Modern cosmogonies

Very few even of the most savage tribes are content to take the world just as it is without speculating as to how it came to be. For time has three dimensions--past, present, and future--and we can no more restrict our thoughts within one of them than we can exist corporeally in Flatland. We are, indeed, told that the Abipones and Esquimaux refuse to trouble themselves with questions of origin, on the ground that the hard facts of life leave no room for otiose discussions; but even they feel obliged to justify their incuriosity. In easier circumstances they, too, would claim the entirely human privilege of 'looking before and after,' as their forgotten progenitors may have done. It is, indeed, difficult to think at all about the framework of nature without attempting to divine, were it only by a crude surmise, the process of its construction. We are instinctively convinced that there is no such thing as fixity of condition. So far, Heracleitus was in the right.

Experience tells us of continual change in ourselves and whatever surrounds us. Reason teaches us that its minute momentary effects, if pursued backward for an indefinite time, must sum up to a prodigious total. No limit, that is to say, can be put to the difference between what is and what was. Yet the machinery of modification must somehow have been set going. An initial state is prescribed by logical necessity. And the start was made on certain terms--it was 'conditioned.' But the conditioned implies the absolute; ordinances, an enactive power. The inevitableness of the connection has been more or less obscurely perceived wherever men have tried to establish some kind of accord between phenomena and intuition, with results legible in the wavering outlines of many primitive cosmogonies. Only, however, in the Hebrew Scriptures has the idea of Creation been realized in all its fulness and freedom; elsewhere the gods invoked to bring the world into existence themselves demanded a birth-history, a theogony being the usual and necessary prelude to a cosmogony.

Nevertheless 'picture-thoughts' (it has been well said),[1] and nothing more, were represented by these prefatory genealogies. Night and darkness loomed into personal shape, and from the obscurity of their union the creatures of light radiantly sprang, and proceeded, according to a predetermined law of order, to sort out the elements of chaos and dispose them into cosmical harmony.

This mythical phase of thought terminated in Greece with the rise of the Ionian School of Philosophy. Immemorial legends, discredited by the advent of a new wisdom, took out a fresh lease of life under the guise of folk-lore; Orphic fables were left to the poets and the people; and the sage of Miletus set on foot a speculative tradition, maintained by a long succession of metaphysicians down to the very threshold of the recent scientific epoch. All were what we should call evolutionists--Thales of Miletus no less than Descartes and Swedenborg; their main object, in other words, was to find a practicable mode of evoking a systematic arrangement of related parts from the monotony of undifferentiated confusion. Now, in essaying this enterprise they encountered two distinct problems. One was concerned with the nature of the primeval world-stuff; the other with the operations to which it had been submitted. Modern theorists have made it their primary object to expound the mechanism of cosmic growth--the play of forces involved in it, the transformations and progressive redistribution of energy attending it. But questions of this kind could only in the scantiest measure be formulated by early thinkers, who accordingly devoted their chief attention to selecting an appropriate material for the exercise of their constructive ingenuity.