Tag: Science

Bulletin

The History of Astronomy: A Project Update

For the past two years, I’ve been quietly working on a project aimed at making science—particularly astronomy—more accessible and teachable, especially for educators who may not have a formal background in the subject. As someone who doesn’t have a science background, I’ve served as the project’s first test subject: Could I learn the material well enough to teach it? Could I find a way to convey these ideas in a way that felt intuitive, compelling, and grounded in evidence?

The answer turned out to be yes—but only after a great deal of trial and error. And now, I’m excited to share the next stage of the project: a simple, organized set of resources aimed at helping teachers learn the material themselves and feel ready to pass it on to their students. The goal is to make the story of the solar system approachable and teachable, even for those without a science background.

From Learner to Teacher

I came into this project without a science background. My goal was simple: could I learn the material and then teach it to someone else? That process helped me relate to what a new teacher might also struggle with. What was challenging to explain? What kind of details did I need in order to be able to pass the knowledge on to the students I was working with?

One thing became clear early on: having good demonstration tools would be essential. At first, I cobbled together resources I found online, but I eventually realized I would need to build them myself. There were a lot of tools that just didn’t exist, and I didn’t want teachers to have to scavenge for these resources on their own. I wanted everything they needed all in one place.

The Tools

The tools I’ve built are meant to make it easy for a teacher to demonstrate key concepts clearly. For example, take retrograde motion. I’ve integrated an open-source tool called Stellarium into the platform. This tool shows the night sky and comes preloaded with a date and time that demonstrates retrograde motion in action. I’ve added the ability to draw directly on the sky, so teachers and students can track the movement of celestial bodies over time. In the image below, one object is marked in red and another in yellow. Students can see how the yellow body moves with consistent spacing between markers, while the red body’s spacing varies over time—a visual cue that helps highlight the difference between stars and planets and their motion over time.

This is an interactive tool teachers can use with their students to guide them through the kinds of observations they need to make in order to identify two key ideas: first, that planets move differently than stars; and second, how to recognize the phenomenon we now call retrograde motion.

There are many more tools like this, each tailored to support specific learning objectives. They’re designed to help students move from direct observation to theoretical models by making abstract ideas visible and interactive.

The result is a platform that brings together these tools along with lesson plans—everything a teacher would need to teach the material, even without prior experience in astronomy.

What’s Next: Equipping the Teacher

The next stage of the project is perhaps the most important: equipping teachers themselves with the knowledge and confidence to teach the material well. 

Starting next month, I’ll be releasing a series called Tracing the Sky. These short, 10–15 minute videos will come out multiple times per week and guide learners through the course content. They’re designed for anyone curious about how we came to understand the solar system—whether you’re learning for your own interest or because you want to teach it.

I see these videos as the prerequisite step for teachers. Once they’ve followed along and built a basic understanding, they can move on to using the platform and lesson plans I’ve developed to teach the material to their students. These videos aren’t meant to be played in the classroom—instead, they’re designed for the teacher. My hope is that any educator, regardless of their prior familiarity with astronomy, could watch these videos and gain a solid understanding of both the historical development of celestial models and the practical tools available to teach them.

Each video is designed to be the teacher’s starting point—a way to learn the material themselves, step by step. Once they feel comfortable, they can take the next step and explore the platform and lesson plans I’ve created. These plans tie directly into the demonstrations and provide guidance on how each lesson fits into the broader narrative, what questions to ask, and which observations to emphasize.

Closing Thoughts

I’ve come to believe that science education doesn’t need to be intimidating or overly technical. At its best, it should be a process of wonder, reasoning, and discovery—and that’s exactly what the history of astronomy offers. It’s a story of humans looking up at the sky, puzzling over what they saw, and gradually learning to make sense of it all.

If I, as a non-scientist, can learn to tell that story, then I’m confident that others can too. And with the right tools and support, I believe we can help students not only understand the solar system—but appreciate the incredible intellectual journey it took to discover it.

