Dreams of an astronomer

by Camille Flammarion

The orbit of the Earth round the Sun being 92 million miles, and that of Saturn 888 million, there are 796 million miles between the two orbits. Light traverses this gap in 70 minutes. My fancy flew this distance with the speed of light, and I was aware of these 2,240 seconds required to cover the distance at the rate of 186,000 miles a second. Yet I am sure that I did not spend all that time in traversing the distance to Saturn, nor even the lesser time corresponding to the distance between Mars and the ringed planet, for the first stroke of ten had sounded on the old clock when I forgot Mars and fixed my attention on Saturn, and I arrived at my destination before the hour had finished striking.

I alighted on the tenth satellite, whence one can easily appreciate the grandeur of the Saturnian system. The enormous planet of, a diameter more than 9½ times that of our globe, with a surface 90 times that of the Earth, and a bulk 745 times that of our floating home, is surrounded by gigantic rings measuring 178,000 miles across. Girt by this multiple ring, the planet presides over a retinue of ten satellites revolving round it in a system having a radius of 8 million miles, a system which in itself constitutes a universe larger than that known to the ancients. Until the age of truth inaugurated by the conquests of modern astronomy, nobody on our planet, no poet, no philosopher, no thinker, had guessed the real grandeur of the proportions on which the universe is constructed. How small our Earth appears seen from the Saturnian system! It is barely seen, once in six months, as a small luminous dot near the sun, shining for a few minutes in the evening after sunset, or a few minutes in the morning before sunrise.

(4) TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED MILLION MILES FROM THE SUN

In the depths of space, at a distance from the sun more than 30 times our own, under a glow of light and heat 900 times feebler than that which we enjoy, there roams the world of Neptune, among conditions of life quite different from those which obtain on Earth. Those short-sighted naturalists who affirmed even quite recently, with professorial emphasis, that the abysses of the ocean are condemned to an eternal sterility, because the conditions of light and pressure are absolutely different from the conditions near the surface, have received from Nature herself the rudest contradiction which can be inflicted upon the pedantic science of pretenders to infallibility. This contradiction, however direct and absolute, has not discouraged them all, for there are still some who declare that life can only exist on worlds having conditions identical with ours. Always the reasonings of the fish who affirms—quite sincerely—that it is impossible to live outside water! Let us leave these teachers to their illusions and continue our ascent. Astronomy must be the great teacher of philosophy.

The distant world of Neptune, on which every year equals nearly 165 of our years, and where ten years represent the whole historical interval which separates us from the Romans (we must remember than 1,650 years ago the Romans reigned at Paris and in Gaul, and neither France nor any of the present-day nations were thought of), this neighbouring world, I say, is well fitted to teach us to enlarge our narrow and personal conceptions, especially as regards the measurement of time. The calendar of that planet is just as exact, just as precise, as ours, and a Neptunian year is not longer to those slow and reflective beings who inhabit the place than is a terrestrial year to those hurrying and agitated persons who swarm in our turbulent cities. Yet a Neptunian adolescent of 20 has really lived nearly 3,300 terrestrial years, without knowing that such a time is called “very long” by the inhabitants of our planet, whom such a life would carry back to the epoch of Homer and ancient Greece.

It would be impossible even with the most careful examination to discover any point of comparison between the beings which live on the Neptunian world and those which we know on Earth. None of our classifications, whether of the animal kingdom, vast and diversified though it be, or of the vegetable kingdom, highly complex in itself, could be applied to them. It is another world, absolutely different from this one. Spectrum analysis indeed establishes the fact that its chemical composition is quite other than that of our terrestrial home. The organisms which live on the surface of the different planets are the resultant of the forces acting upon them. The origin of the human form lies in the ancestral forms of the long animal series whence it has gradually emerged, and of which it is the highest perfection, and these primitive animal forms go back in an unbroken chain to the rudimentary organisms unprovided with the senses which are the glory of man, organisms which inaugurated the manifestations of life, but which can hardly be described as living. They are neither animals nor plants. They appear to be organised substances, already distinct from the inorganic kingdom, but as yet only simple chemical combinations endowed with a sort of diffused vitality, an elementary protoplasm, the germ of all developments of terrestrial life, both animal and vegetable. The first organised beings were formed in the bosom of the warm waters of the oceans which covered the entire surface of the earth at the time when the geological periods began. Their intrinsic nature, their properties, their faculties, were already the resultant of the chemical composition of those waters, of the density and temperature of the surrounding medium; the variation of this medium and of the condition of existence have brought about corresponding changes in the development of this genealogical tree, and, according to the habitat of the organisms, whether in the deep, middle, or upper regions of the waters, on the sea-shore, in the low-lying plains, on sunny slopes or mountain-tops, the genealogical tree gave rise to more and more diversified organisms. Present-day terrestrial humanity is the last flower, the last fruit of this tree. But all this life is terrestrial from root to summit, and on every planet the tree is different. Life is Neptunian on Neptune, Uranian on Uranus, Saturnian on Saturn, Sirian on the system of Sirius, Arcturian on that of Arcturus, appropriate to every medium, or rather, more strictly speaking, produced and developed by each world according to its physical state and in harmony with that primeval law which all nature obeys: the law of progress.

