DR. WALLACE'S THEORY.

The alluring scientific theory just put forward by Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, that the scheme of creation was deliberately designed to bring all its forces to bear centripetally on our planet for the evolution of man, flatters the human unit's idea as to its place in the visible universe. Hitherto our attitude to the solar and sidereal phenomena surrounding us has been that of the Chaldaean on his plain, with the tent-like roof of the firmament overhead, lit by the clear light of Eastern stars. In his heart he doubtless felt himself the centre of all that came within the range of his vision, but 'his mind was bewildered by a sense of that uncharted infinity, " in wandering mazes lost." His soul was adrift in the star-spaces as amazedly as that of the dreamer in Jean Paul Richter, whom De Quincey has translated in a passage that would read like one of his own gorgeous opium-fantasies if the German poet had not imagined the vision before him. The man called up from dreams into the vestibule of heaven to see the glory of the Creator's house, we are told, swept from the terraces of heaven with his angel-guide into endless space—through Zaharas of darkness, through wildernesses of death, past the rushing of planets and the blazing of suns, by unutterable pace to heights insurmountable and to depths unfathomable. To his dazed senses, mighty constellations built up triumphal gates with measureless architraves and unnumbered archways, by self-repetition mid by answers from afar. Immensity grow ghostly from infinitude as systems more mysterious, worlds more billowy swept into his ken, until the human soul of the man was crushed and lost in this persecution of the Infinite, and his aching spirit cried for respite. Translating his thought the angel, says Jean Paul or his free paraphrase, "threw up his glorious hands to the heaven of heavens, saying, 'End there is none to the Universe of God. Lo ! also, is there no beginning ! ' "

That is what we have been accustomed to accept and resign ourselves to, but Dr. Wallace claims to have discovered for us a stable standpoint in this conflux of immensities. Looking, of course, strictly from a scientific point of view, he finds that we have enough facts at our disposal now, largely as the result of the last quarter of a century of research, to believe that neither the planet nor the individual is a mere whirling atom in this Walpurgis-revel of infinity, but really the centre-point and focus of it all. According to the theory as it is elaborated in the "Fortnightly," this earth of ours is placed precisely in the centre of a cluster of suns, which, again, is situated not only in the plane of the Milky Way, but also centrally in that plane. This arrangement brings into co-operation the united forces of the universe, to develop, as he says, the living soul and perishable body of man, adding that nowhere else than at the centre of the universe could that result have been obtained. This is a new view in the scientific world, and Dr. Wallace believes that he has combined for the first time in his article, where those curious in such matters may study them in detail for themselves, the facts which point to the conclusion he has adopted. It is new in this sense, too, as Dr. Wallace does not fail to remind us, that it puts man's place in the universe in a fresh light when considered in conjunction with those immortal longings in him which appear so disproportionately large to the small space he occupies in the material universe. In this mood he puts his theory forward as an answer to the pessimism or the cynicism of those who base argument, on the irrationality and absurdity of the supposition that the Creator of an unimaginable vastness of suns and systems should have any special interest in so pitiful a creature as man. This is a misgiving which at some time or other has attacked the most sincere believer. The psalms of David cry loudly with its echoes. The crumbling relics of mortality write commentaries on it with their fingers of dust more enduring than any graven line on marble or iron. It is the burden of the story of humanity from age to age, of the same humanity which yet obstinately repeats with the dying Antony after Actium, " I have immortal longings in me !"—and so closes its brief span with a paradox.

If Dr. Wallace can indeed persuade people to think or believe that the universe as a whole is nothing more than a process in the development of the individual human unit he will have gone far to renew humanity's faith in itself. It is sometimes said that the influence of the scientific spirit on the thought of the world is a corrosive influence. It is an acid which bites into the core of life, eating away its aspirations, and leaving only the gross material. So runs the argument among those who contend that the more science reveals in the progress of discovery and research the less room it leaves for the primitive simplicity of belief. But the moral Dr. Wallace seeks to read us is different, for he seems to find that all this forethought and design, moving on so vast and immeasureable a scale for the production of the human unit, justifies the highest hopes of man's ultimate destiny. If in the scheme of creation with its endless processes of decay and reconstruction nothing is ever wasted or lost, as Carlyle says in Sartor, it is not illogical to conclude that the force which secures the usefulness of the dew-drop or the smoke-wreath has some proportionate design in view for the fine flower and culminating fruit of these incalculable world-processes. In the spiritual order, and in its accredited schools of thought, all this is nothing new. But Dr. Wallace is speaking as a man of science of the most modern type, if we may say so with a reservation for his occult leanings. His theory throws arrowy shafts of light into dim vistas of speculation. Not the least of its less serious consequences is that we may have to re-edit the poets. Shakespeare's heavens may still blaze forth the death of princes, and his comets with even more significance than before brandish-their crystal tresses in the sky to import changes of times and states. Such behaviour might not be unbecoming the office of attendant spheres hung in space to light a central world. But the case is different with the poets who, like Byron, thought and wrote of the universe as made up of mere
Myriads of starry worlds, of which our own
Is the dim and remote companion, in
Infinity of life.

The Sydney Morning Herald 2 May 1903,