Dreams of an astronomer

by Camille Flammarion

And the Earth? The Earth is a room in the solar mansion—a small dwelling, miserably small.

Thus in the general economy of nature our planet has no more importance than a poor little room in a considerable house. That house in turn is lost in the middle of an immense town. And that immense town, which to us represents the entire universe, is in fact nothing but a universe beyond which in every direction there exist other universes.

How far is this reality from human pretensions, both ancient and modern, which imagine that our world represents the infinite, that God stops the Sun to illuminate one of Joshua’s battles—a miracle renewed, says history, for Charlemagne and Charles V—and that the great Sower of stars took upon himself a human shape to dwell among us!

What simplicity among sincere theologians! What imposture among the chiefs of states who still dare to invest themselves with titles of divine mandatories to enslave the people! Are not the real atheists those either ignorant or insincere people who make the sublimest idea the accomplice of all their mediocrities, and are not the real Deists the independent searchers whose sole ambition is laboriously to look for the causes and gradually to work up to truth?

With what strange religious systems has humanity up to now enveloped its barren imagination! The Israelite who believes he is agreeable to God in practising circumcision or in buying a new knife to be sure that it has not touched pig’s fat; the Christian who imagines he can make God descend upon a table and who is told by his preachers that prayers and fasts have an influence upon the weather and agriculture; the Mahommedan who sees the gate of Mahomet’s paradise opening before him as he stabs a missionary; the fanatic who casts himself under the wheels of the Juggernaut; the Buddhist who remains fascinated in the beatific contemplation of his navel, or works a prayer-mill for the remission of sins—these surely form the most ridiculous and infantile ideas of the unknown and unknowable Being.

All these littlenesses are related to the primitive illusion of the smallness of the universe, which was considered as a sort of screen studded with golden nails and enclosing the earth in its centre. Certainly if astronomy had had no other result than to enlarge our general conceptions and show us the relativity of terrestrial things in the bosom of the absolute, to deliver us from this ancient slavery of thought and make us free citizens of the infinite, it would deserve our veneration and our gratitude, for without it we should still be incapable of forming true conceptions.

Some conservatives will perhaps object that there are even in French observatories astronomers who go to Communion, tell their beads, and carry candles in the churches, and that the same mentality can be found in certain English, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, and other observatories. Yes, without a doubt, the fact is undeniable. Such a psychological phenomenon has two explanations. Either these hybrid beings are sincere or they are not. If they are believers, they are illogical and in perpetual conflict with their scientific reason, and we must not be astonished at the strange arrangement which their conscience is capable of constructing between two conceptions of nature which directly contradict each other. While incapable of explanation, such sincerity can be respected, like that of the innocent infant who believes all one tells him.

In the second, case it is hypocrisy, falsehood, rascality, personal interest; and this sort of conscience is suitably judged by every honest man.

These anomalies and limitations have not hindered astronomy from bringing light and independence to spirits who can understand it and who have the courage and the freedom of their opinions.

But in telling of my Venetian dream I did not want to indulge in irritating polemics, and my only object was to show to some open eyes the horizons of astronomical philosophy, and I hasten to return to my sidereal voyage and to describe its last phase. I shall, however, add another word concerning our tiny planet, remarking that its inhabitants are as a rule so unintelligent and so incapable of judgment that they imagine that all have an equal intellectual and moral value and that in the most civilised country of this globe the vote of an imbecile or a drunkard has the same weight as that of an educated thinker, so that the legislative chamber entrusted with the fate of the country is an incoherent mass of persons incompetent to deal with any of the questions likely to arise. Half of them are ignorant and are preoccupied with their private concerns. In this system of pretended equality, Judas is the same as Jesus, Philip II equals Marcus Aurelius. Torquemada is the same as St. Vincent de Paul, Fouquier-Tinville the same as Mirabeau, and the wine-merchant at the corner is the equal of Archimedes and Pythagoras. There is no reasoning. Our little planet is as insignificant morally as it is physically. Among terrestrial humanity only one man in a hundred is intelligent. Humanity is practically no older than four or five years as regards intelligence compared with what it ought to be normally.