PART II.
Whatever we talk, Things are as they are—not as we grant, dispute, or hope; depending on neither our affirmative nor negative.[[2]]—Jeremy Taylor.
Let us bear in mind the above passage, pregnant with solemnising reflection, while dealing with the question before us; always remembering that it is one purely speculative, however interesting, however exciting, to imaginative persons; but to weak and superficial ones—to those of unsettled opinions—capable of becoming mischievous.
The state of that question is exactly this: The heavenly bodies around us, some or all of them, are, or are not, in point of fact, the abodes of intellectual and moral beings like ourselves—that is, be it observed, consisting of body and soul. That there are other and higher orders of intelligent existence, both the Christian and the mere philosopher may, and the former must, admit as an article of his “creed;” but what may be the mode of that existence, and its relations to that physical world of which we are sensible, we know not, and conjecture would be idle. That beings like ourselves exist elsewhere than here, is not revealed in Scripture; and the question, consequently, for us to concern ourselves with is, whether there nevertheless exist rational grounds for believing the fact to be so. The accomplished and eminent person who has so suddenly started this discussion, has, since his Essay appeared,[[3]] and in strict consistency with it, emphatically declared—“I do not pretend to disprove a plurality of worlds; but I ask in vain for any argument which makes the doctrine probable. And as I conceive the unity of the world to be the result of its being the work of one Divine Mind, exercising creative power according to His own Ideas; so it seems to me not unreasonable to suppose that man, the being which can apprehend, in some degree, those Ideas, is a creature unique in the creation.” But what says Sir David Brewster, speaking of the greatest known member of our planetary system, Jupiter?
“With so many striking points of resemblance between the Earth and Jupiter, the unprejudiced mind cannot resist the conclusion, that Jupiter has been created, like the Earth, for the express purpose of being the seat of animal and intellectual life. The Atheist and the Infidel, the Christian and the Mahommedan, men of all creeds, nations, and tongues, the philosopher and the unlettered peasant, have all rejoiced in this universal truth; and we do not believe that any individual who confides in the facts of astronomy seriously rejects it. If such a person exists, we would gravely ask him, for what purpose could so gigantic a world have been framed?”[[4]]
I am such a person, would say Dr Whewell, and I declare that I cannot tell why Jupiter was created. “I do not pretend to know for what purpose the stars were made, any more than the flowers, or the crystalline gems, or other innumerable beautiful objects.... No doubt the Creator might make creatures fitted to live in the stars, or in the small planetoids, or in the clouds, or on meteoric stones; but we cannot believe that he has done this, without further evidence.”[[5]] And as to the “facts of astronomy,” let me patiently examine them, and the inferences you seek to deduce from them. Besides which, I will bring forward certain facts of which you seem to have taken no account.
As we foresaw, Dr Whewell’s Essay is attracting increased attention in all directions; and, as far as we can ascertain the scope of contemporaneous criticism hitherto pronounced, it is hostile to his views, while uniformly recognising the power and scientific knowledge with which they are enforced. “We scarcely expected,” observes an accomplished diurnal London reviewer,[[6]] “that in the middle of the nineteenth century, a serious attempt would have been made to restore the exploded ideas of man’s supremacy over all other creatures in the universe; and still less that such an attempt would have been made by any one whose mind was stored with scientific truths. Nevertheless a champion has actually appeared, who boldly dares to combat against all the rational inhabitants of other spheres; and though as yet he wears his vizor down, his dominant bearing, and the peculiar dexterity and power with which he wields his arms, indicate that this knight-errant of nursery notions can be no other than the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.” The reviewer falls, it appears to us, into a serious error as to the sentiments of Dr Whewell, when charging him with requiring us “to assume that, in the creation of intelligent beings, Omnipotence must be limited, in its operations, to the ideas which human faculties can conceive of them: that such beings must be men like ourselves, with similar powers, and have had their faculties developed by like means.” In the very passage cited to support this charge, Dr Whewell will be found thus exactly limiting his proposition so as to exclude so impious and absurd a supposition:—“In order to conceive, on the Moon, or on Jupiter, a race of beings intelligent like man, we must conceive there colonies of men, with histories resembling, more or less, the histories of human colonies: and, indeed, resembling the history of those nations whose knowledge we inherit, far more closely than the history of any other terrestrial nation resembles that part of terrestrial history.”[[7]] In the passage which we have quoted in the preceding column, Dr Whewell expressly declares, as of course he could not help declaring, that the Creator no doubt might make creatures fitted to live on the stars, or anywhere; but the passage misunderstood by the reviewer, appears to us possessed of an extensive significance, of which he has hastily lost sight, but which is closely connected with that portion of the author’s speculations with which we briefly dealt in our last number, especially that which regards Man as a being of progressive[[8]] development. To this we shall hereafter return, reminding the reader of the course of Dr Whewell’s argument as thus far disclosed—namely, that man’s intellectual, moral, religious, and spiritual nature, is of so peculiar and high an order, as to warrant our regarding him as a special and unique existence, worthy of the station here assigned him in creation. Intellectually considered, man “has an element of community with God: whereupon it is so far conceivable that man should be, in a special manner, the object of God’s care and favour. The human mind, with its wonderful and perhaps illimitable powers, is something of which we can believe God to be mindful:”[[9]] that He may very reasonably be thus mindful of a being whom he has vouchsafed to make in his own Image, after His likeness—the image and likeness of the awful Creator of all things.
“The privileges of man,” observes Dr Whewell, in a passage essential to be considered by those who would follow his argument,[[10]] “which make the difficulty in assigning him his place in the Vast Scheme of the universe, we have described as consisting in his being an Intellectual, Moral, and Religious creature. Perhaps the privileges implied in the last term, and their place in our argument, may justify a word more of explanation.... We are now called upon,” proceeds the Essayist, after a striking sketch of the character and capacity of man, especially as a spiritual creature, “to proceed to exhibit the Answer which a somewhat different view of modern science suggests to this difficulty or objection.”
—“The difficulty[[11]] appears great either way of considering it. Can the earth alone be the theatre of such intelligent, moral, religious, and spiritual action? Or can we conceive such action to go on in the other bodies of the universe?... Between these two difficulties the choice is embarrassing, and the decision must be unsatisfactory, except we can find some further ground of judgment. But this, perhaps, is not hopeless. We have hitherto referred to the evidence and analogies supplied by one science, namely, Astronomy. But there are other sciences which give us information concerning the nature and history of the Earth. From some of these we may perhaps obtain some knowledge of the place of the Earth in the scheme of creation; how far it is, in its present condition, a thing unique, or only one thing among many like it. Any science which supplies us with evidence or information on this head, will give us aid in forming a judgment upon the question under our consideration.”
Thus the Essayist reaches the second stage of his inquiry, entering on the splendid domain of Geology. To this great but recently consolidated science Dr Chalmers made no allusion in his celebrated “Discourses on the Christian Revelation, viewed in connection with the Modern Astronomy,”[[12]] which were delivered in the year 1817, nearly thirty-seven years ago: and then he spoke, in his first Discourse, of Astronomy as “the most certain and best established of the sciences.” Dr Whewell, however, vindicates the claims of Geology, in respect of both the certainty and vastness of her discoveries, in a passage so just and admirable, that we must lay it before our readers.
“As to the vastness of astronomical discoveries, we must observe that those of Geology are no less vast: they extend through time, as those of Astronomy do through space; they carry us through millions of years—that is, of the earth’s revolutions—as those of Astronomy through millions of the earth’s diameters, or of diameters of the earth’s orbit. Geology fills the regions of duration with events, as Astronomy the regions of the universe with objects. She carries us backwards by the relation of cause and effect, as Astronomy carries us upwards by the relations of geometry. As Astronomy steps on from point to point of the universe by a chain of triangles, so Geology steps from epoch to epoch of the earth’s history by a chain of mechanical and organical laws. If the one depends on the axioms of geometry, the other depends on the axioms of causation.... But in truth, in such speculations, Geology has an immeasurable superiority. She has the command of an implement, in addition to all that Astronomy can use; and one, for the purpose of such speculations, adapted far beyond any astronomical element of discovery. She has, for one of her studies,—one of her means of dealing with her problems,—the knowledge of life, animal and vegetable. Vital organisation is a subject of attention which has, in modern times, been forced upon her. It is now one of the main parts of her discipline. The geologist must study the traces of life in every form—must learn to decipher its faintest indications and its fullest development. On the question, then, whether there be, in this or that quarter, evidence of life, he can speak with the confidence derived from familiar knowledge; while the astronomer, to whom such studies are utterly foreign, because he has no facts which bear upon them, can offer, on such questions, only the loosest and most arbitrary conjectures, which, as we have had to remark, have been rebuked by eminent men as being altogether inconsistent with the acknowledged maxims of his science.”[[13]]
Before we proceed to state the singular and suggestive argument derived from this splendid science,[[14]] we may apprise the reader that Dr Whewell’s primary object is to show, that even “supposing the other bodies of the universe to resemble the earth, so far as to seem, by their materials, forms, and motions, no less fitted than she is to be the abodes of life, yet that, knowing what we know of Man, we can believe the earth to be tenanted by a race who are the special objects of God’s care.”[[15]] The grounds for entertaining, or rather impugning, that supposition he subsequently deals with after his own fashion in Chapters VII., VIII., IX., X.; but the two with which we are at present concerned are the fifth and sixth, respectively entitled, as we intimated in our last Number, “Geology,” and “The Argument from Geology.”
The exact object at which this leading section of the Essay is aimed is, in the Essayist’s words, this:—“A complete reply to the difficulty which astronomical discoveries appeared to place in the way of religion:—the difficulty of the opinion that Man, occupying this speck of earth but as an atom in the universe, surrounded by millions of other globes larger, and to all appearance nobler, than that which he inhabits, should be the object of the peculiar care and guardianship of the favour and government of the Creator of All, in the way in which religion teaches us that he is.”[[16]]
What is that “complete reply?” The following passage contains a key to the entire speculation of the Essayist, and deserves a thoughtful perusal:—
“That the scale of man’s insignificance is of the same order in reference to time as to space. That Man—the Human Race from its origin till now—has occupied but an atom of time as he has occupied but an atom of space.”... “If the earth, as the habitation of Man, is a speck in the midst of an infinity of space, the Earth, as the habitation of Man, is also a speck at the end of an infinity of time. If we are as nothing in the surrounding universe, we are as nothing in the elapsed eternity; or rather in the elapsed organic antiquity during which the Earth has existed, and been the abode of life. If Man is but one small family in the midst of innumerable possible households, he is also but one small family, the successor of innumerable tribes of animals, not possible only, but actual. If the planets may be the seats of life, we know that the seas, which have given birth to our mountains, were so. If the stars may have hundreds of systems of tenanted planets rolling round them, we know that the secondary group of rocks does contain hundreds of tenanted beds, witnessing of as many systems of organic creation. If the Nebulæ may be planetary systems in the course of formation, we know that the primary and transition rocks either show us the earth in the course of formation, as the future seat of life, or exhibit such life as already begun.
“How far that which Astronomy thus asserts as possible, is probable—what is the value of these possibilities of life in distant regions of the universe, we shall hereafter consider; but in what Geology asserts, the case is clear. It is no possibility, but a certainty. No one will now doubt that shells and skeletons, trunks and leaves, prove animal and vegetable life to have existed. Even, therefore, if Astronomy could demonstrate all that her most fanciful disciples assume, Geology would still have a complete right to claim an equal hearing—to insist on having her analogies regarded. She would have a right to answer the questions of Astronomy, when she asks, How can we believe this? And to have her answer accepted.”[[17]]
We regret that our space prevents our laying before the reader the masterly and deeply interesting epitome of geological discoveries contained in these two chapters. The stupendous series of these revelations may be thus briefly indicated:—That countless tribes of animals tenanted the earth for countless ages before Man’s advent; that former ocean-beds now constitute the centres of our loftiest mountains, as the results of changes gradual, successive, and long continued; that these vast masses of sedimentary strata present themselves to our notice in a strangely disordered state; that each of these rocky layers contains a vast profusion of the remains of marine animals, intermingled with a great series of fresh-water and land animals and plants endlessly varied—all these being different, not only in species, but in kind!—and each of these separate beds must have lasted as long, or perhaps longer, than that during which the dry land has had its present form.
