Earth and the Moon, or between the Earth and Mars, or even between the
Earth and Sirius, is only an illusion due to the insufficiency of our
perceptions. The Moon acts constantly upon the Earth, and moves it
perpetually. The attraction of Mars for our planet is equally acute, and
we in our turn disturb Mars in its course in submitting to the influence
of the Moon. We act upon the Sun itself, and make it move as if we
touched it. By virtue of attraction, the Moon causes the Earth to turn
every month around their common centre of gravity,--a point which
travels one thousand seven hundred kilometres below the surface of the
globe. The Earth causes the Sun to turn annually around their common
centre of gravity, situated four hundred and fifty-six kilometres from
the solar centre; all the worlds act upon each other perpetually, so
that there is no isolation, no real separation, between them. Instead of
being a void separating the worlds from one another, space is rather a
connecting link. Now, if attraction thus establishes a real, perpetual,
active, and indisputable communication between the Earth and its sisters
in immensity, as proved by the precision of astronomical observations,
we do not see by what right pretended positivists can declare that no
communication can be possible between two beings, more or less distant
from each other, either on the Earth or in two different worlds.
Cannot two brains that vibrate in unison at a distance of many
kilometres be moved by the same psychic force? Cannot the emotion which
starts from a brain reach a brain vibrating at no matter what distance,
just as sound crosses a room, making the strings of a piano or violin
vibrate?
Do not forget that our brains are composed of molecules which do not
touch, and which are in constant vibration. And why speak of brains?
Cannot thought, will, psychic force, whatever its nature may be, act on
a being to whom it is attached by the sympathetic and indissoluble ties
of intellectual relationship? Do not the palpitations of a heart
suddenly transmit themselves to the heart which beats in unison with
ours? Are we to admit in the cases of apparitions noted above that the
mind of the dead has really assumed a corporeal form when near the
observer? In the greater part of the cases this hypothesis does not seem
necessary. In our dreams we think we see persons who are not before our
closed eyes at all. We see them perfectly, as well as in broad daylight;
we speak to them, converse with them. Surely it is neither our retina
nor our optic nerve which sees them, any more than our ear hears them.
Our cerebral cells alone are concerned in it.
Certain apparitions may be objective, exterior, and substantial; others
may be subjective,--in that case the being who manifests himself would
act from a distance on the being who sees, and this influence on his
brain would determine the interior vision which appears exterior, as in
dreams, but may be purely subjective and interior. Just as a thought, a
memory, may arouse an image in our minds which may be very distinct and
very vivid, just so one intelligence acting upon another may make an
image appear in him which will for a moment give him the illusion of
reality. It is not the retina which is affected by a positive reality,
it is the optic thalami of the brain which are excited. In what way? The
present state of our physiological and psychological knowledge does not
yet teach us that.
Such are the most rational inductions which it seems possible to
derive from the phenomena to which we have just been giving our
attention,--unexplained, but very old phenomena; for the histories of
all peoples, from the highest antiquity, have preserved examples of it
which it would be very difficult to deny or efface. But it will be
asked, ought we, can we, admit in our age of experimental methods and
positive science that a dying or even a dead man can communicate with
any one? What is a dead man?
A human being dies every second on the whole terrestrial globe; that is,
eighty-six thousand four hundred per day, about thirty-one millions per
year, or more than three milliards per century. In ten centuries more
than thirty milliards of corpses have been committed to the earth and
given back to general circulation under the form of various
products,--water, gas, etc. If we keep an account of the diminution of
human population as we count up the historic ages, we find that for ten
thousand years, _at least two hundred milliards of human bodies have
been formed from the earth and from the atmosphere by respiration and
nourishment, and have returned to it_. Molecules of oxygen, hydrogen,
carbonic acid, and nitrogen, which have constituted these bodies, have
enriched the earth and been given back to atmospheric circulation.
Yes, the Earth we inhabit is now formed partly of the milliards of
brains which have thought, the milliards of organisms who have lived. We
walk over the remains of our ancestors as our descendants will walk over
ours. The brows of thinkers; eyes which have looked, smiled, and wept;
mouths which have sung of love, rosy lips, and marble bosoms; mothers'
flesh and blood; the arms of toilers; the muscles of men, good and
bad,--all who have lived, all who have thought, lie in the same earth.
