“The sea continued contracting, leaving Venus behind and then Mercury; and still it continued contracting, but now it was too small to throw off any more rings, and it consolidated to form one great central globe, the sun. “The first great act of creation was accomplished, and on that vast day when, Mercury left definitely behind, the budding of worlds was finished, the sun and the planets around it might have been seen like a golden bee surrounded by its golden children, shining in the night of space. “The earth was a much brighter place then, for it was simply a globe of incandescent vapour, and yet that glowing vapour held everything. Man and woman, and love and war, beauty and sorrow. Art, poetry, music, hunger, and cruelty. “That mixture of the abstract and the concrete sounds like rant, but it is not. It is a bald statement of facts. Every thought that man has ever thought, every dream that man has ever dreamed was lying unborn yet in the essence of that globe of incandescent vapour. Every form that ever sketched itself on earth was there, too—from the daisy to the hippopotamus. But as yet there was nothing definite, nothing but the dance of the atoms and the atoms themselves. “From the first moment of its separate existence this world _in posse_, consisting as yet of incandescent vapour, began to cool and shrink, and after the first million years or so it began to exhibit the first symptoms of thought and to storm at its own shrinking.” “Excuse me for a moment, but what do you mean by the first symptoms of thought?” [Sidenote: The Germ of Thought] “The first and only symptom of thought is action, arising from opposing forces, and when the world, now condensed into a liquid form, began to exhibit tides and storms of molten matter, it began to exhibit action arising from opposing forces; _and here let me say that the amount of work done by the world before life ever appeared upon it, the amount of work done by what we call senseless matter, and the amount of thought and ingenuity expended on that work put the much trumpeted wonder of life in the shade_. “Long, long before the first germ of life began to form, matter in its own mind had worked out the problem of the mountains and the seas; matter had kneaded the moon in its ‘dull’ hands and flung it up into the sky to be a lamp and a tide-maker; matter had worked out the whole problem of lighting and watering and warming the earth, so that when life appeared in its first humble and rudimentary form, it found a house built for it, water laid on for it, and all the lighting arrangements perfect. “Yes, to me, sometimes, all that work done by matter on its own account is even more wonderful than all the work done by Life, for even had life never appeared on the world, the labours of ‘dull matter’ and ‘brute force’ would still have created the house of the earth.” “It was created for Life to live in?”