The careful prosecution of their researches has forced on the minds of geologists and naturalists “the general impression that, as we descend in this long staircase of natural steps, we are brought in view of a state of the earth in which life was scantily manifested, so as to be near its earliest stages.”[[18]]
In the opinion of the most eminent geologists, some of these epochs of organic transition were also those of mechanical violence, on a vast and wonderful scale—as it were, a vast series of successive periods of alternate violence and repose. The general nature of such change is vividly sketched by the Essayist, in a passage to which we must refer the reader.[[19]] When, continues the Essayist, we find strata bearing evidence of such a mode of deposit, and piled up to the height of thousands and tens of thousands of feet, we are naturally led to regard them as the production of myriads of years; and to add new myriads, as often as we are brought to new masses of strata of the like kind; and again to interpolate new periods of the same order, to allow for the transition from one group to another.[[20]]
The best geologists and naturalists are utterly at fault, in attempting to account for the successive introduction of these numerous new species, at these immense intervals of time, except by referring them to the exercise of a series of distinct Acts of Creation. The chimerical notion of some natural cause effecting a transmutation of one series of organic forms into another, has been long exploded, as totally destitute of proof: and “the doctrine of the successive CREATION of species,” says the Essayist, “remains firmly established among geologists.”[[21]] There is nothing known of the cosmical conditions of our globe, to contradict the terrestrial evidence for its vast antiquity as the seat of organic life,[[22]] says Dr Whewell: and then proceeds thus, in a passage which is well worth the reader’s attention, and has excited the ire of Sir David Brewster:—
“If, for the sake of giving definiteness to our notions, we were to assume that the numbers which express the antiquity of these four periods—the present organic condition of the earth; the tertiary period of geologists which preceded that; the secondary period which was anterior to that; and the primary period which preceded the secondary—were on the same scale as the numbers which express these four magnitudes:—The magnitude of the earth; that of the solar system compared with the earth; the distance of the nearest fixed stars compared with the solar system; and the distance of the most remote nebulæ compared with the nearest fixed stars,—there is, in the evidence which geological science offers, nothing to contradict such an assumption. And as the infinite extent which we necessarily ascribe to space allows us to find room, without any mental difficulty, for the vast distances which astronomy reveals, and even leaves us rather embarrassed with the infinite extent which lies beyond our furthest explorations; so the infinite duration which we, in like manner, necessarily ascribe to past time, makes it easy for us, so far as our powers of intellect are concerned, to go millions of millions of years backwards, in order to trace the beginning of the earth’s existence—the first step of terrestrial creation.”
To return, however, to the course of the argument. We hear the oppressed observer asking, as he reascends this “long staircase of natural steps” which had brought time down to the mystic origin of animal existence; his eye dimmed with its efforts to “decipher,” in the picturesque language of Sir David Brewster, “downwards, the pale and perishing alphabet[[23]] of the Chronology of Life”—where, all this while, was Man?
Were Europe at this moment to be submerged beneath the ocean, or placed under a vast rocky stratum, what countless proofs would present themselves to the exploring eyes of remote future geologists, of the existence of both Man and his handiwork!—of his own skeleton, of the products of his ingenuity and power, and the various implements and instruments with which he had effected them!
The rudest conceivable work of human art would carry us to any extent backward, but it is not to be found! Man’s existence and history incontestably belong to the existing condition of the earth; and the Essayist now addresses himself to the two following propositions:—
First, That the existence and history of man are facts of an Entirely Different Order from any which existed in any of the previous states of the earth.
Secondly, That his history has occupied a series of years which, compared with geological periods, may be regarded as very brief and limited.
Here opens the “Argument from Geology”—and with it Chapter VI.
That the existence of man upon the earth is an event of an order quite different from any previous part of the earth’s history; and that there is no transition from animals to MAN, in even his most degraded, barbarian, and brutish condition, the Essayist demonstrates, with affecting eloquence, and with great argumentative power. No doubt there are kinds of animals very intelligent and sagacious, and exceedingly disposed and adapted to companionship with man; but by elevating the intelligence of the brute, we do not make it become that of the man; nor by making man barbarous, do we make him cease to be man. He has a capacity, not for becoming sagacious, but rational,—or rather he has a capacity for PROGRESS, in virtue of his being rational.
After adverting to Language, as an awful and mysterious evidence of his exalted endowments, and felicitously distinguishing instinct from reason, the Essayist observes that we need not be disturbed in our conclusions by observing the condition of savage and uncultivated tribes, ancient or modern—the Scythians and Barbarians, the Australians and Negroes. The history of man, in the earliest times, is as truly a history of a wonderful, intellectual, social, political, spiritual creature, as it is at present.[[24]] The savage and ignorant state is not the state of nature out of which civilised life has everywhere emerged: their savage condition is one rather of civilisation degraded and lost, than of civilisation incipient and prospective. And even were it to be assumed to be otherwise, that man, naturally savage, had a tendency to become civilised, that TENDENCY is an endowment no less wonderful than those endowments which civilisation exhibits.
When, however, we know not only what man is, but what he may become, both intellectually and morally, as we have already seen; when we cast our mind’s eye over the history of the civilised section of our race, wherever authentic records of their sayings and doings exist, we find repeated and radiant instances of intellectual and moral greatness, rising into sublimity—such as compel us to admit that man is incomparably the most perfect and highly endowed creature which appears to have ever existed on the earth.
“How far previous periods of animal existence were a necessary preparation of the earth as the habitation of man, or a gradual progression towards the existence of man, we need not now inquire. But this, at least, we may say, that man, now that he is here, forms a climax to all that has preceded—a term incomparably exceeding in value all the previous parts of the series—a complex and ornate capital to the subjacent column—a personage of vastly greater dignity and importance than all the preceding line of the procession.”[[25]]
If we are thus to regard man as the climax of the creation in space, as in time, “can we point out any characters,” finally asks the Essayist, “which may tend to make it conceivable that the Creator should thus distinguish him, and care for him—should prepare his habitation, if it be so, by ages of chaotic and rudimentary life, and by accompanying orbs of brute and barren matter? If man be thus the head, the crowned head, of the creation, is he worthy to be thus elevated? Has he any qualities which make it conceivable that, with such an array of preparation and accompaniment”—the reader will note the sudden introduction of these elements of the question, the “accompanying orbs!”—“he should be placed upon the earth, his throne? Does any answer now occur to us, after the views which have been presented to us? That answer,” continues the Essayist, “is the one which has been already given:” “the transcendent intellectual, moral, and religious character of man—such as warrants him in believing that God, in very deed, is not only mindful of him, but visits him.”[[26]]
This may be, the objector is conceived to say; but my difficulty haunts and harasses me: that, while man’s residence is, with reference to the countless glistening orbs revealed by Astronomy, scarcely in the proportion of a single grain of sand to the entire terraqueous structure of our globe, I am required to believe that the Almighty has dealt with him, and with the speck in which he resides, in the awfully exceptional manner asserted in the Scriptures. Let us here remind the reader of a coarser, and an insolent and blasphemous, expression of this “difficulty,” by Thomas Paine, already quoted:—[[27]]
“The system of a plurality of worlds renders the Christian faith at once little and ridiculous, and scatters it in the mind like feathers in the air: the two beliefs cannot be held together in the same mind.” With such an opponent Dr Whewell expressly states that he has no concern; he deals with a “‘difficulty’ felt by a friend:” wishing “rather to examine how to quiet the troubled and perplexed believer, than how to triumph over the dogmatical and self-satisfied unbeliever.”
“Let the difficulty,” he says, “be put in any way the objector pleases.”
I. Is it that it is unworthy of the greatness and majesty of God, according to our conception of Him, to bestow such peculiar care on so SMALL A PART of His creation?[[28]]
But a narrow inspection of the atom of space assigned to man, proves that He has done so. He has made the period of mankind, though only a moment in the ages of animal life, the only period of Intelligence, Morality, Religion. If it be contrary to OUR! conception of Him, to suppose Him to have done so, it is plain that these conceptions are wrong. God has not judged as to what is worthy of Him, as we have presumed to judge. He has deemed it worthy of Himself to bestow upon man this special care, though he occupy so small a portion of TIME:—why not, then, though he occupy so small a portion of SPACE?
II. Is the difficulty this:—That supposing the earth, alone, to be occupied by inhabitants, all the other globes of the universe are WASTED?—turned to NO PURPOSE?[[29]]
Is “waste” of this kind to be considered unsuited to the character of our Creator? But here again we have the like “waste” in the occupation of this earth! All its previous ages, its seas and its continents, have been “wasted” upon mere brute life: often, apparently, on the lowest, the least conscious forms of life:—upon sponges, coral, shell-fish. Why, then, should not the seas and continents of other planets be occupied with life of this order, or with no life at all? Who shall tell how many ages elapsed before this earth was tenanted by life at all? Will the occupation of a spot of land, or a little water, by the life of a sponge, a coral, or an oyster, save it from being “wasted”? If a spot of rock or water be sufficiently employed by its being the mere seat of organisation, of however low and simple a type,—why not, by its being the mere seat of attraction? cohesion? crystalline power? All parts of the universe appear pervaded by attraction, by forces of aggregation and atomic relation, by light and heat: why may not these be sufficient, in the eyes of the Creator, to prevent the space from being “wasted,” as, during a great part of the earth’s past history, and over vast portions of its mass in its present form, they are actually held by Him to be sufficient? since these powers, or forces, are all that occupy such portions. This notion, therefore, of the improbability of there being in the universe so vast an amount of “waste” spaces, or “waste” bodies, as is implied in the notion that the earth alone is the seat of life, or of intelligence, is confuted by matter-of-fact, existing, in respect of vast spaces, waste districts, and especially waste times, upon our own earth. The avoidance of such “waste,” according to our notions of waste, is no part of the economy of creation, so far as we can discern that economy in its most certain exemplification.
III. Is the difficulty this:—That giving such a peculiar dignity and importance to the earth is contrary to the Analogy of Creation?[[30]]
This objection, be it observed, assumes that there are so many globes similar to the earth, and like her revolving,—some accompanied as she is, by satellites,—on their axis, and that therefore it is reasonable to suppose the destination and office of all, the same;—that there are so many stars, each, like our sun, a source of light, probably also of heat; and that it is consequently reasonable to suppose their light and heat, like his, imparted, as from so many centres of systems, to uphold life;—and that all this affords strong ground for believing all such planets, as well those of our own as of other systems, inhabited like our planet.
But the Essayist again directs the eye of the questioner to the state of our own planet, as demonstrated by Geology, in order to show the precariousness, if not futility, of supposing such an analogy to exist. It would lead us to a palpably false conclusion—viz., that during all the vast successive periods of the Earth’s history, that Earth was occupied with life of the same order—nay, even, that since the Earth is now the seat of an intelligent population, it must have been so in all its former conditions. For it was then able, and adapted, to support animal life, and that of creatures pretty closely resembling man[[31]] in physical structure. Nevertheless, if evidence go for anything, the Earth did not do so! “Even,” says Dr Whewell, “those geologists who have dwelt most on the discovery of fossil monkeys, and other animals nearest to man, have not dreamed that there existed, before him, a race of rational, intelligent, and progressive creatures.”[[32]] Here, however, he is mistaken, as we shall presently see Sir David Brewster revelling in such a dream. As, then, the notion that one period of time in the Earth’s history must resemble another in the character of its population, because it resembles it in physical conditions, is negatived by the history of the Earth itself; so the notion that one part of the universe must resemble another in its population, because it has a resemblance in physical conditions, is negatived, as a law of creation. Analogy really affords no support to such a notion.
IV. Nay, continues Dr Whewell,[[33]] we may go further: instead of the analogy of creation pointing to such entire resemblance of similar parts, it points in the opposite direction: it is not entire resemblance, but universal difference, that we discover: not the repetition of exactly similar cases, but a series of cases perpetually dissimilar, presents itself: not constancy, but change—perhaps advance; not one permanent and pervading scheme, but preparation, and completion of successive schemes:—not uniformity, and a fixed type of existences, but progression and a climax.
Viewing the advent of Man, and what preceded it, it seems the analogy of nature that there should be inferior, as well as superior, provinces in the universe, and that the inferior may occupy an immensely larger portion of Time than the superior. Why not, then, of Space?
