8
We believe that we see nothing hanging over us but catastrophes, deaths, torments and disasters; we shiver at the mere thought of the great interplanetary spaces, with their intense cold and their awful and gloomy solitudes; and we imagine that the worlds that revolve through space are as unhappy as ourselves because they freeze, or disaggregate, or clash together, or are consumed in unutterable flames. We infer from this that the genius of the universe is an abominable tyrant, seized with a monstrous madness, delighting only in the torture of itself and all that it contains. To millions of stars, each many thousand times larger than our sun, to nebulæ whose nature and dimensions no figure, no word in our language is able to express, we attribute our momentary sensibility, the little ephemeral play of our nerves; and we are convinced that life there must be impossible or appalling, because we should feel too hot or too cold. It were much wiser to say to ourselves that it would need but a trifle, a few papillæ more or less to our skin, the slightest modification of our eyes and ears, to turn the temperature of space, its silence and its darkness into a delicious spring-time, an incomparable music, a divine light.
“Nothing is too wonderful to be true,” said Faraday.
It were much more reasonable to persuade ourselves that the catastrophes our imagination sees there are life itself, the joy and one or other of those immense festivals of mind and matter in which death, thrusting aside at last our two enemies, time and space, will soon permit us to take part. Each world dissolving, extinguished, crumbling, burnt or colliding with another world and pulverized means the commencement of a magnificent experiment, the dawn of a marvellous hope and perhaps an unexpected happiness drawn direct from the inexhaustible unknown. What though they freeze or flame, collect or disperse, pursue or flee one another: mind and matter, no longer united by the same pitiful hazard that joined them in us, must rejoice at all that happens; for all is but birth and rebirth, a departure into an unknown filled with wonderful promises and maybe an anticipation of some ineffable event.