the animals move in their sheds. The sky turns to pearl, grows brighter and then rose-coloured; the earliest red streak appears in the east; the birds begin to chirp and the first man to go to work sets out with a swinging step.
The man of science also sat down to work. For a long time he bit his penholder, and then decided to set down the first words. For this was to be a big affair, the result of twelve years of experiment and reflection, work really paid for with his own blood. Of course this would only be a rough draft, or rather a sort of physical philosophy or poem, or a confession of faith. It would be a picture of the world composed of figures and equations. But these figures of an astronomical order measured something other than the sublimity of the firmament; he was calculating the instability and destructibility of matter.
Everything that exists is a dull, latent explosive; but whatever the index of its inertia may be, it represents only an insignificant fraction of its explosive power. Everything which takes place, the movement of the stars, tellurian work, entropy, active and insatiable life itself, all this is only on the surface, while invisibly and incalculably there is gnawing beneath it that explosive force which is called matter. Consider now that the cord which binds it is nothing more than a cobweb on the limbs of a sleeping titan. Give him strength to disturb it and he will tear the surface off the globe, and hurl Jupiter on to Saturn. And you, humanity, you are only a swallow which laboriously builds a nest under the roof of the cosmic powder magazine; you twitter in the eastern sun
