that these seemingly tiny wreaths are revolving round some central
body or system, which itself must revolve round some other, and that
again round another ... until imagination fails. Is there, we ask, some
final centre of all? some unmoved source of motion? Or is the material
universe infinite?

Then we turn our gaze in another direction and we find in the tiniest
grain of sand countless millions of molecules whose atoms (or
electrons), it is said, are in perpetual motion, revolving like the
stars. Are then (we ask) the stars themselves nothing but molecules? Is
the whole material universe nothing but some grain of sand on the shore
of the ocean of eternity?

We turn away dazzled, and we rest our eyes, as Socrates was wont to say,
on images, on reflexions. We try to make the mystery intelligible, or
at least to pacify the reason by throwing it some such sop as the theory
that 'Size is only relative,' or that 'Space is only a mode of
consciousness' and therefore nothing real in itself. Or we lull the mind
to sleep with imaginative metaphors and speak (as Plato did) of the
Central Fire of Hestia, the Hearth and Home of the Universe, or we call
that mysterious unmoved centre of all motion the Throne of God. Thus we
try to lay the spectre of infinite Space.

Or consider Time instead of Space. In a single second how many waves of
light are supposed to enter the eye? About 500 billions I believe. And
of these waves some 500 would not exceed the breadth of a hair. Now any
being to whom these tiny waves were as slow as the ripples on a pond are
to us would live our human life of three score years and ten in the
hundredth part of _his_ second, while a being on one of those great
worlds of space revolving but once in long aeons around its centre would
live--if his life were measured as ours--millions of our years. Here
again, in our dazzlement, we have recourse to metaphor and theory: we
lay the spectre of Time by explaining it away as merely a 'mode' and as
therefore of no objective reality. In other words, dazed and outworn by
the incomprehensible infinities of Time and Space we console ourselves
with the theory that it is all a mere phenomenon, a projection of our
own mind, and with Faust we exclaim

What wondrous vision! yet a vision only!

and in the words of a still greater master of magic than Faust himself
we despairingly add that

like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towe