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These views in connection with a simple star almost forgotten among the multitude of its sisters bring us face to face with the most formidable realities of the constitution of the universe. But they do not yet represent the most interesting aspect of our contemplation. It is a singular fact, quite unexpected by the ancient philosophers, fantastic and hardly conceivable to the seeker after truth who endeavours to comprehend its real value: It is that these suns of the infinite, far from being fixed as they seem to be on account of their immense distance, are travelling through space with tremendous speed. The star in question[2] runs, flies, hurls itself across the immensity with a speed of about 20 million miles per day!
There are no fixed stars.
Yes, 6,800 million miles per annum! And yet, in ten years, in fifty years, in one hundred years, this star will be barely displaced in the sky! The speed of a bullet or a shell fired by one of our most powerful guns being only 2,340 feet per second and that of this star being a million feet per second, we see that the speed of the star surpasses that of the shell in the proportion of 457 to 1! Can the most daring imagination picture such a flight!
In five days and some hours the star would cover the 92 million miles which separate us from the Sun, a distance which a gunshot would take seven years to cover. It is clear that such a speed is marvellous, yet it exists, and has been measured by delicate and precise operations. It cannot in any case be less than the figure we have indicated.
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This speed is a symbol, and it is as such that I wish to present it here. All the stars are endowed with such movements more or less rapid, and not only all the stars—each of them a sun and most of them the centres of planetary systems, dispensers of light, heat, and harmony, around which gravitate habitable earths, the present, past, or future abodes of various beings and terrestrial things—not only, I say, are all the stars thus driven through the void, but all the planets, all the satellites, all the worlds and systems, all creation.
The Earth swings round the Sun carried along with a speed of 1,600,000 miles per day, meanwhile rotating on its axis, animated by a dozen different sorts of movements, lighter and more mobile than a child’s balloon floating in the air, solicited by the attractions of various neighbouring bodies, a veritable plaything of cosmic forces which carry us along in an immense whirlpool. The Moon revolves round the Earth, constantly deranging us in our progress and subjecting us to perpetual undulations. The Sun carries us along with all its cortège towards the constellation Hercules, so that since its very origin our Earth has never passed through the same place twice, but describes in space, not closed ellipses, but spirals which roll on without end. The suns adjoining ours move with their systems in various directions. The constellations are dislocated from one century to another, each star being animated by a proper movement which produces a constant modification of the figures in the sky. In addition to all this, our whole sidereal system is carried along in space by a joint movement. And thus everything moves, everything circulates, everything rushes, with breathless speed, towards a goal which is unknown and which is never reached.
This is not a romance, a dream of pure contemplation, an outside view of ourselves: it is our own history, fatal and inevitable. Since an hour ago, every one of us, reader or writer, rich or poor, wise or ignorant, infant or greybeard, whether we are active or asleep—since an hour ago every one of us has described in the sky an invisible track of more than 60,000 miles, for our planet traces out 580 million miles per annum merely by its revolution round the Sun, and a centenarian lives to mark out a distance of 58,000 million miles. Now, it is found that these speeds are the very condition of the stability of the universe: the heavenly bodies, the Earth, planets, satellites, suns, stellar systems, star clusters, galaxies, and remote universes, are mutually sustained by the equilibrium of their attractions. They are all suspended in the void and maintain themselves in their ideal orbits simply because they turn quickly enough to create a centrifugal force equal and opposite to the attraction exerted upon them, so that they remain in an unstable but perpetual equilibrium.
Our Sun carries us along towards the constellation of Hercules: this has been known for a hundred years; but we know now that the constellation of Hercules forms part of our sidereal universe and that that universe is travelling in a certain direction. We therefore only perceive relative movements. Whither are we going? Vain question. We are going—into infinite space.