If you’d like to keep up to date with the project and follow along with the videos as I release them, you can sign up for my newsletter here: https://mailchi.mp/7be3350a4b33/tracing-the-sky-newsletter

Bulletin

From a Review of A Brief Quadrivium and Teaching the Quadrivium: A Guide for Instructors

From a review of A Brief Quadrivium and Teaching the Quadrivium: A Guide for Instructors originally published in Principia 3, no. 1 (2024)

Classical educators know that the canon of the liberal arts numbers seven, but very few of us make much progress beyond the trivium before we jump headfirst into philosophy. We approach advanced mathematics through the modern canon of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus, not the four arts of the quadrivium—geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy. Even the one common term, geometry, means different things. For most of us, it is something like applied algebra. The minority who have gone through Euclid will know that the classical art of geometry uses no numbers at all, only proportion. If we have some direct knowledge of the quadrivium this is only very rarely because we studied them as they are. We tend to learn about them, presenting them either as primitive (and therefore obsolete) forms of the STEM fields, or as a few wonder-inspiring diagrams of the golden ratio projected onto the masterpieces of the Old Masters sandwiched between sessions of mathematics classes hardly distinct from those offered in non-classical educational settings—two excellent starting places are Gary B. Meisner’s Golden Ratio and Mirana Lundy’s Quadrivum. In the end, if the quadrivium enters into our thinking or our teaching, it is at second or third hand, and we and our students at best come to appreciate its historical presence in the past of Western culture without acquiring the intellectual character or skills that would enable us to use the quadrivium productively in our own attempts to make the world more beautiful.

This is due to reasons both theoretical and practical. Many who would never question the enduring value of the arts of grammar, logic, or rhetoric struggle to see how the historically constructed quadrivium could be of any more than historical interest to contemporary educators. A deeper problem is that since antiquity these arts have been debased and abused, such that Latin dictionaries list “astrologer or wizard” as the second definition of the noun mathematicus. For such reasons, Plato’s Timaeus and Boethius’ De Arithmetica tend to be reserved for those undertaking advanced studies of those authors, and the immense influence exerted by these texts on Western culture is often presented as a curiosity or problem rather than as a fact whose recovery might lead to fresh insight in the present.

 But what if contemporary students went beyond learning about the historical importance of the quadrivium and learned the content and skills embedded in study of the quadrivial subjects? While many of us make verum, bonum, pulchrum our motto, few of us are prepared to give any account of the final term. The classical education movement has recovered and redeployed the arts of language, showing that logic can still be used to gain certain knowledge of truth and that virtue ethics can still be a means of knowing and doing the good. Despite our recovery of the arts of language and our confidence in their ability to give us access to reality, many see beauty as being in the eye of the beholder rather than being a transcendental susceptible to objective analysis and real knowledge. Writers such as Stratford Caldecott and David Clayton have pointed to the quadrivium as the traditional means of setting the third transcendental, beauty, on an objective basis from which it can be contemplated, known, imitated, and produced.

It comes as no surprise that our inability to accommodate pre-Copernican astronomy and pre-Cartesian mathematics (with the notable exception of Euclid) to our narrative of scientific revolution and progress has not led many of us to develop classroom resources that would give our students access to these traditions and help them develop the skills the arts promise to impart. Green Lion Press, whose edition of Euclid is no doubt well known to many readers of Principia, follows a grand narrative of the “Scientific Revolution” to a great extent in their offerings, providing the text editions that make it possible for students in great books programs to re-create the discoveries of Kepler, Newton, Lavoisier, and Faraday. When I met Howard Fisher, an associate editor at Green Lion Press, I asked him why they do not offer editions of Aristoxenus, Boethius, or other “quadrivial” authors. He told me there is no editorial policy against it, and in fact, they would if they could. The problem, he said, is a lack of editors. Would I like, he added, to try my hand at doing it myself?

A Brief QuadriviumFortunately for me, a humanist who has not yet mastered the arts of number, Peter Ulrickson has provided the sort of book I have long imagined but not had the skill to write. A Brief Quadrivium divides the four arts into a thirty-week curriculum, distributed approximately equally across geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy, ending with three brief chapters that consider the quadrivium’s relationship to modern physics, mathematics, and music theory and its propaedeutic role in “preparing us to seek the highest, unchanging things.” Upon completion of the curriculum, students will not only have been exposed to wonder, but they will also have laid the foundation of a detailed, technical knowledge of the quadrivium that they can use both to understand the nature of reality and to produce works of art, in the Aristotelian sense, imitating nature to bring order to chaos and instantiate beauty in the world.

