* * * * *
As I contemplated those panoramas of time and space, as the bygone ages passed slowly across my view, with their long trails of past glories, and as the races which peopled the worlds arose from the depths of space, shedding their winding-sheets and walking again in the flowery paths of life, all this prodigious secular past became present, and the millions of suns extinguished through the ages lighted up and shone again. The sky was bright with innumerable stars which our eyes had never seen, and the light of life shed its rays on celestial shores stretching away to infinity!
Suddenly, an immense black veil fell from the skies and hid the view, and I saw no more. In front of this veil, our planet flew along with its speed of 62 thousand miles an hour.
I found myself again in the ordinary condition of an Earth-dweller, who sees nothing beyond the horizon, and who imagines that, in time as in space, our mediocre humanity exists alone on the world.
III. THE WORLD TO COME
CHAPTER III
THE WORLD TO COME
The future is as real as the past. The world to come is in the mind’s eye as substantial as the world of long ago.
ONCE upon a time, in a solar system belonging to the constellation Andromeda, a planet a million times the size of our Earth bore on its surface a very advanced human race. The eyes of its inhabitants were constructed differently from ours and received radiations which are dark to us. Also, instead of five senses those human organisms possessed twelve. Their subtle and far-seeing industry had invented instruments of great space-penetrating power, and they had succeeded in determining at immense distances the volumes, masses, densities, physical and chemical constitutions, the movements, and the intrinsic nature of worlds at present quite indiscernible to us.
Amidst the glories of a sumptuous civilisation, those human beings, whose form did not at all resemble ours, thought, in spite of their progress in astronomy, that they were the centre, the final goal, and the justification for the existence of the universe. Some of their philosophers had indeed put forward the idea of a probability of inhabited worlds, but this idea, received with scepticism by most of the learned men and resolutely rejected by the theologians, was only accepted by the most liberal spirits with a reservation concerning the intellectual superiority of their race, considered as the necessary and normal type of all humanity. To them it seemed impossible that Nature should create anything other or better than what had been established in their own world; the zoology of their own planet set a standard, and living beings, they thought, could not be organised otherwise than as they knew them. To their minds, the area accessible to their observation included all the possible manifestations of the forces acting throughout the cosmos. It was only possible to have twelve senses, neither more nor less.
There came a time when some transcending genius discovered among the stars of the constellation which terrestrial astronomers call Centaurus the star which we call the Sun and around which we gravitate. He noticed round this star nine principal spheres circulating round it, and, by some secret sympathy, he directed his attraction chiefly to the globe which we now inhabit.