It would be difficult now to take a single step on the planet without
walking on the remains of the dead; it would be difficult to breathe
without inhaling the breath of the dead. The constructive elements of
the body draw upon Nature and are returned to Nature, and each one of us
bears in himself atoms which have formerly belonged to other bodies.
Ah, well! Do you think that can be all of humanity? Do you think it may
not have left something nobler, grander, and more spiritual? Does each
of us give the universe, when we breathe our last, nothing but sixty or
eighty kilos of flesh and bone which will disintegrate and return to the
elements? Does not the soul which animates us endure by the same right
as each molecule of oxygen or nitrogen or iron? And all the souls that
have lived, do they not still exist?
We have no right to affirm that man is composed solely of material
elements, and that the thinking faculty is only one property of the
organization. On the contrary, we have the strongest reasons for
admitting that the soul is an individual entity, that it is that which
governs the molecules to organize the living form of the human body.
What becomes of the invisible and intangible molecules which have
composed our body during life? They will belong to new bodies. What
becomes of the equally invisible and intangible souls? It may be thought
that they also reincarnate themselves in new organisms, each in
accordance with its nature, its faculties, and its destiny.
The soul belongs to the psychic world. Doubtless there is on the Earth
an innumerable quantity of souls, still heavy and coarse, barely freed
from matter, and incapable of conceiving intellectual realities. But
there are others who live in study, in contemplation, in the culture of
the psychic or spiritual world. Those cannot remain imprisoned on the
Earth, and their destiny is to live the Uranian life.
The Uranian soul, even during its terrestrial incarnations, lives in the
world of the absolute and divine. It knows that, though dwelling on the
Earth, it is really in heaven, and that our planet is a star of heaven.
What is the inner nature of the soul? What are its ways of
manifestation? When does its memory become permanent, and maintain with
certainty a conscious identity? Under what variety of forms and
substances can it live? What extent of space can it overcome? What is
the order of intellectual relationship which exists among the different
planets of the same system? What is the germinating force which sows the
world with seed? When can we put ourselves in communication with the
neighboring earths? When shall we penetrate the profound secret of
destiny? Mystery and ignorance to-day. _But the unknown of yesterday is
the truth of to-morrow._
[Illustration]
It is an historic and scientific fact, and absolutely incontestable,
that in all ages, among all peoples, and under the most diverse
religious manifestations, the idea of immortality rests invulnerable at
the base of human consciousness. Education has given it a thousand
forms, but did not invent it. It exists of itself. Every human being
coming into the world brings with him, under a form more or less vague,
this inner feeling, this desire, this hope.
[Illustration]
II.
ITER EXTATICUM CŒLESTE.
The hours and days that I devoted to the study of these psychological
and telepathical questions did not prevent my observing Mars through the
telescope, and taking geographical drawings of it, every time that our
atmosphere, so often cloudy, would permit. Besides, it may be realized
that while in the study of Nature and in science all questions are
related to each other, yet that astronomy and psychology are most
closely united to each other, since the psychic universe has the
material world for its habitat, while astronomy has for its object the
study of the regions of eternal life, and we could form no idea of these
regions if we did not know them astronomically. In fact, whether we know
it or not, we are living now, at this moment, in heavenly regions, and
all beings, whatever they may be, are eternally citizens of heaven. It
was not without a secret divination of things that antiquity made Urania
the Muse of all the sciences.
My mind had been occupied with the planet Mars for a long time, when one
day, in a solitary ramble on the edge of a wood, after several hours of
July heat, I seated myself at the foot of a clump of oak-trees, and was
not long in dropping off to sleep.
The heat was overpowering, the landscape silent, the Seine seemed quiet
as a canal at the bottom of the valley. I was strangely surprised on
waking up after a few minutes' nap at no longer recognizing the
landscape nor the trees, nor the river flowing at the foot of the hill,
nor the undulating meadows which stretched far away to the distant
horizon. The setting sun was smaller than we are accustomed to see it,
the air thrilled with harmonious sounds unknown to Earth, and insects
as large as birds were fluttering about on the leafless trees, which
were covered with gigantic red flowers. Astonishment made me spring up
with so energetic a bound that I found myself on my feet feeling
singularly light and buoyant. I had taken but a few steps before it
seemed to me that more than half the weight of my body had evaporated
during my sleep. This inner sensation struck me even more forcibly than
the metamorphosis of Nature spread out before me.