A key component of Ulrickson’s presentation is the continuity of the quadrivium and the trivium as two parts of a whole, as opposed to the modern division of the disciplines into arts and sciences. An excellent example of this in practice is Ulrickson’s gentle but persistent and effective explanation and use of technical terminology. Relying on a philosophy of language based in Aristotelian ideas that recognizes the adaequatio of words, concepts, and things and the status of each of the components of the quadrivium as stable and articulated technai, Ulrickson provides readers with an account of terms like “definition,” “lemma,” “proposition,” and “conjecture” and encourages them to build up familiarity with them. Those who, like me, have made the transition from “literary studies” to the “trivium,” who have come to appreciate the precision that training in the arts of language can bring to conversations about the great ideas, will be pleased to ground their developing knowledge of the quadrivium in this system of language. Properly technical language is not jargon; it is rather a key constitutive element of the knowledge and practice of the art, and Ulrickson presents this in a compelling way that will resonate with classical educators.

Bulletin

Einstein’s Imagination

Excerpt from Relativity: The Special and General Theories by Albert Einstein.

Part of Einstein’s genius was his ability to think things through using just his imagination. In this excerpt, Einstein shows how imagining an elevator accelerating in empty space led him to posit that gravity can be understood as a relative phenomenon. 

In contrast to electric and magnetic fields, the gravitational field exhibits a most remarkable property, which is of fundamental importance for what follows. Bodies which are moving under the sole influence of a gravitational field receive an acceleration, which does not in the least depend either on the material or on the physical state of the body. For instance, a piece of lead and a piece of wood fall in exactly the same manner in a gravitational field (in vacuo), when they start off from rest or with the same initial velocity…We then have the following law: The gravitational mass of a body is equal to its inertial mass.

It is true that this important law had hitherto been recorded in mechanics, but it had not been interpreted. A satisfactory interpretation can be obtained only if we recognize the following fact: The same quality of a body manifests itself according to circumstances as “inertia” or as “weight” (lit. “heaviness”). In the following section we shall show to what extent this is actually the case, and how this question is connected with the general postulate of relativity.

WE imagine a large portion of empty space, so far removed from stars and other appreciable masses that we have before us approximately the conditions required by the fundamental law of Galilei. It is then possible to choose a Galileian reference-body for this part of space (world), relative to which points at rest remain at rest and points in motion continue permanently in uniform rectilinear motion. As reference-body let us imagine a spacious chest resembling a room with an observer inside who is equipped with apparatus. Gravitation naturally does not exist for this observer. He must fasten himself with strings to the floor, otherwise the slightest impact against the floor will cause him to rise slowly towards the ceiling of the room.

To the middle of the lid of the chest is fixed externally a hook with rope attached, and now a “being” (what kind of a being is immaterial to us) begins pulling at this with a constant force. The chest together with the observer then begin to move “upwards” with a uniformly accelerated motion. In course of time their velocity will reach unheard-of values—provided that we are viewing all this from another reference-body which is not being pulled with a rope. But how does the man in the chest regard the process? The acceleration of the chest will be transmitted to him by the reaction of the floor of the chest. He must therefore take up this pressure by means of his legs if he does not wish to be laid out full length on the floor. He is then standing in the chest in exactly the same way as anyone stands in a room of a house on our earth. If he release a body which he previously had in his hand, the acceleration of the chest will no longer be transmitted to this body, and for this reason the body will approach the floor of the chest with an accelerated relative motion. The observer will further convince himself that the acceleration of the body towards the floor of the chest is always of the same magnitude, whatever kind of body he may happen to use for the experiment.

Relying on his knowledge of the gravitational field (as it was discussed in the preceding section), the man in the chest will thus come to the conclusion that he and the chest are in a gravitational field which is constant with regard to time. Of course he will be puzzled for a moment as to why the chest does not fall in this gravitational field. Just then, however, he discovers the hook in the middle of the lid of the chest and the rope which is attached to it, and he consequently comes to the conclusion that the chest is suspended at rest in the gravitational field.