“The earth was brute and inert, compared with its present condition; dark and chaotic, so far as the light of reason and intelligence are concerned, for countless centuries before man was created. Why then may not other parts of creation be still in this brute and inert and chaotic state, while the earth is under the influence of a higher exercise of creative power? If the earth was for ages a turbid abyss of lava and of mud, why may not Mars or Saturn be so still?... The possibility that the planets are such rude masses, is quite as tenable, on astronomical grounds, as the possibility that the planets resemble the earth, in matters of which astronomy can tell us nothing. We say, therefore, that the example of geology refutes the argument drawn from the supposed analogy of one part of the universe with another; and suggests a strong suspicion that the force of analogy, better known, may tend in the opposite direction.”[[34]]
We have now gone through a large portion, embracing two of the three sections into which we had divided this startling Essay; presenting as full and fair an account of it as is consistent with our limits. Though the author professes that he “does not pretend to disprove the Plurality of Worlds, but to deny the existence of arguments making the doctrine probable,” his undisguised object is to assign cogent reasons for holding the opposite to be the true doctrine—the Unity of the World. What has gone before is, moreover, on the assumption that the other bodies of the universe are fitted, equally with the Earth, to be the abodes of life. Before passing on, however, to the remaining section of the Essay, which is decidedly hostile to that assumption, let us here introduce on the scene Dr Whewell’s only hitherto avowed antagonist, Sir David Brewster.
Though it is impossible to treat otherwise than with much consideration, whatever is published by this gentleman, we must express our regret that he did not more deliberately approach so formidable an opponent as Dr Whewell, and, as we are compelled to add, in a more calm and courteous spirit. We never read a performance less calculated than this Essay, from its modesty and moderation of tone, and the high and abstract nature of the topics which it discusses with such powerful logic, and such a profusion of knowledge of every kind, to provoke an acrimonious answer. It is happily rare, in recent times, for one of two philosophic disputants, to speak of the other’s “exhibiting an amount of knowledge so massive as occasionally to smother his reason;”[[35]] “ascribing his sentiments only to some morbid condition of the mental powers, which feeds upon paradox, and delights in doing violence to sentiments deeply cherished, and to opinions universally believed;”[[36]] characterising some of his reasonings as “dialectics in which a large dose of banter and ridicule is seasoned with a little condiment of science;”[[37]] and an elaborate argument, of great strength and originality, whether sound or not, as “the most ingenious, though shallow piece of sophistry, which we! (Sir David Brewster) have encountered in modern times;”[[38]] referring his “theories and speculations to no better a feeling than a love of notoriety.”[[39]] It is not to be supposed that Sir David was not perfectly aware who his opponent was,[[40]] which occasions extreme surprise at the tone adopted throughout More Worlds than One. In his preface, he explains as a cause of his anger, that he found that “the author” of the Essay, “under a title calculated to mislead the public, had made an elaborate attack upon opinions consecrated, as Sir David had thought, by reason and revelation,”—that the author had not only adopted a theory (the Nebular) so universally condemned as a dangerous speculation, “but had taken a view of the condition of the solar system calculated to disparage the science of astronomy, and throw a doubt over the noblest of its truths.” We dismiss this topic with a repetition of our regret, that so splendid a subject was not approached in a serener spirit; that greater respect was not shown by one of his contemporaries for one of the most eminent men of the age; and that sufficient time was not taken, in order to avoid divers surprising maculæ occurring in even the composition, and certain rash and unguarded expressions and speculations.
If Dr Whewell may be regarded as (pace tanti viri!) a sort of Star-Smasher, his opponent is in very truth a Star-Peopler. Though he admits that “there are some difficulties to be removed, and some additional analogies to be adduced, before the mind can admit the startling proposition[[41]] that the Sun, Moon, and all the satellites, are inhabited spheres”—yet he believes that they are:[[42]] that all the planets of their respective systems are so; as well as all the single stars, double stars, and nebulæ, with all planets and satellites circling about them!—though “our faltering reason utterly fails us!” he owns,[[43]] “when called on to believe that even the Nebulæ must be surrendered to life and reason! Wherever there is matter there must be life!” One can by this time almost pardon the excitement, the alarm rather, and anger, with which Sir David ruefully beheld Dr Whewell go forth on his exterminating expedition through Infinitude! It was like a father gazing on the ruthless slaughter of his offspring. Planet after planet, satellite after satellite, star after star, sun after sun, single suns and double suns, system after system, nebula after nebula, all disappeared before this sidereal Quixote! As for Jupiter and Saturn, the pet planets of Sir David, they were dealt with in a way perfectly shocking. The former turned out, to the disordered optics and unsteady brain of the Essayist, to be a sphere of water, with perhaps a few cinders at the centre, and peopled “with cartilaginous and glutinous monsters—boneless, watery, pulpy creatures, floating in the fluid;” while poor Saturn may be supposed turning aghast on hearing that, for all his grand appearance, he was little else than a sphere of vapour, with a little water, tenanted, if at all, by “aqueous, gelatinous creatures—too sluggish almost to be deemed alive—floating in their ice-cold waters, shrowded for ever by their humid skies!” But talk after this of the pensive Moon! “She is a mere cinder! a collection of sheets of rigid slag, and inactive craters!” This could be borne no longer; so thus Sir David pours forth the grief and indignation of the Soul Astronomic, in a passage fraught with the spirit, and embodying the results, of his whole book, and which we give, as evidently laboured by the author with peculiar care.
“Those ungenial minds that can be brought to believe that the earth is the only inhabited body in the universe, will have no difficulty in conceiving that it also might have been without inhabitants. Nay, if such minds are imbued with geological truth, they must admit that for millions of years the earth was without inhabitants; and hence we are led to the extraordinary result, that for millions of years there was not an intelligent creature in the vast dominions of the universal King; and that before the formation of the protozoic strata, there was neither a plant nor an animal throughout the infinity of space! During this long period of universal death, when Nature herself was asleep—the sun, with his magnificent attendants—the planets, with their faithful satellites—the stars in the binary systems—the solar system itself, were performing their daily, their annual, and their secular movements unseen, unheeded, and fulfilling no purpose that human reason can conceive; lamps lighting nothing—fires heating nothing—waters quenching nothing—clouds screening nothing—breezes fanning nothing—and everything around, mountain and valley, hill and dale, earth and ocean, all meaning nothing.
‘The stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space.’
To our apprehension, such a condition of the earth, of the solar system, and of the sidereal universe, would be the same as that of our own globe if all its vessels of war and of commerce were traversing its seas with empty cabins and freightless holds; as if all the railways on its surface were in full activity without passengers and goods; and all our machinery beating the air and gnashing their iron teeth without work performed. A house without tenants, a city without citizens, present to our minds the same idea as a planet without life, and a universe without inhabitants. Why the house was built, why the city was founded, why the planet was made, and why the universe was created, it would be difficult even to conjecture. Equally great would be the difficulty were the planets shapeless lumps of matter, poised in ether, and still and motionless as the grave. But when we consider them as chiselled spheres, and teeming with inorganic beauty, and in full mechanical activity, performing their appointed motions with such miraculous precision that their days and their years never err a second of time in hundreds of centuries, the difficulty of believing them to be without life is, if possible, immeasurably increased. To conceive any one material globe, whether a gigantic clod slumbering in space, or a noble planet equipped like our own, and duly performing its appointed task, to have no living occupants, or not in a state of preparation to receive them, seems to us one of those notions which could be harboured only in an ill-educated and ill-regulated mind—a mind without faith and without hope: but to conceive a whole universe of moving and revolving worlds in such a category, indicates, in our apprehension, a mind dead to feeling and shorn of reason.”[[44]]
“It is doubtless possible,” observes Sir David, however, a little further on,[[45]] as if with a twinge of misgiving, “that the Mighty Architect of the universe may have had other objects in view, incomprehensible by us, than that of supporting animal and vegetable life in these magnificent spheres.” Would that Sir David Brewster would allow himself to be largely influenced by this rational and devout sentiment! His book is, on the contrary, crammed with assertions from beginning to end, and of a peremptory and intolerant character unknown to the spirit of genuine philosophy.
The Essayist, however, is not incapable of quiet humour: and the following pregnant passage is at least worthy to stand side by side with that which we have just quoted from his indignant and eloquent opponent:—
“Undoubtedly, all true astronomers, taught caution and temperance of thought by the discipline of their magnificent science, abstain from founding such assumptions upon their discoveries. They know how necessary it is to be upon their guard against the tricks which fancy plays with the senses; and if they see appearances of which they cannot interpret the meaning, they are content that they should have no meaning for them, till the due explanation comes. We have innumerable examples of this wise and cautious temper in all periods of astronomy. One has occurred lately. Several careful astronomers, observing the stars by day, had been surprised to see globes of light glide across the field of view of their telescopes, often in rapid succession, and in great numbers. They did not, as may be supposed, rush to the assumption that these globes were celestial bodies of a new kind, before unseen, and that, from the peculiarity of their appearance and movement, they were probably inhabited by beings of a peculiar kind. They proceeded differently. They altered the focus of their telescopes, looked with other glasses, made various changes and trials; and finally discovered that these globes of light were the winged seeds of certain plants, which were wafted through the air, and which, illuminated by the sun, were made globular by being at distances unsuited to the focus of the telescopes!”[[46]]
Before proceeding to give our readers some idea of the mode in which Sir David Brewster encounters Dr Whewell, let us offer a general observation concerning both these eminent gentlemen. While the latter exhibits throughout his Essay a spirit of candour and modesty, without one harsh expression or uncharitable insinuation with reference to the holder of doctrines which he is bent upon impugning with all his mental power and multifarious resources; the former, as we have seen, uses language at once heated, uncourteous, and unjustifiable: especially where he more than insinuates that his opponent, whose great knowledge and ability he admits, either deliberately countenances doctrines tending really to Atheism, or may be believed “ignorant of their tendency, and to have forgotten the truths of Inspiration, and even those of Natural Religion.”[[47]] To venture, however circuitously, to hint such imputations upon an opponent whom he had the slightest reason to suspect being one of such high and responsible academic position, is an offence equally against personal courtesy and public propriety; as we think Sir David Brewster would, on reflection, acknowledge. Both Dr Whewell and Sir David Brewster must excuse us, if, scanning both through the cold medium of impartial criticism, their speculations, questions, or assertions appear to us disturbed and deflected by a leading prepossession or foregone conclusion, which we shall indicate in the words of each.
Dr Whewell.—“The Earth is really the largest Planetary body in the Solar system; its domestic hearth, and the Only World [i. e. collection of intelligent creatures] in the Universe.”[[48]]
Sir David Brewster.—“Life is almost a property of matter.... Wherever there is Matter, there must be Life:—Life physical, to enjoy its beauties; Life Moral, to worship its Maker; and Life Intellectual, to proclaim His wisdom and His power.... Universal Life upon Universal matter, is an idea to which the mind instinctively clings.... Every star in the Heavens, and every point in a nebula which the most powerful telescope has not separated from its neighbour, is a sun surrounded by inhabited planets like our own.... In peopling such worlds with life and intelligence, we assign the cause of their existence; and when the mind is once alive to this great Truth, it cannot fail to realise the grand combination of infinity of life with infinity of matter.”[[49]]
The composition of Sir David Brewster, though occasionally too declamatory and rhetorical, and so far lacking the dignified simplicity befitting the subjects with which he deals, has much merit. It is easy, vivid, and vigorous, but will bear retrenchment, and lowering of tone. As to the substantial texture of his work, we think it betrays, in almost every page, haste and impetuosity, and evidence that the writer has sadly under-estimated the strength of his opponent. Another feature of More Worlds than One, is a manifest desire provocare ad populum—a greater anxiety, in the first instance, to catch the ear of the million, than to convince the “fit audience, though few.” Now, however, to his work; and, as we have already said, on him lies the labouring oar of proof. All that his opponent professes to do, is to ask for arguments “rendering probable” that “doctrine” which Sir David pledges himself to demonstrate to be not only the “hope” of the Christian, but the creed of the philosopher: as much, that is, an article of his belief, as the doctrines of attraction and gravitation, or the existence of demonstrable astronomical facts.