I could hardly believe my eyes or senses. Besides, my eyes were not at
all the same. I did not hear in the same way, and I realized at once
that my organization had developed several new senses quite different
from those of our terrestrial body, especially a magnetic sense, by
which one being can communicate with another without the necessity of
translating thoughts audibly by words. This sense reminds one of the
magnetic needle, which, from a cellar in the Paris Observatory, starts
and shivers when an aurora borealis appears in Siberia, or when an
electric explosion breaks out in the Sun.
The orb of day had just sunk in a distant lake, and the rosy gleams of
twilight were hovering far down the sky, like a last dream of light. Two
moons were beginning to shed their rays at different heights: the first,
a crescent, hung over the lake in whose bosom the Sun had disappeared;
the second, in its first quarter, was much higher, and towards the east.
They were very small, and but distantly resembled the immense torch of
our earthly nights. It seemed as if they shed their bright but feeble
rays regretfully. I looked from one to the other in utter bewilderment.
Perhaps the strangest thing in all this strange spectacle was that the
western moon, which was about three times as large as its companion in
the east, although five times smaller than our terrestrial moon,
travelled through the sky with a motion very easy to follow with the
eye, and seemed to speed quickly from right to left to join its
celestial sister in the west.
A third moon, or rather a brilliant star, could also be seen in the last
beams of the setting Sun, which were dying away. Smaller than the
smallest of the satellites, it showed no appreciable disk, but its light
was dazzling. It looked out from the evening sky as Venus in her most
brilliant season beams in our own heavens, when the "shepherd's star"
reigns like a queen over balmy evenings in spring, and weaves the fabric
of happy dreams.
The more brilliant stars were already lighting up the sky. I recognized
Arcturus with its golden rays, Vega so white and pure, the seven stars
of the Septentrion, and several of the zodiacal constellations. The
evening star, the new vesper, was shining in the constellation of the
Fishes. After having studied its position in the heavens for a few
moments, and finding out by the constellations where I was myself; after
examining the two satellites and reflecting on the lightness of my own
body,--I was convinced that I was on the planet Mars, and that the
beautiful evening star was--the Earth!
* * * * *
[Illustration]
My eyes rested on it with that feeling of mournful love which thrills
the fibres of our hearts when our thoughts fly away to a beloved object
from whom we are separated by cruel distance; for a long time I looked
at that fatherland where so many different feelings meet and jostle each
other, and I thought,--
"What a pity it is that the numberless human beings living on that
little habitation do not know where they are! That little Earth is most
beautiful thus lighted up by the Sun, with its microscopic moon which
looks like a speck beside it. Borne through the invisible by the divine
laws of attraction, a floating atom in the harmony of the skies, it
fills its place and hovers overhead like an angelic island! But its
inhabitants are unaware of it! Singular humanity! They find the Earth
too wide, so divide themselves up into flocks, and spend their time
shooting one another. In that angelic isle there are as many soldiers as
there are male inhabitants; they are all in arms against one another,
and think it glorious to change the names of countries and the colors
of flags, when it would have been so simple a matter to live peacefully.
War is the favorite occupation of its nations, and the primordial
education of the people. Aside from that, they spend their existence in
adoring matter. They do not appreciate intellectual worth, are
indifferent to the most wonderful problems of creation, and live an
objectless life! What a pity! A citizen of Paris who had never heard the
city's name mentioned, nor that of France, would not be more of a
stranger than they in their own country. Ah! if they could but see the
Earth from here! How delighted they would be to return to it, and how
transformed all their ideas would be, both general and individual! Then
they would at least know the land they live in; it would be a
beginning,--they would study progressively the sublime truths about it,
instead of vegetating under a horizonless fog, and after a while they
would live the true life, the intellectual life."
