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

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

CHAPTER II
THE WORLD OF LONG AGO

I HAD a dream, which yet was not a dream.

I found myself as an observer of the world as it was 100 million years ago, inhabiting a planet in attendance upon one of those distant stars of space, in the middle of a sidereal universe analogous to that which exists at present, though it was not the same, for the universe of that time was destroyed long ago and the universe of to-day did not yet exist.

At that time, also, there were stars and constellations, but they were neither the same constellations nor the same stars.

There were suns, moons, inhabited earths, days, nights, seasons, years, countries, beings, impressions, thoughts, facts; but they were not the same as now.

The Earth which we inhabit was not yet in existence. The materials which compose it floated through space in a state of diffused nebulosity, gravitating about the slowly condensing solar focus. There were as yet neither water, nor air, nor earth, nor heavens, nor planets, nor animals, nor any one of those bodies reputed to be simple by chemistry, as oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, lead, copper, etc. The gas (which by its condensations and final transformations was eventually to give rise to the various gaseous, liquid, and solid substances at present constituting our globe and its inhabitants) was a single homogeneous gas, containing within it, like an unconscious chrysalis, the possibilities of the future. But no prophet could have foreseen the unknown which slumbered amid its mysteries.

Our planet showed at that time the aspect of those vague gaseous nebulæ which the telescope discovers on the floor of the skies and which the spectroscope analyses. The solar nebula in the course of condensation floated among the stars. All humanity with its history, every one of us with all his energies, all the living beings of this Earth, were contained in the germ of that nebula and its forces; but the beings and the things which we know were not to come into existence until after a long incubation of centuries. In the place of what was destined to be the Earth, there was nothing but a gas floating in starry space. Nor was it in the real “space” where we are now, for the Earth, the planets, and the whole solar system came from afar and flew swiftly across the void.

* * * * *

In the history of creation, 100 million years pass like a day; they dwindle and disappear, a fugitive dream, into the bosom of that eternity which absorbs all.

Then, although our planet did not exist, there were stars, suns, solar systems, and inhabited worlds as there are now. The humanities which peopled those worlds lived their lives as we live ours.

It would have been a wonderful spectacle for the thinker to contemplate the great work of all those beings. In passion or indifference, in pleasure or pain, in laughter or tears, in movement or repose, they lived; fighting, forgiving; accusing, forgetting; loving, hating; being born and dying; drawn into the fatal whirlpool; blindly succeeding each other through the generations and centuries, not knowing what gave them birth; ignorant of the fate in store for individuals and souls; playthings of that Nature which forms worlds and beings, stars and atoms, centuries and minutes, like soap-bubbles blown by a child into the air; and all plunging into the sea, like those whirls of sand which the desert wind raises and blows along in the typhoon or the breeze. It is the same spectacle as that which the earth offers to-day; living multitudes fighting for life and knowing only death.

The thought which must strike us most in our retrospective contemplation is that at that time the Earth did not exist. Not one of those human beings who live now, who will live in the future, or who have lived in the past, were then thought of. Nothing of all that now exists around us existed then. Yet in those ancient worlds which have disappeared long ago, the humanities which animated them had their vivid history, with flourishing cities, fights and struggles, laws and law-courts, judges of spiritual things, historians, economists, politicians, theologians, literary men, who took pains to tell the true from the false and to write down conscientiously what they, too, called “universal history.” For them, all creation stopped in their era and in their place; for all of them, creation was finished; the rest of the universe and of limitless eternity was lost in insignificance in comparison with what they called the “Present.” They never thought of the eternity which had already passed before them, nor of the eternity which would come after them.

They lived, learned or ignorant, famous or obscure, rich or poor, opulent or miserable, religious or sceptical, they all lived as if their era would never come to an end. Some of them, without losing a minute, amassed a fortune which their heirs hastened to dissipate; some spent their time in dreams and contemplations without thinking of the morrow. In one place there would be battalions inflaming the populace with their patriotic shouts; in another loving couples united their souls in mystery. Under the pressure of what they believed to be affairs of imperative importance, driven by the attractions of pleasure or borne on the wings of ambition, the inhabitants of that ancient world, like those of ours, flung themselves into the whirlpool of life. They, like ourselves, had days of glory and of sorrow; they had their ’89 and ’93, their Austerlitz and Waterloo, and political drama had its 18th Brumaire and its 2nd of December. Thus recently on our own Earth shone the life of Babylon, of Thebes, of Memphis, of Nineveh, of Carthage, the glory of Semiramis, Sesostris, Solomon, Alexander, Cambyses, and Cæsar; and to-day the silence of funeral solitude reigns supreme over the ruins of the palaces and temples, in the slumber of the invading night. In the history of the universe it is not only peoples, kingdoms, and empires which have disappeared, but it is whole worlds, groups of worlds, archipelagoes of planets, visible universes!

For eternity did not begin, it was never begun. The forces of Nature have never been inactive. For Nature itself, our measures of time, our conceptions of duration, do not exist. She has no past and no future, but a perpetual present. She remains immutable throughout her incessant manifestations and transformations. We pass away; She remains.

One can hardly think without terror of the innumerable beings which have lived on the worlds now lost, of all the leading spirits who have thought, acted, guided humanity in the path of progress, light, and liberty. One cannot think of Platos, Pascals, and Newtons of the vanished worlds without asking what has become of them. It is easy to reply that that is nothing, that they died as they were born, that all is dust and returns to dust. It is an easy answer, but it is not satisfying.

