The word “infallibility” does not exist in the language of that people. Only one religion reigns in their hearts: natural religion, founded upon astronomy. Their faculties, more transcendent than ours, their senses, more numerous and more penetrating, their more powerful instruments of observation, have long ago placed them in communication with neighbouring worlds, and they have been able to utilise astral magnetism for purposes of transport from one world to another.
They have discovered the mystery of the union between force and matter, and know that there is a fundamental identity between them. In their own religions, they have never given God a name, and have never dared to play at a cult, knowing that such puerility and such pride would be unworthy of their merit. Their religion consists in a belief in immortality based on the knowledge of the intimate nature of being, in preparations for the future life, in efforts to make themselves better and more perfect by a continual study of creation, and a mutual love based on an enlightened sentiment of justice and equity.
They consider Reason as the highest prerogative of the human race, and would consider any doctrinaire mad who would forbid the exercise of that faculty for the sake of any religious system whatever.
From that world, nobody has ever yet perceived the Earth, and nobody suspects its existence.
Their senses are more perfect and more subtle. While our human race is less endowed than certain animals which can foresee a storm, the changes of the seasons, and earthquakes, they possess the sense of orientation, which we lack entirely, although on our own planet certain species like the dog, the cat, the pigeon, and the swallow possess it.
They seemed to me absolutely happy, though exceedingly sensitive. They spent the greatest part of their existence amid the most refined pleasures. Their world is a perpetual paradise ever born afresh. Perfumes arise from the bosom of splendid and varied flowers, and woods are balmy with intoxicating spices, and the light of day plays upon fairy-like scenery.
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When I contemplated this marvellous spectacle, I felt surrounded and penetrated, so to speak, with waves of sound which cradled my enraptured soul in the most delicious melody my ears had ever heard. The sensation of a celestial attraction seemed to carry me on a cloud and make me slowly descend towards an island on which a palace of flowers appeared. I felt a sort of electric shock and—I felt myself in a high ogival window of Venice. A gondola filled with musicians was returning from the Lido by the Grand Canal. Groups chanted harmonious choruses, the sky shone with stars, the moon was setting behind the domes, and Mars was descending towards the horizon.
The old clock sounded slowly the twelve strokes of midnight. “Well,” I exclaimed, “I have been sleeping. Here I have been for two hours at this window. Meanwhile the Moon has flown 4,850 miles in its orbit round the Earth, and the Earth has traversed 410,000 miles in its revolution round the Sun, drawn by that wonderful attraction which rules the world across the voids of space; perhaps it also rules our souls through the voids of time. “Thou beautiful starry sky,” I murmured, “who hast taught us so much already, wilt thou not soon solve for us the riddle of the great mystery? Thou art our hope, thou alone canst teach us, thou alone canst open before our eyes the panoramas of infinity and eternity.”