This is the most obvious tendency of modern science in its relation to the question under consideration. Nothing is more remarkable in the present aspect of physical research than what has been aptly called "the transcendental character of its results." As George Henry Lewes observes, "the fundamental ideas of modern science are as transcendental as any of the axioms of ancient philosophy."[139] Palætiological science in general has advanced by sure and steady steps, through careful observation and experiment, inductive inference, and the application of exact mathematical calculus to the recognition of the truth long ago announced by Paul: "The things which are seen are _temporal_, the things which are not seen are _eternal_." Dynamical Geology, Astronomical Palætiology, Cosmogony, Molecular Physics, Abstract Dynamics, have all landed in the same inevitable conclusion that "the existing order of things had a beginning." Sir William Thomson's doctrine of the "Dissipation of Energy" leads us, by sure steps of deductive reasoning, to the necessary future of the universe--necessary, that is, if physical laws remain unchanged--"so it enables us distinctly to say that the present order of things has not been evolved through infinite past time by the agency of laws now at work, but must have had a _distinctive beginning_, a state beyond which we are totally unable to penetrate--a state which must have been produced by _other than the now acting causes_."[140] The science of Geology reduces all terrestrial phenomena to the great law of finite duration. If there be one scientific induction which may be fairly pronounced legitimate and irrefragable, it is this one--that the existing terrestrial economy had a beginning. "All organic existence, recent or extinct, vegetable or animal, had a beginning; there was a time when they were not. The geologist can indicate that time, if not by years, at least by periods, and show what were its relations to the periods that went before and that came after." He can carry us back to the time when man did not exist upon the earth, when no mammals existed; to the time when no birds, no reptiles, no fishes existed--when even Huxley's protoplasm had no being; "when all creation, from its centre to its circumference, was a creation of dead inorganic matter,"[141] and when there was not one spore or monad or atom of life throughout its dark domain. The form of the earth itself clearly reveals its history, and points us to that beginning. Its bulging equator and flattened poles, its pavement of congealed lava, which in some cases we name granite; nay, the oldest water-worn pavement composed of the detritus of the igneous rocks--all attest the emergence of our planet from a molten condition, and a temperature[142] in which no life could exist; so that even Tyndall admits "there are the strongest grounds for believing that during a certain period of its history the earth was not,