He commences with a brief introduction, sketching the growth of the belief in a plurality of worlds—one steadily and firmly increasing in strength, till it encountered the rude shock of the Essayist, whose “very remarkable work” is “ably written,” and who “defends ingeniously his novel and extraordinary views:” “the direct tendency of which is to ridicule and bring into contempt the grand discoveries in sidereal astronomy by which the last century has been distinguished.” In his next chapter, Sir David discusses “the religious aspect of the question,” representing man, especially the philosopher, as always having pined after a knowledge of the scene of his future being. He declares that neither the Old nor the New Testament contains “a single expression incompatible with the great truth that there are other worlds than our own which are the seats of life and intelligence;” but, on the contrary, there are “other passages which are inexplicable without admitting it to be true.” He regards, as we have seen, the noble exclamation of the Psalmist, “What is man,” as “a positive argument for a plurality of worlds;” and “cannot doubt” that he was gifted with a plenary knowledge of the starry system, inhabited as Sir David would have it to be! Dr Chalmers, let us remark, in passing, expressed himself differently, and with a more becoming reserve: “It is not for us to say whether inspiration revealed to the Psalmist the wonders of the modern astronomy,” but “even though the mind be a perfect stranger to the science of these enlightened times, the heavens present a great and an elevating spectacle, the contemplation of which awakened the piety of the Psalmist”—a view in which Dr Whewell concurs. Sir David then comes to consider the doctrine of “Man, in his future state of existence, consisting, as at present, of a spiritual nature residing in a corporeal frame.” We must, therefore, find for the race of Adam, “if not for the races which preceded him!”[[50]] “a material home upon which he may reside, or from which he may travel to other localities in the universe.” That house, he says, cannot be the earth, for it will not be big enough—there will be such a “population as the habitable parts of our globe could not possibly accommodate;” wherefore, “we can scarcely doubt that their future abode must be on some of the primary or secondary planets of the solar system, whose inhabitants have ceased to exist, like those on the earth; or on planets which have long been in a state of preparation, as our earth was, for the advent of intellectual life.” Here, then, is “the creed of the philosopher,” as well as “the hope of the Christian.” Passing, according to the order adopted in this paper, from the first chapter (“Religious Aspect of the Question”), we alight on the seventh, entitled “Religious Difficulties.” We entertain too much consideration for Sir David Brewster to speak harshly of anything falling from his pen; but we think ourselves justified in questioning whether this chapter—dealing with speculations of an awful nature, among which the greatest religious and philosophical intellects tremble as they “go sounding on their dim and perilous way”—shows him equal to cope with his experienced opponent, whom every page devoted to such topics shows to have fixed the Difficulty with which he proposed to deal, fully and steadily before his eyes, in all its moral, metaphysical, and philosophical bearings, and to have discussed it cautiously and reverently. We shall content ourselves with briefly indicating the course of observation on that “difficulty” adopted by Sir David Brewster, and leaving it to the discreet reader to form his own judgment whether Sir David has left the difficulty where he found it, or removed, lessened, or enhanced it.
Dr Whewell, in his Dialogue, thus temperately and effectively deals with this section of his opponent’s lucubrations:—
“His own solution of the question concerning the redemption of other worlds appears to be this, that the provision made for the redemption of man by what took place upon earth eighteen hundred years ago, may have extended its influence to other worlds.
“In reply to which astronomico-theological hypothesis three remarks offer themselves: In the first place, the hypothesis is entirely without warrant or countenance in the revelation from which all our knowledge of the scheme of redemption is derived; in the second place, the events which took place upon earth eighteen hundred years ago, were connected with a train of events in the history of man, which had begun at the creation of man, and extended through all the intervening ages; and the bearing of this whole series of events upon the condition of the inhabitants of other worlds must be so different from its bearing on the condition of man, that the hypothesis needs a dozen other auxiliary hypotheses to make it intelligible; and, in the third place, this hypothesis, making the earth, insignificant as it seems to be in the astronomical scheme, the centre of the theological scheme, ascribes to the earth a peculiar distinction, quite as much at variance with the analogies of the planets to one another, as the supposition that the earth alone is inhabited; to say nothing of the bearing of the critic’s hypothesis on the other systems that encircle other suns.”[[51]]
“In freely discussing the subject of a Plurality of Worlds,” says Sir David, “there can be no collision between Reason and Revelation.” He regrets the extravagant conclusion of some, that the inhabitants of all planets but our own, “are sinless and immortal beings that never broke the Divine Law, and enjoying that perfect felicity reserved for only a few of the less favoured occupants of earth. Thus chained to a planet, the lowest and most unfortunate in the universe, the philosopher, with all his analogies broken down, may justly renounce his faith in a Plurality of Worlds, and rejoice in the more limited but safer creed of the anti-Pluralist author, who makes the earth the only world in the universe, and the special object of God’s paternal care.”[[52]] He proceeds, in accordance with “men of lofty minds and undoubted piety,” to regard the existence of moral evil as a necessary part of the general scheme of the universe, and consequently affecting all its Rational Inhabitants.[[53]] He “rejects the idea that the inhabitants of the planets do not require a Saviour; and maintains the more rational opinion, that they stand in the same moral relation to their Maker as the inhabitants of the earth; and seeks for a solution of the difficulty—how can there be inhabitants in the planets, when God had but One Son, whom He could send to save them? If we can give a satisfactory answer to this question, it may destroy the objections of the Infidel, while it relieves the Christian from his difficulties.”[[54]]... “When our Saviour died, the influence of His death extended backward, in the Past, to millions who never heard His name; in the Future, to millions who never will hear it ... a Force which did not vary with any function of the distance.[[55]]... Emanating from the middle planet of the system.”
——The earth the middle planet of the system? How is this? In an earlier portion of his book (p. 56), Sir David had demonstrated that “our earth is neither the middle [his own italics] planet, nor the planet nearest the sun, nor the planet furthest from that luminary: that therefore the earth, as a planet, has no pre-eminence in the solar system, to induce us to believe that it is the only inhabited world.... Jupiter is the middle planet (p. 55), and is otherwise highly distinguished!” How is this? Can the two passages containing such direct contradictions have emanated from the same scientific controversialist?—To resume, however:
—“Emanating from the middle planet of the system, why may it not have extended to them all, ... to the Planetary Races in the Past, and to the Planetary Races in the Future?... But to bring our argument more within the reach of an ordinary understanding”—he supposes our earth split into two parts! the old world and the new (as Biela’s comet is supposed to have been divided in 1846), at the beginning of the Christian era![[56]]—“would not both fragments have shared in the beneficence of the Cross—the penitent on the shores of the Mississippi, as richly as the pilgrim on the banks of the Jordan?... Should this view prove unsatisfactory to the anxious inquirer, we may suggest another sentiment, even though we ourselves may not admit it into our creed.... May not the Divine Nature, which can neither suffer, nor die, and which, in our planet, once only clothed itself in humanity, resume elsewhere a physical form, and expiate the guilt of unnumbered worlds?”[[57]]
We repeat, that we abstain from offering any of the stern strictures which these passages almost extort from us.
He proceeds to declare himself incompetent to comprehend the Difficulty “put in a form so unintelligible” by the Essayist—that of a kind of existence, similar to that of men, in respect of their intellectual, moral, and spiritual character, and its progressive development, existing in any region occupied by other beings than man. He denies that Progression has been the character of the history of man,[[58]] but rather frequent and vast retrogressions ever since the Fall; and asks “which of these ever-changing conditions of humanity is the unique condition of the Essayist—incapable of repetition in the scheme of the Universe?”[[59]] Why may there not be an intermediate race between that of man and the angelic beings of Scripture, where human reason shall pass into the highest form of created mind, and human affections into their noblest development?—
“Why may not the intelligence of the spheres be ordained for the study of regions and objects unstudied and unknown on earth? Why may not labour have a better commission than to earn its bread by the sweat of its brow? Why may it not pluck its loaf from the bread-fruit tree, or gather its manna from the ground, or draw its wine from the bleeding vessels of the vine, or inhale its anodyne breath from the paradise gas of its atmosphere?”[[60]]
And Sir David thus concludes the chapter:—
“The difficulties we have been considering, in so far as they are of a religious character, have been very unwisely introduced into the question of a Plurality of Worlds. We are not entitled to remonstrate with the sceptic, but we venture to doubt the soundness of that philosopher’s judgment who thinks that the truths of natural religion are affected by a belief in planetary races, and the reality of that Christian’s faith who considers it to be endangered by a belief that there are other Worlds than his own.”
This last paragraph induces us to go so far as to doubt whether Sir David Brewster has addressed his understanding deliberately, to the subject to which so large a portion of the most elaborate reasonings of Dr Whewell have been directed.
Sir David does not quarrel with the Essayist’s account of the constitution of man; and we must now see how he deals with the Essayist’s arguments drawn from Geology.
Sir David “is not disposed to grudge the geologist even periods so marvellous” as “millions of years required for the formation of strata, provided they be considered as merely hypothetical;” and admits that “our seas and continents have nearly the same locality, and cover nearly the same area, as they did at the creation of Adam;” but demurs to the conclusion that the earth was prepared for man by causes operating so gradually as the diurnal change going on around us. “Why may not the Almighty have deposited the earth’s strata, during the whole period of its formation, by a rapid precipitation of their atoms from the waters which suspended them, so as to reduce the period of the earth’s formation to little more than the united generations of the different orders of plants and animals constituting its organic remains? Why not still further shorten the period, by supposing that plants and animals, requiring, in our day, a century for their development, may in primitive times have shot up in rank luxuriance, and been ready, in a few days! or months! or years, for the great purpose of exhibiting, by their geological distribution, the progressive formation of the earth?”[[61]]
These questions, of which a myriad similar ones might be asked by any one, we leave to our geological readers; and hasten to inform them, that in involuntary homage to the powerful reasonings of his opponent, Sir David Brewster is fain to question the “inference that man did not exist during the period of the earth’s formation;”[[62]] and to suggest that “there may have existed intellectual races in present unexplored continental localities, or the immense regions of the earth now under water!”—“The future of geology may be pregnant with startling discoveries of the remains of intellectual races, even beneath the primitive Azoic[[63]] formations of the earth!... Who can tell what sleeps beyond? Another creation may be beneath! more glorious creatures may be entombed there! the mortal coils of beings more lovely, more pure, more divine than man, may yet read to us the unexpected lesson that we have not been the first, and may not be the last of the intellectual race!”[[64]] Is he who can entertain and publish conjectures like these, entitled to stigmatise so severely those of other speculators—as “inconceivable absurdities, which no sane mind can cherish—suppositions too ridiculous even for a writer of romance!” This wild license given to the fancy may not be amiss in a poet, whose privilege it is that his “eye in a fine phrenzy rolling” may “give to airy nothing a local habitation, and a name:”—but when set in the scale against the solemnly magnificent array of facts in the earth’s history established by Geology, may be summarily discarded by sober and grave inquirers.
The Essayist’s suggested analogy between man’s relation to time and to space appears to us not understood, in either its scope or nature, by Sir David Brewster. At this we are as much surprised, as at the roughness with which he characterises the argument, as “the most ingenious though shallow piece of sophistry he has ever encountered in modern dialectics.” The Essayist suggests a comparison between the numbers expressing the four magnitudes and distances,—of the earth, the solar system, the fixed stars, and the nebulæ—and the numbers expressing the antiquity of the four geological periods “for the sake of giving definiteness to our notions.” Sir David abstains from quoting these last expressions, and alleges that the Essayist, “quitting the ground of analogy,” founds an elaborate argument on the mutual relation of an atom of time and an atom of space. The “argument” Sir David thus presents to his readers, the capital and italic letters being his own: “That is, the earth, the ATOM OF SPACE, is the only one of the planetary and sidereal worlds that is inhabited, because it was so long without inhabitants, and has been occupied only an ATOM OF TIME.”[[65]] “If any of our readers,” he adds, “see the force of this argument, they must possess an acuteness of perception to which we lay no claim. To us, it is not only illogical; it is a mere sound in the ear, without any sense in the brain.” This is the language possibly befitting an irritated Professor towards an ignorant and conceited student, but hardly suitable when Sir David Brewster is speaking of such an antagonist as he cannot but know he has to deal with. It does not appear to us the Essayist’s attempt, or purpose, to establish any arbitrary absolute relation between time and space, or definite proportions of either, as concurring or alternative elements for determining the probability of a plurality of worlds. But he says to the dogmatic astronomical objector to Christianity, Such arguments as you have hitherto derived from your consideration of SPACE, MULTITUDE, and MAGNITUDE, for the purpose of depressing man into a being beneath his Maker’s special notice, I encounter by arguments derived from recent disclosures concerning another condition of existence—DURATION, or TIME. Protesting that neither Time nor Space has any true connection with the subject, nevertheless I will turn your own weapons against yourself. My argument from Time shall at least neutralise yours from Space: mine shall involve the conditions of yours, fraught with their supposed irresistible force, and falsify them in fact, as forming premises whence may be deduced derogatory inferences concerning man. The Essayist’s ingenious and suggestive argument is intended not to prove an opinion, but to remove an objection; which, according to the profound thinker, Bishop Butler, is the proper office of analogy. It is asked, for instance, how can you suppose that man, such as he is represented to be, occupies only an immeasurably minute fraction of existing matter? and it is answered, I find that man occupies only an immeasurably minute fraction of elapsed time: and this is, to me, an answer to the “How,” as concluding improbability. How is balanced against How: Difficulty against difficulty: they neutralise each other, and leave the great question, the great reality, standing as it did before either was suggested, to be dealt with according to such evidence as God has vouchsafed us. We, therefore, do not see that the Essayist is driven to say, as Sir David Brewster alleges he is, either that because man has occupied only an atom of space, he must live only an atom of time on the earth;[[66]] or that because he has lived only an atom of time, he must occupy but an atom of space. In dismissing this leading portion of the Essayist’s reasonings, we shall say only that we consider it worthy of the attention of all persons occupied in speculations of this nature, as calculated to suggest trains of novel, profitable, and deeply interesting reflection.