Ought we to smile at the man and say that he errs in his conclusion? I do not believe we ought if we wish to remain consistent; we must rather admit that his mode of grasping the situation violates neither reason nor known mechanical laws. Even though it is being accelerated with respect to the “Galileian space” first considered, we can nevertheless regard the chest as being at rest. We have thus good grounds for extending the principle of relativity to include bodies of reference which are accelerated with respect to each other, and as a result we have gained a powerful argument for a generalised postulate of relativity.

We must note carefully that the possibility of this mode of interpretation rests on the fundamental property of the gravitational field of giving all bodies the same acceleration, or, what comes to the same thing, on the law of the equality of inertial and gravitational mass. If this natural law did not exist, the man in the accelerated chest would not be able to interpret the behavior of the bodies around him on the supposition of a gravitational field, and he would not be justified on the grounds of experience in supposing his reference-body to be “at rest."

Suppose that the man in the chest fixes a rope to the inner side of the lid, and that he attaches a body to the free end of the rope. The result of his will be to stretch the rope so that it will hang “vertically” downwards. If we ask for an opinion of the cause of tension in the rope, the man in the chest will say: “The suspended body experiences a downward force in the gravitational field, and this is neutralized by the tension of the rope; what determines the magnitude of the tension of the rope is the gravitational mass of the suspended body.” On the other hand, an observer who is poised freely in space will interpret the condition of things thus: “The rope must perforce take part in the accelerated motion of the chest, and it transmits this motion to the body attached to it. The tension of the rope is just large enough to effect the acceleration of the body. That which determines the magnitude of the tension of the rope is the inertial mass of the body.” Guided by this example, we see that our extension of the principle of relativity implies the necessity of the law of the equality of inertial and gravitational mass. Thus we have obtained a physical interpretation of this law.

From our consideration of the accelerated chest we see that a general theory of relativity must yield important results on the laws of gravitation. In point of fact, the systematic pursuit of the general idea of relativity has supplied the laws satisfied by the gravitational field. Before proceeding farther, however, I must warn the reader against a misconception suggested by these considerations. A gravitational field exists for the man in the chest, despite the fact that there was no such field for the co-ordinate system first chosen.

Now we might easily suppose that the existence of a gravitational field is always only an apparent one. We might also think that, regardless of the kind of gravitational field which may be present, we could always choose another reference-body such that no gravitational field exists with reference to it. This is by no means true for all gravitational fields, but only for those of quite special form. It is, for instance, impossible to choose a body of reference such that, as judged from it, the gravitational field of the earth (in its entirety) vanishes.

We can now appreciate why that argument is not convincing, which we brought forward against the general principle of relativity at the end of the general principle of relativity at the end of Section XVIII. It is certainly true that the observer in the railway carriage experiences a jerk forwards as a result of the application of the brake, and that he recognises in this the nonuniformity of motion (retardation) of the carriage. But he is compelled by nobody to refer this jerk to a “real” acceleration (retardation) of the carriage. He might also interpret his experience thus: “My body of reference (the carriage) remains permanently at rest. With reference to it, however, there exists (during the period of application of the brakes) a gravitational field which is directed forwards and which is variable with respect to time. Under the influence of this field, the embankment together with the earth moves non-uniformly in such a manner that their original velocity in the backwards direction is continuously reduced.

Bulletin

Creativity in STEM and Bill McLean

I am blessed to have received a classical liberal arts education. I was homeschooled through high school, and then graduated with a Bachelor’s in liberal arts from the Great Books program of Thomas Aquinas College. After that I found myself at a bit of a loss. My education did what it promised: it ignited wonder, vivified my imagination, and engaged my heart and emotions while at the same time developing my calculating mind. But, though I liked the philosophy I’d studied, I didn’t think that I was capable of doing it for the rest of my life while staying attached to reality. Moreover, I didn’t really like the idea of relying on the charity of others for my livelihood, as I would likely have to do at least indirectly in becoming a professor and taking a job at any school whose existence rests on the beneficence of its donors. Not that there’s anything the slightest bit wrong with doing so; we need great teachers, which is why successfully wealthy people are willing to donate to the institutions that foster them! But we need the donors too, and part of me wanted the challenge of seeing if I could be a provider in that way.

So academia was out. But then, how was I to bring the goods of my education into the rest of my life? This talk of joy and wonder and imagination sounds great, in theory, but the modern world is hard, scientific, competitive, complex, and process driven. Did a traditional education in the ways of wonder and imagination really prepare me as a young graduate to thrive in the 21st century world?

