properties but also in their entirety, in their occult relations and
affinities. The greatest man among you divined, in his latter days,
that all was reciprocally cause and effect; that the visible worlds
were co-ordinated among themselves and subject to worlds invisible. He
groaned at the recollection of having tried to establish fixed
precepts. Counting up his worlds, like grape-seeds scattered through
ether, he had explained their coherence by the laws of planetary and
molecular attraction. You bowed before that man of science--well! I
tell you that he died in despair. By supposing that the centrifugal
and centripetal forces, which he had invented to explain to himself
the universe, were equal, he stopped the universe; yet he admitted
motion in an indeterminate sense; but supposing those forces unequal,
then utter confusion of the planetary system ensued. His laws
therefore were not absolute; some higher problem existed than the
principle on which his false glory rested. The connection of the stars
with one another and the centripetal action of their internal motion
did not deter him from seeking the parent stalk on which his clusters
hung. Alas, poor man! the more he widened space the heavier his burden
grew. He told you how there came to be equilibrium among the parts,
but whither went the whole? His mind contemplated the vast extent,
illimitable to human eyes, filled with those groups of worlds a mere
fraction of which is all our telescopes can reach, but whose immensity
is revealed by the rapidity of light. This sublime contemplation
enabled him to perceive myriads of worlds, planted in space like
flowers in a field, which are born like infants, grow like men, die as
the aged die, and live by assimilating from their atmosphere the
substances suitable for their nourishment,--having a centre and a
principal of life, guaranteeing to each other their circuits, absorbed
and absorbing like plants, and forming a vast Whole endowed with life
and possessing a destiny.