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It is in virtue of this transcendent law that, long after the death of the earth, of the giant planets and the central luminary, while our old and darkened sun was still speeding through boundless space, with its dead worlds on which terrestrial and planetary life had once engaged in the futile struggle for daily existence, another extinct sun, issuing from the depths of infinity, collided obliquely with it and brought it to rest!
Then in the vast night of space, from the shock of these two mighty bodies was suddenly kindled a stupendous conflagration, and an immense gaseous nebula was formed, which trembled for an instant like a flaring flame, and then sped on into regions unknown. Its temperature was several million degrees. All which here below had been earth, water, air, minerals, plants, atoms; all which had constituted man, his flesh, his palpitating heart, his flashing eye, his armed hand, his thinking brain, his entrancing beauty; the victor and the vanquished, the executioner and his victim, and those inferior souls still wearing the fetters of matter,—all were changed into fire. And so with the worlds of Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and the rest. It was the resurrection of visible nature. But those superior souls which had acquired immortality continued to live forever in the hierarchy of the invisible psychic universe. The conscious existence of mankind had attained an ideal state. Mankind had passed by transmigration through the worlds to a new life with God, and freed from the burdens of matter, soared with an endless progress in eternal light.
The immense gaseous nebula, which absorbed all former worlds, thus transformed into vapor, began to turn upon itself. And in the zones of condensation of this primordial star-mist, new worlds were born, as heretofore the earth was.
So another universe began, whose genesis some future Moses and Laplace would tell, a new creation, extra-terrestrial, superhuman, inexhaustible, resembling neither the earth nor Mars, nor Saturn, nor the sun.
And new humanities arose, new civilizations, new vanities, another Babylon, another Thebes, another Athens, another Rome, another Paris, new palaces, temples, glories and loves. And all these things possessed nothing of the earth, whose very memory had passed away like a shadow.
And these universes passed away in their turn. But infinite space remained, peopled with worlds, and stars, and souls, and suns; and time went on forever.
For there can be neither end nor beginning.