* * * * *

Certainly, nobody can be so foolish as to claim to have found a solution of the great mystery. For treating those profound problems of eternity and infinity, we are about in the position of ants attempting to gain a knowledge of the history of France. In spite of all their mental gifts, which have indeed been fully recognised, in spite of their goodwill, their gallant attempts and all their efforts, it is quite probable that they would not get beyond the history of their ant-heap and would not arrive at any reasonable conclusions concerning human beings and their affairs. To them, naturally, the proprietors of the woods and fields are the ants, and the plant-lice domesticated by them. And the parasites of the Earth are those inedible insects which interfere with them. Do they know that birds exist? It is doubtful. As regards men, they do not know of their existence, though it may be that the ants in civilised countries have in their antennal language an expression corresponding to the idea of “sugar-maker,” or cook, or confectioner, or for some implacable enemy such as a gardener. But even if they suspected our existence, they could not form any idea about the human race or its history but—the ideas of ants.

* * * * *

It would no doubt be as useless as it is foolish to lose ourselves in the nebulosity of metaphysics to attain a solution which will escape us for ever. But it is no doubt a proper subject for the exercise of our mental faculties to think of this particular aspect of creation: Time; to think that from all eternity earths inhabited like ours have floated in the light of their suns, that from all eternity there have been humanities enjoying the pleasures of life, and that from all eternity the end of the world has sounded on the hoary timepiece of destiny, burying in turn the universes and their inhabitants in the tomb of annihilation and oblivion. For it is impossible for us to conceive a commencement which was not preceded by an eternity of inaction, and as far as the observational sciences can take us, they show us forces in perpetual activity.

If infinite space dazzles us by its limitless immensity, an eternity without a beginning and without end arises, still more formidable perhaps, before our terrified gaze. The voices of the past speak to us from the abyss: they speak of the future.

The past of extinct worlds is the future of the earth.

* * * * *

In 100 million years, the earth where we live will no longer exist, or if any wreck of it remains, it will only be a funereal desert. The various worlds of our system will have achieved their circle of life, the histories of its human race will long ago have been finished, our own Sun, no doubt, will have lost its light and will roll along a dark star, through the realms of night. It may be that, thrown back by destiny into the melting-pot of perpetual change, united in a supreme climax with some old dead sun traversing the same abyss, it will arise like a phœnix from its ashes by the conversion of motion into heat.

But, then as now, the nebulæ will have given birth to suns, then as now, endless space will be filled with stars without number gravitating in the harmony of their mutual attraction, the planets will swing in the rays of their suns, mornings and evenings will follow each other, blue sky will spread overhead, clouds will float in the twilight mysteries, perfumed breezes will blow through the woods and valleys, mysterious sounds will stop the songs of the birds, and eternal love will sway a later youth with the divine rapture of insatiable aspirations. Marvellous ascension of life! Nature will chant, as it does to-day, the hymn of youth and happiness, and an imperishable spring will bloom for ever in this immense universe where the historian of the past sees nothing but tombs!

If there are no limits to space, if, whatever part of the sky our thought may essay, it can always pass on without being stopped by anything, however swift or prolonged its flight, if, in a word, space is infinite in every sense, it is the same with eternity: there is no possible limit to it, and whatever end we may imagine, whatever hour or minute fixed for its end, our thought immediately leaps the obstacle and continues on its way. Infinity even now is filled with budding worlds, worlds reaching maturity, decadent worlds, dead worlds, disseminated in all regions of an unlimited space, gaseous nebulæ, hydrogen suns, oxidised stars, planets in the course of formation, congealed satellites, disintegrated comets—the forces of Nature are everywhere active, the energy of creation remains constant, neither increasing nor diminishing, and all the scientists agree in testifying that what we call destruction and annihilation is only transformation. Astronomy reveals to us Time as it has revealed Space. It shows that there is nothing peculiar about our present epoch in the history of Nature, nor about our present position in space, and it combines Time and Space, the two forms of reality, in the same synthesis as the two grand aspects of the development of the universe.

* * * * *

No, this dream was no dream. For to the human race which lived on the different worlds of space during the ages preceding the formation of our solar system, the Earth with all its history was only a possibility of what the future might bring forth. It might never have existed at all. The writers of history of terrestrial peoples, Moses, Herodotus, Manetho, Ma-Tuan-Lin, Titus Livius, Tacitus, Gregory of Tours, Bossuet, all those who have attempted to write universal histories, the great Leibnitz himself, who placed the commencement of the history of a small German duchy at the time of creation of the world, and even the delightful author of the Metamorphoses, who tells of the history of the birth of the Earth and Heaven—the astronomer smiles at their annals, as he has smiled at the genealogies of the kings and the conquests of the Cæsars—

“Battles of ants in microscopic space.”

Simple illusions of infants who fondle their dolls!

Let them invent new microscopes for distinguishing Charlemagne and Napoleon in the ant-heap of Lilliput; we cannot find them! And the whole Earth, where is it? By an abstraction of thought, we manage to live before it and after it; its whole history has disappeared like a lightning flash which passes in the calm of a long summer day.

* * * * *

As I contemplated those panoramas of time and space, as the bygone ages passed slowly across my view, with their long trails of past glories, and as the races which peopled the worlds arose from the depths of space, shedding their winding-sheets and walking again in the flowery paths of life, all this prodigious secular past became present, and the millions of suns extinguished through the ages lighted up and shone again. The sky was bright with innumerable stars which our eyes had never seen, and the light of life shed its rays on celestial shores stretching away to infinity!