[Illustration]
* * * * *
"What honor he pays it! One would think he had left friends in that
prison yonder!"
I had not spoken, but I distinctly heard this sentence, which seemed
like a reply to my inward conversation. Two of the dwellers upon Mars
were looking at and had understood me, by virtue of that sixth sense of
magnetic perception to which I before alluded. I was somewhat confused,
and, I must confess, deeply wounded, by this apostrophe. "After all," I
thought, "I love the Earth; it is my country, and I am patriotic." My
two neighbors both began to laugh.
"Yes," answered one of them, with unexpected good-nature, "you are
patriotic; any one might know that you have just come from the Earth."
And the elder added,--
"Let your compatriots alone. They will never be any more intelligent or
less blind than they are now. They have been there eighty thousand years
already, and you yourself acknowledge that they are not yet capable of
thinking. It is really very absurd of you to look at the Earth with such
sorrowful eyes. It is too foolish."
Dear reader, have you not, in your journey through the world, sometimes
met men who were puffed up with imperturbable pride, and who thought
themselves sincerely and unquestionably above all the rest of the world?
When these proud personages find themselves face to face with anything
superior, they are instantly hostile to it, they cannot endure it. Very
well. In the preceding dithyramb (of which you have had but a very poor
translation), I felt myself greatly superior to earthly humanity, since
I felt pity for it, and invoked for it better days. But when these two
inhabitants of Mars pitied me, and I thought I discovered in them a cold
superiority to myself, I was for a moment like these foolish, proud
people. My blood gave one bound, and, restraining myself by a remnant of
French politeness, I opened my mouth to say,--
"After all, gentlemen, the inhabitants of the Earth are not as stupid as
you appear to think, but are worth perhaps more than you."
Unfortunately they did not give me time to begin my sentence, inasmuch
as they had understood it all while it was being formed by the vibration
of the substance of the brain.
[Illustration]
"Permit me to remark at once," said the younger, "that your planet is an
absolute failure, in consequence of an occurrence which happened about
ten million years ago. It was at the time of the primary period of the
earthly genesis. There were plants already, and very fine plants too;
the first animals were beginning to appear in the depths of the sea and
along the shores,--mollusks that were headless, deaf, mute, and without
sex. You know that respiration is all a tree requires for its entire
nourishment, and that your most robust oaks, your most gigantic cedars,
have never eaten anything, and that that has not prevented their growth.
They are nourished solely by respiration. Misfortune, Fatality, had
willed that a drop of water thicker than the surrounding medium should
pass through one of the mollusks. Perhaps he liked it. That was the
first digestive tube, which was to exert so baleful an effect on the
entire animal kingdom, and later on mankind itself. The first murderer
was the mollusk who ate. Here we do not eat, have never eaten, and never
shall eat. Creation is developing itself gradually, peacefully, and
nobly, as it began. Organisms are nourished; or, to express it
differently, renew their molecules by a simple respiration, like your
terrestrial trees, each leaf of which is a little stomach. In your
precious country you can live a single day only on condition of killing.
With you, the law of life is the law of death. Here, the idea of
killing even a bird has never occurred to any one.
[Illustration]
"You are all more or less butchers. Your hands are stained with blood,
your stomachs are gorged with food. How can you expect to have
wholesome, pure, elevated ideas,--I will even say (excuse my frankness)
clean ideas,--with such coarse organisms? What souls could live in such
bodies? Reflect a moment, and do not soothe yourself any more with blind
illusions, too ideal for such a world."
"What!" I cried, interrupting him, "do you deny us the possibility of
having clean ideas? Do you take human beings for animals? Have Homer,
Plato, Phidias, Seneca, Virgil, Dante, Columbus, Bacon, Galileo, Pascal,
Leonardo, Raphael, Mozart, Beethoven, never had lofty aspirations? You
think our bodies coarse and repulsive; if you had seen Helen, Phryne,
Aspasia, Sappho, Cleopatra, Lucretia Borgia, Agnes Sorel, Diane de
Poitiers, Marguerite de Valois, Borghese, Talien, Récamier, Georges, and
their charming rivals, you would perhaps think differently. Ah, my dear
Martial, let me in my turn regret that you know the Earth only from
afar."
