This is no imaginative comparison of mine. To my mind radio-activity
is a real disease of matter. Moreover, it is a contagious disease. It
spreads. You bring those debased and crumbling atoms near others and
those too presently catch the trick of swinging themselves out of
coherent existence. It is in matter exactly what the decay of our old
culture is in society, a loss of traditions and distinctions and assured
reactions. When I think of these inexplicable dissolvent centres that
have come into being in our globe--these quap heaps are surely by far
the largest that have yet been found in the world; the rest as yet mere
specks in grains and crystals--I am haunted by a grotesque fancy of the
ultimate eating away and dry-rotting and dispersal of all our world. So
that while man still struggles and dreams his very substance will change
and crumble from beneath him. I mention this here as a queer persistent
fancy. Suppose, indeed, that is to be the end of our planet; no splendid
climax and finale, no towering accumulation of achievements, but
just--atomic decay! I add that to the ideas of the suffocating comet,
the dark body out of space, the burning out of the sun, the distorted
orbit, as a new and far more possible end--as Science can see ends--to
this strange by-play of matter that we call human life.
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