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CREATION.
the rebuke of the Scientist who has succeeded in establishing that it is not possible to make something out of nothing. The laws of conservation of matter and energy are hostile to the notion of a first beginning, and we have to recognise that the process of world-making cannot possibly involve anything more than the restoring of a certain kind of order in an already existing state of affairs, that is, the making of a cosmos out of a chaos. But the chaos itself, when enquired into, would seem to owe its origin to a previous cosmos, which likewise must have succeeded an antecedent chaos, and so forth. Hence, instead of getting at a beginning of things, we find ourselves entangled in a circle of alternating chaos and cosmos, whence escape is possible only by abandoning the idea itself.
The doctrine of the first cause may afford momentary relief to a mind baffled by a sense of vastness of the worldproblem, but it is the sort of relief which one dropping into fire from the frying pan enjoys. The man of Science has understood the world-process much better than the theologian. Says professor Haeckel :--
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"It has recently been strongly confirmed and enlarged by theory that this cosmogonic process did not simply take place once, but is periodically repeated. While new cosmic bodies arise and develop out of rotating masses of nebula in some parts of the Universe, in other parts old, extinct, frigid suns come into collision and are once more reduced by the heat generated to the condition of nebulæ."
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The immense quantity of heat which is generated in the collision of swiftly moving bodies represents the new kinetic energy which affects the condition of the resultant nebula and the construction of new rotating
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