you see the snow and ice melt every spring), which is uninhabited. The
population of the temperate regions is very dense, but in the equatorial
lands it is more so; the population there is as dense as in China,--and
especially the sea-coasts, notwithstanding the inundations. A large
number of cities are built almost on the water, suspended in the air in
some way above the overflows, which are calculated and expected
beforehand."
"Are your arts and your industries like ours? Have you railways,
steamships, the telegraph, and the telephone?"
"It is all quite different. We have never had either steam or railways,
because we have always known of electricity, and aerial navigation is
natural to us. Our fleets are moved by electricity, and are more aerial
than aquatic. We live principally in the air, and have no homes of
stone, iron, or wood. We do not experience the rigors of winter,
because no one stays exposed to them. Those who do not dwell in the
equatorial countries emigrate every autumn, just as your birds do. It
would be very difficult for you to form an exact idea of our manner of
life."
"Are there many human beings on Mars who have already lived on the
Earth?"
"No; among the inhabitants of your planet the greater part are either
ignorant, sceptical, or indifferent, and are unprepared for the
spiritual life. They are attached to the Earth, and their attachment
lasts for a long time. Many souls sleep completely. Those which act,
live, and aspire to know the truth, are the only ones called to
conscious immortality, the only ones whom the spirit-world interests,
and who are capable of understanding it. These souls can leave the Earth
and live in other lands. Many come and live for a while on Mars (the
first stage of an ultra-terrestrial journey, going from the Sun), or on
Venus, the first abode going the other way; but Venus is a world
analogous to the Earth, and still less favored, on account of its too
rapid seasons, which oblige its inhabitants to suffer the most sudden
changes of temperature. Certain spirits wing their way at once to the
starry regions. As you know, space has no existence. To sum up, justice
reigns in the moral world as equilibrium does in the physical world; and
the destiny of souls is but the perpetual result of their capabilities,
their aspirations, and consequently of _their works_. The Uranian way is
open to all; but the soul becomes truly Uranian only when it has
entirely shaken off the weight of material life. The day will come, even
on your planet, when there will be no other belief, no other religion,
than the knowledge of the universe and the certainty of immortality in
its infinite regions, in its eternal domain."
"What a strange thing," said I, "that no one on the Earth should know
these sublime truths! No one looks at the sky; we live as though our
little isle alone existed in the universe."
"Terrestrial humanity is young," answered Spero. "You must not despair.
It is a child, and still in primitive ignorance. It is amused at
trifles, and obeys masters of its own giving. You like to divide
yourselves into nations, to trick yourselves out in national costumes,
and to exterminate each other to music! Then you raise statues to those
who have led you to butchery. You ruin yourselves, you commit suicide,
and yet you cannot live without wresting your daily bread from the
Earth. That is a sad condition of things, but one which fully satisfies
the greater part of the dwellers on your planet. If some of them, with
higher aspirations, think occasionally of problems of the higher order,
of the nature of the soul or the existence of God, the result has been
no better, because they have put their souls outside of Nature, and have
invented strange, horrible gods, who never existed except in their
perverted imaginations, and in whose name they have committed all kinds
of outrages against the human conscience, have blessed all crimes, and
bound weak minds in a slavery from which it will be difficult for them
to escape. The lowest animal on Mars is better, finer, gentler, more
intelligent, and greater than the god of the armies of David,
Constantine, Charlemagne, and all your crowned assassins. There is
therefore nothing surprising in the coarseness and stupidity of
terrestrial humanity. But the law of progress governs the world. You are
more advanced than at the period of your ancestors of the stone age,
whose wretched existence was spent in fighting night and day with
ferocious beasts. In a few thousands of years you will be more advanced
than you are now. Then Urania will reign in your hearts."
"It would require a brutal material fact to teach and convince human
beings. If, for instance, we could some day enter into communication
with the neighboring world which you inhabit, not into physical
communication with one isolated person of it, as I am now doing, but
with the planet itself, by hundreds and thousands of witnesses, that
would be a gigantic stride towards progress."
