D.
To all who have familiarized themselves, even cursorily, with modern
scientific knowledge, it is well known that the mind encounters the
_infinite_ in the contemplation of minute as well as in the study of vast
natural phenomena. The farthest limit we have reached, with the most
gigantic standard of measurement we could well employ, in gauging the
greatness of the universe, only leaves us with an overwhelming
consciousness of the awful greatness--the abyss of the infinite--that lies
beyond, and which our minds can never measure. The indefinite has a limit
somewhere; but it is not the indefinite, it is the measureless, the
infinite, that vast extension forces upon our minds. In like manner, the
immeasurable in minuteness is an inevitable mental sequence from the facts
and phenomena revealed to us by a study of the _minute_ in nature. The
practical divisibility of matter disclosed by modern physics may well
arrest and astonish us. But biology, the science which investigates the
phenomena of all living things, is in this matter no whit behind. The most
universally diffused organism in nature, the least in size with which we
are definitely acquainted, is so small that fifty millions of them could
lie together in the one-hundredth of an inch square. Yet these definite
living things have the power of locomotion, of ingestion, of assimilation,
of excretion, and of enormous multiplication, and the material of which
the inconceivably minute living speck is made is a highly complex chemical
compound.
Pages:
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116