"The history of the universe, as immediately known to us, offers as its leading feature the falling together of small discrete bodies in enormous numbers and with great velocities, or the condensation of very rare and diffused gases. Hence the formation of bodies, some of vast size, others smaller, but all originally greatly heated. This process seems to point to an earlier state of things, in which such accumulations of matter, though sparse even now, were far less common--a state in which, to use the expression which I have proposed, matter was far less integrated. It is quite true that the great change of which we thus obtain a glimpse is not a recurring process. It is not therefore fitted for eternal repetition and continuance. But it is a bold thing to say that this earlier state of things may not have followed from one still older by a natural process, and this again from one before, and so on through an indefinite regression. We have seen what an important part the ether plays in the present process of the dissipation of energy. The existence of that ether, the separation of matter into two main forms, may have sprung out of some previous condition of things wholly unknown to us. And so also there may be forms and stores of energy as yet unknown. "Mr Proctor, in his work on the sun, has cautioned us how we speculate on the physical constitution of that body, whilst we must feel uncertain how far the physical laws, which we observe here, will hold under the vastly different conditions obtaining there. He supports his caution by referring to cases in which what had been confidently thought by many to be safe generalisations have been shown to fail in novel circumstances. Thus it was thought that the passage of a gas from the gaseous into the liquid form was always an abrupt change. But it has been found that carbonic acid gas can be made to pass into the liquid state by insensible gradations. Again, it had been thought that gas, when incandescent, always gave light whose spectrum was broken into thin lines; but it has been shown that hydrogen, under high pressure, may be made to give forth light with a continuous spectrum. Now surely this caution, which Mr Proctor enters in the case of which he speaks, might still more wisely be entered when we come to consider a state of things so novel, so remote from our experience, as that which attended the origin of the universe, or rather of that state of the universe with which we are acquainted. We certainly must not be in haste to conclude that because the laws of nature, as they are known to us, will not explain what must have taken place at some very remote period, therefore those events must have been altogether anomalous."--Religion and Science, pp. 71-74.