But once more let this world be tortured into closer
compression, again let the screw be put upon it, and once again it
shall shake off the oppression of distance as the dew-drops are shaken
from a lion's mane. And thus in fact the mysterious architect plays at
hide-and-seek with his worlds. 'I will hide it,' he says, 'and it shall
be found again by man; I will withdraw it into distances that shall
seem fabulous, and again it shall apparel itself in glorious light; a
third time I will plunge it into aboriginal darkness, and upon the
vision of man a third time it shall rise with a new epiphany.'
But, says the objector, there is no such world; there is no world that
has thus been driven back, and depressed from one deep to a lower deep.
Granted: but the same effect, an illustration of the same law, is
produced equally, whether you take four worlds, all of the same
magnitude, and plunge them _simultaneously_ into four different
abysses, sinking by graduated distances one below another, or take one
world and plunge it to the same distances _successively_. So in
Geology, when men talk of substances in different stages, or of
transitional states, they do not mean that they have watched the same
individual _stratum_ or _phenomenon_, exhibiting states removed
from each other by depths of many thousand years; how could they?
but they have seen one stage in the case A, another stage in the
case B.
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