This immense symphony of life, adapted to every world according to conditions of space and time, develops like a universal choir, the parts of which are separated from each other by deserts of space and by eternities of time. It appears to us discontinuous because we can only hear one note at a time. But in reality there is no absolute separation either in space or time. Jupiter will not be inhabited by thinking beings for millions of years to come; from the point of view of the Absolute, the interval is not greater than that which separates yesterday from to-day.

All this happens and accomplishes itself naturally, and as if God did not exist. And indeed the being whom the inhabitants of the Earth have hitherto defined as God does not exist. The Buddha of the Chinese, the Osiris of the Egyptians, the Jehovah of the Hebrews, the Ormuzd and Ahriman of the Persians, the Teutates of the Gauls, the Jupiter of the Greeks, “God the Father” or “God the Son” of the Christians, or the great Allah of the Mussulman, are human conceptions, personifications invented by man in which he has embodied not only his highest aspirations and his sublimest virtues, but also his grossest prevarications and ugliest vices.

Man has conceived as God in his own likeness. It is in the name of this pretended God that monarchs and pontiffs have in all the ages and under cover of all religions bound humanity in a slavery from which it has not yet freed itself. It is in the name of this God who “protects Germany,” “protects England,” “protects France,” “protects Italy,” “protects Russia,” “protects Turkey,” protects all the divisions and all the barbarities, that even in our own day the so-called civilised people of our planet have been armed in war against each other and, like mad dogs, have hurled themselves upon one another in a conflict over which falsehood and hypocrisy, seated on the steps of the thrones, figure a “God of Armies” as presiding, a God who blesses the daggers and plunges his hands in the smoking blood of victims to mark the foreheads of kings. It is to this God that altars are raised and Te Deums are chanted. It is in the names of the Gods of Olympus that the Greeks condemned Socrates to drink the hemlock; it is in the name of Jehovah that the high-priests and Pharisees crucified Jesus. It is in the name of Jesus, himself become God, that fanaticism ignominiously condemned to the stake men like Giordano Bruno, Vanini, Étienne Dolet, John Huss, Savonarola, and so many other heroic victims; that the Inquisition ordered Galileo to belie his conscience; that thousands and thousands of unfortunates accused of witchcraft were burnt alive in popular ceremonies; that Ravaillac stabbed Henry the Fourth. It was with the express benediction of Pope Gregory the Thirteenth that the butchery of St. Bartholomew drenched Paris in blood and the free thinkers of the reformation were chased out of France; it is for the extermination of supposed heresies that many thousands of brave people have been burnt alive; it was with cross in hand that the peaceful natives of America were savagely massacred by the Spaniards; it was in the names of the gods worshipped in Rome that the Christian martyrs suffered the most awful tortures; it was in the name of the Christian God that the fanatics, led by Bishop St. Cyril, stoned the beautiful and learned Hypatia, and that in later times the Bishop of Beauvais led the virgin of Domremy to the stake; it was in the name of the Bible that the kings of God’s “chosen people” savagely exterminated their neighbours; it was in the name of Allah that the standards of Mahomet covered Europe with armies of assassins and that even now millions of fanatics are ready to rise against the Europeans on the cry of a “Holy War,” that Mahomet the Second painted the walls of St. Sophia with the blood of his steed, that Genghis Khan and Tamerlane marked their paths of conquest with pyramids of severed heads; it is to the glory of these imaginary deities that even now so many and useless souls condemn themselves to strange penances in the convents, that the Russian stropzi mutilate themselves, that the howling and dancing Dervishes writhe in mad contortions, that certain sects kill their babies and drink their blood. Religious wars have been the most horrible and odious of all, and the most insensate. People have killed each other for the sake of a word or its interpretation, for the sake of an adjective, for the “consubstantiality” of the Father and the Son of the Trinity, for “homoousios” against “homoiousios,” for a thousand other crotchets placed above the most elementary reason and proclaimed articles of faith in the name of a God! This symbol of the oppressions of peoples, of murder and robbery, this infamous being, does not exist, and has never existed.

In making a god in their likeness, as miserable as themselves, men resemble monkeys, who, raising themselves to the idea of God, would figure him as a Grand Ape, dogs who would make him a Grand Dog, fleas who would represent him in the shape of a Grand Flea. But it does not follow that, because this inferior god does not exist, therefore the universe goes on without thought, without a destiny, and without laws. If the believers of all religions are in error, those who deny the existence of any intellectual principle in the world are equally mistaken. Yes, the evolution of nature takes place without the acts of an anthropomorphic deity, without malice and without miracles. The only name which would fit God would be the Unknowable. God remains hidden by the very perfection of nature’s mechanism. In a healthy body we do not feel the passage of the blood through the heart, nor the circulation of blood in the brain, nor that of the air in the lungs, nor the liver, nor the kidneys, nor the stomach, nor the bowels. The attention is not directed to those organs unless they work badly. The world is so arranged that they appear to work by themselves, and that is its divine quality. Everything functions regularly by means of a perfect construction, the gearing of which is invisible and silent, but which we can only judge by the infinitesimal fraction of which we form a part, and the author of which is a transcendental thought, impenetrable to mankind. Force governs matter; mens agitat molem; but Thought guides nature.