antage of resting on an objective basis:
it is the substitute of an unrepresentable reality. Scientific culture,
which people often accuse of stifling imagination, on the contrary opens
to it a field much vaster than esthetics. Astronomy delights in
infinitudes of time and space: it sees worlds arise, burn at first with
the feeble light of a nebular mass, glow like suns, become chilled,
covered with spots, and then become condensed. Geology follows the
development of our earth through upheavals and cataclysms: it foresees a
distant future when our globe, deprived of the atmospheric vapors that
protect it, will perish of cold. The hypotheses of physics and chemistry
in regard to atoms and molecules are not less reckless than the
speculations of the Hindoo imagination. "Physicists have determined the
volume of a molecule, and referring to the numbers that they give, we
find that a cube, a millimeter each way (scarcely the volume of a
silkworm's egg), would contain a number of molecules at least equal to
the cube of 10,000,000--i.e., unity followed by twenty-one zeros. One
scientist has calculated that if one had to count them and could
separate in thought a million per second, it would take more than
250,000,000 years: the being who commenced the task at the time that our
solar system could have been no more than a formless nebula, would not
yet have reached the end."[92] Biology, with its protoplasmic elements,
its plastids, gemmules, hypotheses on hereditary transmission by means
of infinitesimal subdivisions; the theory of evolution, which speaks
off-hand of periods of a hundred thousand years; and many other
scientific theses that I omit, offer fine material for the numerical
imagination.

More than one scientist has even made use of this form of imagination
for the pleasure of developing a purely fanciful notion. Thus Von Baer,
supposing that we might perceive the portions of duration in another
way, imagines the changes that would result therefrom in our outlook on
nature: "Suppose we were able, within the length of a second, to note
10,000 events distinctly, instead of barely 10, as now; if our life were
then destined to hold the same number of impressions, it might be 1,000
times as short. We should live less than a month, and personally know
nothing of the change of seasons. If born in winter, we should believe
in summer as we now believe in the heats of the Carboniferous era. The
motions of organic beings would