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MODERN SCIENCE AND OCCULTISM. 645
provisional for the present, and abandon all matters of detail to
Physical Science. The duty of the Occultist lies with the Sozd and
Spirit of Cosmic Space, not merely with its illusive appearance and
behaviour. That of official Physical Science is to analyze and study
its shell—th.e Ultima Thule of the Universe and Man, in the opinion
of Materialism.
With the latter, Occultism has nought to do. It is only with the
theories of such men of learning as Kepler, Kant, Oersted, and Sir
William Herschell, who believed in a Spiritual World, that Occult
Cosmogony might treat, and attempt a satisfactory compromise. But
the views of those Physicists differed vastly from the latest modern
speculations. Kant and Herschell had in their mind's eye speculations
upon the origin and the final destiny, as well as upon the present
aspect, of the Universe, from a far more philosophical and psychic
standpoint ; whereas modern Cosmology and Astronomy now repudiate
anything like research into the m)'Steries of Being. The result is
what might be expected: complete failure and inextricable contradictions
in the thousand and one varieties of so-called Scientific Theories,
and in this Theory as in all others.
The nebular hypothesis, involving the theory of the existence of a
Primeval Matter, diffused in a nebulous condition, is of no modern date
in Astronomy, as ever>'one knows. Anaximenes, of the Ionian school,
had already taught that the sidereal bodies were formed through the
progressive condensation of a primordial pregenetic Matter, which had
almost a negative weight, and was spread out through Space in an
extremely sublimated condition.
Tycho Brahe, who viewed the Milky Way as an ethereal substance,
thought the new star that appeared in Cassiopeia, in 1572, had been
formed out of that Matter.* Kepler believed that the star of 1606 had
likewise been formed out of the ethereal substance that fills the
universe.! He attributed to that same Ether the apparition of a
luminous ring round the Moon, during the total eclipse of the Sun
observed at Naples in 1605.]: Still later, in 17 14 the existence of a
self-luminous Matter was recognized by Halley in the Philosophical
Transactions. Finally, the journal of this name published in 1811 the
famous hypothesis of the
eminent Astronomer, Sir William Herschell,
• Progymnasmaia, p. 795.
+ De Stella Nov&. in Pede Serpenlarii, p. 115.
X HyPothises Cosmogoniques, p. 2, C. Wolf, 1886.