DREAMS OF AN
ASTRONOMER
DREAMS OF AN
ASTRONOMER
_By_ CAMILLE FLAMMARION
_Translated from the French by_ E. E.
FOURNIER D’ALBE
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK MCMXXIII
PUBLISHED, 1923, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AMERICA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. A VOYAGE IN THE SKY 9
(1) TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY THOUSAND
MILES FROM THE EARTH 12
(2) THIRTY-SEVEN MILLION MILES
FROM THE EARTH 15
(3) AT SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY
MILLION MILES 18
(4) TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED MILLION MILES FROM THE SUN 20
(5) AT TWENTY-FIVE BILLION MILES 36
(6) AT SIXTY THOUSAND BILLION
MILES 44
(7) IN INFINITE SPACE 49
II. THE WORLD OF LONG AGO 65
III. THE WORLD TO COME 79
IV. VENUS THE BEAUTIFUL 95
V. THE PLANET MARS 111
VI. THE GIANT WORLD OF JUPITER 123
VII. HEARTBEATS ACROSS SPACE 131
VIII. IDEAS CONCERNING COMMUNICATION BETWEEN
THE WORLDS 141
IX. STABS AND ATOMS 157
X. ARE OTHER PLANETS INHABITED? (A DISCUSSION
OF SCHEINER’S ARGUMENTS) 179
GENERAL REMARKS 182
HISTORICAL 184
THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 193
THE CONDITIONS OF LIFE 196
THE PLANETS OF OUR SYSTEM 201
THE POSSIBLE EXISTENCE OF BEINGS
OF DIFFERENT CHEMICAL CONSTITUTION 210
REMARKS 215
INDEX 223
I. A VOYAGE
IN THE SKY
CHAPTER I
A VOYAGE IN THE SKY
INTRODUCTION
IT WAS at Venice. The lofty windows of the ancient Ducal Palace of the
Speranzi opened upon the Grand Canal. The orb of night was mirrored in
the waters by a furrow of silver spangles, and the immensity of the sky
stretched over the towers and cupolas.
When the musicians borne by the gondolas had turned the corner of
the canal to glide towards the Bridge of Sighs, their last choruses
vanished in the night, and Venice seemed to go to sleep in that
profound silence known to no hive of humanity but the Queen of the
Adriatic. This Venetian silence was untroubled save by the cadenced
beats of the old clock, and perhaps I should not have appreciated the
whole depth of the universal muteness but for the regular oscillation
of that apparatus designed for measuring time. The continuous
“tick-tock” marked out the silence, and, curiously enough, seemed to
intensify it.
Seated in the embrasure of the high window, I contemplated the shining
disc of the Moon enthroned in an azure sky filled entirely with its
light, and I remembered that this luminary of the night, so tranquil
and calm in appearance, moved a thousand yards in space at each beat of
the clock. This fact struck me for the first time with a certain force,
perhaps on account of the enveloping solitude.
Gazing upon the lunar globe, in which I could distinguish with the
naked eye the ancient seas and geographical outlines, I bethought
myself that it was still perhaps inhabited by beings organised
differently from ourselves who can live in an extremely rarefied
atmosphere; but what struck me even more forcibly was its rapid
revolution round the Earth, at the rate of 1,000 yards at each beat of
the clock, making 38 miles a minute, 2,280 an hour, 53,800 a day, or
1,500,000 miles for each lunar month.
I saw in my mind the Moon revolving round us from west to east in less
than a month, and at the same time I felt, so to speak, the daily
movement of the Earth about its axis, also from west to east, which
makes the sky appear to move in the opposite direction. While I was
still reflecting, indeed, the Moon had actually shifted and descended
in the west towards the steeple of the Chiesa. These terrestrial and
celestial movements, softer than those of the gondolas gliding on the
limpid waters, bear us along through reality as through a dream. They
measure the days and the years as we pass, like fleeting shadows,
while they endure for ever. The silent Moon, sphinx of the sky, shone
already on the waters silvered by her splendour millions of years ago,
while terrestrial humanity was still awaiting its slow unfolding in
the limbo of future possibilities. Strange animals peopled the forests
which covered the continents, fantastic fishes pursued each other
in the floods, vampires clove the air, and two-footed crocodiles,
which seem to be the ancestors of those of Egyptian mythology, showed
themselves in the clearings on the banks of the rivers. Later the same
Moon shone on the birth of the flowers, on the nests of the first
birds. But how many nights had she not illuminated with pale beams
before the first glance from a human eye fell upon her, before the
first human thought ascended towards her! To-night she shines upon a
populous and active humanity, flourishing cities, marble palaces, built
amid the clouds. Just now, at my feet, in a gondola a pair of lovers
called upon her to witness their eternal vows, forgetting that her
rapid phases are the symbol of our changefulness and our shortness of
life. Yes, she has been the confidante of many mysteries, and for a
long time yet will radiant youth sing under her sky its eternal song
of love. But one day, a poor, enfeebled lamp, she will only shine upon
a cemetery of ice; there will be no more clocks for measuring hours
nor human beings to count them. Thus I mused, in the bright moonlight
which seemed to intensify all the shadows and to deepen all the abysses
between the palaces plunging into the black water. This neighbouring
world exists at a distance of 240,000 miles from us. Our thoughts fly
thither in a flash. With the speed of light, the distance is covered in
1⅓ second. In imagination I took flight up to the distant luminary. I
forgot Venice, the Adriatic, and the Earth, and I felt myself carried
beyond the confines of the terrestrial atmosphere.
(1) TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY THOUSAND MILES
FROM THE EARTH
I seemed to approach the pale Phœbe and to arrive suddenly above the
immense chain of the lunar Apennines, which separate the “Sea of
Vapour” from the “Sea of Rain,” not far from the central meridian. I
recognised, just as I had so often observed them in the telescope, the
amphitheatres and craters of Archimedes, Autolycus, and Aristillus, and
I hovered for some time over the steep cliffs of the “Sea of Serenity.”
I saw the traces of old submersions and I distinguished several craters
almost obliterated by formidable land-slides. I got accustomed to this
view the more rapidly for the fact that astronomical instruments have
long familiarised us with this neighbouring world, and that certain
details of lunar geography are better known than are many points of
terrestrial geography. Those immense amphitheatres, those yawning
craters, those steep-walled mountains, those deep valleys, those
numerous cracks in the soil--we have studied them all and we know
them. We find there the geographical result of considerable volcanic
activity, craters 2 miles in depth and 60, 100, or 150 miles wide,
mountain peaks 4 or 5 miles high, plains and valleys where the traces
of successive selenological epochs are traceable. In the lower depths I
observed the effects of a sensible atmosphere, surface changes produced
over immense stretches of ground by the action of the Sun’s rays during
days fifteen times as long as ours, changes of aspect due to the frost
of the long lunar night and the thaw under the midday Sun, long white
streaks traversing the circular plains; something like geysers in
activity; short-lived plants without any terrestrial analogy--a whole
world still alive, apparently in its last death-struggle. My thought
and my gaze rested on the pale figure of the Earth’s satellite, and
I asked myself whether there was not alive at that moment, in some
ancient city at the bottom of a crater or a valley, some thinking
being, with its eyes raised to the sky, contemplating the Earth where
we are and asking the same question: whether any intelligent beings
lived on the surface of that immense globe throning for ever over
their heads, and presenting to their minds the same riddle which their
abode presents to us.
While I thus reflected about our neighbour in space, the orb of night
had sunk in the west, and I saw at some distance from it on the left
a star shining with a reddish glow, shedding rays of fire over the
heavenly vault. I was not long in recognising in this ardent star
our neighbour the planet Mars, and I forgot the moon over this other
celestial island, the sister of our own, which has so many analogies
with our planet.