"You are mistaken there; I lived in that world for fifty years. That was
enough for me, and I assure you I would not return to it again.
Everything is a failure there, even--what seems most delightful to you.
Do you imagine that in all the earths of heaven the flowers produce the
fruits of the same sorts? Would not that be a little cruel? As for me, I
like primroses and rosebuds."
"Well, but still," I answered, "notwithstanding all that, there have
been great minds on the Earth, and creatures really worthy of
admiration. May we not comfort ourselves with the hope that physical
and moral beauty will go on perfecting themselves more and more as
they have done hitherto, and that intelligence will enlighten itself
progressively? We do not spend all our time eating. Men will surely end,
in spite of their material labors, by giving up a few hours every day to
the development of their understanding. Then probably they will no
longer continue to manufacture little gods in their own image; and
perhaps also they will abolish their childish boundaries, so that
harmony and fraternity may reign."
[Illustration]
"No, my friend, for if they wished it, they could do so now; but they
are very careful not to. Terrestrial man is a little animal who on the
one hand feels no need of thinking, not even having independence of
soul, and who on the other likes to fight, and squarely establishes
right by might. Such is his good pleasure, and such is his nature. You
will never make peaches grow on a thorn-bush. Remember that the most
exquisite beauties, to whom you alluded just now, are but coarse
monsters compared to the aerial women of Mars, who live on our spring
air, the perfume of our flowers, and are so captivating in the very
quivering of their wings, in the ideal kiss of a mouth which has never
eaten, that if Dante's Beatrice had been of such a nature, the immortal
Florentine would never have been able to write two of the parts of his
'Divine Comedy;' he would have begun with Paradise, and could never have
left it. Reflect that our youths have as much innate science as
Pythagoras, Archimedes, Euclid, Kepler, Newton, Laplace, and Darwin
after all their laborious studies; our twelve senses put us in direct
communication with the universe; we feel from here Jupiter's attraction
as he passes, a hundred million leagues away. We see the rings of Saturn
with the naked eye, we detect the coming of a comet, and our body is
impregnated with the solar electricity which puts all Nature in
vibration. Here there has never been either religious fanaticism or
executioners, or martyrs or international divisions or wars, but from
the first, humanity, naturally peaceful, and freed from all material
needs, has lived independent in body and mind, in a constant
intellectual activity, raising itself unhindered to the knowledge of the
truth. But come over here."
[Illustration]
* * * * *
I walked a few steps on the mountain-top with my new acquaintances, and
coming in sight of the other slope, I saw multitudes of different
colored lights flitting about in the air. It was the inhabitants, who,
when they desire it, become luminous at night. Aerial cars, apparently
formed of phosphorescent flowers, were carrying orchestras and choruses;
one of them passed us, and we took our places in it, in the midst of a
cloud of perfumes. The sensations which I experienced were singularly
unlike any which I had ever felt on the Earth, and this first night on
Mars passed like a rapid dream; for the dawn found me still in the
aerial car conversing with my entertainers, their friends, and their
indescribably lovely companions. What a panorama with the rising sun!
Flowers, fruits, perfumes, fairy-like palaces rose on the islands with
their orange vegetation; the waters stretched themselves out like limpid
mirrors, and joyous aerial couples were whirling down to these
enchanting shores. There, all material work is done by machines, and
directed by a few perfected races of animals whose intelligence is very
nearly of the same order as that of mankind on the Earth. The
inhabitants live only for and by the mind; their nervous system has
reached such a degree of development that each one of these beings, at
once very delicate and very strong, seems an electric battery, and their
most sensual impressions, felt more by their souls than their bodies,
surpass a hundredfold all those that our five terrestrial senses
together could ever offer us. A kind of summer palace illuminated by the
rays of the rising Sun opened beneath our aerial gondola. My neighbor,
whose wings were fluttering with impatience, placed her delicate foot
upon a tuft of flowers which rose between two jets of perfume. "Will you
return to the Earth?" she asked, holding out her arms to me.
"Never," I cried, springing towards her.
* * * * *
But at that moment I found myself alone near the wood on the slope of
the hill, at whose feet the Seine was winding with undulating curves.
[Illustration]