Now the student contemplates an abyss swarming with orbs each out weighing millions of our earth. Then they read their nativities in the planets and felt how great must be the state overwatched by such resplendent servitors. Now "They seek communion with the stars that they may know How petty is this ball on which they come and go."
Then the hugest view of the extent of the universal sphere was that an iron mass would require nine days and nights to plunge from its Olympian height to its Tartarean depth. Now we are told by the masters of science that there are stars so distant that it would take their light, travelling at a rate of nearly twelve million miles a minute, thirty million years to reach us. The telescope has multiplied the size of the creation by hundreds of millions, and the grandest conception of the stellar universe possible to the most capacious human mind probably bears no larger proportion to the fact than an orrery does to the solar system. Our earth is a hundred million miles from the sun, whose diameter is so monstrous that a hundred such orbs strung in a straight line would occupy the whole distance. The sun, with all his attendant planets and moons, is sweeping around his own centre supposed by some to be Alcyone at the rate of four hundred thousand miles a day; and it will take him eighteen million years to complete one revolution. Our firmamental cluster contains, it has been calculated, in round numbers about twenty million stars. There are many thousands of such nebula visible, some of them capable of packing away in their awful bosoms hundreds of thousands of our galaxies. Measure off the abysmal space into seven hundred thousand stages each a hundred million miles wide, and you reach the nearest fixed stars, for instance, the constellation of the Lyre. Multiply that inconceivable distance by hundreds of thousands, and still you will discern enormous sand banks of stars obscurely glittering on the farthest verge of telescopic vision. And even all this is but a little corner of the whole.
Coleridge once said, "To some infinitely superior Being, the whole universe may be as one plain, the distance between planet and planet being only as the pores in a grain of sand, and the spaces between system and system no greater than the intervals between one grain and the grain adjacent." One of the vastest thoughts yet conceived by any mortal mind is that of turning the universe from a mechanical to a chemical problem, as illustrated by Prof. Lovering.29 Assuming the acknowledged truths in physics, that the ultimate particles of matter never actually touch each other, and that water in evaporating expands into eighteen hundred times its previous volume, he demonstrates that the porosity of our solar system is no greater than that of steam. "The porosity of granite or gold may be equal to that of steam,
29 Cambridge Miscellany, 1842.
the greater density being a stronger energy in the central forces." And the conclusion is scientifically reached that "the vast interval between the sun and Herschel is an enormous pore, while the invisible distance that separates the most closely nestled atoms is a planetary space, a stupendous gulf when compared with the little spheres between which it flows." Thus we may think of the entire universe as a living organism, like a ripening orange, its component atoms worlds, the sidereal movements its vital circulation.
Surely, when a man looks up from his familiar fields and household roof to such incommensurable objects as scientific imagination reveals in the sparkling sword handle of Perseus and the hazy girdle of Andromeda, overpowering humility will fill his breast, an unutterable solemnity will "fall on him as from the very presence chamber of the Highest." And will he not, when he contemplates the dust like shoals of stars, the shining films of firmaments, that retreat and hover through all the boundless heights, the Nubecula nebula, looking like a bunch of ribbons disposed in a true love's knot, that most awful nebula whirled into the shape and bearing the name of the Dumb Bell, the Crab nebula, hanging over the infinitely remote space, a sprawling terror, every point holding millions of worlds, thinking of these all transcendent wonders, and then remembering his own inexpressible littleness, how that the visible existence of his whole race does not occupy a single tick of the great Sidereal Clock, will he not sink under helpless misgivings, will he not utterly despair of immortal notice and support from the King of all this? In a word, how does the solemn greatness of man, the supposed eternal destiny of man, stand affected by the modern knowledge of the vastness of creation? Regarding the immensities receding over him in unfathomable abysses bursting with dust heaps of suns, must not man be dwarfed into unmitigated contempt, his life and character rendered absolutely insignificant, the utmost span of his fortunes seeming but as the hum and glitter of an ephemeron in a moment's sunshine? Doubtless many a one has at times felt the stupendous truths of astronomy thus palsying him with a crushing sense of his own nothingness and burying him in fatalistic despair. Standing at night, alone, beneath the august dome studded from of old with its ever blazing lights, he gazes up and sees the innumerable armies of heaven marshalled forth above him in the order and silence of their primeval pomp. Peacefully and forever they shine there. In nebula separated from nebula by trillions of leagues, plane beyond plane, they stretch and glitter to the feet of God. Falling on his knees, he clasps his hands in speechless adoration, but feels, with an intolerable ache of the heart, that in this infinitude such an one as he can be of no consequence whatever. He waits passively for the resistless round of fate to bear him away, ah, whither? "Conscious that he dwells but as an atom of dust on the outskirts of a galaxy of inconceivable glory" moving through eternity in the arms of law, he becomes, in his own estimation, an insensible dot lost in the uncontainable wilderness of firmamental systems. But this conclusion of despair is a mistake as sophistical as it is injurious, as baseless in reality as it is natural in seeming. Its antidote and corrective are found in a more penetrative thought and juster understanding of the subject, which will preserve the greatness and the immortal destiny of man unharmed despite the frowning vastitudes of creation. This will appear from fairly weighing the following considerations.