Here, said I to myself, is the planet of greatest interest to
ourselves, the one we know best. It gravitates round the sun along an
orbit traced at a mean distance of 143 million miles from the central
luminary. Our Earth passes through its annual revolution at a distance
of 92 million miles. There are, therefore, on an average, 51 million
miles between the two orbits. On the night of my vigil, Mars happened
to be at its minimum distance from the Earth. Fortunately, as the
two orbits are neither circular nor parallel, the real distance is
sometimes reduced to 37 million miles. Light, which takes 1⅓ second
to traverse the distance between the Earth and the Moon, takes 200
seconds, or 3 minutes 20 seconds, to cross the celestial abyss which
separates Mars from the Earth, It seemed to me that I really spent
those 3 minutes in flying the distance, and I entirely forgot the high
window of my Venetian palace over the aspect of the new world to which
the flight of my thought had brought me.
(2) THIRTY-SEVEN MILLION MILES PROM THE EARTH
It is not very far, astronomically speaking. It is, in fact, quite
near, a few paces away. The world of Mars is the first station of the
solar system, the first planet we meet on leaving the Earth to visit
the remote regions of the heavens. The farther we move away from the
Earth, the smaller grows the apparent size of our own world. Seen from
the Moon, our planet hangs in the sky like an enormous moon, four times
the size of our own satellite, and sixteen times as luminous, for it
is isolated in space and reflects the light received from the Sun,
as is done by the Moon and the various planets of the solar system.
From about 250,000 miles, therefore, the Earth still appears of a
considerable size, being about four times the size of the full Moon. At
2½ million miles it appears ten times smaller in diameter, but still
shows a perceptible disc. At the distance of the orbit of Mars, at the
time when the planets are in greatest proximity (37 million miles),
the Earth no longer shows a sensible disc, but is still the biggest
and brightest star in the entire heavens. The inhabitants of Mars,
therefore, admire us as a brilliant star in the sky, showing aspects
similar to those which Venus shows to us. We are their morning and
evening star, and no doubt their mythology has erected altars to us.
When I arrived on that planet, it was about midday on its central
meridian. I noticed two small moons revolving rapidly in their sky,
and I alighted on the slope of a mountain overlooking a distant sea.
The sea was shallow and full of water-plants. The panorama reminded
me of that which one sees from the terrace of the Nice Observatory,
and I seemed to see a Mediterranean of calm water, of a rather dark
bluish-green colour. But it was a different element, and I saw that
the plants were of a species unknown on Earth. Airy navies consisting
of a sort of bird-fishes glided through the atmosphere, and I soon
found that the inhabitants of this celestial territory have received
by natural evolution the enviable privilege of flying through the
air, and that their method of locomotion is particularly aviation.
Gravity is feeble on the surface of the planet, and hence the density
of beings and objects on that planet is much less than it is with us.
Engineering science has for many centuries reached a high degree of
perfection. They have carried out immense works, incomparably superior
to those achieved on our planet during the last century, and they
have transformed their globe by gigantic operations which earthly
astronomers are just beginning to appreciate by means of the telescope.
One may easily understand, indeed, that that world should be more
advanced than ours, because it is more ancient chronologically, and
because, being smaller than our globe, it has cooled down more rapidly
and has run through the phases of organic evolution at a greater rate.
Its years are nearly twice as long as ours, in the proportion of 365
days to 687. While we count 37 years on Earth, the Martian only counts
20, and a man of 79 years on Earth is only 40 Martian years old.
This is an advantage of 88 per cent. Its condition of habitability,
its climate and meteorology, its days and its nights, are analogous
to ours. Even from where we are we can observe its continents, its
polar snows which melt in the spring, its canals which also change
with the seasons, its humid plains periodically varied by vegetation,
its clouds, generally very light, but dense enough towards the polar
regions, its mists in the mornings and especially in the evening, above
all, the perpetual changes, incomparably more intense than those of
the Earths surface--in a word, all those manifestations of an activity
greater than that of our own home of the present day.
I only delayed on Mars for the time necessary to form a general idea of
the life which animates our neighbouring globe and to make sure that it
is more active than that of terrestrial humanity, and I found myself,
some moments later, transported to the annular world of Saturn.
(3) AT SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLION MILES
The conception of time, the appreciation of duration, are essentially
relative to the state of our mind. If we sleep profoundly for seven or
eight hours, that time will have made a gap in our life of no greater
length than that produced by ten minutes of sleep. The miners who by
the collapse of a shaft are entombed for five or six days before being
rescued, always believe that they have not been cut off for more than
twenty hours. Buried on a Tuesday, for instance, they will not believe
that they have had to wait till Sunday. On the other hand, one may
seem to pass several hours, very slowly, in a dream of a few seconds.
A friend of mine told me that one day, as he was riding through a
wood, his horse bolted and threw him into a ravine. He said his fall
had certainly not taken more than three seconds, but that during those
three seconds he had passed in review at least ten years of his life
in all their successive details and without any apparent hurrying of
events. Then, again, who has not observed how long the minutes may seem
during some hours of waiting?
The orbit of the Earth round the Sun being 92 million miles, and that
of Saturn 888 million, there are 796 million miles between the two
orbits. Light traverses this gap in 70 minutes. My fancy flew this
distance with the speed of light, and I was aware of these 2,240
seconds required to cover the distance at the rate of 186,000 miles a
second. Yet I am sure that I did not spend all that time in traversing
the distance to Saturn, nor even the lesser time corresponding to the
distance between Mars and the ringed planet, for the first stroke
of ten had sounded on the old clock when I forgot Mars and fixed my
attention on Saturn, and I arrived at my destination before the hour
had finished striking.
I alighted on the tenth satellite, whence one can easily appreciate
the grandeur of the Saturnian system. The enormous planet of, a
diameter more than 9½ times that of our globe, with a surface 90
times that of the Earth, and a bulk 745 times that of our floating
home, is surrounded by gigantic rings measuring 178,000 miles across.
Girt by this multiple ring, the planet presides over a retinue of
ten satellites revolving round it in a system having a radius of 8
million miles, a system which in itself constitutes a universe larger
than that known to the ancients. Until the age of truth inaugurated
by the conquests of modern astronomy, nobody on our planet, no poet,
no philosopher, no thinker, had guessed the real grandeur of the
proportions on which the universe is constructed. How small our Earth
appears seen from the Saturnian system! It is barely seen, once in six
months, as a small luminous dot near the sun, shining for a few minutes
in the evening after sunset, or a few minutes in the morning before
sunrise.
(4) TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED MILLION
MILES FROM THE SUN
In the depths of space, at a distance from the sun more than 30 times
our own, under a glow of light and heat 900 times feebler than that
which we enjoy, there roams the world of Neptune, among conditions
of life quite different from those which obtain on Earth. Those
short-sighted naturalists who affirmed even quite recently, with
professorial emphasis, that the abysses of the ocean are condemned to
an eternal sterility, because the conditions of light and pressure
are absolutely different from the conditions near the surface, have
received from Nature herself the rudest contradiction which can be
inflicted upon the pedantic science of pretenders to infallibility.
This contradiction, however direct and absolute, has not discouraged
them all, for there are still some who declare that life can only exist
on worlds having conditions identical with ours. Always the reasonings
of the fish who affirms--quite sincerely--that it is impossible to live
outside water! Let us leave these teachers to their illusions and
continue our ascent. Astronomy must be the great teacher of philosophy.
