Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports many
doubtful things and all of them appalling. There seems
no substance to this solid globe on which we stamp:
nothing but symbols and ratios. Symbols and ratios
carry us and bring us forth and beat us down; gravity
that swings the incommensurable suns and worlds
through space, is but a figment varying inversely as the
squares of distances; and the suns and worlds themselves,
imponderable figures of abstraction, NH ₃ and H ₂ O.
Consideration dares not dwell upon this view; that way
madness lies; science carries us into zones of speculation,
where there is no habitable city for the mind of man.

But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our senses
give it us. We behold space sown with rotatory islands,
suns and worlds and the shards and wrecks of systems:
some, like the sun, still blazing; some rotting, like the
earth; others, like the moon, stable in desolation. All of
these we take to be made of something we call matter: a
thing which no analysis can help us to conceive; to whose
incredible properties no familiarity can reconcile our
minds. This stuff, when not purified by the lustration
of fire, rots uncleanly into something we call life; seized
through all its atoms with a pediculous malady; swelling
in tumours that become independent, sometimes even
(by an abhorrent prodigy) locomotory; one splitting into
millions, millions cohering into one, as the malady pro-
ceeds through varying stages. This vital putrescence of
the dust, used as we are to it, yet strikes us with occa-
sional disgust, and the profusion of worms in a piece of

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