Thus far the Essayist, as followed by his opponent, on the assumption that the other bodies of the universe are fitted, equally with the earth, to be the abodes of life. But are they? Here we are brought to the last stage of the Essayist’s speculations—What physical EVIDENCE have we that the other bodies of the Solar System, besides the Earth, the Fixed Stars, and the Nebulæ, are structures capable of supporting human life, of being inhabited by Rational and Moral Beings?
The great question, in its physical aspect, is now fully before us: Is there that analogy on which the pluralist relies?
For the existence of Life several conditions must concur; and any of these failing, life, so far as we know anything about it, is impossible. Not air, only, and moisture, but a certain temperature, neither too hot nor too cold, and a certain consistence, on which the living frame can rest. Without the other conditions, an atmosphere alone does not make life possible; still less, prove its existence. A globe of red-hot metal, or of solid ice, however well provided with an atmosphere, could not be inhabited, so far as we can conceive. The old maxim of the logicians is true: that it requires all the conditions to establish the affirmative, but that the negative of any one proves the negative.
First, as to the smallest tenants of our system, the thirty[[67]] planetoids, some of which are certainly no larger than Mont Blanc.
Sir David Brewster dare not venture to suggest that they are inhabited, or in any condition to become so, any more than meteoric stones, which modern science regards as masses of matter, moving, like the planets, in the celestial spaces, subject to the gravitating attraction of the Sun; the Earth encountering them occasionally, either striking directly upon them, or approaching to them so closely that they are drawn by the terrestrial attraction, first within the atmosphere, and afterwards to the earth’s surface.[[68]] Here our Essayist gives a thrust at his Pluralist opponent not to be parried, asking him why he shrunk from asserting the planetoids and meteoric stones to be inhabited? If it be because of their being found to be uninhabited, or of their smallness, then “the argument that they are inhabited because they are planets fails him.”[[69]]
“There is, then,” says elsewhere the wary Essayist,[[70]] “a degree of smallness which makes you reject the supposition of inhabitants. But where does that degree of smallness begin? The surface of Mars is only one-fourth that of the Earth. Moreover, if you allow all the planetoids to be uninhabited, those planets which you acknowledge to be probably uninhabited far outnumber those with regard to which even the most resolute Pluralist holds to be inhabited. The majority swells every year; the planetoids are now thirty. The fact of a planet being inhabited, then, is, at any rate, rather the exception than the rule; and therefore must be proved, in each case, by special evidence. Of such evidence I know not a trace!”
We may add, also, that Dr Lardner, vouched by Sir David Brewster, as we shall soon see, to be a thoroughly competent witness, gives up the planetoids as seats of habitation for animal life.[[71]]
Let us now, would say our Essayist, proceed on our negative tour, so to speak, and hasten to pay our respects to the Moon, our nearest neighbour, and whose distance from the Sun is admitted to adapt her, so far, for habitation.[[72]] If it appear, by strong evidence, that the Moon is not inhabited, then there is an end of the general principle, that all the bodies of the solar system are inhabited, and that we must begin our speculation about each with this assumption. If the Moon be not inhabited, then, it would seem, the belief that each special body in the system is inhabited, must depend upon reasons specially belonging to that body, and cannot be taken for granted without these reasons.[[73]] Now, as to the Moon, we have latterly acquired the means of making such exact and minute inquiries, that at the meeting of the British Association at Hull last year, Mr Phillips, an eminent geologist, stated that astronomers can discern the shape of a spot on the Moon’s surface, only a few hundred feet in breadth. Passing by, however, the Essayist’s brief but able account of the physical condition of this satellite of ours, we will cite the recent testimony of one accredited by Sir David Brewster[[74]] as “a mathematician and a natural philosopher, who has studied, more than any preceding writer, the analogies between the Earth and the other planets”—Dr Lardner, who, in the third volume (published since our last Number appeared) of the work placed at the head of this article, thus concludes his elaborate account of the Moon, as now regarded by the most enlightened astronomers—after proving it to be “as exempt from an atmosphere as is the utterly exhausted receiver of a good air-pump!”
“In fine, the entire geographical character of the moon, thus ascertained by long-continued and exact telescopic surveys, leads to the conclusion, that no analogy exists between it and the earth which could confer any probability on the conjecture that it fulfils the same purposes in the economy of the universe; and we must infer, that whatever be its uses in the solar system, or in the general purposes of creation, it is not a world inhabited by organised races such as those to which the earth is appropriated.”[[75]]
We must leave Sir David and Dr Lardner to settle their small amount of differences together; for Sir David will have it that “the moon exhibits such proofs of an atmosphere that we have a new ground from analogy for believing that she either has, or is in a state of preparation for receiving, inhabitants;”[[76]] whom, “with monuments of their hands,” he “hopes may be discovered with some magnificent telescope which may be constructed!”[[77]] And he is compelled to believe that “all the other unseen satellites of the solar system are homes to animal and intellectual life.”[[78]] The Essayist would seem not to have deemed it necessary to deprive the sun of inhabitants; but our confident Pluralist will not surrender the stupendous body so easily. His friend Dr Lardner properly regards it “as a vast globular furnace, the heat emitted from each square foot of which is seven times greater than the heat issuing from a square foot of the fiercest blast-furnace: to what agency the light and heat are due, no one can do more than conjecture. According to our hypothesis, it is a great Electric Light in the centre of the system;”[[79]] and “entirely removed from all analogy with the earth”—“utterly unsuited for the habitation of organised tribes.”[[80]] Nevertheless Sir David believes that “the sun is richly stored with inhabitants”—the probability “being doubtless greatly increased by the simple consideration of its enormous size”—a “domain so extensive, so blessed with perpetual light;” but it would seem that “if it be inhabited,” it is probably “occupied by the highest orders of intelligence!”[[81]] who, however, are allowed to enjoy their picturesque, and, it must be owned, somewhat peculiar, but doubtless blessed position, only by peeping every now and then through the sun’s spots, and so “seeing distinctly the planets and stars”—in fact, “large portions of the heavens!”[[82]] Perhaps it may be thought that this is not a very handsome way of dealing with such exalted beings!
The Essayist has now our seven principal sister-planets to deal with—the two infra-terrestrial, Mercury and Venus, and the five extra-terrestrial—Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune;—and as to all these, the question continues, do they so resemble the earth in physical conditions, as to lead us safely to the conclusion that they resemble it in that other capital particular, of being the habitations of intellectual and moral beings? Here, be it observed, that every symptom of unlikeness which the Essayist can detect, greatly augments the burthen of proof incumbent upon his opponents.
When it was discovered that the old planets in certain important particulars resembled the earth, being opaque and solid bodies, having similar motions round the sun and on their own axis, some accompanied by satellites, and all having arrangements producing day and night, summer and winter, who could help wondering whether they must not also have inhabitants, reckoning and regulating their lives and employments by days, months, and years? This was, at most, however, a mere guess or conjecture; and whether it is now more probable than then, depends on the intervening progress of astronomy and science in general. Have subsequent discoveries strengthened or impugned the validity of the conjecture? The limits of our system have been since vastly extended by the discovery of Uranus and Neptune; and the planetary sisterhood has also increased in number by thirty little and very eccentric ones.
Now, as to Neptune, says the Essayist, in substance, what reason has a sensible person for believing it peopled, as the earth is, by human beings—i. e. consisting of body and soul? He is thirty times further than we are from the sun, which will appear to it a mere star—about the size of Jupiter to us; and Neptune’s light and heat will be nine hundred times less than ours![[83]] If it, nevertheless, contain animal and intellectual life, we must try to conceive how they get on with such a modicum of those useful elements!
But have we general grounds for assuming all the planetary bodies inhabited? Beginning with the moon, we have encountered a decided negative. If any planet, however, have sufficient light, heat, clouds, winds, and a due adjustment of gravity, and the strength of the materials of which organisation consist, there may be life of some sort or other. Now we can measure and weigh the planets, exactly, by the law of gravitation, which embraces every particle of matter in our system, and find the mass of our earth to be only five times heavier than water. Comparing it with Jupiter—the bulk of which is 1331 times greater than that of the Earth—his density is, as a whole, only a quarter of that of the Earth—not greater than it would be as a sphere of water; and he is conjectured to be such, and the existence of his belts to be lines of clouds, fed with vapours raised by the sun’s action on such a watery sphere—the lines of such clouds being of so steady and determined a character, in consequence of his great rotatory velocity. Equal bulk for equal bulk, he is lighter than the Earth, but of course much heavier altogether; and as he is five times the Earth’s distance from the Sun, he must get a proportionally smaller amount of light and heat, and even that diminished by the clouds enveloping him to so great an extent. What a low degree of vitality, and what kind of organisation must animal existence possess, to suit such physical conditions, especially with reference to gravity, which, at his surface, is nearly two and a half times that on the Earth! Boneless, watery, pulpy inhabitants of the cold waters; or they may be frozen so far as to exclude the idea of animal existence; or it may be restricted to shallow parts in a planet of ice.[[84]] But if this be so, to what end his gorgeous array of satellites?—his four moons? “Precisely the same,” answers our pertinacious Essayist, “as the use of our moon during the countless ages before man was placed on the earth; while it was tenanted by corals, madrepores, shell-fish, belemnites, the cartilaginous fishes of the old red sandstone, or the Saurian monsters of the lias. With these differences, it is asked, what becomes of analogy—of resemblances justifying our belief that Jupiter is inhabited like ourselves?”
To this answers Sir David Brewster—Jupiter’s great size “is alone a proof that it must have been made for some grand and useful purpose:” it is flattened at its poles; revolves on its axis in nearly ten hours; has different climates and seasons; and is abundantly illuminated, in the short absence of the sun, by its four moons, giving him, in fact, “perpetual moonlight.” Why does the sun give it days, nights, and years? Why do its moons irradiate its continents and seas? Its equatorial breezes blow perpetually over its plains? To what purpose could such a gigantic world have been framed, unless to supply the wants, and minister to the happiness, of living beings? Still, it is admitted,[[85]] “that certain objections or difficulties naturally present themselves.” The distance of Jupiter from the sun precludes the possibility of sufficient light and heat from that quarter, to support either such vegetable or animal life as exists on the earth; the cold must be very intense—its rivers and seas must be tracks and fields of ice.[[86]] But it may be answered, that the temperature of a planet depends on other causes—the condition of its atmosphere, and the internal heat of its mass—as is the case with our earth; and such “may” be the case in Jupiter; and, “if” so, may secure a temperature sufficiently genial to sustain such animal and vegetable life as ours; yet, it is owned, it cannot “increase the feeble light which Jupiter derives from the sun; but an enlargement of the pupil of the eye, and increased sensibility of the retina, would make the sun’s light as brilliant to Jovians as to us.”[[87]] Besides, a brilliant phosphorescent light “may” be excited in the satellites by the sun’s rays. Again, the day of ten hours may be thought insufficient for physical repose; but, it is answered, five hours’ repose are sufficient for five of labour. “A difficulty of a more serious kind,[[88]] however, is presented by the great force of gravity on so gigantic a planet as Jupiter;” but Sir David gives us curious calculations to show that a Jovian’s weight would be only double that of a man on the earth.
Struck by such a formidable array of differences, when he was in quest of resemblances only,
“Alike, but, oh! how different!”
