Sail to the Pacific with some Ancient Mariner, and
traverse day by day that silent sea until you reach
a region never before furrowed by keel where a tiny
island, a mere speck on the vast ocean, has just risen
from the depths, a little coral reef capped with green,
an atoll, a mimic earth, fringed with life, built
up through countless ages by life on the remains of
life that has passed away. And now, with wings
of fancy, join Ianthe in the magic car of Shelley,
pass the eternal gates of the flaming ramparts of
the world and see his vision:
Below lay stretched
the boundless Universe!
There, far as the remotest
line
That limits swift imagination’s
flight,
Unending orbs mingled
in mazy motion,
Immutably fulfilling
Eternal Nature’s
law.
Above, below, around,
The circling systems
formed
A wilderness of harmony.
(Daemon of the World,
Pt. I.)
And somewhere, “as fast and far the chariot
flew,” amid the mighty globes would be seen
a tiny speck, “earth’s distant orb,”
one of “the smallest lights that twinkle in
the heavens.” Alighting, Ianthe would find
something she had probably not seen elsewhere in her
magic flight—life, everywhere encircling
the sphere. And as the little coral reef out
of a vast depth had been built up by generations of
polyzoa, so she would see that on the earth, through
illimitable ages, successive generations of animals
and plants had left in stone their imperishable records:
and at the top of the series she would meet the thinking,
breathing creature known as man. Infinitely little
as is the architect of the atoll in proportion to
the earth on which it rests, the polyzoon, I doubt
not, is much larger relatively than is man in proportion
to the vast systems of the Universe, in which he represents
an ultra-microscopic atom less ten thousand times
than the tiniest of the “gay motes that people
the sunbeams.” Yet, with colossal audacity,
this thinking atom regards himself as the anthropocentric
pivot around which revolve the eternal purposes of
the Universe. Knowing not whence he came, why
he is here, or whither he is going, man feels himself
of supreme importance, and certainly is of interest—to
himself. Let us hope that he has indeed a potency
and importance out of all proportion to his somatic
insignificance. We know of toxins of such strength
that an amount too infinitesimal to be gauged may
kill; and we know that “the unit adopted in
certain scientific work is the amount of emanation
produced by one million-millionth of a grain of radium,
a quantity which itself has a volume of less than
a million-millionth of a cubic millimetre and weighs
a million million times less than an exceptionally
delicate chemical balance will turn to” (Soddy,
1912). May not man be the radium of the Universe?
At any rate let us not worry about his size.
For us he is a very potent creature, full of interest,
whose mundane story we are only beginning to unravel.
