" It was increasingly felt, as the
nineteenth century wore on, that the atoms had themselves been
evolved out of some simpler material, and that ether might turn
out to be the primordial chaos. There were even those who felt
that ether would prove to be the one source of all matter and
energy. And just before the century closed a light began to shine
in those deeper abysses of the submaterial world, and the
foundations of the universe began to appear.
CHAPTER II. THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE UNIVERSE
To the mind of the vast majority of earlier observers the phrase
"foundations of the universe" would have suggested something
enormously massive and solid. From what we have already seen we
are prepared, on the contrary, to pass from the inconceivably
large to the inconceivably small. Our sun is, as far as our
present knowledge goes, one of modest dimensions. Arcturus and
Canopus must be thousands of times larger than it. Yet our sun is
320,000 times heavier than the earth, and the earth weighs some
6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons. But it is only in resolving
these stupendous masses into their tiniest elements that we can
reach the ultimate realities, or foundations, of the whole.
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