Sir David rebukes the sceptic for forming so low an opinion of Omnipotent Wisdom, as to assume that “the inhabitants of the planets must be either men, or anything resembling them;—is it,” he asks, “necessary that an immortal soul should be hung upon a skeleton of bone, or imprisoned in a cage of cartilage and skin? Must it see with two eyes, and hear with two ears, and touch with ten fingers, and rest on a duality of limbs? May it not rest in a Polyphemus with one eyeball, or in an Argus with a hundred? May it not reign in the giant forms of the Titans, and direct the hundred hands of Briareus?[[89]] The being of another world may have his home in subterranean cities, warmed by central fires; or in crystal caves, cooled by ocean tides; or he may float with the Nereids upon the deep; or mount upon wings as eagles; or rise upon the pinions of the dove, that he may flee away, and be at rest!”[[90]]
Let us pause at this point, and see how the question stands on the showing of the respectively imaginative and matter-of-fact disputants themselves. Sir David Brewster, being bound to show that analogy forces us to believe Jupiter inhabited, is compelled to admit a series of signal discrepancies in physical condition; expecting his opponent, in turn, to admit such a series of essential alterations, both of inert matter and organisation, as will admit of what?—totally different modes of animal and intellectual existence—so different, as to drive a philosopher into the fantastic dreams in which we have just seen him indulging. Not so the Essayist, a master of the Inductive Philosophy. He does not presume impiously to limit Omnipotence; but reverently owns His power to create whatever forms and conditions of existence He pleases. But when it is asserted that He has, in fact, made beings wholly different from any that we see, “he cannot believe this without further evidence.”[[91]] And on this very subject of the imaginary inhabitants of Jupiter, he says, after reading what his heated and fanciful opponent has advanced,—“You are hard,” he makes an objector say, “on our neighbours in Jupiter, when you will not allow them to be anything better than ‘boneless, watery, pulpy creatures.’” To which he answers, “I had no disposition to be hard on them when I entered upon these speculations. I drew, what appeared to me, probable conclusions from all the facts of the case. If the laws of attraction, of light, of heat, and the like, be the same there as they are here, which we believe to be certain, the laws of life must also be the same; and, if so, I can draw no other conclusions than those which I have stated.”[[92]]
Says the Essayist, I know that my Maker can invest with the intellect of a Newton, each of
“The gay motes that people the sunbeams;”
but before I believe that he has done so, give me reasonable and adequate evidence of so wonderful and sublime a fact; or I must believe in any kind of nonsense that any one can imagine.
The planet Jupiter affords a fair sample of the procedure of the Essayist and his opponent, with reference to all the other primary planets of the Solar system. From Mercury, in red-hot contiguity to the Sun, to Neptune, which is at thirty times the Earth’s distance from it, and from which as we have seen it derives only one nine-hundredth part of the light and heat imparted to ourselves by the Sun,—Sir David Brewster will have all inhabited, and the physical condition of each correspondingly altered to admit of it: central heat, and eyes the pupils of which are sufficiently enlarged, and the retina’s sensibility sufficiently increased, to admit of seeing with nine hundred times less light than is requisite for our own organs of sight! “Uranus and Neptune,” concludes the triumphant Pluralist[[93]]—nothing daunted by the overwhelming evidences of physical difference of condition—“are doubtless”—with the Sun—“the abodes of Life and Intelligence: the colossal temples where their Creator is recognised and worshipped—the remotest watch-towers of our system, from which his works may be better studied, and his glories more easily descried!”
Why, with such elastic principles of analogy as his, stop short of peopling the Meteoric Stones with rational inhabitants? whom, and whose doings, as in the case of the Moon, “some magnificent” instrument, yet to be constructed, may discover to us?
Thus much for the planets,—before quitting which, however, we may state that, according to Dr Lardner, about as staunch a Pluralist as his admirer Sir David Brewster, a greater rapidity of rotation, and smaller intervals of light and darkness, are among the characteristics distinguishing the group of major planets from the terrestrial group. He also adds that another “striking distinction” is the comparative lightness of the matter constituting the former. The density of Venus, Mars, and our earth, is nearly equal—about the same as that of ironstone; while the density of the thoroughly-baked planet Mercury is equal to that of gold. “Now it appears, on the contrary,” he continues, “that the density of Jupiter very little exceeds that of water; that of Uranus and Neptune is exactly that of water; while Saturn is so light, that it would float in water like a globe of pine wood.... The seas and oceans of these planets must consist of a liquid far lighter than water. It is computed that a liquid on Jupiter, which would be analogous to the terrestrial oceans, would be three times lighter than sulphuric ether, the lightest known liquid; and would be such that cork would scarcely float in it!”[[94]]
Commending these trifling discrepancies to Sir David’s attention, while manufacturing his planetary inhabitants in conformity with them, shall we now follow his flight beyond the solar system, and get among the Fixed Stars? Here we are gazing at the Dog-Star! “I allow,” says a pensive objector to the Essayist,[[95]] “that if you disprove the existence of inhabitants in the planets of our system, I shall not feel much real interest in the possible inhabitants of the Sirian system. Neighbourhood has its influence upon our feelings of regard,—even neighbourhood on a scale of millions of miles!”
Here our Pluralist is quite at home, and evidently in great favour. The stars twinkle and glitter with delight at his gleeful approach, to elevate them into moral and intellectual dignity, and at the same time, perhaps, select “some bright particular” one, to be hereafter distinguished as the seat of his own personal existence; whence he is to spend eternity in radiating astronomical emanations throughout infinitude.
“Then, unembodied, doth he trace,
By steps each planet’s heavenly way?
A Thing of Eyes, that all survey, ...
A Thought Unseen, yet seeing all!”[[96]]
He stands in the starry solitude, waving his wand, and lo! he peoples each glistening speck with intellectual existence, with the highest order of intelligence, as in the case of that little star, the sun, which he has quitted. Now as to these same FIXED STARS, we can easily guess the steps of Sir David’s brief and satisfactory argument. If the stars be suns, they are inhabited like our sun; and if they be suns, each has its planets, like our sun; and if they have planets, they are inhabited like our planets; and if they have satellites like some of ours, they are also inhabited. But the stars are suns, and they all have planets, and at least some of these planets, satellites; therefore, all the fixed stars, with their respective planetary systems, are inhabited (Q. E. D.) Here are Sir David’s words:—“We are compelled to draw the conclusion that wherever there is a sun, there must be a planetary system; and wherever there is a planetary system, there must be Life and Intelligence.”[[97]] This is the way in which, it seems, we worms of the earth feel ourselves at liberty to deal with our Almighty Creator: dogmatically insisting that every scene of existence in which He may have displayed His omnipotence, is but a repetition of that particular one in which we have our allotted place! As if He had but one pattern for Universal Creation! Only one scheme for peopling and dealing with infinitude! O, that the clay should think thus of Him that fashioneth it![[98]] Forgetting, in an exulting moment of blindness and presumption, His own awful words, My thoughts are not as your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways. For as the Heavens are higher than the Earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts![[99]]
We are now, however, about to people the Fixed Stars. The only proof that they are the centres of planetary systems, resides in the assumption that these Stars are like the Sun; and as resembling him in their nature and qualities, so having the same offices and appendages:—independent sources of light, and thence probably of heat; therefore having attendant planets, to which they may impart such light and heat,—and these planets’ inhabitants living under and enjoying those benign influences. Everything here depends on this proposition, that the Stars are like the Sun; and it becomes essential to examine what evidence we have of the exactness of their likeness.[[100]] In the Preface to his Second Edition, the Essayist, whose scientific knowledge few will venture to impugn, boldly asserts that “man’s knowledge of the physical properties of the luminaries which he discerns in the skies, is, even now, almost nothing;” and “such being the state of our knowledge, as bearing on the doctrine of the plurality of worlds, the time appeared to be not inopportune for a calm discussion of the question,—upon which, accordingly,” he adds, “I have ventured in the following pages.” In the same Preface he has ably condensed into a single paragraph his views on the nature and extent of our present knowledge on the subject of the Fixed Stars.[[101]]
In the opening of the chapter devoted to this subject (ch. viii.), he admits “the special evidence,” as to the probability of these stars containing, in themselves, or in accompanying planets, inhabitants of any kind, “is, indeed, slight, either way.”
As to Clustered and Double stars, they appear to give us, he says, but little promise of inhabitants. In what degree of condensation the matter of these binary systems is, compared with that of our solar system, we have no means whatever of knowing: but even granting that each individual of the pair were a sun like ours, in the nature of its material, and its state of condensation, is it probable that it resembles our Sun also in having planets revolving about it? A system of planets revolving about, or among, a pair of Suns, which are at the same time revolving about one another, is so complex a scheme [apparently], so impossible to arrange in a stable manner, that the assumption of the existence of such schemes, without a vestige of evidence, can hardly require refutation. No doubt, if we were really required to provide such a binary system of Suns with attendant planets, this would be best done by putting the planets so near to one Sun that they should not be sensibly affected by the other; and this is accordingly what has been proposed. For, as has been well said by Sir John Herschell, of the supposed planets in making this proposal, “unless closely nestled under the protecting wing of their immediate superior, the sweep of the other Sun in his perihelion passage round their own, might carry them off, or whirl them into orbits utterly inconsistent with the existence of their inhabitants.” “To assume the existence of the inhabitants, in spite of such dangers, and to provide against the dangers by placing them so close to one Sun as to be out of the reach of the other, though the whole distance of the two may not, and as we know in some cases does not, exceed the dimensions of our solar system, is showing them all the favour which is possible. But in making this provision, it is overlooked that it may not be possible to keep them in permanent orbits so near to the selected centre. Their Sun may be a vast sphere of luminous vapour, and the planets plunged into this atmosphere may, instead of describing regular orbits, plough their way in spiral paths through the nebulous abyss of its central nucleus.”[[102]]
In dealing with the Single Stars, which are, like the Sun, self-luminous, can they be proved, like him, to be definite dense masses? [His density is about that of water.] Or are they, or many of them, luminous masses in a far more diffused state, visually contracted to points through their immense distance? Some of those which we have the best means of examining are one-third, or even less, in mass, than he: and if Sirius, for instance, be in this diffused condition, though that would not of itself prevent his having planets, it would make him so unlike our Sun, as much to break the force of the presumption that he must have planets as he has. Again: As far back as our knowledge of our Sun extends, his has been a permanent condition of brightness: yet many of the fixed stars not only undergo changes, but periodical, and possibly progressive changes:—whence it may be inferred, perhaps, that they are not, generally, in the same permanent condition as our Sun. As to the evidence of their revolution on their axis, this has been inferred from their having periodical recurrences of fainter and brighter lustre; as if revolving orbs with one side darkened by spots. Of these, five only can be at present spoken of by astronomers[[103]] with precision. Nothing is more probable than that these periodical changes indicate the revolution of these stellar masses on their axis—a universal law, apparently, of all the large compact masses of the Universe, but by no means inferring their being, or having accompanying planets, inhabited. The Sun’s rotation is not shown, intelligibly, connected with its having near it the inhabited Earth. In the mean time, in so far as these stars are periodical, they are proved to be, not like, but unlike our Sun. The only real point of resemblance, then, is that of being self-luminous, in the highest degree ambiguous and inconclusive, and furnishing no argument entitled to be deemed one from analogy. Humboldt deems the force of analogy to tend even in the opposite direction. “After all,” he asks,[[104]] “is the assumption of satellites [attendant planets] to the fixed stars, so absolutely necessary? If we were to begin from the outer planets, Jupiter, &c., analogy might seem to require that all planets have satellites:—yet this is not so with Mars, Venus, Mercury;” to which may now be added the thirty Planetoids—making a much greater number of bodies that have not, than that have satellites. The assumption, then, that the fixed stars are of exactly the same nature as the Sun, was originally a bold guess; but there has not since been a vestige of any confirmatory fact:—no planet, nor anything fairly indicating the existence of one revolving round a fixed star, has ever hitherto been discerned;—and the subsequent discovery of nebulæ; binary systems; clusters of stars; periodical stars; of varied and accelerating periods of such stars,—all seem to point the other way: leaving, though possibly facts small in amount, the original assumption a mere guess, unsupported by all that three centuries of most diligent, and in other respects, successful research, have been able to bring to light. All the knowledge of times succeeding Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, (who might well believe the stars to be in every sense suns);—among other things, the disclosure of the history of our own planet, as one in which such grand changes have been constantly going on; the certainty that in by far the greatest part of the duration of its existence it has been tenanted by creatures entirely different from those which give an interest, and thence a persuasiveness, to the belief of inhabitants in worlds appended to each star; the impossibility of which appears, in the gravest consideration of transferring to other worlds such interests as belong to our race in this world;—all these considerations, it would seem, should have prevented that old and arbitrary conjecture from growing up, among a generation professing philosophical caution and scientific discipline, into a settled belief. Finally, it will be time enough to speculate about the inhabitants of the planets which belong to such systems, as soon as we shall have ascertained that there are such planets,—or that there is one such.[[105]]
In the Dialogue, written after the first edition of the “Essay” had appeared, the Essayist greatly strengthened the position for which he had contended in it, by an important passage containing the results of the eminent astronomer M. Struve’s recent examination of double stars, and the result of his elaborate and comprehensive comparison of the whole body of facts in stellar astronomy. Among the brighter stars, he arrives at the conclusion, that every FOURTH such star is physically double; and that a completed knowledge of double stars may prove every THIRD bright star to be physically double! And in the case of stars of inferior magnitude, that the number of insulated stars, though indeed greater than that of such compound systems, is nevertheless only three times, perhaps only twice as great. Thus the loose evidence of resemblance between our Sun and the fixed stars becomes feebler the more it is examined; and the assumption of stellar planetary systems appears, when closely scrutinised, to dwindle away to nothing.[[106]]
Now, to so much of the foregoing facts and speculations as are contained in the Essay, from which we have faithfully and carefully extracted the substance, in order that our readers may judge for themselves, Sir David Brewster answers, in effect, and generally in words, thus:—
The greatest and grandest truth in astronomy, is the motion of the solar system, advancing with all the planets and satellites in the heavens, at the rate of fifty-seven miles a second, round some distant invisible body, in an orbit of such inconceivable dimensions, that millions of years may be required for a single orbit. When we consider that this centre must be a sun with attendant planets like our own, revolving in like manner round our sun, [?] or round their common centre of gravity, the mind rejects, almost with indignation, the ignoble sentiment that Man is the only being performing this immeasurable journey—and that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, with their bright array of regal train-bearers, are but as colossal blocks of lifeless clay, encumbering the Earth as a drag, and mocking the creative majesty of Heaven. From the birth of man to the extinction of his race [!] the system to which he belongs will have described but an infinitesimal arc in that grand cosmical orbit in which it is destined to move. This affords a new argument for the plurality of worlds. Since every fixed star must have planets, the fact of our system revolving round a similar system of planets, furnishes a new argument from analogy; for as there is at least one inhabited planet in the one system, there must for the same reason be one in the other, and consequently as many as there are systems in the Universe.[[107]] Thus our system is not absolutely fixed in space, but is connected with the other systems in the Universe.