"You could do it now if you chose, for we Martials are all prepared for
it, and have even tried it many times. But you have never replied to us.
Solar reflections, showing geometrical figures on our vast plains, prove
to you that we exist. You could reply to us by like figures also
displayed on your plains, either during the day by the sun, or during
the night by the electric light. But you never even think of it; and if
some one should propose to try it, your courts would interpose to
prevent it, for the very idea is immeasurably too high for the general
approval of the denizens of your planet. What do your scientific
assemblies work for? The preservation of the past. To what do your
political assemblies direct their attention? Increasing the taxes. In
the land of the blind, one-eyed men are kings.
"But you must not utterly despair. Progress bears you on in spite of
yourselves. One of these days, too, you will realize that you are
citizens of the sky; then you will live in the light, in knowledge, in
the mind's true world."
While the inhabitant of Mars was teaching me the principal
characteristics of his new country, the terrestrial globe had turned
towards the east, the horizon had sunk lower, and the Moon had gradually
risen in the sky, which she was illuminating with her radiance.
Suddenly chancing to lower my eyes to where Spero sat, I could not
repress a start of surprise. The moonlight was streaming over him as it
did over me, and yet, although my body cast a shadow on the parapet, his
figure was shadowless. I arose abruptly to assure myself of this fact. I
turned about at once and stretched out my hand to touch his shoulder,
watching the shadow of my gesture on the parapet. But my visitor had
instantly disappeared. I was absolutely alone on the silent tower. My
very dark shadow was thrown out sharply on the parapet. The Moon was
brilliant, the village was sleeping at my feet. The air was mild and
very still. And yet I thought I heard footsteps. I listened, and indeed
did hear rather heavy footsteps coming towards me. Some one was
evidently climbing the tower-stairs.
"Monsieur has not gone down yet?" said the custodian, coming up to the
top. "I was waiting to lock the doors, and thought the experiments must
be over."
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
IV.
THE FIXED POINT IN THE UNIVERSE.
The memory of Urania and the celestial journey on which she had borne me
away, the truths she had made me realize, Spero's history, his trials in
his pursuit of the absolute, his apparition, his story of another world,
still haunted me, and kept the same problems (partly solved, partly
veiled in the uncertainty of our knowledge) incessantly before my mind.
I felt that I had gradually risen to a perception of the truth, and that
the visible universe was really but an appearance, which we must pass
through in order to reach reality.
The testimony of our senses is but an illusion. The Earth is not what it
seems to be. Nature is not what we think. In the physical universe
itself, where is the fixed point upon which material creation is in
equilibrium?
The natural and direct impression given by the observation of Nature is
that we inhabit a solid, stable Earth, fixed in the centre of the
universe. It took long centuries of study and a great deal of boldness
to free ourselves from that natural conviction, and to realize that the
world we are on is isolated in space, without any support whatever, in
rapid motion on itself and around the Sun. But to the ages before
scientific analysis, to primitive peoples, and even to-day to three
quarters of the human race, our feet are resting on a solid Earth which
is fixed at the base of the universe, and whose foundations are supposed
to extend into the depths of the infinite.
And yet from the time when it was first realized that it is the same Sun
which rises and sets every day; that it is the same Moon, the same
stars, the same constellations which revolve about us, those very facts
forced one to admit with absolute certainty that there must be empty
space underneath the Earth, to let the stars of the firmament pass from
their setting to their rising. This first recognition was a
turning-point. The admission of the Earth's isolation in space was
astronomy's first triumph. It was the first step, and indeed the most
difficult one. Think of it! To give up the foundations of the Earth!
Such an idea would never have sprung from any brain without the study of
the stars, or indeed without the transparency of the atmosphere. Under a
perpetually cloudy sky, human thoughts would have remained fixed on
terrestrial ground like the oyster to the rock.
