On the other hand, of necessity we are precluded from extending our enquiry to the case of disembodied intelligences, if such be conceived possible. All created existences must be conditioned, but if we have no knowledge of what those conditions may be, or means for attaining such knowledge, we cannot discuss them. Nothing can be affirmed, nothing denied, concerning the possibility of intelligences existing on the Moon or even in the Sun if we are unable to ascertain under what limitations those particular intelligences subsist. Gnomes, sylphs, elves, and fairies, and all similar conceptions, escape the possibility of discussion by our ignorance of their properties. As nothing can be asserted of them they remain beyond investigation, as they are beyond sight and touch.
The only beings, then, the presence of which would justify us in regarding another world as “inhabited” are such as would justify us in applying that term to a part of our own world. They must possess intelligence and consciousness on the one hand; on the other, they must likewise have corporeal form. True, the form might be imagined as different from that we possess; but, as with ourselves, the intelligent spirit must be lodged in and expressed by a living material body. Our enquiry is thus rendered a physical one; it is the necessities of the living body that must guide us in it; a world unsuited for living organisms is not, in the sense of this enquiry, a “habitable” world.
The discussion, as it was carried on sixty years ago by Dr. Whewell and Sir David Brewster, was essentially a metaphysical, almost a theological one, and it was chiefly considered in its supposed relationship to certain religious conceptions. It was urged that it was derogatory to the wisdom and goodness of the Creator to suppose that He would have created so many great and glorious orbs without having a definite purpose in so doing, and that the only purpose for which a world could be made was that it might be inhabited. So, again, when Dr. A. R. Wallace revived the discussion in 1903, he clearly had a theological purpose in his opening paper, though he was taking the opposite view from that held by Brewster half a century earlier.
For myself, if there be any theological significance attaching to the solving of this problem, I do not know what it is. If we decide that there are very many inhabited worlds, or that there are few, or that there is but one—our own—I fail to see how it should modify our religious beliefs. For example: explorers have made their way across the Antarctic continent to the South Pole but have found no “inhabitant” there. Has this fact any theological bearing? or if, on the contrary, a race of men had been discovered there, what change would it have made in the theological position of anyone? And if this be so with regard to a new continent on this earth, why should it be different with regard to the continents of another planet?
The problem therefore seems not to be theological or metaphysical, but purely physical. We have simply to ask with regard to each heavenly body which we pass in review: “Are its physical conditions, so far as we can ascertain them, such as would render the maintenance of life possible upon it?” The question is not at all as to how life is generated on a world, but as to whether, if once in action on a particular world, its activities could be carried on.
CHAPTER II
THE LIVING ORGANISM
A world for habitation, then, is a world whereon living organisms can exist that are comparable in intelligence with men. But “men” presuppose the existence of living organisms of inferior grades. Therefore a world for habitation must first of all be one upon which it is possible for living organisms, as such, to exist.