Suddenly, an immense black veil fell from the skies and hid the view, and I saw no more. In front of this veil, our planet flew along with its speed of 62 thousand miles an hour.

I found myself again in the ordinary condition of an Earth-dweller, who sees nothing beyond the horizon, and who imagines that, in time as in space, our mediocre humanity exists alone on the world.

III. THE WORLD TO COME

CHAPTER III
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

CHAPTER IV
VENUS THE BEAUTIFUL

Eσπερος ος кἀλλιστος έν ούρανω ιρταται ἁστηρ.

(Hesperus, most beautiful of stars in the sky.)

HOMER, Iliad.

IT was Homer who, 3,000 years ago, saluted Venus as the most beautiful of stars. Who has not been struck with her wonderful brilliance? Who can refrain, when she shines so marvellously in the heavens, from greeting her as the brightest of the stars and asking what mysteries are hidden in that light?

This radiant star of eve has been the first to be noticed since the earliest ages; it is the only planet mentioned by Homer; Isaiah celebrated her splendour under the name of Lucifer; at the time of the pyramids the Egyptians called her “the celestial bird of morn and eventide;” thirty-five centuries ago the Babylonians observed one of its transits across the sun; the Indians called her “the brilliant,” and the Arabs “Zorah, the splendour of the sky.” From the earliest days of the world she was the goddess of beauty and love. Let us raise our eyes to the heavens to-night: there is the star chanted by Homer and Virgil.

* * * * *

How many events have happened since those far-off days! Nations, languages, religions, all have changed. Where are the eyes which looked upon Venus 3,000 years ago? Where are the hearts which confided to her their vows of love for all eternity? And who will be our successors when, 3,000 years hence, the Parisians of the fiftieth century admire, as we do now, the star of the Iliad twinkling in their sky? The history of man passes quickly, the waves succeed each other and disappear in the ocean of the ages; the heavens remain, and the astronomer smiles at great ambition and puny achievements.

* * * * *

Venus passes every eighth year through the period of greatest brilliance (1889-1897-1905-1913-1921-1929). She is then so bright that she casts a shadow like a small moon. This is easily seen either in a dark room or when walking past a wall in the country. She can be seen in daylight with the naked eye, not only before sunset, but at midday if one knows where she is. No star or planet attains anything comparable to such brightness.

This visibility of Venus in daylight has been noticed for a long time; sometimes it becomes a public event, as in the spring of 1905. That year among others our beautiful neighbour was under exceptionally favourable conditions of observation. Everyone could see the radiant planet flaming in the west in the spring; in February, March, and April, the proximity of Jupiter, and sometimes of the Moon showed to all eyes a most charming spectacle. The astronomical ignorance of the inhabitants of the Earth is so universal that a free rein was given to fancy, and in France one could read in the papers, under the title: “The Luminous Phenomenon of Cherbourg,” a series of the oddest and most contradictory descriptions. They spoke of an oval disc describing curves in the sky; the appearance of an electric meteor; a halo due to the deviation of the sun; of an illuminated captive balloon, of a new kind of maritime signals, of an unknown star, of a comet, even of a “constellation”!

And there was more to come. On the eleventh day of observation, April 11 (the strange apparition had commenced on April 1, and mariners might have thought of an April hoax), the maritime prefect of Cherbourg ordered the commander of the Chasseloup-Laubat to study the luminous phenomenon, A vessel was sent to look for Venus! The naval officers could not explain the mystery; one of them, however, wrote that it might be the planet Jupiter!

Other commanders, having heard of the comet discovered at the Nice Observatory by M. Giacobini, announced that the “unexplained light” might well be that comet! They did not know that that comet was a telescopic one, invisible to the naked eye.

In the night of April 10-11 a meteorite was seen at Tunis. The question arose whether it was not this meteorite which had first been seen every evening at Cherbourg!

The phenomenon was signalled from Perpignan, Montauban, Nantes, le Hâvre, La Réole, Amélie-les-Bains, etc.

And so on. Every sort of stupidity was given out on the subject.

Well, a star resplendent with light shone every evening in the western sky. It was Venus, the famous Shepherds’ Star. It was seen from every point of France, from Europe, Asia, the United States—and from Cherbourg as well. For three months it reigned on high every evening. It was also at its maximum brilliancy, and so bright that it cast a shadow, as we have said. And nobody at Cherbourg spoke of Venus, nobody compared with Venus the new star situated in the same region of the sky, nobody thought that this mysterious heavenly body might be none other than the radiant planet. Nobody seemed to know that Venus was there![1]

The story repeated itself from December 1912 to March 1913. Venus queened it over the first hours of the night, moving ever nearer to us and remaining a little longer every evening above the horizon.

On the very rare date recorded by the postmarks as 12-12-12 (12 Dec., 1912), the conjunction of Venus and the Moon attracted general attention, especially as the weather was fine. It was the same at the other conjunctions, January 1912, February 11, and March 11.

This association of radiant Venus with the lunar crescent in the evening sky offers to the eyes the most inspiring of spectacles.

The sensation caused at Cherbourg in the spring of 1905 by the brilliant star of the evening shining upon the sea and taken for a mysterious instrument of espionage was renewed in 1913, especially in England. Those who saw it, blinded by its radiant beauty, were led to confound the Shepherds’ Star with German airships, and accused them of espionage.

