Energy

Energy.

' 'Not only around our infancy doth heaven and all its splendors lie." When we focus our attention upon an apparently trifling process with other thoughts than the care of self and the petty human greed for gain, desiring, (however vainly) to see it as it is, with its infinite connections and relations in space and in time to all other things and motions and changes, we get glimpses through the veil with startling clearness and reality of another busy, surging, rushing existence, primeval, vast and unformed —a spacefilling, world-power and world- stuff, some of whose briefest and tiniest undulations are called the destinies of living creatures and of men.

—

ON THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE. 109

While I was writing, the other day, I suspected that my fountain pen was getting empty. I held it up, point downward. Slowly from the holder, the black ink oozed down the edges of the golden pen. So slow and continuous was the motion that, although I could see the black bead at the point growing larger and shinier, yet I could not perceive the intermediate motion from the holder down. Presently the black bulb ceased to grow. I

held it aloft. I backward and forward. turned it around, I

marvelled at the complexity of that black mass of liquid, at the multitudinous forces, acting, there, here, right before my eyes. I thought with awe how the earth is continually pulling straight downwards with a certain definite force upon each tiny molecule of that black mass. My muscles grew tense as I thought how each particle was pulling and striving with all its might, always moving in the direction of the resultant force (that resultant who shall calculate?) and always attracting its

neighbors far and seemed almost like a living near. It thing, or, rather, a whole world of living things, and I saw a huge giant peering through that smooth, shining surface into that other world, where strange forms fight in the darkness, and the everlasting forces, electrical, magnetic, molecular, chemical, superpose their effects, where old forms are shattered and new ones evolved from the fragments, where whole systems are swallowed up in the great vortex-change, and where all matter is but the plaything of one unresting, uncreated god energy. — Chester Snow, B. S.

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