The distant world of Neptune, on which every year equals nearly 165 of
our years, and where ten years represent the whole historical interval
which separates us from the Romans (we must remember than 1,650 years
ago the Romans reigned at Paris and in Gaul, and neither France nor
any of the present-day nations were thought of), this neighbouring
world, I say, is well fitted to teach us to enlarge our narrow and
personal conceptions, especially as regards the measurement of time.
The calendar of that planet is just as exact, just as precise, as
ours, and a Neptunian year is not longer to those slow and reflective
beings who inhabit the place than is a terrestrial year to those
hurrying and agitated persons who swarm in our turbulent cities. Yet a
Neptunian adolescent of 20 has really lived nearly 3,300 terrestrial
years, without knowing that such a time is called “very long” by the
inhabitants of our planet, whom such a life would carry back to the
epoch of Homer and ancient Greece.
It would be impossible even with the most careful examination to
discover any point of comparison between the beings which live on
the Neptunian world and those which we know on Earth. None of our
classifications, whether of the animal kingdom, vast and diversified
though it be, or of the vegetable kingdom, highly complex in itself,
could be applied to them. It is another world, absolutely different
from this one. Spectrum analysis indeed establishes the fact that its
chemical composition is quite other than that of our terrestrial home.
The organisms which live on the surface of the different planets are
the resultant of the forces acting upon them. The origin of the human
form lies in the ancestral forms of the long animal series whence it
has gradually emerged, and of which it is the highest perfection,
and these primitive animal forms go back in an unbroken chain to the
rudimentary organisms unprovided with the senses which are the glory
of man, organisms which inaugurated the manifestations of life, but
which can hardly be described as living. They are neither animals nor
plants. They appear to be organised substances, already distinct from
the inorganic kingdom, but as yet only simple chemical combinations
endowed with a sort of diffused vitality, an elementary protoplasm,
the germ of all developments of terrestrial life, both animal and
vegetable. The first organised beings were formed in the bosom of the
warm waters of the oceans which covered the entire surface of the earth
at the time when the geological periods began. Their intrinsic nature,
their properties, their faculties, were already the resultant of the
chemical composition of those waters, of the density and temperature
of the surrounding medium; the variation of this medium and of the
condition of existence have brought about corresponding changes in the
development of this genealogical tree, and, according to the habitat
of the organisms, whether in the deep, middle, or upper regions of the
waters, on the sea-shore, in the low-lying plains, on sunny slopes
or mountain-tops, the genealogical tree gave rise to more and more
diversified organisms. Present-day terrestrial humanity is the last
flower, the last fruit of this tree. But all this life is terrestrial
from root to summit, and on every planet the tree is different. Life is
Neptunian on Neptune, Uranian on Uranus, Saturnian on Saturn, Sirian
on the system of Sirius, Arcturian on that of Arcturus, appropriate to
every medium, or rather, more strictly speaking, produced and developed
by each world according to its physical state and in harmony with that
primeval law which all nature obeys: the law of progress.
This immense symphony of life, adapted to every world according to
conditions of space and time, develops like a universal choir, the
parts of which are separated from each other by deserts of space and
by eternities of time. It appears to us discontinuous because we can
only hear one note at a time. But in reality there is no absolute
separation either in space or time. Jupiter will not be inhabited by
thinking beings for millions of years to come; from the point of view
of the Absolute, the interval is not greater than that which separates
yesterday from to-day.
All this happens and accomplishes itself naturally, and as if God
did not exist. And indeed the being whom the inhabitants of the
Earth have hitherto defined as God does not exist. The Buddha of the
Chinese, the Osiris of the Egyptians, the Jehovah of the Hebrews,
the Ormuzd and Ahriman of the Persians, the Teutates of the Gauls,
the Jupiter of the Greeks, “God the Father” or “God the Son” of the
Christians, or the great Allah of the Mussulman, are human conceptions,
personifications invented by man in which he has embodied not only his
highest aspirations and his sublimest virtues, but also his grossest
prevarications and ugliest vices.
Man has conceived as God in his own likeness. It is in the name of
this pretended God that monarchs and pontiffs have in all the ages and
under cover of all religions bound humanity in a slavery from which it
has not yet freed itself. It is in the name of this God who “protects
Germany,” “protects England,” “protects France,” “protects Italy,”
“protects Russia,” “protects Turkey,” protects all the divisions and
all the barbarities, that even in our own day the so-called civilised
people of our planet have been armed in war against each other and,
like mad dogs, have hurled themselves upon one another in a conflict
over which falsehood and hypocrisy, seated on the steps of the thrones,
figure a “God of Armies” as presiding, a God who blesses the daggers
and plunges his hands in the smoking blood of victims to mark the
foreheads of kings. It is to this God that altars are raised and Te
Deums are chanted. It is in the names of the Gods of Olympus that the
Greeks condemned Socrates to drink the hemlock; it is in the name of
Jehovah that the high-priests and Pharisees crucified Jesus. It is in
the name of Jesus, himself become God, that fanaticism ignominiously
condemned to the stake men like Giordano Bruno, Vanini, Étienne Dolet,
John Huss, Savonarola, and so many other heroic victims; that the
Inquisition ordered Galileo to belie his conscience; that thousands
and thousands of unfortunates accused of witchcraft were burnt alive
in popular ceremonies; that Ravaillac stabbed Henry the Fourth. It
was with the express benediction of Pope Gregory the Thirteenth that
the butchery of St. Bartholomew drenched Paris in blood and the free
thinkers of the reformation were chased out of France; it is for the
extermination of supposed heresies that many thousands of brave people
have been burnt alive; it was with cross in hand that the peaceful
natives of America were savagely massacred by the Spaniards; it was in
the names of the gods worshipped in Rome that the Christian martyrs
suffered the most awful tortures; it was in the name of the Christian
God that the fanatics, led by Bishop St. Cyril, stoned the beautiful
and learned Hypatia, and that in later times the Bishop of Beauvais
led the virgin of Domremy to the stake; it was in the name of the
Bible that the kings of God’s “chosen people” savagely exterminated
their neighbours; it was in the name of Allah that the standards of
Mahomet covered Europe with armies of assassins and that even now
millions of fanatics are ready to rise against the Europeans on the
cry of a “Holy War,” that Mahomet the Second painted the walls of St.
Sophia with the blood of his steed, that Genghis Khan and Tamerlane
marked their paths of conquest with pyramids of severed heads; it is
to the glory of these imaginary deities that even now so many and
useless souls condemn themselves to strange penances in the convents,
that the Russian stropzi mutilate themselves, that the howling and
dancing Dervishes writhe in mad contortions, that certain sects kill
their babies and drink their blood. Religious wars have been the most
horrible and odious of all, and the most insensate. People have killed
each other for the sake of a word or its interpretation, for the sake
of an adjective, for the “consubstantiality” of the Father and the Son
of the Trinity, for “homoousios” against “homoiousios,” for a thousand
other crotchets placed above the most elementary reason and proclaimed
articles of faith in the name of a God! This symbol of the oppressions
of peoples, of murder and robbery, this infamous being, does not exist,
and has never existed.