In hindsight, this question of how to integrate what’s wonderful with what’s practicable has been one of the central themes of the 33 years I’ve lived thus far. The liberal arts tradition of education might itself be to blame here. The “liberal arts” are often defined sharply in opposition to “servile arts” as those that befit free men versus the tasks given to slaves. Was I choosing mental servitude for the sake of material thriving? This left me wondering: could I pursue the so-called servile arts in a way that exercised my wonder and imagination, in a way which led towards freedom?

To express my dilemma more generally, does the student trained in the ways of wonder and imagination have the wherewithal to bountifully provide food, shelter, and security for himself, his family, and his countrymen, to be as free physically as he is intellectually? Ideally, should we not only be able to be free both practically and intellectually, but able to do so in a well-integrated way, without having to painfully wait it out through a boring workday while hoping for a precious little time afterwards with which to dwell on things which actually feel worth freely pursuing?

I decided to pursue a so-called STEM career, having some hope that it would not only allow me to support a family and be in a position to be generous, but also would involve interesting work. I had always liked math and science and airplanes, so I decided on aerospace engineering, this time starting with a second bachelor’s at a state school.

File:China lake.jpgUnfortunately, many of the things which I’d loved most about science and engineering up to that point were significantly lacking in the engineering schooling I experienced, things like exercising imaginative creativity, or the joy of seeing the incarnation of abstract theories in real physical devices. Much of what I actually found seemed to be a sort of advanced box-checking exercise. I hoped that this was an anomaly, perhaps due to the field of aerospace engineering being past its prime or to my having chosen a lackluster engineering program, and kept doggedly on, ultimately getting a job as an aerospace engineer at China Lake Naval Base, the U.S. Navy’s last remaining live fire test range, whose vast expanse stretches out at the southeast base of the beautiful Sierra Nevada mountains. But there too I experienced a certain deadness, an acedia whose sources I couldn’t completely pin down. There were clearly embers of what had once been a fire of inspiration at China Lake; I could sense them in the glow in an old engineer’s eyes, or the cool artifacts around the base, or here or there in the pages of a dusty book in the library. But despite the many ostensibly cool projects and the billions of dollars of annual budget on the base, the original fire was clearly long since gone, burned out in a sea of red tape and wasted time and money. I was tempted to give up on engineering altogether. However, there was one particular ember which really stood out, giving me confidence that engineering had, in fact, existed at least at one time in something like the way I had always idealized it, and in turn giving me something to continue to strive for in the engineering world.

File:2008-12 mclean ship name01.jpgThat glowing remnant from a past age was found in the collected speeches of Dr. William B. McLean. The son of a Presbyterian minister, William Burdette McLean (1914–1976) was a civilian physicist at what was then known as the Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS) in the desert of China Lake, California, during the early Cold War. He led the development of the Sidewinder air-to-air missile, a brilliant and innovative piece of engineering, which was carried by aircraft defending the west from encroaching communism around the globe in greater numbers than any other missile before or since. After leading the Sidewinder team in the late '40s and early '50s, McLean was promoted to Technical Director at NOTS during which time he led what is remembered by those involved as a golden era of engineering and innovation on the station in the service of America's freedom, with the engineering output to prove it. In other words, he was neither a slave nor a mere dreamer; he was both a capable and inspiring leader and one of the true practical geniuses of American history.

While McLean didn't write books, he was often asked to speak, particularly after the success of the Sidewinder program, and we are fortunate enough to have the transcripts of many speeches. I found these typewritten transcripts fascinating; ultimately they renewed my belief that imagination and creativity should be an integral part of my career field.

One of the things which comes through most clearly in reading Bill McLean's speeches is the centrality of his regard for creativity.
“I believe if the United States is to be successful in either its military or economic competition, we will in the future need to learn to appreciate and to foster creative design capabilities.”

But he also saw that the typical formation of the young squelched creativity.

The number of people who start life with a high degree of creative ability and creative drive is unknown because the forces of society begin so rapidly to act to repress and restrain the curiosity and experimental operations of the young child.

He believed the central effort of the creative scientist is to see a good solution in his imagination.

