A school-friend who was keenly interested in astronomy and had directed
my nightly contemplations of the heavens, drew me, just about this
time, a very good map of the stars, by the help of which I found those
stars I knew and extended my knowledge further.
The same school-friend sometimes took me to the Observatory, to see old
Professor d'Arrest--a refined and sapient man--and there, for the first
time, I saw the stellar heavens through a telescope. I had learnt
astronomy at school, but had lacked talent to attain any real insight
into the subject. Now the constellations and certain of the stars began
to creep into my affections; they became the nightly witnesses of my
joys and sorrows, all through my life; the sight of them sometimes
comforted me when I felt lonely and forsaken in a foreign land. The
Lyre, the Swan, the Eagle, the Crown and Boötes, Auriga, the Hyades and
the Pleiades, and among the Winter constellations, Orion; all these
twinkling groups, that human eyes have sought for thousands of years,
became distant friends of mine, too. And the thoughts which the sight
of the countless globes involuntarily and inevitably evokes, were born
in me, too,--thoughts of the littleness of the earth in our Solar
System, and of our Solar System in the Universe, of immeasurable
distances--so great that the stars whose rays, with the rapidity of
light's travelling, are striking against our eyes now, may have gone
out in our childhood; of immeasurable periods of time, in which a human
life, or even the lifetime of a whole people, disappears like a drop in
the ocean. And whereas at school I had only studied astronomy as a
subject, from its mathematical aspect, I now learnt the results of
spectroscopic analysis, which showed me how the human genius of Bunsen
and Kirchhoff had annihilated the distance between the Earth and the
Sun; and at the same time I perceived the inherent improbability of the
culture of our Earth ever being transmitted to other worlds, even as
the Earth had never yet received communications from the civilisation
of any of the stars.
This circumstance, combined with the certainty of the gradual cooling
and eventual death of the Earth, gave me a conclusive impression of the
finality of all earthly existence and of the merely temporary character
of all progress.
Feeling that all religions built up on a belief in a God were
collapsing, Europe had long inclined towards the religion of Progress
as the last tenable. Now I perceived as I raised my eyes to the starry
expanse and rejoiced in my favourite stars, Sirius in the Great Dog,
and Vega in the Lyre or Altair in the Eagle, that it, too, was
tottering, this last religion of all.