THE WORLD TO COME
The future is as real as the past. The world to come is in the mind’s
eye as substantial as the world of long ago.
ONCE upon a time, in a solar system belonging to the constellation
Andromeda, a planet a million times the size of our Earth bore on
its surface a very advanced human race. The eyes of its inhabitants
were constructed differently from ours and received radiations which
are dark to us. Also, instead of five senses those human organisms
possessed twelve. Their subtle and far-seeing industry had invented
instruments of great space-penetrating power, and they had succeeded
in determining at immense distances the volumes, masses, densities,
physical and chemical constitutions, the movements, and the intrinsic
nature of worlds at present quite indiscernible to us.
Amidst the glories of a sumptuous civilisation, those human beings,
whose form did not at all resemble ours, thought, in spite of their
progress in astronomy, that they were the centre, the final goal, and
the justification for the existence of the universe. Some of their
philosophers had indeed put forward the idea of a probability of
inhabited worlds, but this idea, received with scepticism by most of
the learned men and resolutely rejected by the theologians, was only
accepted by the most liberal spirits with a reservation concerning the
intellectual superiority of their race, considered as the necessary and
normal type of all humanity. To them it seemed impossible that Nature
should create anything other or better than what had been established
in their own world; the zoology of their own planet set a standard,
and living beings, they thought, could not be organised otherwise
than as they knew them. To their minds, the area accessible to their
observation included all the possible manifestations of the forces
acting throughout the cosmos. It was only possible to have twelve
senses, neither more nor less.
There came a time when some transcending genius discovered among the
stars of the constellation which terrestrial astronomers call Centaurus
the star which we call the Sun and around which we gravitate. He
noticed round this star nine principal spheres circulating round it,
and, by some secret sympathy, he directed his attraction chiefly to the
globe which we now inhabit.
The star--our own Sun--and the nine planets we have just mentioned
were invisible in our sense of the word. They only emitted dark rays,
black light. For a long time already, in fact, the Sun had been
extinct, and the humanities who had lived on the surface of the Earth,
of Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, of the
trans-Neptunian planet and its sisters, had died in turn and had been
gradually erased from the great book of universal life.
But by means of the superior methods of investigation which this
Andromedic astronomer had at his disposal, he succeeded, after a
laborious study which it took him 250 years of continuous work to
complete, in reconstructing the history of the terrestrial globe, which
interested him specially, and in discovering that it had been formerly
inhabited by animals of different species, and in particular by certain
bipeds endowed with relative intelligence.
* * * * *
This obscure globe, a black bullet revolving round another black
bullet, had a whole history of its own. It had contained in former
times an intense and luxuriant life. The springs and summers had
brought forth a profusion of flowers and fruit in the sunlit fields,
the land had unfolded its golden carpet of corn, springs had murmured
among the hills, birds had sung in the trees, the perfumed breezes
of meadows and woods had been wafted through the valleys, rivers
had rolled through the vast plains, villages and towns had grown
up along their banks, human communities had gradually peopled the
world, inventing fruitful industries, delightful arts, brilliant
sciences; prodigious cities had, in different ages, raised palaces
for kings and temples for gods; Memphis had succeeded Babylon, Athens
had followed Memphis, Rome had cast Athens into oblivion, Paris had
eclipsed Rome, and had vanished in its turn; hundreds of millions
of brains had thought, hundreds of millions of hearts had beaten,
eternal loves had been sworn, divine embraces had united loving souls,
innocent children, charged by the light of day, had held out their
arms for the kisses of their mothers, and life in all its forms had
sparkled for millions of years in sheaves of light ever renewed like
universal and inextinguishable fireworks. Struggles, miseries, lies,
rivalries, ambitions, battles, despairs, tears, mournings, had too
often disfigured with black tempests the sky whose clearness had, in
the springtime of life, seemed unchangeable.
What had dominated everything was a wise and impenetrable trickery
by which Nature persuaded all young girls to become women, to adorn
themselves with irresistible allurements, and to open their arms to
men in order to assure the continuity of life, hiding from their
truthful eyes the dangers and sufferings to which she condemns them
by surrounding them with flowers. And thus humanity had continued
without a stop, believing that its destiny was to enjoy without end
and progress without a limit; and thus it had finally reached the
annihilation of the race and the planet, without leaving anything
behind of its splendours and its conquests. What is past is past.