The designer… needs to outline as many ways of accomplishing the design as he can imagine… Industrial laboratories are handicapped by a natural desire to improve on what exists, by military specifications that are unimaginative.

This means that managers must encourage the creative freedom of those on their teams.

As a man responsible to others for the function of managing research… I need to be in a position to understand and accept new ideas and eventually to judge the ability of people to carry out the work which they are interested in doing. In this type of judgment I would place first priority on the interest and enthusiasm which a man shows in the work which he is doing and, second, on his skill in visualizing and planning the crucial experiments which must be carried out in order to check new theories or hypotheses.

This visualization is so critical for effective and elegant design that McLean is willing to recommend a radically unconventional design methodology, namely design residing in the imagination of a single designer, along the lines of a wall mural.

It seems to me that the creation of a missile system would progress more effectively if it were recognized to have many of the same problems as the creation of a large mural painting. Many useful analogies might then result. The creation of a mural is obviously too large a job for one man and yet, at the same time, it must represent an integrated whole, rather than a collection of parts. In the case of the mural, we have adopted the practice of selecting a master artist whose responsibility is to conceive a picture in accord with the general message which is to be conveyed. He then uses his imagination, his understanding of the materials and tools available, and his knowledge of the abilities of his assistants to lay out an overall design. Committees can review his work and make suggestions, but they cannot take over his responsibility for it. Once the general concept has been sketched out, many people can begin to work using their own specific abilities to fill in the various parts of the picture. As a result, we have an integrated creation that reflects primarily the skill, ability, and experience of the master artist, but which also uses the individual skills of his assistants to a maximum.

McLean proposed that management strategy that aims to maximize imaginative creativity and enjoyment is the necessary way to both practice and preserve the freedom we so deeply treasure.

I hope that we as a Nation can choose in the management of our business and our military programs the type of management which maximizes enjoyment, participation, and the contributions of individual creativity, rather than the type of management whose goals and objectives are set from the top and which is budgeted, planned, and integrated to achieve objectives on schedule without consideration of possible creative inputs. One type of management will strengthen what we have variously called ‘The Free Competitive System,’ ‘The American Way of Life,’ or ‘Life Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.’ The other type of management by overinsistence on the importance of budget and schedule, comes perilously close to conditioning us to the type of organization which believes that man's highest goal is to achieve and surpass through successive five and ten year plans.

What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?

Modern culture stands in awe of the pragmatic fruits of empirical science. However, many are content (as the central planners were) to extort these fruits by any means, leaving the wonder and gratitude which ought to accompany their uncovering (and which originally gave rise to scientific inquiry itself) as a relic of the past. Especially in large corporations and in government, technological development is often seen as the product of a vast machine, the result of a method, in which individual people are merely cogs; taken to its extreme, this view sees imagination, inspiration, and even freedom as no longer necessary. The classically educated liber, on the other hand, sees the wonder in the world, the necessity of a rightful ordering of technology, and the value of knowledge for its own sake as well as for its fruits, but may not always have a ready answer to the often earnestly asked question, “but what are you going to do with that education if not teach or become a priest?” After the initial shock of the encounter with this widening gulf between practicality and wonder, however, one discovers that it is not only possible but necessary that we bridge the gulf, both for the sustenance of wonder (and wonderers) and also for the fullest attainment of the pragmatic. And with the transformation offered by the Christian understanding of the redemptive power of suffering and the Cross, classical thought becomes capable of seeing the full truth, that man is called to imitate his Creator with smaller creations of his own, taking joyful hope not only in the fruits of his labors but also in loving acts of labor itself. But fully carrying this spirit of wonder filled creativity into the pragmatic world of modern technology is a difficult task, undertaken by few and done well by fewer. Those rare few who have really done so well are examples worth treasuring and learning from. Bill McLean is one such treasure.

Bulletin

MacDonald on Effect of Science on an Adolescent

In “A Sketch of Individual Development” (1880), George MacDonald, best known for his works of fantasy such as A Princess and Curdie and Lilith, describes an imaginary boy coming to full consciousness, from infancy into adulthood. In this excerpt, he reflects on the impact that a serious encounter with science in late high school or college might have on the development of mind and heart.

