Cosmos, Vol. 5

the preservation of living forceoriginal: "lebendige Kraft"; a historical term for kinetic energy (mv²) to bypass, in order to subject the problem in question to a mathematical connection of thoughts, reconcile ourselves with all the myths of atomismThe theory that all matter is composed of tiny, indivisible particles.; and hold for true that all bodies, alongside ponderable matterMatter that has measurable weight., also contain vibrating, all-pervading, all-filling etherA hypothesized medium once thought to fill all space and carry light waves. of extremely low density. We merely point out the cliffs here; for not everything is to be denied which one is not yet able to explain.

When we speak in this work of the Cosmos, despite the prospects that have progressively opened in many regions of natural science in every century, often of the non-fulfillment of near hopes, of the failure of a general reduction of physical knowledge to closely linked principles of theoretical natural philosophyThe study of nature and the physical universe that was the precursor to modern science.; we therefore in no way fear that through our fault the vitality of the search for laws, the striving for causality, which is a deep and irresistible need of the human spirit, will diminish. It has been successful, through the combination of what has been observed in the displacement and breaking through of the mountain strata of the solid crust of the earth, in the sequence of extinct organisms which these strata recognizably enclose, to find chronometric monuments of the age of formation and upheaval. The dynamic effects of earthquakes, the thermal springs impregnated with such manifold substances, the mud eruptions of the salsenSmall mud volcanoes or vents emitting gas and salty mud., and the volcanoes themselves from different epochs of time, acting through fissures in the earth or through their own structures: have, in their internal connection as a reaction of the interior of our planet against