In making a god in their likeness, as miserable as themselves, men
resemble monkeys, who, raising themselves to the idea of God, would
figure him as a Grand Ape, dogs who would make him a Grand Dog, fleas
who would represent him in the shape of a Grand Flea. But it does
not follow that, because this inferior god does not exist, therefore
the universe goes on without thought, without a destiny, and without
laws. If the believers of all religions are in error, those who deny
the existence of any intellectual principle in the world are equally
mistaken. Yes, the evolution of nature takes place without the acts of
an anthropomorphic deity, without malice and without miracles. The only
name which would fit God would be the Unknowable. God remains hidden by
the very perfection of nature’s mechanism. In a healthy body we do not
feel the passage of the blood through the heart, nor the circulation
of blood in the brain, nor that of the air in the lungs, nor the
liver, nor the kidneys, nor the stomach, nor the bowels. The attention
is not directed to those organs unless they work badly. The world is
so arranged that they appear to work by themselves, and that is its
divine quality. Everything functions regularly by means of a perfect
construction, the gearing of which is invisible and silent, but which
we can only judge by the infinitesimal fraction of which we form a
part, and the author of which is a transcendental thought, impenetrable
to mankind. Force governs matter; _mens agitat molem_; but Thought
guides nature.
Yes, the supreme being is unknowable. The human mind cannot comprehend
the infinite, eternal, immutable spirit, the organising power of that
All of which the Earth and Man are but particles as imperfect as they
are mediocre. This Infinite is to the infantile deity imagined by man
as the midday sun is to the muddy obscurity of a mole-burrow under
the roots of meadow grass. His existence is proved by the universal
organisation. Everything is organised, from the humblest leaf to the
world system. An invisible, immaterial element of a spiritual nature,
as yet imperfectly revealed by our means of investigation, manifests
itself within us and around us. This spiritual principle should be
revered as enveloping the world and enfolding us. But the clergy of all
religions, of all times and of all countries, have always monopolised
the idea of God and appropriated it to their exclusive and intolerant
purpose of domination. When they speak of God, they mean their own
God. The free spirits who do not acknowledge their figure-head are
treated as atheists and hated and persecuted as such. They will not
admit that one may be a Deist and yet anticlerical. But they are not
too unintelligent to know that it is an injustice, a stupidity, and a
lie to treat as atheists those thinkers who deny the divinity of Jesus.
The people who dare to reduce God to their size and even to put Him in
their pocket are the greatest blasphemers.
It is strange that Man, still in a coarse, savage, and barbarous state,
hardly emerged from the primitive shell of ignorance, incapable of
knowing even his own body, hardly able to spell the great book of the
universe, should have considered himself capable of describing God. He
does not know his own little ant-heap and he pretends to discover the
unknowable. At a time when nothing was known, when astronomy, physics,
chemistry, natural history, and anthropology were as yet unborn, when
the feeble and meandering human mind was still surrounded by illusions
and errors, human audacity conceived the so-called religions and the
gods placed at their heads.
That Confucius, Buddha, Moses, Socrates, Jesus, or Mahomet should
have striven to give to mankind a code of morals destined to deliver
them from barbarism and to teach them the idea of good, such efforts
and achievements cannot but receive the homage and admiration of all
who value the intellectual and moral progress of humanity. That
the founders and organisers of religious rites should place at the
head of every cult an ideal, an inviolable being in whose name they
pretend to govern, even that can be recognised as a work of social
utility, of a value not rising above the worldly standard, and having
no object beyond the general good of man and societies. But that
those gods invented by man should be considered as really existing,
and in an absolutely imaginary heaven which perished in the first
conquests of astronomy, that they should have been, and are still,
adored by a certain portion of the human race, and that even in our
time legislators of all nations dare to base their politics on divine
right, to show the “finger of God” in the most monstrous plagues of the
social body, and decorate their battle-flags with a local providence,
as in the time of Joan of Arc, of Constantine, or of David--that is
the shocking anachronism, a mixture of imposture and credulity, of
hypocrisy and stupidity unworthy of the era of sincere and positive
research in which we live, and which should load the functionaries
who live at the expense of such a system with the contempt of every
independent man.
Definitions are misleading. Were pagans like Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus, not more spiritual than Pope
Alexander the Sixth or Cardinal Dubois, who were true atheists?
The search for the nature of the First Cause--I do not say the
“knowledge of God,” which would be an expression worthy of a
“theologian” and absurd in itself--but simply the search for the
Absolute Being, for the origin of the energy which sustains, animates,
and governs the universe, for the intelligent force which acts
everywhere and perpetually through infinity and eternity and gives
rise to the appearances which strike our eyes and are studied by our
science--this _search_, I say, could not be undertaken nor even
properly conceived before the first discoveries of astronomy and modern
physics, that is to say, before the investigations of Galileo, Kepler,
and Newton. It is only two centuries ago that the purely religious
idea, free from idolatries, from all sorts of mythologies, of errors
and superstitions produced by primitive ignorance--it is only during
the last two centuries that it was possible for this idea to arise
out of modern scientific evolution. All the religions existing at the
present day have been founded during ages of ignorance, when we knew
nothing about the earth or the heavens. True religion, i.e. the union
of free spirits in the search for truth, can only be the work of an
epoch like ours, in which some courageous and disinterested spirits
free from the hypocrisy of false doctrines, yet without falling into
the puerile atheism of superficial minds which only see the outer
shell, will sincerely and freely apply all branches of science to the
search for the intimate constitution of the universe and of the human
being. The future will teach us. To-day we know but little; we are
only beginning to learn. The unknown God conceived by the thinkers,
by Socrates, by Plato, by Marcus Aurelius, by Voltaire (as ardent a
Deist as he was a violent anticlerical), by Newton, by Descartes, by
Linné, by Euler, by Spinoza, by Kant, by all pure Deists, surpasses
in his grand immensity all the poor inventions of the clergy of all
denominations. One cannot see the creator of the hundred million
suns of the Milky Way looking down upon a small village in Judea and
inspiring Judith to seduce Holophernes with the object of cutting off
his head after betraying him with her caresses; or conferring on Joshua
the power of arresting the movement of the solar system to give him
time to exterminate the besiegers of Gibeon! What sort of opinion had
such writers of the Supreme Being? And what opinion of him is still
held by those preachers who continue to teach this “Holy Scripture”?
The Infinite cannot be comprehended by the Finite.
He who has made the tour of the world, who has visited Europe, Asia,
Africa, and the Americas, reasons in a manner wider beyond comparison
with the state of humanity than he who has never left his country.
Between the narrow, incomplete, and false ideas of the latter and the
judicious, exact, and just appreciations of the former there is the
difference of night and day.
Unfortunately we preach to the deaf. For one man who reasons there
are a hundred who do not. The struggle against the domination of the
spiritual directors is very platonic and the clergy despise it. The
Church has organised marriage, birth, and death into ceremonies which
seduce the imagination and please the women. Compare the civil marriage
and the religious marriage; the former cold, dull, insipid; the latter
impressive and attractive with the altar garlanded with flowers, and
the enchantment of the music which makes the creator descend into
the bosom of the spouse, “_Veni, Creator Spiritus_.” It will be
centuries before the religious form of marriage is entirely replaced
by the civil. A certain free-thinking father refrained from having his
four boys baptized so as to leave them entire liberty of conscience.
All four got baptized on the eve of their marriage as their brides
wished to be married in church. Faith or convention, that is how the
world goes--and the priests smile at the simplicity of the layman.
What is Sunday for most Christians but a day for fine clothes?
Tradition has created a distinguished society often permeated
with hypocrisy, but to belong to which is “good form.” Ancient
errors are preserved without being credited. Convention governs the
“well-disposed” people.
