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The Unseen World and Other Essays, by John Fiske

TO
JAMES SIME.

MY DEAR SIME:

Life has now and then some supreme moments of pure happiness,
which in reminiscence give to single days the value of months
or years. Two or three such moments it has been my good fortune
to enjoy with you, in talking over the mysteries which forever
fascinate while they forever baffle us. It was our midnight talks
in Great Russell Street and the Addison Road, and our bright May
holiday on the Thames, that led me to write this scanty essay on
the "Unseen World," and to whom could I so heartily dedicate it
as to you? I only wish it were more worthy of its origin. As for
the dozen papers which I have appended to it, by way of clearing
out my workshop, I hope you will read them indulgently, and
believe
me

Ever faithfully yours,
JOHN
FISKE.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY, February 3, 1876.

CONTENTS.

I. THE UNSEEN WORLD
II. "THE TO-MORROW OF DEATH"
III. THE JESUS OF HISTORY
IV. THE CHRIST OF DOGMA
V. A WORD ABOUT MIRACLES
VI. DRAPER ON SCIENCE AND RELIGION
VII. NATHAN THE WISE
VIII.HISTORICAL DIFFICULTIES
IX. THE FAMINE OF 1770 IN BENGAL
X. SPAIN AND THE NETHERLANDS
XI. LONGFELLOW'S DANTE
XII. PAINE'S "ST. PETER"
XIII.A PHILOSOPHY OF ART
XIV. ATHENIAN AND AMERICAN LIFE

ESSAYS.

I. THE UNSEEN WORLD.

PART FIRST.

"What are you, where did you come from, and whither are you
bound?"--the question which from Homer's days has been put to the
wayfarer in strange lands--is likewise the all-absorbing question
which man is ever asking of the universe of which he is himself
so tiny yet so wondrous a part. From the earliest times the
ultimate purpose of all scientific research has been to elicit
fragmentary or partial responses to this question, and philosophy
has ever busied itself in piecing together these several bits of
information according to the best methods at its disposal, in
order to make up something like a satisfactory answer. In old
times the best methods which philosophy had at its disposal for
this purpose were such as now seem very crude, and accordingly
ancient philosophers bungled considerably in their task, though
now and then they came surprisingly near what would to-day be
called the truth. It was natural that their methods should be
crude, for scientific inquiry had as yet supplied but scanty
materials for them to work with, and it was only after a very
long course of speculation and criticism that men could find out
what ways of going to work are likely to prove successful and
what are not. The earliest thinkers, indeed, were further
hindered from accomplishing much by the imperfections of the
language by the aid of which their thinking was done; for science
and philosophy have had to make a serviceable terminology by dint
of long and arduous trial and practice, and linguistic processes
fit for expressing general or abstract notions accurately grew up
only through numberless failures and at the expense of much
inaccurate thinking and loose talking. As in most of nature's
processes, there was a great waste of energy before a good result
could be secured. Accordingly primitive men were very wide of the
mark in their views of nature. To them the world was a sort of
enchanted ground, peopled with sprites and goblins; the quaint
notions with which we now amuse our children in fairy tales
represent a style of thinking which once was current among grown
men and women, and which is still current wherever men remain in
a savage condition. The theories of the world wrought out by
early priest-philosophers were in great part made up of such
grotesque notions; and having become variously implicated with
ethical opinions as to the nature and consequences of right and
wrong behaviour, they acquired a kind of sanctity, so that any
thinker who in the light of a wider experience ventured to alter
or amend the primitive theory was likely to be vituperated as an
irreligious man or atheist. This sort of inference has not yet
been wholly abandoned, even in civilized communities. Even to-day
books are written about "the conflict between religion and
science," and other books are written with intent to reconcile
the two presumed antagonists. But when we look beneath the
surface of things, we see that in reality there has never been
any conflict between religion and science, nor is any
reconciliation called for where harmony has always existed. The
real historical conflict, which has been thus curiously misnamed,
has been the conflict between the more-crude opinions belonging
to the science of an earlier age and the less-crude opinions
belonging to the science of a later age. In the course of this
contest the more-crude opinions have usually been defended in the
name of religion, and the less-crude opinions have invariably won
the victory; but religion itself, which is not concerned with
opinion, but with the aspiration which leads us to strive after a
purer and holier life, has seldom or never been attacked. On the
contrary, the scientific men who have conducted the battle on
behalf of the less-crude opinions have generally been influenced
by this religious aspiration quite as strongly as the apologists
of the more-crude opinions, and so far from religious feeling
having been weakened by their perennial series of victories, it
has apparently been growing deeper and stronger all the time. The
religious sense is as yet too feebly developed in most of us; but
certainly in no preceding age have men taken up the work of life
with more earnestness or with more real faith in the unseen than
at the present day, when so much of what was once deemed
all-important knowledge has been consigned to the limbo of
mythology.