The Earth once isolated in space, the first step was taken. Before this
revolution, whose philosophical bearing equals its scientific value, all
manner of shapes had been imagined for our sublunary dwelling-place. In
the first place, the Earth was thought to be an island emerging from a
boundless ocean, the island having infinite roots. Then the Earth, with
its seas, was supposed to be a flat, circular disk, all around which
rested the vault of the firmament. Later, cubic, cylindrical, polyhedric
forms, etc., were imagined. But still the progress of navigation tended
to reveal its spherical nature, and when its isolation, with its
incontestable proofs, was recognized, this sphericity was admitted as a
natural corollary of that isolation and of the circular motion of the
celestial spheres around the supposed central globe.
The terrestrial globe being from that time recognized as isolated, to
move it was no longer difficult. Formerly, when the sky was looked upon
as a dome crowning the massive and unlimited Earth, the very idea of
supposing it to be in motion would have been not only absurd but
untenable. But from the time that we could see it in our minds, placed
like a globe in the centre of celestial motion, the idea of imagining
that perhaps this globe could revolve on itself, so as to avoid obliging
the whole sky and the immense universe to perform this daily task, might
come naturally into a thinker's mind; and indeed we see the hypothesis
of the daily rotation of the terrestrial sphere coming to light in
ancient civilizations, among the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Indians,
etc. It is sufficient to read a few chapters of Ptolemy, Plutarch, or
Surya-Siddhanta for an account of these conjectures. But this new
hypothesis, although it had been prepared for by the first one, was none
the less bold, and contrary to the feelings inspired by the direct
contemplation of Nature. Thoughtful mankind was obliged to wait until
the sixteenth century, or, to speak more correctly, until the
seventeenth century, to learn our planet's true position in the
universe, and to _know_ by supported proofs that it has a double
movement,--daily about itself, and yearly about the Sun. From that time
only, from the time of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, has real
astronomy existed.
And yet again, that was but a beginning, for the great remodeller of the
world's system, Copernicus himself, had no suspicion of the Earth's
other motions, or of the distances of the stars. It is only in our own
century that the first measurements of the distances of the stars could
be made, and it is only in our day that sidereal discoveries have
afforded us the necessary data by which we might endeavor to account for
the forces which maintain the equilibrium of creation.
The ancient idea of endless roots attributed to the Earth, evidently
left much to be desired to minds anxious to go to the bottom of things.
It is absolutely impossible for us to conceive of a material pillar, as
thick and as wide as you like (of the diameter of the Earth, for
example), sinking down into the infinite; just as one cannot admit the
real existence of a stick which should have but one end. No matter how
far our mind goes down towards the base of such a material pillar, there
is a point where it can see the end of it. The difficulty had been
obviated by materializing the celestial sphere and putting the Earth
inside it, occupying all its lower portion. But in the first place it
became difficult to adjust the motion of the stars, and on the other
hand this material universe itself, enclosed in an immense crystal
globe, was held up by nothing, since the infinite must extend all
around, beneath it, as well as above. Investigating minds were at first
obliged to free themselves from the vulgar idea of weight.
Isolated in space like a child's balloon floating in the air, and more
absolutely too, for the balloon is carried by aerial waves, while worlds
gravitate in the void, the Earth is a toy for the invisible cosmic
forces which it obeys,--a real soap-bubble, sensitive to the faintest
breath. Besides, we can easily judge of it by looking at the same time
at the whole of the _eleven_ principal motions of the Earth, by which it
is moved. Perhaps they will help us to find that "fixed point" which our
philosophical ambition asks for.
Thrown around the Sun at a distance of 37,000,000 leagues, and making at
this distance its annual revolution around the luminous star, it
consequently moves at the rate of 643,000 leagues per day; that is,
26,800 leagues an hour, or 29,450 metres per second. This speed is
eleven hundred times more rapid than an express train going at the rate
of a hundred kilometres an hour. It is a ball, going with a rapidity
seventy-five times greater than that of a bomb, always hurrying on, but
never reaching its goal. In 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, and 10
seconds, the terrestrial projectile has returned to the same point of
its orbit relative to the Sun, and continues its flight. The Sun, on its
part, is moving in space, following a line oblique to the plane of the
Earth's annual motion,--a line drawn towards the constellation of
Hercules. The result is, that instead of describing an exact circle, the
Earth describes a spiral, and has never passed over the same road twice
in its existence. To its motion of annual revolution around the Sun
there is added perpetually, as a second motion, that of the Sun itself,
which draws it, with all the solar system, into an oblique descent
towards the constellation of Hercules.