One could read, in fact, in the paper, that the authorities on the other side of the Channel were greatly alarmed by the nocturnal flight of mysterious dirigibles which came under cover of the shades of the evening and hovered over British ports. The cars and the balloons themselves were, so it was said, invisible on account of the darkness, but the powerful searchlights thrown upon the earth revealed the unusual presence of the aerial intruder!

At the same time we received from Russia similar stories of the fear inspired by Venus among the people, who professed to recognise in its bright light the fires of Austrian aeroplanes spying out the upper atmosphere.

In Roumania, Venus was taken for a Russian aeroplane; and in Bessarabia (Russia), rifle-shots were fired at the beautiful planet, in the belief that it was a Roumanian dirigible.

Yet it would be sufficient to use quite a small telescope or even a good opera-glass to correct this error, for Venus showed phases which would have immediately completed the identification, and certainly not allowed it to be confused with aerial vehicles.

Such popular emotions caused by the appearance of Venus are not confined to our own times. In December 1797 the young General Bonaparte, after his wonderful conquest of Italy, returned to Paris to receive from the Directory the honours which presaged the consulate. Attended by a brilliant staff, he was going on horseback to the palace of the Luxembourg, where the Directory awaited him, when he was surprised to see, in the Rue de Tournon, all the people who stood ready to greet him turn round and look at a point in the sky instead of looking at him. His aide-de-camp told him that a star shone in the sky and that the French saw in it the star of the conqueror of Italy. It was Venus, then at its maximum brightness. Political conditions have changed, but the star remains.

It was there in mythological times:

Venus Astarte, daughter of the sea,

Shook off her mother’s tears amid her fond caresses

And fertilised the earth in wringing out her tresses.

She was there, receiving the lovers’ holocausts within the temples consecrated to her in Greece, Egypt, India, all over the world, for it was from her brilliant or mysterious aspects of the morning and evening that the cult of her charming personality was derived. Even nowadays many an observer sees in her only a radiant beauty in an ethereal dwelling-place, and does not remember that science has explained the idol and transfigured the star.

From its greatest easterly elongation to its greatest westerly elongation the brightness of the planet is such that when it is not quite close to the sun it is usually seen with the naked eye in daylight. Its phases are always curious and interesting. Their discovery by Galileo was of great importance to the beginning of modern astronomy in proving that the planets are globes without light of their own, similar to the globe which we inhabit.

* * * * *

Venus is no longer for us an allegorical symbol lost in the incense of the clouds and reigning over enslaved hearts; the Earth is no longer an inferior abode controlled by celestial influence; the horizon is grown wider, our planet has been liberated in unlimited space; Venus has become a celestial Earth, our sister and neighbour, and the better-informed eyes which contemplate it to-day see in her, not, like Homer and Manilius, a luminous point shining above our heads and controlling the feelings of our hearts and the movement of our blood, but a world corresponding to the world we ourselves inhabit, gravitating like us round the same sun, living on the same light and heat, and fit like ours to bear a thinking race for whom the Earth we inhabit is itself a star in the sky.

Venus, the brightest star which ever shines in the limpid glory of the western sky, is not a star, strictly speaking; it is a planet, a world like ours, and of the same size, which only shines by reflecting the Sun’s light into space. When one remembers that it is the same with us, and that, seen from the distance of some ten million miles, our Earth shines with a similar lustre, one is forced to admit that we are much more beautiful from afar than we are close by.

There is indeed no possible comparison between the two aspects. Seen close at hand, we are agitation, the struggle for existence, fight, battle, envy, jealousy, drama, hunger, often misery; seen from afar, we are calm, serenity, pure nobility, celestial light, almost an image of God! It is probably the same with Venus, so white and so radiant seen from here; possibly if we could go close to her, we should hear the cries of wild beasts in the forests, the battles of men devouring each other in so-called civilised lands, and we might witness geological and human revolutions, more formidable on account of the fact that Venus, younger than ourselves, is less advanced in evolution.

Being nearer the Sun than we and enveloped in a very dense atmosphere, Venus must have a higher temperature than the Earth. Its atmosphere is heavily charged with hot vapours. Its sky is always overcast; thunder and lightning must be never-ending. Electricity plays no doubt a prominent part. But, although many things are imperfect, there is good everywhere.

It is one of the charms of astronomy that it enables us to see through time as well as through space. Those who remain in ignorance of the elements of this science do not even know that they are depriving themselves of the most agreeable satisfactions of the mind. They are like travellers who pass through a wonderful landscape without even asking where they are. This planet consecrated to Venus, the goddess of beauty and love, who, in the days of ancient Greece, was said to have emerged from the waves to charm gods and men, and whose mythical history brings us such eloquent evidence of the influence of celestial aspects upon the origin of religions—this planet, we say, owes its terrestrial glory to its situation between the Earth and the Sun. While our globe gravitates round the Sun at the distance of 92 million miles, in a year of 365 days, Venus passes along the orbit contained within our own, at the distance of 65 million miles from the Sun, in a year numbering 225 days.

It follows that from time to time it passes between the Sun and ourselves, approaching to within 25 million miles or even less, since the two orbits are not circular, but elliptical.