Independence of spirit is the rarest of phenomena. All religions are
sacred and respectable if they raise our thoughts to a higher ideal,
when they console the afflicted and relieve misery. But let them not
be exploited, and let there be no killing in their name! Ideal and
sentiment are part of the domain of thought, with as much right as
Reason. It is a mistaken policy to suppress them, and it plays into
the hands of reactionaries, who profit by the errors. To claim that
science demonstrates the non-existence of God and of the soul is an
unscientific argument. An education without ideals or responsibility,
which neglects conscience and proclaims rights without duties, is as
false as that of the Catechism which teaches the creation of Adam
and Eve, the temptation of the serpent, the universal deluge, the
incarnation of God, the Virgin Birth, the resurrection and ascension of
Jesus to the right hand of God the Father, or the resurrection of our
bodies (articles of faith which cannot, without heresy, be interpreted
as symbols, but must be taken literally), and it is socially more
dangerous, as we see by its fruits for the last thirty years, the
gradual increase of crime and the rule of the Apaches and anarchists
of all sorts. Why not follow the way of enlightened wisdom? If the
socialists were permeated with spiritual truth, they would hold the
world; they would continue the work of their predecessor, Jesus Christ,
in the light and with the positive methods of modern science. The false
gods invented by man, the legends, the superstitions, the errors, lies,
and hypocrisies, are not necessary to secure a place in the educational
system for the sense of honour, of duty, of justice, and of personal
conscience; and this is often forgotten by modern educators who have
suppressed everything without putting anything in its place.
Let us have no sectaries of any kind!
Humanity grows up. We are no longer children.
At the distance from the Earth which suggested such reflections,
the distance of the planet Neptune, the farthest limit of the solar
system known at present to astronomy, our judgment on the works of
man is quite different from that which satisfied us before we left
our country. We contemplate the solar system in all its grandeur, we
recognise the smallness of our own little planet compared with the vast
space in which it moves, and the short time of its revolution round the
Sun, and we feel that our ordinary terrestrial estimates have hitherto
been based upon those narrow and limited sentiments circumscribed by
the horizon of the church tower. We free ourselves from them and find
ourselves in a position to judge the immensity of creation with greater
liberty, independence, and integrity. But far as Neptune is from our
terrestrial home, it still forms, like ourselves, part of the solar
family. Other planets still unknown to terrestrial astronomy gravitate
beyond Neptune, the first of them probably at a distance 48 times as
great as the distance between the Earth and the Sun, that is to say, at
7,500 million miles, in an immense orbit which it takes at least 330
years to accomplish. The celestial voyage which I have begun takes me
beyond the outermost regions of the solar system. Flinging myself into
the infinite heavens, I arrived at another system by penetrating into
the cosmic domain of a star.
(5) AT TWENTY-FIVE BILLION MILES
Every star is a sun shining by its own light. The Sun which illuminates
us has 1,300,000 times the volume of the Earth and weighs 333,000 times
as much. The dimensions and the masses of the stars are of the same
order. A large number of them are much more voluminous and their masses
are still more considerable.
Whatever star we approach, we find in it a sun like a blinding
furnace. These innumerable centres of light, heat, electricity, and
gravitational attraction only appear to us as small luminous points
on account of the immense abysses which separate us from them. The
nearest sun, our nearest star in space, burns at 276,000 times the
distance which separates us from the Sun, i.e. 25 billion miles from
here.
Travelling with the speed of an express train flung into space at 40
miles an hour towards the nearest star without any stoppage or any
slowing down, we should not arrive at our destination until after an
uninterrupted flight of 75 million years.
Travelling with the speed of the swiftest projectile which the most
ingenious man-killers have yet constructed, a speed which we can reckon
as double that of sound, or 2,200 feet per second, we should yet
require a million and a half years to cover that distance.
If that star were to burst with a terrific explosion, and if the noise
of the catastrophe could be transmitted to us at the ordinary speed of
sound in air, we should not hear that explosion until three million
years had elapsed after its occurrence.
We should see the star shining steadily in the sky for four years after
the catastrophe which had destroyed it, because light travels through
space with a speed of 186,000 miles a second, and it would have to
travel with this constant velocity more than four years before reaching
us.
Seen from that distance, our brilliant Sun is reduced to the rank of
a simple star. The planets which gravitate around it, the Earth,
Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and their brothers of the solar family,
are crowded up against it by the perspective of the distance and are
invisibly lost in its rays.
Considered at that distance in the sidereal universe, these provinces
of the solar empire are recognised as insignificant even by the most
optimistic spirit. Even if they did not exist at all, the suns of
infinite space would none the less shed their rays of life and light
all around. Our planet, which to us seems so important, becomes a
microscopic point impossible to discover by means of senses such as
ours, and its history told at that distance becomes like the flight of
a dragon-fly or even less, since we should never suspect its existence
if we did not know it. It is at such moments especially that the
pretensions of Pontiffs and the dogmatic assurance of their adepts show
forth in all their absurdity.
I felt transported into the system of that star, the nearest of all
those whose distances have been measured, a star belonging to the
constellation of the Centaur; it is the Alpha of that constellation.
This system is curious and more interesting than ours. Instead of a
single sun corresponding to that which shines upon us, two twin suns
gravitate one round the other in a time equalling 81 of our years,
and separated from each other by a distance of 2,000 million miles.
These twin suns are both of considerable brightness (first and second
magnitude, seen from here), and greatly superior to the central hearth
of our own system. Planets circulate around each of these luminaries
under their protecting wings, and receive from their radiation the
sources of their fertility and their life. They are illuminated by two
different suns, sometimes united in the same sky, sometimes separated
and alternating, differing in magnitude and brightness according to the
variation of the distances in consequence of the revolutions of these
worlds round their respective centres.
These are very different conditions of existence from those which
govern the destinies of the Earth and of the planets of our group. Two
suns! What curious alternations of seasons! What variations in the
climates! What transformations in the doubtlessly very rapid changes
of their vitality! What complications of their calendars, in the
succession of their years, their summers and winters, their days and
nights! The sole fact of the existence of such a system, relatively
near to us and already well-known to terrestrial astronomers, testifies
to the infinite variety disseminated in the starry depths of the cosmos.
What multiplicity of manifestations of the diverse forces
of nature must have been produced in this wealth of solar
development--manifestations strange to the phenomena studied on
our planet, and which are doubtlessly felt and appreciated by means
of senses differing absolutely from those existing in terrestrial
organisms, senses awakened, determined, and developed in those distant
worlds by their own natural forces.
On worlds illuminated, heated, and regulated by two suns life can only
have appeared and organised itself in forms very different from those
on Earth, having no doubt an alternating double life, served by other
modes of perception, other organs, and other senses. The thinker, the
astronomer, the physiologist, can no longer regard terrestrial life as
the type of all life. All we could learn, study, or know on Earth will
never be more than an infinitesimal and absolutely insufficient part
of the immense reality embodied in the innumerable creations of the
Infinite.
Yet it is a point which must be insisted upon before pursuing our
terrestrial investigations further, that whatever may be the variety
of stellar systems, the differences of volume, temperature, density,
illumination, electrification, movement, chemical constitution, etc.,
of the various globes which people the immensity of the universe, all
these worlds are linked amongst themselves by the same invisible and
imponderable Power which combines them all in a network of extreme
sensitiveness. The prodigious extent of the distances which separate
these systems one from the other does not prevent their being
connected together by some sort of maternal link. The distance from
the Earth to the Moon is 240,000 miles. The Moon acts constantly upon
all the molecules of our globe and upon the entire Earth, and every
one of us weighs a little less when that body shines over our heads
than when it is on the horizon. The distance from the Sun to the
Earth is 92 million miles; the Sun makes our planet move with a speed
corresponding to that distance, and the Earth in its turn displaces
the Sun in the heavens. The distance from the Sun to Neptune is over
2,500 million miles. The central globe acts upon that distant world and
makes it revolve round it, and on the other hand Neptune makes the Sun
revolve round their common centre of gravity, which is at a distance
of 144,000 miles from the centre of the Sun. Jupiter displaces the
Sun by 460,000 miles, and Saturn by 25,000 miles. The Moon disturbs
the Earth to the extent of 2,900 miles. At the same time Jupiter acts
upon the Earth, the Earth upon Venus, and so on. On account of this
reciprocal influence of all the heavenly bodies upon each other, not
a single point can remain in repose for an instant, and no heavenly
body can ever come back to the place it previously occupied. All that
we call matter is in perpetual motion under the irresistible power of
invisible, intangible, and imponderable force.