The Fixed Stars are suns of other systems, whose planets are invisible from their distance, as are ours from the nearest fixed star. Every single star shining by its own native light is the centre of a planetary system like our own—the lamp that lights, the stove that heats, and the power that guides in their orbits, inhabited worlds like our own. Many are double, with a system of planets round each, or the centre of gravity of both. No one can believe that two suns would be placed in the heavens, for no other purpose than to revolve round their common centre of gravity. It is “highly probable,” that our Sun is one of a binary system, and has at present an unseen partner; and we are “entitled to conclude” that all the other binary systems have at least an inhabited planet: wherever there is a self-luminous fixed or movable Sun there must be a planetary system; and wherever there is a planetary system, there must be life and intelligence.[[108]]
Apart from the assertion of his cardinal principle with which we are familiar, namely, that since our Sun has an inhabited planet, all others must; and also that all planets must be inhabited;—the argumentative value of these two chapters seems to lie in this that they annihilate one of the Essayist’s points of unlikeness between our Sun and other Fixed Stars, inasmuch as it, together with so many of them, is one of a binary system: wherefore what is true of it, is true of them, et vice versa. He bases this proposition, viz., that our Sun is one of a binary system, on “high probability,” from “the motion of our own system round a distant centre.”[[109]] The great truth of this motion, he says the Essayist “has completely misrepresented, foreseeing its influence on the mind as an argument for more worlds than one.”[[110]] What the Essayist had said on the subject, was this:[[111]] he speaks of “the attempt to show that the Sun, carrying with it the whole solar system, is in motion; and the further attempt to show the direction of that motion;—and again, the hypothesis that the Sun itself revolves round some distant object in space.” These minute inquiries and bold conjectures, he says, “cannot throw any light on the question, whether any part besides the earth be inhabited: any more than the investigation of the movements of the ocean and their laws can prove or disprove the existence of marine plants and animals. They do not, on that account, cease to be important and interesting objects of speculation, but they do not belong to our subject.” As to the Sun’s motion, we are bound to say, that the Astronomer Royal has recently declared that “every astronomer who has examined the matter carefully, has come to the conclusion of Sir William Herschell, that the whole solar system is moving towards a point in the constellation Hercules.”[[112]] Before quitting this part of the subject, we may state that the Essayist, in his second Preface,[[113]] points out the insecure character of astronomical calculations as to the amount of absolute light ascribed to some of the fixed stars. It has been estimated that the illuminating power of Alpha Centauri is nearly double that of the Sun, placed at that distance, which is two hundred thousand times as far off as is the Sun; but Sir John Herschell will not concur in more of the calculation than attributes to the star the emission of more light than our Sun. Surely the critical and precarious character of such calculations should not be lost sight of by candid inquirers, but incline them to scan somewhat closely any pretensions tinctured by astronomic dogmatism.
One immense step more, however,—and it is our last, brings to “the outskirts of creation,” as the Essayist calls it,—the Nebulæ: and here we find him once more confronted by his indefatigable and implacable opponent. We must therefore take our biggest and best mental telescope to behold these two Specks intellectual, so far off in infinitude, wrangling about a faint cloud vastly further off than themselves. Do you see how angry one of them looks, and how provokingly stolid the other? ’Tis all about the nature of that same cloud, or Nebula; and if we could only hear what they said, we might catch a chord or two of the music of the spheres! The Essayist is required, by his brother speck, to believe that the faintly-luminous patch at which they are gazing—a thousandth part of the visible breadth of our own Sun—contains in it more life than exists in as many such systems as the unassisted eye can see stars in the heavens on the clearest winter night:—a view of the greatness of creation so stupendous, that the astounded speck, the Essayist, asks for a moment’s time to consider the matter. “We are entitled to draw the conclusion,” says the other, “that these Nebulæ are clusters of stars, at such an immense distance from our own system, that each star of which they are composed is the sun or centre of a system of planets; and that these planets are inhabited—like our Earth, the seat of vegetable, animal, and intellectual life:”[[114]] that all the Nebulæ are resolvable into stars; and appear as Nebulæ only because they are more distant than the region in which they can appear as stars.[[115]] The conclusion, however, at which the Essayist arrives, after an elaborate examination of evidence, and especially of the latest discoveries in this dim and distant region by Sir John Herschell and the Earl of Rosse, is—that “Nebulæ are vast masses of incoherent or gaseous matter, of immense tenuity, diffused in forms more or less irregular, but all of them destitute of any regular system of solid moving bodies.... So far, then,” he concludes, “as these Nebulæ are concerned, the improbability of their being inhabited appears to amount to the highest point that can be conceived. We may, by the indulgence of fancy, people the summer clouds, or the beams of the aurora borealis, with living beings of the same kind of substance as those bright appearances themselves; and in doing so, we are not making any bolder assertion than when we stock the Nebulæ with inhabitants, and call them, in that sense, inhabited worlds.”[[116]] The Essayist contends that the argument for the vastness of the scheme of the Universe, suggested by the resolution of the Nebulæ, is found to be untenable:—inasmuch as the greatest astronomers now agree in believing Nebulæ to have distances of the same order as Fixed Stars. Their filmy appearance is a true indication of a highly attenuated substance: so attenuated as to destroy all probability of their being inhabited worlds. With this opinion as to the tenuity of Nebulæ agrees the absence of all observed motion among their parts; while the extraordinary spiral arrangement of many of them, prove that nevertheless many of them really have motion, and suggests modes of calculating their tenuity, and showing how extreme it is. “It is probable,” said Lord Rosse, in a paper which we ourselves heard him read not long ago, from the chair of the Royal Society, “that in the Nebular systems, motion exists. If we see a system with a distinct spiral arrangement, all analogy leads us to conclude that there has been motion; and that if there has been motion, that motion still continues.”... “Among the Nebulæ,” he says, “there are vast numbers, much too faint to be sketched or measured with any prospect of advantage: the most powerful instruments we possess showing in them nothing of an organised structure, but merely a confused mass of nebulosity, of varying brightness.”[[117]] The Essayist makes powerful use, moreover, of Sir John Herschell’s celebrated observation of the Magellanic Clouds, lying near the South Pole; exhibiting the coexistence, in a limited compass, and in indiscriminate position, of stars, clusters of stars, nebulæ regular and irregular, and nebular streaks and patches, things different not merely to us, but in themselves: nebulæ, side by side with stars and clusters of stars; nebulous matter resolvable, close to nebulous matter irresolvable;—the last and widest step by which the dimensions of the Universe have been expanded, in the notions of eager speculators, being checked by a completer knowledge, and a sager spirit of speculation.[[118]] In discussing such matters as these, he finely observes—“It is difficult to make men feel that so much ignorance can lie close to so much knowledge; to make them believe that they have been allowed to discover so much, and yet are not allowed to discover more.”[[119]]
In alluding to the Nebulæ, as subjects of our most powerful telescopic observation, the Essayist speaks in a tone of sarcasm concerning the “shining dots,”—the “lumps of light” which are rendered apparent amidst them: asking, what are these lumps? (1.) How large? (2.) At what distances? (3.) Of what structure? (4.) Of what use?—adding, he must be a bold man who undertakes to answer the question, that each is a Sun, with attendant systems of planets. Sir David, exceedingly irate, says, “We accept the challenge, and appeal to our readers:”—(1.) The size of the dot, or lump, is large enough to be a Sun. (2.) He cannot answer this, for want of knowing ‘the apparent distance between the centres of the dots.’ (3.) Like our Sun—‘It will consist of a luminous envelope, enclosing a dark nucleus.’ (4.) Of no conceivable use, but to give light to planets, or to the solid nuclei of which they consist. In his turn, he asks the Essayist—what is the size, distance, structure, and use of the dots, upon his hypothesis? The Essayist, he observes, is silent;[[120]] but in his Essay, he had said, distinctly enough, “Let us not wrangle about words. By all means let these dots be stars, if we know about what we are speaking: if a star mean, merely, a luminous dot in the sky. But that these stars shall resemble, in their nature, Stars of the First Magnitude, and that such stars shall resemble Our Sun, are surely very bold structures of assumption, to build on such a basis. Some nebulæ are resolvable into distinct points: but what would it amount to? That the substance of all nebulæ is not continuous; separate, and separable into distinct luminous elements:—nebulæ are, it would then seem, as it were of a curdled or granulated texture; they have run into lumps of light, or been formed originally of such lumps.” And then follow some very ingenious and refined speculations, into which we have not space to enter; and indeed we may be well content with what we have done, having travelled from a tolerable depth in the crust of our own little planet, past planet after planet, star after star, till we reached the nebulous “outskirts of creation;” accompanied by two Mentors of Infinitude,—whispering into our ear—one, that life, animal, intellectual, moral, was swarming around us at every step; the other, that that life ceased with our own Earth, as far as we were able to detect its existence, and giving us very solemn and mysterious reasons why it should be so.
Our Essayist, however, is not exhausted by the efforts he has made in his destructive career. If he be a “proud setter down” of cosmological systems, he determines, in turn, to be a “putter up:” and so presents us with his own Theory of the Solar System; and an explanation of the mode in which all appearances in the Universe beyond may be reconciled with it. “It may serve” he says, “to confirm his argument, if he give a description of the system which shall continue and connect his views of the constitution and peculiarities as to physical circumstances of each of the planets. It will help us in our speculation, if we can regard the planets as not only a collection, but a scheme;—if we can give not an Enunciation only, but a Theory. Now, such a Scheme, such a Theory, appears to offer itself to us.”[[121]] The scope of this scheme, or theory, is, as we some time ago saw, to make our earth, in point of astronomical fact and reality, the largest Planetary Body in the solar system; its domestic hearth; the only part of the frame revolving round the Sun which has become a “World.” We must, however, make short work of it.
The planets exterior to Mars—especially Jupiter and Saturn—appear spheres of water, or aqueous vapour. The Earth has a considerable atmosphere of air and of vapour; while on Venus or Mercury—so close to the sun—we see nothing of a gaseous or aqueous atmosphere; they and Mars differing little in density from the earth.
The Earth’s orbit, according to the Essayist’s theory, is the Temperate Zone of the Solar System, where only the play of hot and cold, moist and dry, is possible. Water and gases, clouds and vapours, form, mainly, the planets in the outer part of the solar system; while masses, such as result from the fusion of the most solid materials, lie nearer the Sun, and are found principally within the orbit of Jupiter. After a further exposition of his “theory,” the Essayist observes that it agrees with the nebular hypothesis, SO FAR as it applies to the Solar System; exactly, and very sternly, repudiating that hypothesis as it applies to the Universe in general.[[122]] “If we allow ourselves,” says he, “to speculate at all on physical grounds respecting the origin of the Earth, the hypothesis, that it has passed through a fluid and a gaseous condition, does not appear more extravagant than any other cosmogonical hypothesis: not even if we suppose that the other bodies of the Solar System have shared in the like changes. But, that all the stars and the nebulæ have gone, or are going through, a series of changes such as those by which the Solar System has been formed,—the nebular hypothesis, as it applies to the Universe in general, is precisely the doctrine which I here reject, giving my reasons.”[[123]]
The whole of the Chapter devoted to “the Theory of the Solar System,” is distinguished by remarkable ingenuity and originality. It is, however, that entitled the Argument from Design, which, independently of all connection with the speculations of the author as already laid before our readers, is worthiest of consideration, by all interested in Natural Theology. It touches many topics which must have occupied the profoundest thoughts of mankind, and touches them with the utmost caution and delicacy. In the 34th Section will be found a passage of singular boldness and imaginative eloquence; but liable, in our opinion, to serious misconception, and susceptible of misrepresentation—by those, at least, who are either unable, or indisposed, to weigh the entire chapter, and ascertain its real value and tendency. Some expressions have startled us not a little, when reflecting that they relate to the possible mode of action of Omniscient Omnipotence; and we shall be gratified by seeing them vindicated or explained in the next edition of his “Essay.”
