Pursuing this teleological argument, it is suggested that perhaps
this apparent waste of energy is "only an arrangement in virtue
of which our universe keeps up a memory of the past at the
expense of the present, inasmuch as all memory consists in an
investiture of present resources in order to keep a hold upon the
past." Recourse is had to the ingenious argument in which Mr.
Babbage showed that "if we had power to follow and detect the
minutest effects of any disturbance, each particle of existing
matter must be a register of all that has happened. The track of
every canoe, of every vessel that has yet disturbed the surface
of the ocean, whether impelled by manual force or elemental
power, remains forever registered in the future movement of all
succeeding particles which may occupy its place. The furrow which
is left is, indeed, instantly filled up by the closing waters;
but they draw after them other and larger portions of the
surrounding element, and these again, once moved, communicate
motion to others in endless succession." In like manner, "the air
itself is one vast library, on whose pages are forever written
all that man has ever said or even whispered. There in their
mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest as well
as the latest sighs of mortality, stand forever recorded vows
unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united
movements of each particle the testimony of man's changeful
will."[6] In some such way as this, records of every movement
that takes place in the world are each moment transmitted, with
the speed of light, through the invisible ocean of ether with
which the world is surrounded. Even the molecular displacements
which occur in our brains when we feel and think are thus
propagated in their effects into the unseen world. The world of
ether is thus regarded by our authors as in some sort the obverse