During all this time our little globe pirouettes around itself every
twenty-four hours, and gives us the daily succession of days and
nights,--diurnal rotation: third motion.
It does not turn upright upon itself, like a top, which would be
vertical on a table, but is inclined, as everybody knows, by 23° 27'.
This inclination, too, is not always the same; it varies from year to
year, from age to age, oscillating slowly by secular periods. That is a
fourth kind of motion.
The orbit in which our planet yearly travels around the Sun is not
circular, but elliptical. This ellipse itself also varies from year to
year, and from century to century; sometimes it approaches the
circumference of a circle, sometimes it lengthens out to a great
eccentricity. It is like an elastic ring, which can be bent more or less
out of shape. Fifth complication in the Earth's motion.
This ellipse itself is not fixed in space, but revolves in its own plane
in a period of 21,000 years. The perihelion, which at the beginning of
our era was at 65 degrees of longitude, starting from the vernal
equinox, is now at 101 degrees. This secular displacement of the line
of the apsides brings a sixth complication to the motion of our
abiding-place.
Here is a seventh. We said just now that our globe's axis of rotation is
inclined, and everybody knows that the imaginary prolongation of this
axis points towards the polar star. This axis itself is not fixed. It
revolves in 25,765 years, keeping its inclination of 22 to 24 degrees,
so that its prolongation describes a circle of 44 to 48 degrees in
diameter--according to the epoch--on the celestial sphere around the
pole of the ecliptic. It is in consequence of this displacement of the
pole that Vega, in twelve thousand years, will again become the polar
star, as she was fourteen thousand years ago. Seventh kind of movement.
An eighth motion, due to the action of the Moon on the equatorial
swelling of the Earth, that of nutation, causes the pole of the equator
to describe a small ellipse in eighteen years and eight months.
A ninth, due also to the attraction of our satellite, incessantly
changes the position of the globe's centre of gravity and the Earth's
place in space. When the Moon is in front of us, she accelerates the
speed of the globe; when she is behind, she retards us, on the
contrary, like a check-rein,--a monthly complication which is added to
all the others.
When the Earth passes between the Sun and Jupiter, the attraction of the
latter, in spite of its distance of 155,000,000 leagues, makes it
deviate by 2 m. 10 sec. from its absolute orbit. The attraction of Venus
makes it deviate 1 m. 25 sec. the other way. Saturn and Mars also act
upon it, but more feebly. These are exterior disturbances, which make up
a tenth kind of correction to add to the motion of our celestial barque.
The whole of the planets weigh about one seven hundredth part of the
weight of the Sun; the centre of gravity around which the Earth annually
turns is not in the very centre of the Sun, but far from the centre, and
often even outside of the solar globe. Now, absolutely speaking, the
Earth does not turn around the Sun; but the two heavenly bodies, Sun and
Earth, turn about their common centre of gravity. Thus the centre of our
planet's annual motion is constantly changing place, and we may add this
eleventh complication to the others. We might even add many others to
these; but the preceding ones are enough to make the degree of
lightness and delicacy of our floating island appreciated, subject, as
we have seen, to all the fluctuations of celestial influences.
Mathematical analysis goes very far beyond this summary statement. It
has found that the Moon alone, which seems to turn so peacefully about
us, has more than sixty distinct motions.
The expression is therefore not exaggerated: our planet is but the
plaything of the cosmic forces which accompany it in the meadows of the
sky, and it is the same with everything existing in the universe. Matter
is meekly obedient to force.
Where, then, is the fixed point which we desire for our support?
