O might I on some mountain height, Encircled in thy holy light, With spirits hover round crags and caves, O'er the meadows float on the moonlight's waves.
Then, turning from Nature, he casts once more a look around his dreary cell:
Ah me, this dungeon still I see, This drear accursèd masonry, Where e'en the welcome daylight strains But duskly through the painted panes, Hemmed in by many a toppling heap Of books worm-eaten, grey with dust, Which to the vaultèd ceiling creep Against the smoky paper thrust, With glasses, boxes, round me stacked And instruments together hurled, Ancestral lumber stuffed and packed-- Such is my world! And what a world!... Alas! In living Nature's stead, Where God his human creatures set, In smoke and mould the fleshless dead And bones of beasts surround me yet.
He takes up the book of the Mystic astrologer Nostradamus and sees in it the sign, or cipher, of the universe. As he gazes a wondrous vision reveals itself: the mystic lines of the cipher seem to live and move and to form one living whole; and in spirit he beholds the Powers of Nature ascending and descending and reaching to each other golden vessels filled with the waters of life and wafting with their wings blessing and harmony through the universe.
And yet from this vision he turns away dissatisfied:
What wondrous vision! yet a vision only! Where shall I grasp thee, Nature infinite?
And from this cipher of the material universe, this vision of inconceivable immensity and infinite diversity, the human spirit which is not content with the dead bones of science and has entered into communion with Nature cannot but turn away dissatisfied--and even with despair. Let me try to illustrate this in a more matter-of-fact way.
The human mind discovers, let us say, that the earth is not the centre of the universe; that the sun is larger than the 'bottom of a cask,' as in the old legend Faust discovered it to be; that there are other worlds quite as large as ours; that this earth of ours is a good deal smaller than the sun and actually revolves round it; that even the sun itself is not the centre of the universe but one of many suns--one of the countless stars in that enormous starry wreath that surrounds us, and which we call the Milky Way. And we direct our telescopes to this Milky Way and find that what we took for nebula is for the most part an accumulation of countless millions of suns, each perhaps with its planets. Then, as we sweep the sky with our glass, we discover numberless little wreath-like spiral cloudlets, and find that they also are just such wreaths of countless millions of suns and solar systems, and that these seemingly tiny wreaths are revolving round some central body or system, which itself must revolve round some other, and that again round another ... until imagination fails. Is there, we ask, some final centre of all? some unmoved source of motion? Or is the material universe infinite?