The changelessness amid change, the law amid seeming disorder, the unity amid units, draws him again. He begins to descry the indwelling poetry of science. The untiring forces at work in measurable yet inconceivable spaces of time and room, fill his soul with an awe that threatens to uncreate him with a sense of littleness; while, on the other side, the grandeur of their operations fills him with such an informing glory, the mere presence of the mighty facts, that he no more thinks of himself, but in humility is great, and knows it not. Rapt spectator, seer entranced under the magic wand of Science, he beholds the billions of billions of miles of incandescent vapour begin a slow, scarce perceptible revolution, gradually grow swift, and gather an awful speed. He sees the vapour, as it whirls, condensing through slow eternities to a plastic fluidity. He notes ring after ring part from the circumference of the mass, break, rush together into a globe, and the glowing ball keep on through space with the speed of its parent bulk. It cools and still cools and condenses, but still fiercely glows. Presently--after tens of thousands of years is the creative presently--arises fierce contention betwixt the glowing heart and its accompanying atmosphere. The latter invades the former with antagonistic element. He listens in his soul, and hears the rush of ever descending torrent rains, with the continuous roaring shock of their evanishment in vapour--to turn again to water in the higher regions, and again rush to the attack upon the citadel of fire. He beholds the slow victory of the water at last, and the great globe, now glooming in a cloak of darkness, covered with a wildly boiling sea--not boiling by figure of speech, under contending forces of wind and tide, but boiling high as the hills to come, with veritable heat. He sees the rise of the wrinkles we call hills and mountains, and from their sides the avalanches of water to the lower levels. He sees race after race of living things appear, as the earth becomes, for each new and higher kind, a passing home; and he watches the succession of terrible convulsions dividing kind from kind, until at length the kind he calls his own arrives. Endless are the visions of material grandeur unfathomable, awaked in his soul by the bare facts of external existence.

But soon comes a change. So far as he can see or learn, all the motion, all the seeming dance, is but a rush for death, a panic flight into the moveless silence. The summer wind, the tropic tornado, the softest tide, the fiercest storm, are alike the tumultuous conflict of forces, rushing, and fighting as they rush, into the arms of eternal negation. On and on they hurry--down and down, to a cold stirless solidity, where wind blows not, water flows not, where the seas are not merely tideless and beat no shores, but frozen cleave with frozen roots to their gulfy basin. All things are on the steep-sloping path to final evanishment, uncreation, non-existence. He is filled with horror--not so much of the dreary end, as at the weary hopelessness of the path thitherward. Then a dim light breaks upon him, and with it a faint hope revives, for he seems to see in all the forms of life, innumerably varied, a spirit rushing upward from death--a something in escape from the terror of the downward cataract, of the rest that knows not peace. "Is it not," he asks, "the soaring of the silver dove of life from its potsherd-bed--the heavenward flight of some higher and incorruptible thing? Is not vitality, revealed in growth, itself an unending resurrection?"

The vision also of the oneness of the universe, ever reappearing through the vapours of question, helps to keep hope alive in him. To find, for instance, the law of the relation of the arrangements of the leaves on differing plants, correspond to the law of the relative distances of the planets in approach to their central sun, wakes in him that hope of a central Will, which alone can justify one ecstatic throb at any seeming loveliness of the universe. For without the hope of such a centre, delight is unreason--a mockery not such as the skeleton at the Egyptian feast, but such rather as a crowned corpse at a feast of skeletons. Life without the higher glory of the unspeakable, the atmosphere of a God, is not life, is not worth living. He would rather cease to be, than walk the dull level of the commonplace--than live the unideal of men in whose company he can take no pleasure--men who are as of a lower race, whom he fain would lift, who will not rise, but for whom as for himself he would cherish the hope they do their best to kill. Those who seem to him great, recognize the unseen--believe the roots of science to be therein hid--regard the bringing forth into sight of the things that are invisible as the end of all Art and every art--judge the true leader of men to be him who leads them closer to the essential facts of their being. Alas for his love and his hope, alas for himself, if the visible should exist for its own sake only!--if the face of a flower means nothing--appeals to no region beyond the scope of the science that would unveil its growth. He cannot believe that its structure exists for the sake of its laws; that would be to build for the sake of its joints a scaffold where no house was to stand. Those who put their faith in Science are trying to live in the scaffold of the house invisible.