We have here a fact of capital importance, the consideration of which
must always be associated with the conception we can form of the real
nature of the universe. We have seen just now that the distance which
separates our Sun from the star Alpha Centauri is 25 billion miles. But
this distance is traversed by gravitational attraction. In reality the
two suns are not absolutely separated.
They know each other, they feel each other’s attraction, and they feel
the attraction of all the other suns of infinite space. They both roam
about, our own Sun with a speed calculated at about 200 million miles
per annum and Alpha Centauri with a speed of approximately 400 million.
The other suns of which we know the distance and the movement rush
on with similar speeds. Some of them fly with incomparably greater
velocities, which attain 200 miles a second, 11,000 miles per minute,
600,000 miles an hour, 15 million per day, and 5 or 6 thousand million
miles per annum, veritable starry projectiles of the heavenly fields.
But our whole sidereal universe itself is moving with its hundred
million stars through the immensity of infinite space. The movements
which we measure are relative and not absolute.
Our sun and its companions are driven through space by some initial
force and by the combined attraction of the innumerable stars of our
visible universe. Whether this force of attraction is a property
inherent in every atom of matter, whether these theoretical atoms
by which we explain the appearance of matter in order to account
for observed phenomena are centres of force, mathematical points of
concentration, or nodes and crossings of ethereal vibrations and
undulations, the fact which dominates our analytical contemplation
of the universe is that the innumerable worlds which people space
are not isolated from each other, but are united by a perpetual and
indestructible link.
Here we have a new and important conception of the unity of nature. And
what is equally worthy of attention is that this sort of communication
between the worlds cannot be defined better than by the word
“attraction.”
Attraction is therefore the supreme law among the worlds, among atoms,
and among beings. The stars which gravitate in the depth of space, the
Earth which revolves in the solar rays, the Moon which raises the tides
on the surface of the ocean, the molecules of stone or iron which cling
together by molecular attraction, the plant which pushes its roots into
the nourishing soil or raises its stem in response to light, the flower
which turns towards the Sun, the bird which flies from branch to branch
seeking a place for its nest, the nightingale which with incomparable
song charms the sweet mistress of the night, the man whose heart is
troubled at the appearance of a beloved being, the sound of a beloved
voice, or a fond memory--all these beings, all these things obey the
same law, that of universal attraction which in diverse forms governs
all nature and guides it--whither? Towards yet another attraction, to
the attraction of the unknown!
Amid the ignorance of the Absolute which surrounds us in spite of the
manifold, courageous, and persevering efforts of science, the fact
of the existence of such a force uniting all worlds together must be
appreciated at its proper value. It would be impossible to exaggerate
its importance. Let us then not forget it: the worlds are in mutual
communication by means of attraction.
(6) AT SIXTY THOUSAND BILLION MILES
Continuing my celestial voyage, I left the system of Alpha Centauri to
penetrate into the starry depths of the Southern Cross. I traversed
sunny shores and deserts of night, passing from sun to sun, from system
to system, flying past stars which blinded me one moment and then were
engulfed by the infinite night. The normal state of the universe is
night and silence. There is no light except round the suns and planets;
there is no sound but in their immediate neighbourhood, in their
atmosphere. In skirting stellar groups, I noticed enormous globes
rolling in a strange light, and I often seemed to feel electric shocks,
magnetic disturbances, certain indefinable sensations which warned me,
by a sort of malaise, that such spheres are unsuitable for our mode of
existence, and that they are inhabited by beings whose perceptions,
feelings, and thoughts differ from ours. I remember particularly having
seen in the course of my flight a group of many-hued worlds illuminated
by three suns, one a ruby red, one an emerald green, and a third a
sapphire blue, and so singularly illuminated by this false light--false
to us, but natural to them--that I asked myself whether I was not the
victim of an illusion and whether such creations really exist, though,
indeed, having observed those well-known associations of coloured suns
hundred of times in the telescope, I ought not to have been in doubt
for an instant. I stopped and approached one of those worlds and saw
that it was inhabited by beings who seemed to be woven out of light. To
their eyes, certainly, the inhabitants of our planet would appear so
sombre, heavy, and coarse that they might legitimately ask whether we
were alive and whether we felt ourselves to be alive.
Those are worlds peopled by aerial organisms whose brightness surpasses
the tint of the freshest roses and purest lilies. These beings live on
the very atmosphere which they breathe, without being condemned, like
the inhabitants of our planet, to be constantly killing innumerable
animals with which to fill their bodies.
Their beauty, delicacy, and brightness reminded me by contrast of the
conditions imposed by terrestrial life. I remembered that brute force
reigns supreme here, that millions of beings are killed every day to
assure the existence of the rest, that war is a natural law amongst
animals, and that humanity is so little freed from animal barbarism
that nearly all people continue to accept, as in primitive times,
slavery and servitude. Being so far from the Earth, I judged of the
colossal stupidity of the inhabitants of our planet. But if, down to
our own times, the nations have made their greatest glory consist of
international butcheries, that state is transitory. Every tree bears
fruit after its kind. Tortoises and bears cannot aspire to the wings
of the swallow or the song of the thrush. The military glories of
Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, or Bismarck, being of the
order of carnivorous animal instincts, last no longer than the brutal
repast itself, and a few centuries suffice to efface them from the
history of the planet.
Endeavouring to estimate the real importance of this history and of
our planet itself, I searched space, not only for the Earth which had
become invisible long ago, but even the Sun; but I could neither find
the Sun nor any of its brightest neighbours such as Alpha Centauri or
Sirius, nor any of the stars which one sees from the Earth. The whole
region of space where our floating island gravitates had disappeared
long ago as an insignificant point in the depths of space. Austerlitz,
Waterloo, Sevastopol, Magenta, Sadowa, Keichshofen, Sedan, were but
microscopic agitations in a Lilliputian ant-heap, amusement of infants
delighting in muscular exercises involving blood and smoke. Why blame
them? Why pity them? They do what pleases them and nobody forces them
to do it. Why should astronomy use a magnifying-glass to study the
microbes on a planet T The system of many-coloured suns, the blinding
organic wealth of which had inspired me to return to the earthly
twilight, revolves at a distance of 60,000 billion miles. Light takes
more than ten years to traverse this distance. Yet this is nothing
extraordinary in the way of astronomical distance.
Sirius, the most brilliant star of our sky, transported to that
distance, would be 3,500 times farther away than it is in reality,
and it would send us 12 million times less light. It would be a small
point, still within the range of the new photographic processes. It
would be a telescopic star of the 18th magnitude.
This sidereal milestone would be far from marking the limit of the
space accessible to telescopic investigation, which includes stars of
the 20th magnitude, and which, according to ingenious calculations, is
occupied by about 100 million suns. And indeed, as I advanced in my
celestial voyage, I crossed new abysses and discovered far ahead and
above me new stars which became suns, shone in the night and appeared
single, double, treble, quadruple, even quintuple, radiating a silver
or golden light, or emitting the most vivid and various colours; and I
guessed in passing at celestial earths peopled by unknown humanities
floating in these rays, before these worlds in turn rolled away and
disappeared beneath me in the night. They rushed with different speeds
in every direction through space, like luminous globes in the bouquets
of fireworks, and seemed to fly away in a starry rain.