* * * * *

One of the finest achievements of astronomy is having made man a citizen of the heavens. The planet which we inhabit is a heavenly body, just as is Venus, Mars, or Jupiter, and far from occupying the centre of creation, it lies in the depths of infinite space as do the most distant stars of the Milky Way. Venus possesses no more light of her own than does the Earth; she simply receives the rays of the Sun and sheds them into space as the Moon does. Take, for instance, a small finder telescope and direct it towards Venus; you will see the form of a crescent. It is no longer Venus, but Diana. Take a rather more powerful telescope, and you will see that the border of this crescent is not regular, and the southern pole is blunted and rounded, while the northern pole is pointed. On increasing the power of your instrument you will perceive the atmosphere by the gradual transition between the illuminated hemisphere and the dark hemisphere, or by the blinding clouds and light shadows which fleck its disc.

If you go still farther and give yourself the pains and the pleasure of doing a few astronomical calculations, you will see that the diameter of its globe is just the same as that of the Earth—within one thousandth part!—but that Venus is a little lighter than the Earth, its density being only four-fifths of ours, whence it results that objects weigh a little less on its surface than they would on ours: 1,000 grammes transported on Venus would only weigh 880 grammes; on Mars they would weigh even less, viz. 376 grammes; and even less on the Moon, viz. 165 grammes. We are very heavy down here.

Astronomy alone teaches us that this young sister of ours is in communication with us, not only by means of light, but also by attraction, and that space, so far from being a separation between worlds, is a real link, an invisible hyphen. For example, when the distance between us and Venus is 25 million miles, light only takes 2½ minutes to cross that distance. Is that a serious separation? Even in France a telegram, in spite of its name, takes more than an hour to be delivered a few hundred miles away, on account of intermediate links. If astronomers ever succeeded in establishing celestial telegraphy, communication would be much more rapid between one world and another than between one part of modern Babylon and another. An interplanetary telephone would be almost instantaneous.

* * * * *

If the luminous beams from Venus to the Earth only take two or three minutes to reach us, according to its proximity, the attraction between the two planets is transmitted still more rapidly, for it does not even take a whole second. And just think! At the distance of millions of miles we feel the mysterious influence of Venus, we abandon for a moment the regular course of our orbit round the Sun to follow in her path. Celestial mechanics calculates this displacement and accounts for it in its determinations.

If the Sun were not the strongest, the two sister-planets, Earth and Venus, would gradually approach each other and would graze one another like two dragon-flies roaming together through the fields of the sky. But fortunately for us, the omnipotent Sun soon resumes its rights, and everything is restored back to order.

The years of Venus are shorter than ours. Their precise duration is 224 days 16 hours 49 minutes 8 seconds. We do not yet know the diurnal rotation, i.e. the length of its days. According to certain observations, this appears to be about 24 hours, while others indicate that this planet does not turn upon its axis at all, or rather, that its rotation is equal to its revolution and that it always turns the same side towards the Sun.

It is extremely difficult to determine its rotation, for two reasons. Firstly, because its atmosphere is very dense and always full of clouds, so that it is impossible to make out its geography and to follow in the telescope the displacement of its surface details; this is so easily done in the case of Mars, whose atmosphere is always clear, and whose rotation is known with perfect accuracy, its period being 24 hours 37 minutes 22½ seconds. The second reason is the difficulty presented by the phases of Venus. The closer the planet approaches us in its orbit round the Sun, the more does its disc apparently grow in size and the less we see of its surface, because it at the same time passes between the Sun and us, so that its illuminated hemisphere, being naturally turned towards the Sun which illuminates it, is hidden from us.

My personal observations lead me to believe that the period of rotation is about 24 hours. At the Juvisy observatory we have often observed and photographed snowy patches in the north and south, probably marking the extremes of an axis and therefore a rotation.

This special point is not yet decided. It is quite possible that the days are very long there, or rather, that they last for ever—perpetual day on one side and perpetual night on the other side. That would make it a very singular world. On one side light, heat, and life; on the other, the icy coldness of death. Some might choose for their abode perpetual sunlight; others might prefer a night illuminated perhaps by electric light; yet others might prefer to dwell in the dawn or the twilight. Beautiful Venus would then have one hemisphere in perpetual night and one in perpetual day. How strange! How our worlds must differ in the form of their organisms and the nature of their inhabitants!

* * * * *

The science of the stars opens unexpected outlooks on extra-terrestrial life. We know already that Venus, the Earth, and Mars are three floating homes controlled by the same forces, governed by the same attraction and cradled in the fluctuation of the same magnetism. Regarded from this point of view, Venus is more interesting to us than she ever was in mythological times. Is not the knowledge of those celestial sympathies a first stage of the road leading to the conquests of other worlds?

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The astronomical annuals had announced the brilliant appearance of Venus. But who reads the Nautical Almanac? People prefer to read the almanacs which falsely predict rain and fine weather and guess at the political events of the year. Humanity prefers its ignorance and its illusions.

