—“Emanating from the middle planet of the system, why may it not have extended to them all, ... to the Planetary Races in the Past, and to the Planetary Races in the Future?... But to bring our argument more within the reach of an ordinary understanding”—he supposes our earth split into two parts! the old world and the new (as Biela’s comet is supposed to have been divided in 1846), at the beginning of the Christian era![[56]]—“would not both fragments have shared in the beneficence of the Cross—the penitent on the shores of the Mississippi, as richly as the pilgrim on the banks of the Jordan?... Should this view prove unsatisfactory to the anxious inquirer, we may suggest another sentiment, even though we ourselves may not admit it into our creed.... May not the Divine Nature, which can neither suffer, nor die, and which, in our planet, once only clothed itself in humanity, resume elsewhere a physical form, and expiate the guilt of unnumbered worlds?”[[57]]
We repeat, that we abstain from offering any of the stern strictures which these passages almost extort from us.
He proceeds to declare himself incompetent to comprehend the Difficulty “put in a form so unintelligible” by the Essayist—that of a kind of existence, similar to that of men, in respect of their intellectual, moral, and spiritual character, and its progressive development, existing in any region occupied by other beings than man. He denies that Progression has been the character of the history of man,[[58]] but rather frequent and vast retrogressions ever since the Fall; and asks “which of these ever-changing conditions of humanity is the unique condition of the Essayist—incapable of repetition in the scheme of the Universe?”[[59]] Why may there not be an intermediate race between that of man and the angelic beings of Scripture, where human reason shall pass into the highest form of created mind, and human affections into their noblest development?—
“Why may not the intelligence of the spheres be ordained for the study of regions and objects unstudied and unknown on earth? Why may not labour have a better commission than to earn its bread by the sweat of its brow? Why may it not pluck its loaf from the bread-fruit tree, or gather its manna from the ground, or draw its wine from the bleeding vessels of the vine, or inhale its anodyne breath from the paradise gas of its atmosphere?”[[60]]
And Sir David thus concludes the chapter:—
“The difficulties we have been considering, in so far as they are of a religious character, have been very unwisely introduced into the question of a Plurality of Worlds. We are not entitled to remonstrate with the sceptic, but we venture to doubt the soundness of that philosopher’s judgment who thinks that the truths of natural religion are affected by a belief in planetary races, and the reality of that Christian’s faith who considers it to be endangered by a belief that there are other Worlds than his own.”
This last paragraph induces us to go so far as to doubt whether Sir David Brewster has addressed his understanding deliberately, to the subject to which so large a portion of the most elaborate reasonings of Dr Whewell have been directed.
Sir David does not quarrel with the Essayist’s account of the constitution of man; and we must now see how he deals with the Essayist’s arguments drawn from Geology.
Sir David “is not disposed to grudge the geologist even periods so marvellous” as “millions of years required for the formation of strata, provided they be considered as merely hypothetical;” and admits that “our seas and continents have nearly the same locality, and cover nearly the same area, as they did at the creation of Adam;” but demurs to the conclusion that the earth was prepared for man by causes operating so gradually as the diurnal change going on around us. “Why may not the Almighty have deposited the earth’s strata, during the whole period of its formation, by a rapid precipitation of their atoms from the waters which suspended them, so as to reduce the period of the earth’s formation to little more than the united generations of the different orders of plants and animals constituting its organic remains? Why not still further shorten the period, by supposing that plants and animals, requiring, in our day, a century for their development, may in primitive times have shot up in rank luxuriance, and been ready, in a few days! or months! or years, for the great purpose of exhibiting, by their geological distribution, the progressive formation of the earth?”[[61]]
These questions, of which a myriad similar ones might be asked by any one, we leave to our geological readers; and hasten to inform them, that in involuntary homage to the powerful reasonings of his opponent, Sir David Brewster is fain to question the “inference that man did not exist during the period of the earth’s formation;”[[62]] and to suggest that “there may have existed intellectual races in present unexplored continental localities, or the immense regions of the earth now under water!”—“The future of geology may be pregnant with startling discoveries of the remains of intellectual races, even beneath the primitive Azoic[[63]] formations of the earth!... Who can tell what sleeps beyond? Another creation may be beneath! more glorious creatures may be entombed there! the mortal coils of beings more lovely, more pure, more divine than man, may yet read to us the unexpected lesson that we have not been the first, and may not be the last of the intellectual race!”[[64]] Is he who can entertain and publish conjectures like these, entitled to stigmatise so severely those of other speculators—as “inconceivable absurdities, which no sane mind can cherish—suppositions too ridiculous even for a writer of romance!” This wild license given to the fancy may not be amiss in a poet, whose privilege it is that his “eye in a fine phrenzy rolling” may “give to airy nothing a local habitation, and a name:”—but when set in the scale against the solemnly magnificent array of facts in the earth’s history established by Geology, may be summarily discarded by sober and grave inquirers.