When I reached the confines of our sidereal universe, the suns and
systems became sparser, and as I continued my ascent I found myself
engulfed in a black and desert void whence I could see the outer form
of our universe, resembling one of those many star clusters which are
seen in every telescopic field. This cluster became smaller and smaller
as I flew on into the outer darkness.
Then, in the infinite night I perceived above me another universe
which appeared in space as a pale and distant nebula, and I understood
that all we can see with our eyes in the clearest night and all that
telescopic vision has yet allowed us to discover represent nothing
but a local region in an animated immensity, and that there are other
universes besides that of which our Sun forms a star.
(7) IN INFINITE SPACE
I approached this second universe, which became larger and larger like
an archipelago of stars, and I soon arrived at its outskirts. As I
traversed it from end to end I saw that it also was composed of several
million suns separated from each other by thousands of millions of
miles. Then I found beyond it another dark abyss resembling that which
I had crossed to reach the second universe.
Continuing my flight, I saw a third, and I crossed it. A fourth
approached, then another, and yet another. And as I crossed those
deserts which separated them, in whatever direction my gaze endeavoured
to pierce the void, everywhere it discovered new universes in the
distance.
The splendid spiral nebulæ are not balls of gas but agglomerations of
suns, Milky Ways situated outside our sidereal universe.
Then I understood that all the stars which have ever been observed in
the sky, the millions of luminous points which constitute the Milky
Way, the innumerable celestial bodies, suns of every magnitude and of
every degree of brightness, solar systems, planets, and satellites,
which by millions and hundreds of millions succeed each other in the
void around us, that whatever human tongues have designated by the name
of universe, do not in the infinite represent more than an archipelago
of celestial islands and not more than a city in the grand total of
population, a town of greater or lesser importance.
In this city of the limitless empire, in this town of a land without
frontiers, our Sun and its system represent a single point, a single
house among millions of other habitations. Is our solar system a palace
or a hovel in this great city? Probably a hovel.
And the Earth? The Earth is a room in the solar mansion--a small
dwelling, miserably small.
Thus in the general economy of nature our planet has no more importance
than a poor little room in a considerable house. That house in turn is
lost in the middle of an immense town. And that immense town, which to
us represents the entire universe, is in fact nothing but a universe
beyond which in every direction there exist other universes.
How far is this reality from human pretensions, both ancient and
modern, which imagine that our world represents the infinite, that God
stops the Sun to illuminate one of Joshua’s battles--a miracle renewed,
says history, for Charlemagne and Charles V--and that the great Sower
of stars took upon himself a human shape to dwell among us!
What simplicity among sincere theologians! What imposture among the
chiefs of states who still dare to invest themselves with titles of
divine mandatories to enslave the people! Are not the real atheists
those either ignorant or insincere people who make the sublimest idea
the accomplice of all their mediocrities, and are not the real Deists
the independent searchers whose sole ambition is laboriously to look
for the causes and gradually to work up to truth?
With what strange religious systems has humanity up to now enveloped
its barren imagination! The Israelite who believes he is agreeable to
God in practising circumcision or in buying a new knife to be sure
that it has not touched pig’s fat; the Christian who imagines he can
make God descend upon a table and who is told by his preachers that
prayers and fasts have an influence upon the weather and agriculture;
the Mahommedan who sees the gate of Mahomet’s paradise opening before
him as he stabs a missionary; the fanatic who casts himself under the
wheels of the Juggernaut; the Buddhist who remains fascinated in the
beatific contemplation of his navel, or works a prayer-mill for the
remission of sins--these surely form the most ridiculous and infantile
ideas of the unknown and unknowable Being.
All these littlenesses are related to the primitive illusion of the
smallness of the universe, which was considered as a sort of screen
studded with golden nails and enclosing the earth in its centre.
Certainly if astronomy had had no other result than to enlarge our
general conceptions and show us the relativity of terrestrial things
in the bosom of the absolute, to deliver us from this ancient slavery
of thought and make us free citizens of the infinite, it would deserve
our veneration and our gratitude, for without it we should still be
incapable of forming true conceptions.
Some conservatives will perhaps object that there are even in French
observatories astronomers who go to Communion, tell their beads, and
carry candles in the churches, and that the same mentality can be
found in certain English, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, and other
observatories. Yes, without a doubt, the fact is undeniable. Such a
psychological phenomenon has two explanations. Either these hybrid
beings are sincere or they are not. If they are believers, they are
illogical and in perpetual conflict with their scientific reason,
and we must not be astonished at the strange arrangement which their
conscience is capable of constructing between two conceptions of nature
which directly contradict each other. While incapable of explanation,
such sincerity can be respected, like that of the innocent infant who
believes all one tells him.
In the second, case it is hypocrisy, falsehood, rascality, personal
interest; and this sort of conscience is suitably judged by every
honest man.
These anomalies and limitations have not hindered astronomy from
bringing light and independence to spirits who can understand it and
who have the courage and the freedom of their opinions.
But in telling of my Venetian dream I did not want to indulge in
irritating polemics, and my only object was to show to some open eyes
the horizons of astronomical philosophy, and I hasten to return to my
sidereal voyage and to describe its last phase. I shall, however, add
another word concerning our tiny planet, remarking that its inhabitants
are as a rule so unintelligent and so incapable of judgment that they
imagine that all have an equal intellectual and moral value and that
in the most civilised country of this globe the vote of an imbecile
or a drunkard has the same weight as that of an educated thinker, so
that the legislative chamber entrusted with the fate of the country
is an incoherent mass of persons incompetent to deal with any of
the questions likely to arise. Half of them are ignorant and are
preoccupied with their private concerns. In this system of pretended
equality, Judas is the same as Jesus, Philip II equals Marcus Aurelius.
Torquemada is the same as St. Vincent de Paul, Fouquier-Tinville the
same as Mirabeau, and the wine-merchant at the corner is the equal of
Archimedes and Pythagoras. There is no reasoning. Our little planet
is as insignificant morally as it is physically. Among terrestrial
humanity only one man in a hundred is intelligent. Humanity is
practically no older than four or five years as regards intelligence
compared with what it ought to be normally.
I had traversed several universes analogous to our galactic system,
universes separated from each other by abysses of nothingness, and
what had struck me most in this general survey was meeting a number
of humanities foreign to our own living in various regions of space,
living their own lives and carried along to their destiny in the
whirlpool of their personal affairs. While the inhabitants of the Earth
reduce creation to their own size, thousands, millions, billions, of
other humanities live in every degree of intellectual advancement on
solar systems which to them are the very centre of observation and from
which our terrestrial home appears lost in the infinite distance.
I also saw dead worlds. It is a fact worthy of attention that all
existence tends towards death. Beings only come into existence to
die. The worlds only attain periods of vitality to descend again into
decadence and the tomb. Suns only burn to be extinguished. Death would
therefore be the supreme law, the final result.
The mathematician can now calculate with great accuracy the date when
our Sun will become extinct aid when the Earth will roll on through the
eternal night like an icy cemetery. The entire history of terrestrial
humanity will have arrived at an absolute zero. The time will come when
even the ruins will be destroyed.
On account of the tendency of energy to establish itself in a state of
stable equilibrium in the universe, life will have an end on our planet
as well as the other worlds.
If everything appears thus to tend to extinction and death, it is
because we do not know the secret of the conservation of energy. An
end such as I have indicated is really unthinkable. The terms of the
problem contain their own condemnation. It is admitted that force and
matter can be neither created nor destroyed, and have therefore existed
and acted from all eternity. If therefore the final result of the
radiation of suns into space is their extinction and consequently the
extinction of life on their attendant planets, then since an eternity
has already elapsed during which energy has tended to equilibrium,
there ought to be not a single sun, star or planet in existence.
