May 01
In no realm of nature is the principle of cause and effect more
conspicuous than in astronomy; and we fall into the habit of thinking
of its laws as not only being unchangeable in our universe, but
necessary to the conception of any universe that might have been
substituted in its place.
compelled to accommodate their acts to the daily and annual
alternations of light and darkness and of heat and cold, as much as to
the irregular changes of weather, attacks of disease, and the fortune
of war. They soon came to regard the influence of the sun, in
connection with light and heat, as a cause. This led to a search for
other signs in the heavens. If the appearance of a comet was sometimes
noted simultaneously with the death of a great ruler, or an eclipse
with a scourge of plague, these might well be looked upon as causes in
the same sense that the veering or backing of the wind is regarded as
a cause of fine or foul weather.
For these reasons we find that the earnest men of all ages have
recorded the occurrence of comets, eclipses, new stars, meteor
showers, and remarkable conjunctions of the planets, as well as
plagues and famines, floods and droughts, wars and the deaths of great
rulers. Sometimes they thought they could trace connections which
might lead them to say that a comet presaged famine, or an eclipse
war.
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