Each of our speculators closes his book with a chapter devoted to “The Future.” The ideas of Sir David concerning the duration of the human race upon the earth (which Inspiration tells us is so awfully uncertain, and will be cut short suddenly—in a moment—in the twinkling of an eye), seem to be curiously definite; for we have seen that in his sixth chapter he states that “from the birth of man to the extinction of his race, the Solar System to which he belongs will have described but an infinitesimal arc in that grand cosmical orbit in which it is destined to move.” Without pausing to ask who told him this, let us intimate, that in his final chapter he says that the scientific truths on which depends the plurality of worlds are intimately associated with the future destiny of man: he turns to the future of the sidereal systems, as the hallowed spots in which is to be spent his immortal existence. Scripture has not spoken articulately of the future locality of the blest; but Reason has combined the scattered utterances of Inspiration, and with an almost oracular voice declared that the Maker of the worlds will place in these the beings of his choice. In what region, reason does not determine; but it is impossible for man, with the light of Revelation as his guide, to doubt for a moment that on the celestial spheres his future is to be spent in lofty inquiries; social intercourse; the renewal of domestic ties; and in the service of his Almighty benefactor. The Christian’s future, not defined in his creed, enwrapt in apocalyptic mysteries, evades his grasp: it is only Astronomy that opens the mysterious expanse of the Universe to his eye, and creates an intelligible paradise in the world to come: wherefore, says Sir David, we must impregnate the popular mind with the truths of natural science; teaching them in every school, and recommending, if not illustrating, them from every pulpit: fixing in the minds and associating in the affections, alike of age and youth, the great truths in the planetary and sidereal universe, on which the doctrine of More Worlds than One must respectively rest—the philosopher scanning with a new sense the sphere in which he is to study; and the Christian the temples in which he is to worship.—Such, in his own words, is Sir David Brewster’s final and authoritative exposition of the CREED of the philosopher, and the HOPE of the Christian:—of such a nature are to be the new heavens and the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness; and such, henceforth, as he has indicated, becomes the duty of the Christian teacher in the Family, in the School, in the Pulpit! So absolutely and irrefragably, it seems, are demonstrated the stupendous facts of astronomical science on which this Creed and this Faith depend: so unerring are our telescopes and other instruments, that he who does not receive this “Creed” is no philosopher, nor he who rejects the “Hope” a Christian. But, in the mean time, how inconceivably embarrassing to such a philosopher, and to such a Christian, is the possibility that many, or a few years hence, such immense improvements may be made in telescopes, or in other modes of acquiring a knowledge of the celestial structures, as to demonstrate to the sense, as well as reason, of us impatient and presumptuous tenants of the earth, that the planets are not inhabited! that the fixed stars are not suns, and have not a planet a piece—no, not even a solitary planet among them! Thus rendering our astounded and dismayed philosopher homeless and creedless, and the Christian helpless and hopeless:—the former one of those who professing themselves to be wise become fools;[[124]] the latter, likened unto a foolish man which built his house upon the sand.[[125]]
The “Future” of the Essayist is of a different kind, and adumbrated with becoming humility and diffidence. “I did not,” he says, “venture further than to intimate, that when we are taught, that as we have borne the image of the Earthy, we shall also bear the image of the Heavenly, we may find, in even natural science, reasons for opening our minds to the reception of the cheering and elevating announcement.”[[126]]
We have now placed before our readers the substance of the arguments for and against a plurality of worlds, so far as developed in the essays of Dr Whewell and Sir David Brewster. The former is a work so replete with subtle thought, bold speculation, and knowledge of almost every kind, used with extraordinary force and dexterity, as to challenge the patient and watchful attention of the most thoughtful reader; and that whether he be, or be not, versed in astronomical speculations. Great as are the power and resources of the author, we detect no trace of dogmatism or arrogance, but, on the contrary, a true spirit of fearless, but patient and candid, inquiry. It is a mighty problem of which he proposes a solution, and he does no more than propose it: in his Preface declaring that, to himself at least, his arguments “appear to be of no small philosophical force, though he is quite ready to weigh carefully and candidly any answer which may be offered to them.”
We feel grateful to the accomplished Essayist for the storehouse of authentic facts, and the novel combination of inferences from them, with which he has presented us; and we are not aware that he has given us just reason to regret confiding in his correctness or candour. And in travelling with him through his vast and chequered course, we feel that we have accompanied not only the philosopher and the divine, but the gentleman: one who, while manifestly knowing what is due to himself, as manifestly respects his intelligent reader. In several of his astronomical assumptions and inferences we may be unable to concur, particularly in respect of the nebulous stars. We may also well falter at expressing a decisive “Aye” or “No,” to the great question proposed by him for discussion, on scientific grounds, and independently of Scriptural Revelation; yet we acknowledge that he has sensibly shaken our opinion as to the validity of the reasons usually assigned for believing in a plurality of worlds. He remorselessly ties us down to Evidence, as he ought to do; and all the more rigorously, because the affirmative conclusion, at which many heedless persons are disposed to jump, is one which, if well founded, occasions religious difficulties of a grave character among the profoundest and perhaps even devoutest thinkers. To suppose that Omnipotence may not have peopled already, or contemplate a future peopling of the starry spheres with intelligent beings, of as different a kind and order as it is possible for our limited faculties to conceive, yet in some way involved in physical conditions, altogether inexplicable to us, would be the acme of impious presumption. When we look at Sirius, in his solitary splendour in the midnight sky, pouring forth possibly fifty times the light and heat of our sun, upon a prodigiously greater planetary system than our own, it is natural to conjecture whether, among many other possibilities, it may be the seat of intelligence, perhaps of a transcendent character. Here the imagination may disport itself as it pleases: yet we shall feel ourselves compelled—those who can think about the matter—to own, that our imaginations are, as it were, “cabined, cribbed, confined,” by the objects and associations to which we are at present restricted; and as the late eminent Prussian astronomer, Bessel, observed, those who imagine inhabitants in the moon and planets, “supposed them, in spite of all their protestations, as like to men, as one egg to another.” But when we proceed further, and insist on likening these supposed inhabitants to ourselves, intellectually and morally, then it is that both philosophy and religion concur in rebuking us, and enjoining a reverent diffidence. We have probably read as much on these subjects as many of our readers, and that with deep interest and attention; but we never met with so cogent a demonstration as is contained in this Essay, of the theological difficulties besetting the popular doctrine of a plurality of worlds. Had God vouchsafed to tell us that it was so, there would have been an end of the matter, and with it all difficulty would have disappeared, to one whose whole life, as the Christian’s ought to be, is one continued act of faith; but God has thought fit to preserve an awful silence concerning his dealings with other scenes of physical existence: while He has as distinctly revealed that of spiritual beings whose functions are vitally connected with man, as he exists upon the earth, the subject of a sublime economy, which, we are assured by Inspiration, that the angels desire to look into. The Christian implicitly believes that there IS a Heaven, where the presence of the adorable Deity constitutes happiness, to the most exalted of His ministers and servants, perfect and ineffable: happiness in which He has solemnly assured us that we may hereafter participate: for since the beginning of the world, men have not heard, nor perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen, O God, beside Thee, what He hath prepared for him that waiteth for Him.[[127]] This, our Maker has told us; he has not told us the other, nor anything about it: no, not when He visited the earth, unless we can dimly see such a significance in the words, “In my Father’s house (οἰκίᾳ) are many mansions (μοναι): if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place (τόπον) for you.” The word μονη is used twice in the New Testament, and in the same chapter:[[128]] in the verse already quoted, and in the 23d—“If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode (μονὴν) with him.” Here are the three words in the same verse, οἰκια, μονη, τοπος. In my Father’s house there are μοναὶ πολλαὶ, many places of abode. Heaven is the οικια, our common place, and it has many subdivisions, room enough for angels, as well as for the spirits of just men made perfect. It is possibly an allusion to the temple, God’s earthly house, which had many chambers in it. But who shall require us to believe that this μονη, was a star, or planet? It may be so, it may not; there can be no sin in a devout mind conjecturing on the subject; but the Essayist does not meddle with these solemn topics: confining himself to the physical reasons for conjecturing, with more or less probability, that the stars are habitations for human beings. We take our leave of him with a quotation from his Dialogue, couched in grave and dignified terms:—
“U. But your arguments are merely negative. You prove only that we do not know the planets to be inhabited.
“Z. If, when I have proved that point, men were to cease to talk as if they knew that the planets are inhabited, I should have produced a great effect.
“U. Your basis is too narrow for so vast a superstructure, as that all the rest of the universe, besides the earth, is uninhabited.
“Z. Perhaps; for my philosophical basis is only the earth—the only known habitation. But on this same narrow basis, the earth, you build up a superstructure that other bodies ARE inhabited. What I do is, to show that each part of your structure is void of tenacity, and cannot stand.
“It is probable that when we have reduced to their real value all the presumptions drawn from physical reasoning, for the opinion of planets and stars being either inhabited, or uninhabited, the face of these will be perceived to be so small, that the belief of all thoughtful persons on this subject will be determined by moral, metaphysical, and theological consideration.”[[129]]
“More Worlds than One” will not, we are constrained to say, in our opinion, add to the well-earned reputation of Sir David Brewster. It is a hasty and slight performance, entirely of a popular character; and disfigured throughout, not only by an overweening confidence and peremptoriness of assertion, but by tinges of personality and outbursts of heat that are indeed strange disturbing forces in a philosophical discussion. Dr Whewell’s Essay is a work requiring, in a worthy answer, great consideration; and we do not think that “More Worlds than One” evidences a tithe of such consideration. Nor does Sir David show a proper respect for his opponent; nor has he taken a proper measure of his formidable proportions as a logical and scientific disputant, one who should be answered in a cold and exact spirit; or it were much better to leave him alone. Sir David must forgive us if we quote a sentence or two from devout old John Wesley, a man who had several points of greatness in him:—
“Be not so positive, especially with regard to things which are neither easy, nor necessary to be determined. When I was young, I was sure of everything. In a few years, having been mistaken a thousand times, I was not half so sure of most things as before. At present, I am hardly sure of anything, but what God has revealed to me!... Upon the whole, an ingenious man may easily flourish on this head. How much more glorious is it for the great God to have created innumerable worlds than this little globe only!... Do you ask, then, what is This Spot to the great God? Why, as much as millions of systems. Great and LITTLE have place with regard to us; but before Him, they vanish away!”[[130]]
Fontenelle has much to answer for, if we may judge from what has been said concerning the extent and nature of the influence he has exercised on thoughtless minds. That flippant but brilliant trifler, Horace Walpole, for instance, declared that the reading Fontenelle had made him a sceptic! He maintained, on the supposition of a plurality of worlds, the impossibility of any revelation! That the reception of this opinion was sufficient, with him, to destroy the credibility of all revelation![[131]] This ground he has, if this report be true, the honour of occupying with Thomas Paine.
Let us, however, think and speak and act differently, remembering fearfully, how often the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. Is it, indeed, consistent with even mere worldly wisdom, on the ground of an assumption with regard to inhabited planets, to reject a belief founded on direct and positive proofs, such as is the belief in the truths of Natural and Revealed Religion?
“Newton,” says Dr Chalmers, in his discourse on the Modesty of True Science, “knew the boundary which hemmed him. He knew that he had not thrown one particle of light on the moral or religious history of these planetary regions. He had not ascertained what visits of communication they received from the God who upholds them. But he knew that the fact of a Real Visit to this Planet had such evidence to rest upon that it was not to be disposted by any aerial imagination.” Let this noble and devout spirit be in us: both Faith and Reason assuring us, that we stand, in Scriptural Truth, safe and immovable, like a wise man, which built his house upon a rock.[[132]]