Now relatively, not to an eternal duration but only to a period like
a lightning flash compared with that, say a trillion years, the
life of a human race, of a planet, or even of a sun, is very short.
Geologists talk of 20 to 30 million years for the whole duration of
the geological eras from the origin of life on earth; physicists talk
of 100 million for the constitution of the terrestrial globe from the
liquid to the solid state; astronomers also assign 100 million years
to the age of the Sun, and even less to its future duration. Even if
we doubled or trebled these numbers, even if we multiplied them by ten
or even a hundred, we should not arrive at the millionth part of a
trillion years! Thus without going back to a previous eternity, if the
energy of suns had no other final result but extinction we should not
exist now and nothing that is would be.
The universe was not made of one piece at the origin of things. This
origin does not in fact exist. We find in space suns of every age.
There are old ones, there are new ones. Here are cradles, yonder are
tombs. If the first creations formed by matter and energy had not been
renewed, there would no longer be a universe. All primitive energy
which had animated the suns would be used up. Besides, matter and
energy are but one.
Just as in passing through a forest we find oaks in decay, green trees,
and new growths, thus also does the celestial traveller encounter in
space worlds long dead, dying worlds, worlds in full activity, and
budding stars.
Everything dies, but everything lives again.
Among the last worlds in full vitality which I visited on my voyage
among distant universes there was one which appeared particularly
remarkable on account of the high state of social progress. Although
this world is the most distant of all those suspected to exist in the
depths of space, yet the human race which dwells there is not very
different from ours, physically. It is divided into two sexes, and the
organic forms somewhat resemble those of our race. But the social state
is distinctly superior to ours.
A perpetual harmony reigns among all the members of this vast family.
Simple and modest, each of these beings has no higher ambition than
gradually to raise himself in the knowledge of things and in moral
perfection.
The atmosphere is not entirely nutritious, and there, as here, one is
obliged to eat in order to live. But they live exclusively on fruit and
vegetables, and kill no living being.
The functions of material life only take up a very short time, and life
is mainly intellectual. Instead of personal rivalries, great and small,
and the various ambitions which agitate the entire lives of the men and
women of our poor little world, those beings are mainly occupied in
study and pleasure.
There is no money. There are no rich nor poor. The fruits necessary
for nourishment can be picked anywhere beyond all needs. Summer is
perpetual and no sort of clothing has been thought of because the
bodily forms always keep their beauty, and coquetry would have nothing
to conceal.
There is no old age. On reaching a ripe age one goes to sleep and the
body dissolves like a cloud, which becomes invisible by the change of
state of its molecules.
No law has instituted the marriage bond. As it would be impossible to
contract for interest, because there are neither castes nor fortunes,
love alone guides the choice. On rare occasions the years reveal some
divergence of character sufficient to lead to a desire for another
choice, but when this divergence shows itself there is no chain to
break. Besides, they always remain lovers and never become married. The
desire of change, of variety, of curiosity, hardly arises because the
persons who have freely chosen each other love each other beyond all
others and have only chosen each other because they knew each other.
Friendships are sure and faithful, and there is no example of treason
dictated by the vile sentiment of jealousy.
Contrary to what happens on earth, every person whose life is ruled by
the sentiment of personal interest or ambition would be considered as a
monster beyond all explanation and thoroughly despised. In that world
they do not, as we do here, meet people who are constantly unhappy on
account of a desire to occupy all the best places, are never satisfied
with their own lot, and who, being indefatigable opportunists, grab
everything in their insatiable egoism, and die full of honours and
vanities.
There is no frontier. Humanity forms a single family. Communications
are established over the whole globe by a sort of language which passes
with the speed of lightning. An administrative council controlled by
universal suffrage directs public education, science, art, and justice;
and this universal suffrage is enlightened, and exercises its choice
among the best and wisest spirits. The dregs of the population are not
represented; the deputies do not shine by numbers and incompetence, but
by worth. In a country corresponding to France, their number would be
reduced from 600 to 100, every deputy possessing a special competence
in legislative questions. It is superfluous to add that a Ministry of
War has never been thought of there. The people, led by reason, do not
follow a fetish. Besides, no patriotic sentiment can there be exploited
or brutally debased, since no frontier divides humanity, and patriotic
sentiment consists solely in the recognition of intellectual worth.
No institute of so-called official science has been established there.
No Sorbonne has condemned the theory of the Earth’s movement, no
Academy has disapproved of the doctrine of perpetual peace. There
are no titles, no decorations. Nothing is appreciated but personal,
intellectual, and moral worth.
The word “infallibility” does not exist in the language of that
people. Only one religion reigns in their hearts: natural religion,
founded upon astronomy. Their faculties, more transcendent than ours,
their senses, more numerous and more penetrating, their more powerful
instruments of observation, have long ago placed them in communication
with neighbouring worlds, and they have been able to utilise astral
magnetism for purposes of transport from one world to another.
They have discovered the mystery of the union between force and matter,
and know that there is a fundamental identity between them. In their
own religions, they have never given God a name, and have never dared
to play at a cult, knowing that such puerility and such pride would
be unworthy of their merit. Their religion consists in a belief in
immortality based on the knowledge of the intimate nature of being, in
preparations for the future life, in efforts to make themselves better
and more perfect by a continual study of creation, and a mutual love
based on an enlightened sentiment of justice and equity.
They consider Reason as the highest prerogative of the human race, and
would consider any doctrinaire mad who would forbid the exercise of
that faculty for the sake of any religious system whatever.
From that world, nobody has ever yet perceived the Earth, and nobody
suspects its existence.
Their senses are more perfect and more subtle. While our human race
is less endowed than certain animals which can foresee a storm, the
changes of the seasons, and earthquakes, they possess the sense of
orientation, which we lack entirely, although on our own planet certain
species like the dog, the cat, the pigeon, and the swallow possess it.
They seemed to me absolutely happy, though exceedingly sensitive.
They spent the greatest part of their existence amid the most refined
pleasures. Their world is a perpetual paradise ever born afresh.
Perfumes arise from the bosom of splendid and varied flowers, and woods
are balmy with intoxicating spices, and the light of day plays upon
fairy-like scenery.
* * * * *
When I contemplated this marvellous spectacle, I felt surrounded
and penetrated, so to speak, with waves of sound which cradled my
enraptured soul in the most delicious melody my ears had ever heard.
The sensation of a celestial attraction seemed to carry me on a cloud
and make me slowly descend towards an island on which a palace of
flowers appeared. I felt a sort of electric shock and--I felt myself
in a high ogival window of Venice. A gondola filled with musicians was
returning from the Lido by the Grand Canal. Groups chanted harmonious
choruses, the sky shone with stars, the moon was setting behind the
domes, and Mars was descending towards the horizon.
The old clock sounded slowly the twelve strokes of midnight. “Well,”
I exclaimed, “I have been sleeping. Here I have been for two hours at
this window. Meanwhile the Moon has flown 4,850 miles in its orbit
round the Earth, and the Earth has traversed 410,000 miles in its
revolution round the Sun, drawn by that wonderful attraction which
rules the world across the voids of space; perhaps it also rules
our souls through the voids of time. “Thou beautiful starry sky,” I
murmured, “who hast taught us so much already, wilt thou not soon solve
for us the riddle of the great mystery? Thou art our hope, thou alone
canst teach us, thou alone canst open before our eyes the panoramas of
infinity and eternity.”
II. THE WORLD
OF LONG AGO