sand
may be, innumerable in multitude its grains, there was and is a ray
of light for each. A ray for every invisible atom that dances in
the air--for the million million changing facets of the million
ocean waves. Immense as these numbers may be, they are not
incomprehensible. The priestess at Delphi in her moment of
inspiration declared that she knew the number of the sands. Such
number falls into insignificance before the mere thought of light,
its speed, its quantity, its existence over space, and yet the idea
of light is easy to the mind. The mind is the priestess of the
Delphic temple of our bodies, and sees and understands things for
which language is imperfect, and notation deficient. There is a
secret alphabet in it to every letter of which we unconsciously
assign a value, just as the mathematician may represent a thousand
by the letter A. In my own mind the idea of light is associated with
the colour yellow, not the yellow of the painters, or of flowers,
but a quick flash. This quick bright flash of palest yellow in the
thousandth of an instant reminds me, or rather conveys in itself,
the whole idea of light--the accumulated idea of study and thought.
I suppose it to be a memory of looking at the sun--a quick glance at
the sun leaves something such an impression on the retina. With that
physical impression all the calculations that I have read, and all
the ideas that have occurred to me, are bound up. It is the
sign--the letter--the expression of light. To the builders of the
pyramids came the arrow from the sun, tinting their dusky forms, and
glowing in the sand. To me it comes white and spectral in the
silence, a finger pointed, a voice saying, 'Even now you know
nothing.' Five thousand years since they were fully persuaded that
they understood the universe, the course of the stars, and the
secrets of life and death. What did they know of the beam of light
that shone on the sonorous lap of their statue Memnon? The
telescope, the microscope, and the prism have parted light and
divided it, till it seems as if further discovery were impossible.
This beam of light brings an account of the sun, clear as if written
in actual letters, for example stating that certain minerals are as
certainly there as they are here. But when in the silence I see the
pale visitant at my bedside, and the mind rushes in one spring back
to the builders of the pyramids who were equally sure with us, the
thought will come to me that ev