with Alcyone--1,000 times larger than our central
sun![2]

These, of course, are among the commonplaces of modern astronomy; but
we do not think we {223} are wrong in saying that they leave a great
many minds singularly ill at ease, in a condition of vague but
unmistakeable discomfort, oppressed by the vastness of the universe as
revealed by science, feeling lost and utterly insignificant in this
illimitable expanse of worlds on circling worlds, and aeons upon
exhaustless aeons. It was possible, when the universe was regarded as
a comparatively small affair, with our earth as its veritable centre,
to think oneself of sufficient value in the scheme of things to live
for ever; but now such a claim seems to not a few grotesque in its
presumption. Have we not been told by Mr. Balfour that, so far as
natural science by itself is able to teach us, man's "very existence is
an accident, his story a brief and discreditable episode in the life of
one of the meanest of the planets"?--and shall such a one, member of
such a race, dream of prolonging his atomic existence world without
end? As Lucretius asked:--

What! Shall the dateless worlds to dust be blown
Back to the unremembered and unknown,
And this frail Thou--this flame of yesterday--
Burn on, forlorn, immortal, and alone?

This mental attitude, familiar enough nowadays, has been forcibly and
typically expressed in a clever, melancholy book, _The Letters Which
never Reached Him_. "We suffer," the author says, "from our own
diminutiveness and from the narrow limits of our life and knowledge
since the endlessness of space and time have {224} been taught to us.
People of former epochs cannot have known this contrast between human
smallness and the world's infinity; they must have been more contented,
because they fancied they were made in right proportion to everything
else." Such conditions as these favoured the flourishing of "that
highest blossom of the conviction of personal importance, the belief in
one's eternal individual continuance." "But one who has been cast by
the waves on countless foreign shores, and who has reflected that
everywhere, and since times infinite, millions and millions have been
born and buried without leaving by their coming and going more trace
than the swarms of insects which for a moment glide through the rays of
the sun--such a one loses the belief in the importance of all
transitory phases, and doubts the inner necessity