The more-crude theories of early times are to be chiefly
distinguished from the less-crude theories of to-day as being
largely the products of random guesswork. Hypothesis, or
guesswork, indeed, lies at the foundation of all scientific
knowledge. The riddle of the universe, like less important
riddles, is unravelled only by approximative trials, and the most
brilliant discoverers have usually been the bravest guessers.
Kepler's laws were the result of indefatigable guessing, and so,
in a somewhat different sense, was the wave-theory of light. But
the guesswork of scientific inquirers is very different now from
what it was in older times. In the first place, we have slowly
learned that a guess must be verified before it can be accepted
as a sound theory; and, secondly, so many truths have been
established beyond contravention, that the latitude for
hypothesis is much less than it once was. Nine tenths of the
guesses which might have occurred to a mediaeval philosopher
would now be ruled out as inadmissible, because they would not
harmonize with the knowledge which has been acquired since the
Middle Ages. There is one direction especially in which this
continuous limitation of guesswork by ever-accumulating
experience has manifested itself. From first to last, all our
speculative successes and failures have agreed in teaching us
that the most general principles of action which prevail to-day,
and in our own corner of the universe, have always prevailed
throughout as much of the universe as is accessible to our
research. They have taught us that for the deciphering of the
past and the predicting of the future, no hypotheses are
admissible which are not based upon the actual behaviour of
things in the present. Once there was unlimited facility for
guessing as to how the solar system might have come into
existence; now the origin of the sun and planets is adequately
explained when we have unfolded all that is implied in the
processes which are still going on in the solar system. Formerly
appeals were made to all manner of violent agencies to account
for the changes which the earth's surface has undergone since our
planet began its independent career; now it is seen that the same
slow working of rain and tide, of wind and wave and frost, of
secular contraction and of earthquake pulse, which is visible
to-day, will account for the whole. It is not long since it was
supposed that a species of animals or plants could be swept away
only by some unusual catastrophe, while for the origination of
new species something called an act of "special creation" was
necessary; and as to the nature of such extraordinary events
there was endless room for guesswork; but the discovery of
natural selection was the discovery of a process, going on
perpetually under our very eyes, which must inevitably of itself
extinguish some species and bring new ones into being. In these
and countless other ways we have learned that all the rich
variety of nature is pervaded by unity of action, such as we
might expect to find if nature is the manifestation of an
infinite God who is without variableness or shadow of turning,
but quite incompatible with the fitful behaviour of the
anthropomorphic deities of the old mythologies. By thus
abstaining from all appeal to agencies that are extra-cosmic, or
not involved in the orderly system of events that we see
occurring around us, we have at last succeeded in eliminating
from philosophic speculation the character of random guesswork
which at first of necessity belonged to it. Modern scientific
hypothesis is so far from being a haphazard mental proceeding
that it is perhaps hardly fair to classify it with guesses. It is
lifted out of the plane of guesswork, in so far as it has
acquired the character of inevitable inference from that which
now is to that which has been or will be. Instead of the
innumerable particular assumptions which were once admitted into
cosmic philosophy, we are now reduced to the one universal
assumption which has been variously described as the "principle
of continuity," the "uniformity of nature," the "persistence of
force," or the "law of causation," and which has been variously
explained as a necessary datum for scientific thinking or as a
net result of all induction. I am not unwilling, however, to
adopt the language of a book which has furnished the occasion for
the present discussion, and to say that this grand assumption is
a supreme act of faith, the definite expression of a trust that
the infinite Sustainer of the universe "will not put us to
permanent intellectual confusion." For in this mode of statement
the harmony between the scientific and the religious points of
view is well brought out. It is as affording the only outlet from
permanent intellectual confusion that inquirers have been driven
to appeal to the principle of continuity; and it is by unswerving
reliance upon this principle that we have obtained such insight
into the past, present, and future of the world as we now
possess.

