FOR WHAT PURPOSE WERE THE STARS CREATED?
Surely not (says Sir John Herschel) to illuminate our nights, which an additional moon of the thousandth part of the size of our own would do much better; nor to sparkle as a pageant void of meaning and reality, and bewilder us among vain conjectures. Useful, it is true, they are to man as points of exact and permanent reference; but he must have studied astronomy to little purpose, who can suppose man to be the only object of his Creator’s care, or who does not see in the vast and wonderful apparatus around us provision for other races of animated beings. The planets derive their light from the sun; but that cannot be the case with the stars. These doubtless, then, are themselves suns; and may perhaps, each in its sphere, be the presiding centre round which other planets, or bodies of which we can form no conception from any analogy offered by our own system, are circulating.[19]