V. THE PLANET MARS

CHAPTER V
THE PLANET MARS

THE inhabitants of the Earth are at last beginning to take some interest in the sky. Tired of living as blind strangers to their own country, they are beginning to know that the world on which they move about is a planet gravitating round the Sun, and that other sister-planets swing round at the same time in the harmony of the solar system. Mars is now spoken of in public as one speaks of politics and of socialism. In America as well as in Europe, at Buenos Ayres, Mexico, or Caracas, as well as at Paris, Milan, Petrograd, Budapest, and Stockholm, the latest telescopic results are discussed. It is known that this neighbouring planet sometimes approaches the Earth within 37½ or even 35 million miles; that astronomers have their eyes on the planet and that they have observed luminous flashes on it, the explanation of which is puzzling them. People remember that in a certain year, 1877, the planet being in its greatest proximity, straight lines resembling canals were discovered, and that the question of possible inhabitants of this new country and future communication with them has been raised. Questions are put and answers are given, discussions give rise to curious confusions and exaggerations, but the net result is that an interest is created in these high questions which raise us above the vulgarities of ordinary life, and a general knowledge of the universe is advanced. That is the main thing.

The last occasions on which Mars was in close proximity to us were 1897, 1899, and 1909.

This remarkable development of public curiosity is easily explained by the marvellous achievements of contemporary astronomy and the admirable precision of certain results obtained. Unless one has a stone instead of a heart and a lump of fat in the place of a brain, it is difficult not to feel some emotion over the achievements of science. If we declare, for instance, that we know the general geography of Mars better than we do that of our own planet, the listener or reader is at first inclined to be somewhat sceptical. But if we show him, either in a telescope or in a diagram, the snows of the north or south poles of Mars, he will admit that nobody has as yet had a complete view of these regions on the Earth, in spite of the discoveries of polar explorers, and he will be convinced that we do know those Martian regions better than our own poles. That is already a fact of some interest; but we can go farther than that.

It is not only the pole, but the whole surrounding country that is better known on Mars than on the Earth, not only from the geographical, but also from the meteorological point of view. Thus, for instance, we can almost constantly measure the extent of the polar snows, and we find that it varies with the seasons. We see with our own eyes the melting of these snows taking place very rapidly under the light and heat of the Sun, night after night, so to speak, during a summer which is twice as long as ours. The snows disappear almost entirely, and only a little ice remains on a region which we know, and which represents the pole of extreme cold, situated 212 miles from the geographical pole. In spite of the perseverance and heroism of arctic explorers, none of these climatological facts have been witnessed on Earth. It is possible that the Martians are ignorant of their own phenomena if they have been unable to reach their poles. Still, since their poles are free at the end of the summer, they are much better able than we to explore their polar regions. We may say that in general the meteorology and climatology of Mars are better known than those of the Earth. At the time when you read these lines you do not know, and nobody can tell you, what sort of weather you will have to-morrow. But we do know almost certainly what the weather will be to-morrow, next week, next month, on such and such a region on Mars: if we do not wait till the winter comes, we know that it will be fine. Hardly do we see a cloud between the vernal equinox and the autumnal equinox, neither in the equatorial nor the temperate regions, and hardly even in the circumpolar regions. If we are unable to make a drawing of the telescopic image of the planet, the difficulty hardly ever arises from the Martian atmosphere, but from our own, which is so often overcast or turbid. All the geographical configurations, seas, rivers, plains, covered with vegetation according to the moisture available, water-courses varying with the seasons, canals and oases, are mapped out with precision; we know in advance which country will pass across the field of our telescope; and the period of rotation, as already mentioned, is known to the 100th of a second. It is 24 hours 37 minutes 22.58 seconds. We also know that the Martian year contains 59,355,041 seconds, i.e. 686 terrestrial days 23 hours 30 minutes 41 seconds. But since that planet turns on its axis a little more slowly than the Earth, there are only 668 Martian days in the Martian year. In fact the Martian calendar is composed of two successive years of 668 days and a leap year of 669 days. As in our case, there is no exact number of days in the Martian year. Perhaps their calendar has also been reformed several times without being made perfect. But let us hope that they are not as stupid as we, with our months of 28, 29, 30, and 31 days, and calling the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth month the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth respectively; with our disagreement about dates, Russia only arriving at the 1st of January when the rest of the civilised world has reached the 14th; with our three kinds of days: the civil day which commences at midnight, the astronomical day which commences the next midday, and the naval day which commences the previous midday; we who waited thousands of years before we could fix an exact hour, because we counted from conventional meridians, and the various countries could not agree upon the single meridian. Being probably more advanced than ourselves in its planetary age, Martian humanity is most likely more reasonable and is not mixed up with the littleness of frontiers, dialects, customs, national rivalries, etc. For a long time already, no doubt they form a simple unit. One may also suppose that they do not celebrate their new-year festival and its rejoicings amid the winter frosts, but in the hopeful days of the equinox.

* * * * *

One of the most curious observations which have been made on this neighbouring planet, or rather which have, apart from the canals, attracted the greatest attention, is that of the luminous flashes. It has been said that these flashes are all seen at the edge of the disc, or beyond it. This is not correct; they show themselves on the line which separates the hemisphere illuminated by the Sun from the dark hemisphere—the line called the “terminator.” They are only seen when the globe of Mars offers a sensible phase, and only along the line of that terminator.

The phenomenon is a slight projection, swelling, or puffing-up of the terminator. It is not a more extraordinary observation than that of the irregularities in the lunar diameter at certain phases: the Sun illuminates, either before its rising or before its setting, the summits of mountains whose bases are still in darkness, and such summits sometimes appear on the Moon as luminous points detached from the disc. Some fertile imaginations have interpreted these flashes as forests on fire or as signals sent out by the Martians. This is going too far. But the possibility of the population of Mars by a human species more intelligent than ours is quite a natural conclusion from the observations. One may also guess without scientific heresy that the canals of Mars are rivers straightened with a deliberate intention of distributing water which has become a rarity over that planet. The astronomers who deny these possibilities show a very poor spirit. But, on the other hand, there is no reason to see nothing on that world but human activity. Among several explanations of observed phenomena one must always prefer the simplest. In the case of luminous dashes on the terminator, the illumination of mountain-tops or clouds by the Sun suffices to account for them.

