[2] Every one knows that the farther an object is, the smaller it appears. An object which is seen under an angle of one second, is at a distance of 206,265 times its own diameter, whatever it may be; because as there are 1,296,000 seconds in the circumference, the ratio between the circumference and its diameter being 314,159 × 2, it follows that this object is at a distance equal to 206,265 times its own diameter. As Capella sees the semi-diameter of the terrestrial orbit only under an angle 22 times smaller, its distance is 22 times greater. Capella is therefore at a distance of 4,484,000 times the radius of the terrestrial orbit. Future micrometrical measurements may modify these results concerning the parallax of this star, but they cannot change the principle upon which the conception of this work is grounded.
SECOND CONVERSATION
REFLUUM TEMPORIS
I
Quærens. Your revelations which were interrupted by the break of day, O Lumen, have left me hungering and thirsting to hear more of this wonderful mystery. As a child to whom one shows a delicious fruit longs to have a bite, and when he has tasted of it begs for more, so my curiosity is eager to have renewed enjoyment of these paradoxes of nature. May I venture to submit to you a few questions in relation to the subject, which have been suggested to me by the friends to whom I have communicated the substance of your revelations, and then may I ask you to continue the narrative of your impressions of the regions beyond this Earth?
Scientific truth, not fancy or romance.
Lumen. No, my friend, I cannot consent to such curiosity. However perfectly disposed your mind may be to accept my communications, I am convinced that all the details of my subject have not been equally apprehended by you, and are not in your eyes equally self-evident. My recital has been called mystical by those who have not quite understood that it is neither a romance nor a phantasy, but a scientific truth, a physical fact demonstrable and demonstrated, indisputable and as positive as the fall of an aerolite or the motion of a cannon-ball. The reason which prevents you and your friends from fully comprehending these facts is, that they took place beyond this Earth, in regions foreign to the sphere of your impressions, and inaccessible to your terrestrial senses. Naturally you do not comprehend them. (Pardon my frankness, but in the spiritual world one is frank; there, even thoughts are visible.) You only comprehend those things which you perceive. And as you persist in regarding your ideas of time and space as absolute, although they are only relative, and thence form a judgment on truths which are quite beyond your sphere, and which are imperceptible to your terrestrial organism and faculties, I should not do you a true service, my friend, in giving you fuller details of my ultra-terrestrial observations.
An inquiring mind.