. I saw a paragraph the
other day about Digby's theory, and Browne Faber's discoveries. Theories
and discoveries! Where they are standing now, I stood fifteen years ago,
and I need not tell you that I have not been standing still for the last
fifteen years. It will be enough if I say that five years ago I made the
discovery to which I alluded when I said that then I reached the goal.
After years of labour, after years of toiling and groping in the dark,
after days and nights of disappointment and sometimes of despair, in
which I used now and then to tremble and grow cold with the thought that
perhaps there were others seeking for what I sought, at last, after so
long, a pang of sudden joy thrilled my soul, and I knew the long journey
was at an end. By what seemed then and still seems a chance, the
suggestion of a moment's idle thought followed up upon familiar lines
and paths that I had tracked a hundred times already, the great truth
burst upon me, and I saw, mapped out in lines of light, a whole world, a
sphere unknown; continents and islands, and great oceans in which no
ship has sailed (to my belief) since a Man first lifted up his eyes and
beheld the sun, and the stars of heaven, and the quiet earth beneath.
You will think all this high-flown language, Clarke, but it is hard to
be literal. And yet; I do not know whether what I am hinting at cannot
be set forth in plain and homely terms. For instance, this world of ours
is pretty well girded now with the telegraph wires and cables; thought,
with something less than the speed of thought, flashes from sunrise to
sunset, from north to south, across the floods and the desert places.
Suppose that an electrician of to-day were suddenly to perceive that he
and his friends have merely been playing with pebbles and mistaking them
for the foundations of the world; suppose that such a man saw uttermost
space lie open before the current, and words of men flash forth to the
sun and beyond the sun into the systems beyond, and the voices of
articulate-speaking men echo in the waste void that bounds our thought.
As analogies go, that is a pretty good analogy of what I have done; you
can understand now a little of what I felt as I stood here one evening;
it was a summer evening, and the valley looked much as it does now; I
stood here, and saw before me the unutterable, the unthinkable gulf that
yawns profound between two worlds, the world of matter and the world of
spirit; I saw the g