Neither terrestrial humanity nor its abode remained. All had
disappeared, all had been suppressed, except the spirit. The universal
spirit still reigned. But the metamorphoses of matter had transformed
everything. The entire history of our globe had been wiped off the
slate by the sponge of Time; and the sidereal universe went on as if
that history had never been written.
* * * * *
For several millions of centuries, the Sun had been a globe of gas,
shedding light and heat around it. After being a brilliant white it
had become yellow and then red, passing, in the course of its cooling
process, through the successive stages of white, yellow, orange,
and red suns like Sirius, Arcturus, Betelgeuse, and Antares. As it
had grown cooler, terrestrial life had become attenuated. The Sun
had finally been covered with a solid crust, often pierced by the
pressure of the incandescent lava within, and giving rise to prodigious
volcanoes. With the failure of light and heat, the joys and pains
of terrestrial life had come to an end. And the radiant day-star
of former days had become an obscure globe covered with oceans and
clouds, without a new sun to illuminate it, without day or twilight,
careering through space in the eternal night, and gradually enveloped
in a winding sheet of ice and snow consisting of carbonic acid. All the
nations of the Earth had gone to rest in as many cemeteries. The dying
Sun had recapitulated in its evolution the phases of its ancestors.
In infinite space, the extinct suns are much more numerous than the
luminous suns, and the stars revived by collision with another are
the exception. Temporary stars, which only shine a short time, are
exceptional occurrences.
Thus our extinct Sun still roamed through the void, carrying along its
retinue of defunct planets and travelling with great speed through
empty and unconcerned space.
And at the time of which we are speaking, the stars still shone in
the sky, the worlds still gravitated around the suns in space; but
they were no longer the same stars, nor the same suns, planets, or
humanities; it was neither the Earth nor its contemporaries. Life
continued to blossom; but it was not our life.
Just as, before the birth of the Earth, other worlds had flourished in
space, so also after the death of our planet will the universe continue
to exist, as it existed during the human era. And in the world of which
we speak, a new and flourishing humanity shone in the joy of another
sun. What had happened was in direct opposition to what terrestrial
theologians had taught us concerning the end of the world. For them the
end of the world was to have meant the end of the living universe and
the establishment of a celestial and infernal world. For every one of
the mortals inhabiting the future globe of which we speak, life passed
with the fugitive and inexorable speed of the river which flows from
its source to the sea, day by day, month by month, year by year, so
swiftly that at the end of its course all the moments of that life seem
to touch.
The inhabitants of the world of Andromeda lived on their immense globe
and occupied themselves with their personal affairs as if our Earth
had never existed and without suspecting that long before them, in the
past, our human race had played the game of destiny, cradled in the
illusion that they existed alone in the world. Nobody thought, amid the
common people, that worlds succeeded each other in time as well as in
space. Only the thinkers standing on the heights from which the whole
of things and events can be surveyed, realised that important truth,
that the doctrine of the plurality of worlds applies to eternity as
well as to infinity.
* * * * *
In our attempts to arrive at an idea of the constitution of the
universe, two questions constantly and inevitably present themselves
to our minds: the questions of Space and Time. They are correlative,
but their interpretations are far from being identical, as is often
supposed.
Space does not exist by itself, nor does time.
It is impossible to imagine the suppression of space. It is asserted
in vain that space is the interval which separates two objects, and
that if the objects are suppressed, space vanishes also. That is a pure
scholastic sophism. The definition is not exact. One can safely say
that it is impossible to suppress by a thought the place where objects
could be. The place, the locality, that void, if you like, by whatever
noun it is designated, is there quite ready to receive any object which
our imagination can suppose to be there. Even though the universe did
not exist, if nothing, absolutely nothing, existed, that nothing would
still be space, empty space ready to receive an object. We are then
forced to conclude that space exists by itself, even if it cannot be
measured in any way.
It is not the same with time.
Time is created by the movements of the heavenly bodies. If the earth
did not turn, nor the stars, if there were no succession of periods,
time would not exist. It is astronomy which has created time.
If you suppress the universe, space continues to exist, but time
ceases, vanishes, disappears.
We measure the duration of a second, of an hour, of a day, of a
year, because the heavenly bodies are there as points of reference
between which we can count. Besides, it is all relative. If the Earth
moved twice as slowly, the days would be twice as long, but would be
apparently the same. If our calendar were different, it would still be
our measure of time, and we should be none the wiser.
One may put all the clocks forward or backward by one hour, and all the
calendars by one day, one month, or one year, change the reckoning of
the centuries, or modify the time system in any way one pleases, but it
would not change the real course of nature.