The work just mentioned[1] is especially interesting as an
attempt to bring the probable destiny of the human soul into
connection with the modern theories which explain the past and
future career of the physical universe in accordance with the
principle of continuity. Its authorship is as yet unknown, but it
is believed to be the joint production of two of the most eminent
physicists in Great Britain, and certainly the accurate knowledge
and the ingenuity and subtlety of thought displayed in it are
such as to lend great probability to this conjecture. Some
account of the argument it contains may well precede the
suggestions presently to be set forth concerning the Unseen
World; and we shall find it most convenient to begin, like our
authors, with a brief statement of what the principle of
continuity teaches as to the proximate beginning and end of the
visible universe. I shall in the main set down only results,
having elsewhere[2] given a simple exposition of the arguments
upon which these results are founded.

[1] The Unseen Universe; or, Physical Speculations on a Future
State. [Attributed to Professors TAIT and BALFOUR STEWART.] New
York: Macmillan & Co. 1875. 8vo. pp. 212.

[2] Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, based on the Doctrine of
Evolution. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co. 1875. 2 vols. 8vo.

The first great cosmological speculation which has been raised
quite above the plane of guesswork by making no other assumption
than that of the uniformity of nature, is the well-known Nebular
Hypothesis. Every astronomer knows that the earth, like all other
cosmical bodies which are flattened at the poles, was formerly a
mass of fluid, and consequently filled a much larger space than
at present. It is further agreed, on all hands, that the sun is a
contracting body, since there is no other possible way of
accounting for the enormous quantity of heat which he generates.
The so-called primeval nebula follows as a necessary inference
from these facts. There was once a time when the earth was
distended on all sides away out to the moon and beyond it, so
that the matter now contained in the moon was then a part of our
equatorial zone. And at a still remoter date in the past, the
mass of the sun was diffused in every direction beyond the orbit
of Neptune, and no planet had an individual existence, for all
were indistinguishable parts of the solar mass. When the great
mass of the sun, increased by the relatively small mass of all
the planets put together, was spread out in this way, it was a
rare vapour or gas. At the period where the question is taken up
in Laplace's treatment of the nebular theory, the shape of this
mass is regarded as spheroidal; but at an earlier period its
shape may well have been as irregular as that of any of the
nebulae which we now see in distant parts of the heavens, for,
whatever its primitive shape, the equalization of its rotation
would in time make it spheroidal. That the QUANTITY of rotation
was the same then as now is unquestionable; for no system of
particles, great or small, can acquire or lose rotation by any
action going on within itself, any more than a man could pick
himself up by his waistband and lift himself over a stone wale So
that the primitive rotating spheroidal solar nebula is not a
matter of assumption, but is just what must once have existed,
provided there has been no breach of continuity in nature's
operations. Now proceeding to reason back from the past to the
present, it has been shown that the abandonment of successive
equatorial belts by the contracting solar mass must have ensued
in accordance with known mechanical laws; and in similar wise,
under ordinary circumstances. each belt must have parted into
fragments, and the fragments chasing each other around the same
orbit, must have at last coalesced into a spheroidal planet. Not
only this, but it has also been shown that as the result of such
a process the relative sizes of the planets would be likely to
take the order which they now follow; that the ring immediately
succeeding that of Jupiter would be likely to abort and produce a
great number of tiny planets instead of one good-sized one; that
the outer planets would be likely to have many moons, and that
Saturn, besides having the greatest number of moons, would be
likely to retain some of his inner rings unbroken; that the earth
would be likely to have a long day and Jupiter a short one; that
the extreme outer planets would be not unlikely to rotate in a
retrograde direction; and so on, through a long list of
interesting and striking details. Not only, therefore, are we
driven to the inference that our solar system was once a vaporous
nebula, but we find that the mere contraction of such a nebula,
under the influence of the enormous mutual gravitation of its
particles, carries with it the explanation of both the more
general and the more particular features of the present system.
So that we may fairly regard this stupendous process as veritable
matter of history, while we proceed to study it under some
further aspects and to consider what consequences are likely to
follow.