Our planet, then, formerly supposed to be at the base of the universe,
is in fact kept up at a distance by the Sun, which makes the Earth
gravitate about it with a speed corresponding to that distance. This
speed, caused by the solar mass itself, keeps our planet at the same
mean distance from the central star. A lesser speed would make the
weight predominate, and would lead to the Earth's falling into the Sun;
a greater speed, on the contrary, would progressively and infinitely
send our planet away from its life-giving focus. But at the speed
resulting from gravitation, our wandering home remains suspended in
permanent stability, just as the Moon is upheld in space by the force of
the Earth's gravity, which makes it circulate about the Earth with the
speed requisite to maintain it constantly at the same mean distance. The
Earth and the Moon thus form a planetary couple in space which sustain
each other in perpetual equilibrium under the supreme domination of
solar attraction. If the Earth existed alone in the universe, it would
be forever motionless in the void, wherever it had been placed, with no
power to descend or rise or change its position in any way whatsoever;
these very expressions--to rise, descend, left or right--having no
absolute sense whatever. If this same Earth, while existing alone, had
received any impetus whatever, had been thrown with any speed in any
direction, it would have whirled away forever in a straight line in that
direction, never being able to stop or to slacken its pace or change its
motion. It would have been the same thing if the Moon had existed alone
with it; they would both have turned about their common centre of
gravity, fulfilling their destiny in the same place in space, flying
together, following the direction in which they had been thrown. The Sun
existing and being the centre of its system, the Earth, all the planets
and their satellites, are dependent upon it, and to it their destiny is
irrevocably bound.
Is the fixed point that we are seeking, the solid base which we seem to
need to insure the stability of the universe, to be found in that
colossal and heavy globe, the Sun?
Assuredly not, since the Sun itself is not in repose, for it is bearing
us and all its system away towards the constellation of Hercules.
Does our Sun gravitate around an immense sun whose attraction extends to
it and controls its destinies as it controls that of the planets? Do
investigations in sidereal astronomy lead us to believe that a star of
such magnitude can exist in a direction situated at right angles with
our course towards Hercules? No; our Sun is influenced by sidereal
attraction, but no one star appears to overpower all the others and
reign sovereign over our central star.
Although it may be perfectly admissible, or rather certain, that the sun
nearest to ours, the star Alpha Centauri, and our own Sun feel their
mutual attraction; although this star may be situated at about 90
degrees from our tangent towards Hercules, and, more than that, in the
plane of the principal stars, passing by Perseus, Capella, Vega,
Aldebaran, and the Southern Cross; and although the proper motion of
this neighboring sun may be turned sensibly in the opposite direction
from ours,--yet we could not consider these two systems as forming one
couple analogous to that of the double stars; in the first place,
because all the known double-star systems are composed of stars much
nearer to each other, and then because in the immensity of the orbit
described, according to this hypothesis, the attraction of the
neighboring stars could not be considered as remaining without
influence; and lastly, because the actual rates of speed with which
these two suns are moved are much less great than those which would
result from their mutual attraction.
The little constellation of Perseus, especially, might very well exert a
more powerful action than that of the Pleiades, or than any other group
of stars, and be the fixed point, the centre of gravity, of the motions
of our Sun, of Alpha Centauri, and the neighboring stars, inasmuch as
the cluster of Perseus is not only at right angles with the tangent of
our movement towards Hercules, but also in the great circle of the
principal stars and precisely at the intersection of this circle with
the Milky Way. But here another factor comes in, of more importance than
all the preceding ones,--this Milky Way, with its eighteen millions of
suns, of which it would assuredly be audacious to seek the centre of
gravity.
But what is the whole entire Milky Way, after all, compared with the
milliards of stars which our mind contemplates in the bosom of the
sidereal universe? Is not this Milky Way itself moving like an
archipelago of floating islands? Is not every resolvable nebula, each
cluster of stars, a Milky Way in motion under the action of the
gravitation of other universes, which call to it and appeal to it
through the infinite night?
* * * * *