The terrestrial days and years do not count in the heavens. The time
which can be measured in our own system on the nearest planets, Mars,
Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Neptune, although simultaneous with that which
we measure here, is not relative to ours. Time is essentially local. If
we did not exist there might be other measures of time, but it would
not be time according to our conception. In fact our impressions are
relative, there is nothing absolute in time. If we suppress life, the
sensation of time disappears, time itself ceases to exist. In empty
space, a thousand centuries are no longer than one minute, because they
do not exist.
It is we who say “yesterday” and “to-morrow.” To nature, everything is
“to-day.” Besides, every one of us has had the opportunity of proving
for himself that time does not exist when we sleep. To sleep one hour
or five hours is the same to us as regards the appreciation of time.
Time being purely relative, a sleep of a decillion years would be the
same as the sleep of an hour.
Renan the philosopher, who expressed this truth, added: “Heaven
does not exist; in a decillion years it may possibly exist. Those
whom a tardy justice places there will believe that they have died
the previous evening. To have been, means to be. Succession is the
absolute condition of our mind; but in a material object, succession
and simultaneity are confounded. When in the presence of death, we ask
whether the night will be long, we are as simple as the child who asks
the same question in going to bed, because he loves the daylight in
which he plays.”
If our thinking monads are associated with these worlds to come,
eternity is their empire.
Speaking in the absolute, time does not exist. But space exists.
It might be objected that space itself is a measure, and when we cannot
measure it we cannot know it. No doubt if the terrestrial globe were
100 times smaller, 8 feet would barely be as long as one inch, and the
man measuring “6 feet” from head to foot would really only be ¾ inch
high. But nothing would appear smaller, because the metre would still
be the ten-millionth part of the quarter circumference of the Earth,
and everything would be reduced in the same proportion. As in the case
of time, measurement is essentially relative and has nothing absolute
about it. But this does not alter the fact that time only exists by the
succession of events, whereas space exists absolutely.
Empty space, which is nothing to our senses unless we measure it by
some length, cannot be suppressed. Whether we measure it or not this
is nothing to do with its existence by itself. These measures of space
which we take have no common measure with infinity, nor with absolute
space; yet they are taken in absolute space, and depend upon our means
of observation. In the infinite void we can imagine several measures
of space, all very different: for example, a fourth dimension which
for us has no dimensions at all, and in which modes of investigation
unknown to us can discover other dimensions which we cannot even guess
at, since for us three dimensions exhaust all possible measurements of
space.
* * * * *
The past which is no longer in existence, the future which is not yet,
is contained as a germ in the present. To the universal eye, everything
is in the present. In transporting ourselves, as we have done, into
future times, we observe the events of those future times as if they
were already present and already past. We are ephemeral atoms floating
in the bosom of eternity, seen for an instant in a beam of light. We
regard our epoch as a permanent reality--the illusion of a grain of
dust which appears and disappears in the beam.
He who contemplates nature must live in those ages as yet uncreated as
well as in those which have passed away. And the future as well as the
past are even more real than the present, which does not exist, since
from one second to another time climbs up into the future only to fall
Lack into the pit of the past. Shall we say that the “present” is the
present hour? No, for an hour is long. The present minute? No, for the
minute is long to the observing astronomer or physicist. The present
second! No, for it is exceedingly long to electrify. Shall we reduce
the “present” to the tenth of a second? Yes, if you like, but it is
still relative to our sensations. Still, let us agree to that. Here,
then, is the present--a tenth of a second! All the rest is past or
future, and eternity is the only permanent reality.
* * * * *
Thus, from that point of space and time where we were placed in that
celestial region of the constellation of Andromeda, we have seen arise
before us, like a mummy awakening from a long sleep, the history of
the dead Earth, while we saw life shaping itself in a world which, in
our twentieth century, was not yet in existence. Thence, reascending
through the ages, we watched the slow secular evolution of our
humanity, until sunlit days became night and we lived in a new present
which, in its turn, seemed unique and eternal.
The world to come is there, in the future eternity, just as the world
of long ago is there, in the eternity of the past, and all is present
in the Absolute.
God does not look either forward or backward. He does not remember,
he does not foresee: he sees. We can write our verbs in the different
times, past, present, and future. In transporting ourselves by means
of thought beyond even the distant era of which we have sketched an
episode, we could describe even this episode as an ancient event.
* * * * *
The history which we have written took place--a hundred million years
after to-day!
IV. VENUS THE
BEAUTIFUL