Our attention should first be directed to the enormous waste of
energy which has accompanied this contraction of the solar
nebula. The first result of such a contraction is the generation
of a great quantity of heat, and when the heat thus generated has
been lost by radiation into surrounding space it becomes possible
for the contraction to continue. Thus, as concentration goes on,
heat is incessantly generated and incessantly dissipated. How
long this process is to endure depends chiefly on the size of the
contracting mass, as small bodies radiate heat much faster than
large ones. The moon seems to be already thoroughly refrigerated,
while Jupiter and Saturn are very much hotter than the earth, as
is shown by the tremendous atmospheric phenomena which occur on
their surfaces. The sun, again, generates heat so rapidly, owing
to his great energy of contraction, and loses it so slowly, owing
to his great size, that his surface is always kept in a state of
incandescence. His surface-temperature is estimated at some three
million degrees of Fahrenheit, and a diminution of his diameter
far too small to be detected by the finest existing instruments
would suffice to maintain the present supply of heat for more
than fifty centuries. These facts point to a very long future
during which the sun will continue to warm the earth and its
companion planets, but at the same time they carry on their face
the story of inevitable ultimate doom. If things continue to go
on as they have all along gone on, the sun must by and by grow
black and cold, and all life whatever throughout the solar system
must come to an end. Long before this consummation, however, life
will probably have become extinct through the refrigeration of
each of the planets into a state like the present state of the
moon, in which the atmosphere and oceans have disappeared from
the surface. No doubt the sun will continue to give out heat a
long time after heat has ceased to be needed for the support of
living organisms. For the final refrigeration of the sun will
long be postponed by the fate of the planets themselves. The
separation of the planets from their parent solar mass seems to
be after all but a temporary separation. So nicely balanced are
they now in their orbits that they may well seem capable of
rolling on in their present courses forever. But this is not the
case. Two sets of circumstances are all the while striving, the
one to drive the planets farther away from the sun, the other to
draw them all into it. On the one hand, every body in our system
which contains fluid matter has tides raised upon its surface by
the attraction of neighbouring bodies. All the planets raise
tides upon the surface of the sun and the periodicity of
sun-spots (or solar cyclones) depends upon this fact. These tidal
waves act as a drag or brake upon the rotation of the sun,
somewhat diminishing its rapidity. But, in conformity with a
principle of mechanics well known to astronomers, though not
familiar to the general reader, all the motion of rotation thus
lost by the sun is added to the planets in the shape of annual
motion of revolution, and thus their orbits all tend to
enlarge,--they all tend to recede somewhat from the sun. But this
state of things, though long-enduring enough, is after all only
temporary, and will at any rate come to an end when the sun and
planets have become solid. Meanwhile another set of circumstances
is all the time tending to bring the planets nearer to the sun,
and in the long run must gain the mastery. The space through
which the planets move is filled with a kind of matter which
serves as a medium for the transmission of heat and light, and
this kind of matter, though different in some respects from
ordinary ponderable matter, is yet like it in exerting friction.
This friction is almost infinitely little, yet it has a wellnigh
infinite length of time to work in, and during all this wellnigh
infinite length of time it is slowly eating up the momentum of
the planets and diminishing their ability to maintain their
distances from the sun. Hence in course of time the planets will
all fall into the sun, one after another, so that the solar
system will end, as it began, by consisting of a single mass of
matter.