Doubts were raised concerning this explanation by the height of 200,000 feet found by an astronomer for the elevation of these mountains. I went over the calculation and found only 15,000 feet. These mountains would not therefore be higher than Mont Blanc, and perhaps less. We should also remember that those luminous projections appear every time that the planet returns to the same condition of illumination with regard to the Earth. They were observed in 1890, 1892, 1894, 1899, 1907, 1909, 1911, 1913, etc. The regions where they appear are a sort of island called Noachis, another called Hesperia, and a third called Tempe. According to all appearances, we have to do with high mountains covered with snow and with still higher clouds.

* * * * *

The epoch at which the inhabitants of Mars can communicate with us has not yet arrived, or perhaps it has already passed away. All cosmological studies agree in presenting this planet as older than ours, since it is farther from the Sun, and as having passed through its phases of astral life more rapidly than we, on account of its smallness and lightness. We cannot pretend to know the forms which living beings may have assumed there; but we cannot imagine, on the other hand, that the forces of nature, being the same as here and exercised under almost identical conditions (atmosphere, climate, seasons, water, vapours, etc.), have been sterilised by a perpetual miracle of annihilation while on Earth the cup of life overflows all round and the generative force of living beings everywhere surpasses continual and permanent production. But whatever may be the forms of Martian humanity, they must be superior to us, for several reasons. The first of these is that it would be difficult for a human species to be less intelligent than ours, because we do not know how to behave and three-quarters of our resources are employed for feeding soldiers.

The second reason is that progress is an absolute law which nothing can resist. If therefore the inhabitants of Mars have passed their infancy, the centuries have brought them to an age of reason, and their present state represents what our race will be in several million years.

A third circumstance is that they are better situated than ourselves for escaping from the heaviness of matter. A given bulk of water, earth, or other substance is only seven-tenths of the weight it is here; 1,000 grammes taken to Mars would only weigh 376 grammes there; and the woman weighing 8 stone would only weigh 3 stone there.

And, finally, the climatic conditions appear to be much more agreeable there.

* * * * *

Those are all advantages in favour of the Martians. If, therefore, the idea has occurred to them to make signals to us, it is probably not at the present time. There is no reason that they should think of it at the same time as we and should wait for us. Perhaps they tried 200,000 or 300,000 years ago, before the appearance of man, at the time of the cave-bear or the mammoth. Perhaps they addressed themselves to our planet at the time of the Iguanodon and the Dinosaurus. Perhaps they tried again 2,000 or 3,000 years ago. Never having seen any sign of life, they will have concluded that either there are no inhabitants on the Earth, or that they are busy with other things besides the study of the universe and eternal truths. That was true yesterday—and it is true to-day.

VI. THE GIANT WORLD OF JUPITER

CHAPTER VI
THE GIANT WORLD OF JUPITER

EVERYBODY notices, year by year, in a southerly direction, a bright star which half the spectators believe to be the evening star, but which so far from being Venus, is its very antithesis.

To mistake Jupiter for Venus is a sufficiently gross error. But even this error is preferable to nothing. It is better to be mistaken than not to see anything. A large portion of the human race sees nothing at all, thinks nothing, and passes its whole life in the stupidity of plants and slugs.

To notice the star in the sky, even to give it a wrong name, is something, at all events. It shows that one does not go about with eyes cast on the ground or occupied with worldly affairs and with the spirit absorbed by material interests.

Venus, the Shepherds’ Star, the morning and evening star, is never far from the sun. It is never in the south, neither in the evening nor at midnight. Its orbit round the Sun lies within our own. Jupiter, on the contrary, revolves round the same Sun along an orbit outside our own, five times as far as the central luminary, at 485 million miles instead of 92 million miles. The distance between us and Jupiter is therefore always greater than 393 million miles except when the Earth reaches the extremity of its elliptical orbit (“aphelion”) at a time when Jupiter is in “opposition” to the Sun. We often see it at a medium distance of 450 million miles. If the atmosphere extended over all that distance, an aeroplane flying without a stop at 62 miles an hour, and therefore covering 1,500 miles a day, would take no less than 300,000 days or 812 years to complete the voyage. It would be wise to take some provisions with us!

But on what sort of a world should we arrive?

A giant world, an immense world, a strange world. It is only a thousand times smaller than the Sun—that is to say, 1,000 times larger than the Earth, or even more. Jupiter is eleven times larger in diameter than our globe, i.e. 1,300 times larger in volume. Gravitation is enormous at its surface, 2½ times what it is here. A man weighing 10 stone here would weigh 25 stone there. But its density is very low, being one-quarter of that of the earth. It is a world of water and more or less dense gas.

Astronomers observe it with great interest since they see it furrowed with various currents and enveloped in clouds and vapours. The currents at the surface revolve with different speeds, so that it is difficult to know what is the rotation of the planet itself. At the equator, this rotation is accomplished in 9 hours 50 minutes 30 seconds; not far from the equator, in the subtropical regions, it takes 9 hours 55 minutes 41 seconds. Since Jupiter’s year is twelve times as long as ours, there are more than 10,000 days per annum.