In the first place, the immensity of the material universe is an element entirely foreign to the problem of human fate. When seeking to solve the question of human destiny, we are to study the facts and prophecies of human nature, and to conclude accordingly. It is a perversion of reason to bring from far an induction of nebular magnitudes to crush with their brute weight the plain indications of the spirit of humanity. What though the number of telescopic worlds were raised to the ten thousandth power, and each orb were as large as all of them combined would now be? what difference would that make in the facts of human nature and destiny? It is from the experience going on in man's breast, and not from the firmaments rolling above his head, that his importance and his final cause are to be inferred. The human mind, heart, and conscience, thought, love, faith, and piety, remain the same in their intrinsic rank and capacities whether the universe be as small as it appeared to the eyes of Abraham or as large as it seems in the cosmical theory of Humboldt. Thus the spiritual position of man really remains precisely what it was before the telescope smote the veils of distance and bared the outer courts of being.
Secondly, if we do bring in the irrelevant realms of science to the examination of our princely pretensions, it is but fair to look in both directions. And then what we lose above we gain below. The revelations of the microscope balance those of the telescope. The animalcula magnify man as much as the nebulsa belittle him. We cannot help believing that He who frames and provides for those infinitesimal animals quadrillions of whom might inhabit a drop of water or a leaf and have ample room and verge enough, and whose vital and muscular organization is as complicated and perfect as that of an elephant, will much more take care of man, no matter how numerous the constellations are. Let us see how far scientific vision can look beneath ourselves as the question is answered by a few well known facts. In each drop of human blood there are three million vitalized corpuscular disks. Considering all the drops made up in this way, man is a kosmos, his veins galaxies through whose circuits these red clustering planets perform their revolutions. How small the exhaling atoms of a grain of musk must be, since it will perfume every breath of air blowing through a hall for a quarter of a century, and then not be perceptibly diminished. An ounce of gold may be reduced into four hundred and thirty two billion parts, each microscopically visible.30 There is a deposit of slate in Bohemia covering forty square miles to the depth of eight feet, each cubic inch of which Ehrenberg found by microscopic measurement to contain forty one thousand million infusorial animals. Sir David Brewster says, "A cubic inch of the Bilin polieschiefer slate contains above one billion seven hundred and fifty thousand millions of distinct individuals of Galionella ferruginea."31 It is a fact that the size of one of these insects as compared with the bulk of a man is virtually as small as that of a man compared with the whole scheme of modern astronomy. Thus, if the problem of our immortal consequence is prejudicially vitiated by contemplating the immense extremity of vision, it is rectified by gazing on the opposite extremity. If man justly scrutinized, without comparisons, is fitted for and worthy of eternity,
30 Lardner, Hand Book of Natural Philosophy, book i. chap. v.31 More Worlds than One, ch. viii. note 3.
no foreign facts, however magnificent or minute, should alter our judgment from the premises.