than one-tenth of the total
insect; it is less therefore than one thousandth part of an ounce in
weight, and yet it is found, by calculation, that this small
instrument is actually able to move at the enormous rate of a thousand
vibrations per second and keep in motion for hours, from five to ten
million tons of matter, and it does this so powerfully that every
particle of that enormous bulk of matter gives out a sound audible to
our ears. But even these millions of tons are not its limit of action,
for we know that these vibrations must go on until, in the end, every
particle of matter connected with this earth has been affected by each
of those vibrations.
All our difficulties of understanding the true meaning of these and
other phenomena around us are, as I have already pointed out, caused
by our inability to recognise that vibration or motion has no reality,
it is a pseudo-conception arising from the fact that our senses are
entirely dependent upon the two modes or limitations, Time and Space,
for their very action, and that, as conceptional knowledge is based
upon perceptional knowledge, our very consciousness of living is also
dependent upon these same limitations. We have seen that Motion is
nothing but the product of these two modes of perceptions, and, in my
next Views, I shall examine these elusive limitations, these two
mysteries of Time and Space, the forever and the never-ending; I shall
trace them to the utmost limit of our conception, and try to gain
thereby a clearer insight into the fact, not only that the whole
Physical Universe is but a transient and Space-limited phenomenon, a
thin film which our senses have erected and which divides us from the
Reality, but that, if our power of _introspection_ were fully
developed, we should know that the Reality is nearer and dearer to us,
and has much more to do with us, even in this life, than has the
physical.
VIEW SIX
SPACE
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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