But this is by no means the end of the story. When two bodies
rush together, each parts with some of its energy of motion, and
this lost energy of motion reappears as heat. In the concussion
of two cosmical bodies, like the sun and the earth, an enormous
quantity of motion is thus converted into heat. Now heat, when
not allowed to radiate, or when generated faster than it can be
radiated, is transformed into motion of expansion. Hence the
shock of sun and planet would at once result in the vaporization
of both bodies; and there can be no doubt that by the time the
sun has absorbed the outermost of his attendant planets, he will
have resumed something like his original nebulous condition. He
will have been dilated into a huge mass of vapour, and will have
become fit for a new process of contraction and for a new
production of life-bearing planets.

We are now, however, confronted by an interesting but difficult
question. Throughout all this grand past and future career of the
solar system which we have just briefly traced, we have been
witnessing a most prodigal dissipation of energy in the shape of
radiant heat. At the outset we had an enormous quantity of what
is called "energy of position," that is, the outer parts of our
primitive nebula had a very long distance through which to travel
towards one another in the slow process of concentration; and
this distance was the measure of the quantity of work possible to
our system. As the particles of our nebula drew nearer and nearer
together, the energy of position continually lost reappeared
continually as heat, of which the greater part was radiated off,
but of which a certain amount was retained. All the gigantic
amount of work achieved in the geologic development of our earth
and its companion planets, and in the development of life
wherever life may exist in our system, has been the product of
this retained heat. At the present day the same wasteful process
is going on. Each moment the sun's particles are losing energy of
position as they draw closer and closer together, and the heat
into which this lost energy is metamorphosed is poured out most
prodigally in every direction. Let us consider for a moment how
little of it gets used in our system. The earth's orbit is a
nearly circular figure more than five hundred million miles in
circumference, while only eight thousand miles of this path are
at any one time occupied by the earth's mass. Through these eight
thousand miles the sun's radiated energy is doing work, but
through the remainder of the five hundred million it is idle and
wasted. But the case is far more striking when we reflect that it
is not in the plane of the earth's orbit only that the sun's
radiance is being poured out. It is not an affair of a circle,
but of a sphere. In order to utilize all the solar rays, we
should need to have an immense number of earths arranged so as to
touch each other, forming a hollow sphere around the sun, with
the present radius of the earth's orbit. We may well believe
Professor Tyndall, therefore, when he tells us that all the solar
radiance we receive is less than a two-billionth part of what is
sent flying through the desert regions of space. Some of the
immense residue of course hits other planets stationed in the way
of it, and is utilized upon their surfaces; but the planets, all
put together, stop so little of the total quantity that our
startling illustration is not materially altered by taking them
into the account. Now this two-billionth part of the solar
radiance poured out from moment to moment suffices to blow every
wind, to raise every cloud, to drive every engine, to build up
the tissue of every plant, to sustain the activity of every
animal, including man, upon the surface of our vast and stately
globe. Considering the wondrous richness and variety of the
terrestrial life wrought out by the few sunbeams which we catch
in our career through space, we may well pause overwhelmed and
stupefied at the thought of the incalculable possibilities of
existence which are thrown away with the potent actinism that
darts unceasingly into the unfathomed abysms of immensity. Where
it goes to or what becomes of it, no one of us can surmise.

Now when, in the remote future, our sun is reduced to vapour by
the impact of the several planets upon his surface, the resulting
nebulous mass must be a very insignificant affair compared with
the nebulous mass with which we started. In order to make a
second nebula equal in size and potential energy to the first
one, all the energy of position at first existing should have
been retained in some form or other. But nearly all of it has
been lost, and only an insignificant fraction remains with which
to endow a new system. In order to reproduce, in future ages,
anything like that cosmical development which is now going on in
the solar system, aid must be sought from without. We must
endeavour to frame some valid hypothesis as to the relation of
our solar system to other systems.

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