1.
We must devote particular attention to the hy-
potheses about the birth and death of worlds; they were
bound to
have privileged connections with the imagi-
nation through the overtones they awaken in the
darkest regions of
human sensibility.
There is hardly any question here of anything sug-
gestive of the Parmenideans. We are about to talk of
those who
are friends of Change when it assumes the
form which is closest to our
inner being: the life cycle.
The lovers of change conceived the evolution
of the
world as a biological process, a favorite model of
explanation
especially from the start of the eighteenth
century.
In particular two modes of the genesis of worlds
excite the imagination, and
one of them is especially
explosive and violent. Out of a primordial star,
father
of worlds, are born secondary heavenly bodies; the
planets
escape from their suns, and these suns escape
from the “Sun of
Suns”: by means of centrifugal force
(Emmanuel Swedenborg,
Principa rerum naturalium,
1734) or by
means of a collision with a comet (G. L.
L. de Buffon, Théorie de la terre, 1745). For the scien-
tist, it seems, a rational explanation is
in order, but
reverie takes hold of it and the dreamer sees a seminal
emission or childbirth instead. This fantasy slips easily
into the dream of
the Great Pulsation. The Sun-father
becomes the God Saturn who devours his
children;
then, after a period of digestion, which is also a gesta-
tion, he procreates them again.
Opposed to this violent parturition there is a type
of slow, mysterious
genesis whose prestige is bound to
be much greater than the violent type,
since the
Mother nostalgia is powerful among most men. Only
this
nostalgia can explain the capture of the imagina-
tion by the idea of “Prime Matter,” which
revives the
old dream of primordial waters. In rationalistic cen-
turies while scientific astronomy makes
progress, we
shall see the triumph of cosmogonies which owe not
their
development but their success among the profane
or semi-profane to strong unconscious motivations.
The first and one of the most grandiose unitary
systems of the formation and
evolution of the world
was Kant's Theorie des
Himmels (1755), conceived
six years earlier when he was
twenty-five. Like
many a great mind, Kant reconciled within himself
two contrary tendencies. From the Parmenidean he
sought a holistic
structure: “a single system... a single
general law in an
eternal and perfect order.” He in-
herited from his time a corpuscular Matter scattered
to infinity in
an infinite space. He reestablished an
effective center, but it was not a
geometric one, which
would be absurd for an infinite universe. The
first
condensed nucleus was to become the Central Body
of the
Universe. And if it was not God's throne, as
Wright would have it, at least
this Sun of Suns had
a most extraordinary density and power of attraction.
Nevertheless, the Heraclitean tendency is dominant
in the young cosmologist.
The order of the universe
is always in the process of being worked out. As
in
Laplace's hypothesis of the origin of the solar system,
rings of
gaseous vapors start turning around the primi-
tive star, break off, condense, and thus form systems
of concentric
zones farther and farther away from the
center. As the organized universe
wins over chaos, the
earliest born worlds grow old and disintegrate
through
the wear of motion. And so there reappears an internal
zone of
unorganized matter, though this chaos cannot
remain at rest more than an
instant; active forces start
to work on it again, and while the cosmic
bubble
expands to infinity, a new bubble swells at its center.
Whence
the dynamic Universe has an equilibrium
guaranteed by a central mass, but
it is perpetually
broken and reestablished like the march or progress
of man. The Scale of Perfection is not a fixed one either,
but is
constantly adding new gradations. In fact, the
further one goes away from
the center, the more does
the finer attenuated matter show itself gently
yielding
to the soul embodied in it, and the distant planets are
the
most perfect abode of the most perfect creations.
However, that absolute
Beauty which resides in the
realization of all possible worlds is never
completely
attained.
No matter how intellectual the young philosopher
Kant may be, he is still
under the shadow of the pres-
tige of the idea
of genesis. When he approaches this
chapter, he speaks of the
“ravishing charm of the
subject.” He takes some
delight in evoking a primordial
matter buried “in a silent
night,” but possessing “in
its essence”
the forces which are the sources of motion
and life. Sleep is only apparent
in this maternal obscu-
rity, in the depths of
which Kant saw seeds of worlds
germinating: “It is not a minor
pleasure to let the
imagination wander to the limits of the creation
achieved in the realm of chaos.” More than that is
the
way the death of worlds is seen as a phase of that
eternal
process, visible also in flowers and insects, a
process which the
philosopher has to accept, not with
resignation but with a certain delight.
