[881] The mean distance of the sun from the earth, is, according to the latest results, about 92,400,000 miles.
[882] Saturnʼs volume is 686.7 that of the earth; it is the sixth planet in order of distance from the sun, and describes in 10,795,22 days, or twenty-nine years five months and fourteen days, an orbit whose semi-major axis is 872,137,000 miles. In our authorʼs time Saturn was supposed to be the planet the farthest from the sun. See page [135], note 264.
[883] “Immensurable” is a word La Bruyère tried to naturalise in French, but he did not succeed, yet it exists in English; “incommensurable” is to be found in both languages.
[884] According to Aragoʼs Leçons dʼAstronomie the star nearest the earth is still 22,800,000,000,000 leagues distant from it.
[885] No south polar star exists.
[886] Though the number of stars visible to the naked eye is not more than five thousand, thousands of millions of stars are in existence of which only about a hundred thousand have been observed.
[887] See page [479], note 875. The sun is not the centre of the universe, but of our planetary system.
[888] The atomic system of philosophy started by Leucippus, and adopted by Epicurus, Democritus, and many other philosophers, was that the universe, material and mental, consisted of minute, indivisible, and impenetrable atoms, which atoms were assumed to be the ultimate ground of nature, whilst necessity was supposed to be the cause of all existence.
[889] According to Descartesʼ Discours de la Méthode, animal spirits, which are so often mentioned in the philosophical and moral works of his time, “are like a very subtle mind, or rather like a very pure and bright flame, which is continually and in great abundance ascending from the heart to the brain, proceeds from thence through the nerves into the muscles, and produces motion in all the members of the body.”
[890] Pascal already in his Pensées (i. 6.) had called man “a thinking reed ... nobler than the universe, even if it were to crush him, because he knows he has to die.”