The Historians' History of the World 01

Not till well toward the close of the eighteenth century was an attempt made to substitute a scientific guess at the riddle of creation for the old poetic ones, and yet another century elapsed before the new explanations availed fully to supplant the old ones. It was Laplace, the great French mathematician, who elaborated toward the close of the eighteenth century a so-called nebular hypothesis, which may fairly be considered the first measurably scientific attempt ever made to explain the origin of the world. The hypothesis conceives that, at a time indefinitely remote, the entire solar system and space far beyond it was filled with a “fire mist,” consisting of the material in a gaseous state which now forms the sun and planets. This gaseous body, contracting through loss of heat, and rotating on its axis, left behind from time to time, successive rings of its own substance, that, consolidating, became the planets; the remaining core of substance contracting finally to constitute the body that we call the sun.

Nineteenth century science elaborated, without essentially modifying, this nebular hypothesis. Elaborate attempts have been made by Dr. Croll and by Sir Norman Lockyer to explain the origin of the “fire mist” itself, from which per hypothesis our solar system and an infinity of like stellar systems were formed. The meteoritic hypothesis of Lockyer supposes that the primeval fire mist was due to the collision of swarms of meteors; Croll’s theory postulates the smashing together of dark stars: but the two theories are essentially identical in their main thought, which is, that previously solidified bodies of the universe are made gaseous through mutual impact, thus affording material for the operation of those changes outlined in the nebular hypothesis of Laplace. True or false, this hypothesis stands to-day as the expression of the profoundest cosmogonic scientific guess that modern thought has been able to substitute for the poetic guesses of antiquity.

As to the creation of the living things on the globe, including man, the Oriental idea, which amounted to no explanation at all, but was rather the hiding of utter ignorance behind a screen of positive assertion, has been supplanted in the latter part of the nineteenth century by the scientific explanations of the evolutionists. The theory of evolution, as first formulated in anything like scientific terms, about the close of the eighteenth century, by the elder Darwin, the poet Goethe, and the French philosophical zoölogist Lamarck, and as given such amazing fertility by Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection in 1859, has taken full possession of the field as an explanation of the development of man through a series of lower organisms. But it must not be forgotten that this theory, with all of its revolutionary implications, does not as yet explain in clear scientific terms the origin of that lowliest organism which is the first in its series of living beings. It is for the science of the future to take this remaining step. Meantime, the developmental theory of to-day suffices to substitute in precise terms a scientific explanation of the origin of man for the vagaries of the old-time dreamers; and the more daring thinkers feel that the gap between the inorganic world and the lowest of man’s ancestors is not an impassable barrier to the application of a theory of universal evolution.

CHAPTER III

COSMOLOGY AND GEOGRAPHY—ANCIENT AND MODERN IDEAS

The vague notions of the ancients as to the origin of the world were inseparably linked with their restricted notions as to the present status of the world itself.

It is curious to reflect how small a portion of the habitable globe was the theatre of all those human activities, the record of which constitutes ancient history. Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria, Greece, and Italy taken as a whole constitute but a small patch of territory encircling the Mediterranean Sea. Persia and India, stretching away to the East, lay vaguely at the confines of the world as conceived even in relatively late classical times. From a very early day, doubtless, there had been intercommunication between India and the West. Nevertheless, the conquest of Alexander was regarded as extending into regions hitherto utterly unknown, and as opening up a new world to Greek thought. Similarly two centuries later, Cæsar’s invasion of Britain brought regions to the attention of the geographer concerning which only the vaguest notions had been current.