. From the bottom to the top of the universe means simply
more or less heat. It seems like a misuse of words to say that iron
freezes at a high temperature, that a bar of red-hot or white-hot iron
is frozen. Water freezes at a high temperature, the air freezes at a
vastly lower. Carbon dioxide becomes a solid at a very low
temperature. Hydrogen becomes a liquid at 252 deg. below zero centigrade,
and a solid at 264 deg.. The gas fluorine becomes a liquid at 210 deg. below
zero centigrade.

In a world of absolute zero everything would be as solid as the rocks,
all life, all chemical reactions would cease. All forms of water are
the result of more or less heat. The circuit of the waters from the
earth to the clouds and back again, which keeps all the machinery of
life a-going, is the work of varying degrees of temperature. The Gulf
Stream, which plays such a part in the climate of Europe, is the
result of the heat in the Gulf of Mexico. The glacial periods which
have so modified the surface of the earth in the past were the result
of temperature changes.

* * * * *

How habitually we speak of beauty as a positive thing, just as we do
of truth! whereas what we call beauty is only an emotional experience
of our own minds, just as light and heat are sensations of our bodies.
There is no light where there is no eye, and no sound where there is
no ear. One is a vibration in the ether, and the other a vibration in
the air. The vibrations are positive. We do not all see beauty in the
same things. One man is unmoved where another is thrilled. We say the
world is full of beauty, when we mean that it is full of objects that
excite this emotion in our minds.

We speak of truth as if it, too, were a positive thing, and as if
there were a fixed quantity of it in the world, as there is of gold or
silver, or diamonds. Truth, again, is an intellectual emotion of the
human mind. One man's truth is another man's falsehood--moral and
aesthetic truth, I mean. Objective truth (mathematics and science) must
be the same to all men.

A certain mode of motion in the molecules of matter gives us the
sensation of heat, but heat is not a thing, an entity in itself, any
more than cold is. Yet to our senses one seems just as positive as the
other.

New truth means a new man. There are as many kinds of truth as there
are human experiences and temperaments.

* * * * *

How adaptive