Here is a curious circumstance: on account of the difference of rotation, the Jovian year comprises 87 more (Jovian) days at the equator than it does in the subtropical zone. If it were the same on our globe, the inhabitants of the Congo, Colombia, Borneo, and Sumatra would have a day more in their year (and even five in four years) than those of Senegal, the Antilles, Siam, or India, a difference of 125 days per century! It would be difficult to keep their calendars in agreement.

There are seven or eight kinds of currents between the equator and the poles, so that one can say of Jupiter, as of the Sun, that it does not turn in one piece.

And those speeds themselves vary with the years. In the southern tropical zone there is a curious spot which has been followed with some interest for fifty years. Although it is much larger than the Earth, it seems to float in the current. Constant observation shows its period of rotation to have been 9 hours 55 minutes 41 seconds in 1900 and 9 hours 55 minutes 39 seconds in 1906, and its period returned in 1913 to the figure of 1900. What is the nature of this floating spot? In 1890 its colour was red. It then gradually got paler, and then pink once more. Its shape was that of a long oval, measuring 26,000 miles in length, or more than three times the diameter of our globe. The current in which it floats has not the same period of rotation as the spot itself. The spot is pushed from west to east, and it has shifted 57 degrees in two years. Now, a degree on the globe of Jupiter in that latitude represents 720 miles. This Jovian formation has, therefore, been displaced 41,000 miles, or a distance more than five times the diameter of our planet. It is as if Australia were to detach itself from the bottom of the sea and float about on the surface of the Pacific Ocean! Does this oscillation, which we only see in plan, and not in elevation, indicate the formation of a satellite trying to disengage itself from its parent planet and not succeeding? It looks as if there were on this giant world of Jupiter no surface at all, but irregular aerial layers one over the other, and full of clouds. The temperature must be very high, and enormous masses of vapour are formed, to wrestle in prodigious storms. Though mythology is of no importance here, it is evident that Jupiter is indeed the god of thunder-storms. Jupiter is a world in the making, a sun which has lost its light, but not its heat. Its density, nearly equal to that of the Sun, is barely greater than that of water. A globe of vapour varied by mountains of clouds, impalpable Himalayas, aerial Alps in convulsions, fluid and constantly agitated Pyrenees! Its colossal bulk has prevented its cooling as fast as our Earth, and it will no doubt take tens of hundreds of millions of years to arrive at a temperature fit for inhabitants. In all probability there is nobody yet on Jupiter, neither men nor animals nor plants. This immense world is in its primordial state and prepares itself for the future.

Spectrum analysis shows that the substances which abound there are different from terrestrial substances. Any living beings who may develop there will probably be chemically different from terrestrial beings, and consist not of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, or nitrogen, but of combinations of other substances. It will be a differently constituted world.

Our interest in observing it is not lessened by that consideration. The thinking mind knows that our present era is of no particular importance. It has been preceded by other eras and will be succeeded by other cycles. It is not because we live at this particular moment that our time can be said to be of any special value. The years contemporary with Jesus Christ or with the Pharaohs who built the pyramids had just as much value as ours, and when we shall no longer be there, the Earth will continue to revolve and measure out their days to our successors indefinitely. Whether Jupiter is inhabited this year or in 500,000 years or in 10,000,000 years is the same to the philosopher. Everything to him is present, both the future and the past ... this great subject has already been dealt with, and there is no need to refer to it again.

Let us greet Jupiter as the symbol of the future. Behind him, among the constellation, there are stars whose light, starting at the time of the siege of Troy, has only arrived to-day. Thus in the same celestial record the past and the future are thrown together, and they tell us that if there is anything interesting in human life it is Thought, the mind which contemplates the universe, which lives intelligently, and without which all Nature would be but the play of an automaton.

VII. HEARTBEATS ACROSS SPACE

CHAPTER VII
HEARTBEATS ACROSS SPACE

ACROSS 92 million miles of space the magnetic pulses of the solar heart are transmitted to the earth, and they make the small and light compass needle, ever trembling and seeking its pole, vibrate on its pivot.

This magnetic needle does not remain fixed in the magnetic meridian, but oscillates every day to the right and left of the line, i.e. to the east and west. The greatest deviation is produced at about 8 a.m. The needle stops and returns to the magnetic meridian of the time (it varies from year to year), crosses it a little after 10 a.m., and continues to deviate towards the west, reaching its greatest deviation about 1.15 p.m. It then returns to the meridian, which it reaches about 6 p.m. and crosses to the east. It moves very slowly, with a slight oscillation between 8 and 10 p.m. to the east, attaining at 8 a.m. the greatest easterly deviation with which we began.

Such is the daily oscillation of the needle, a process expressive of the unknown and mysterious vital current which traverses our planet and manifests, so to speak, the soul of the earth.

This phenomenon is absolutely general and is observed on the entire globe, from the equator to the poles, in the same manner; the amplitude of the oscillation increases with the latitude but not proportionately; it only amounts to 1 or 2 minutes of arc in the tropics, to 9 minutes in France, and 7 minutes in Norway. This variation corresponds sensibly to the variation of temperature, the amplitude of which increases from the tropics to the poles. Heat, electricity, water-vapour, and barometric pressure are all associated with it.

There are certain perturbations, to be mentioned presently, to which some human beings are sometimes a little too sensive. We live enveloped in an invisible world.