Chapter II: Introduction (1)

IT WAS at Venice. The lofty windows of the ancient Ducal Palace of the Speranzi opened upon the Grand Canal. The orb of night was mirrored in the waters by a furrow of silver spangles, and the immensity of the sky stretched over the towers and cupolas.

When the musicians borne by the gondolas had turned the corner of the canal to glide towards the Bridge of Sighs, their last choruses vanished in the night, and Venice seemed to go to sleep in that profound silence known to no hive of humanity but the Queen of the Adriatic. This Venetian silence was untroubled save by the cadenced beats of the old clock, and perhaps I should not have appreciated the whole depth of the universal muteness but for the regular oscillation of that apparatus designed for measuring time. The continuous “tick-tock” marked out the silence, and, curiously enough, seemed to intensify it.

Seated in the embrasure of the high window, I contemplated the shining disc of the Moon enthroned in an azure sky filled entirely with its light, and I remembered that this luminary of the night, so tranquil and calm in appearance, moved a thousand yards in space at each beat of the clock. This fact struck me for the first time with a certain force, perhaps on account of the enveloping solitude.

Gazing upon the lunar globe, in which I could distinguish with the naked eye the ancient seas and geographical outlines, I bethought myself that it was still perhaps inhabited by beings organised differently from ourselves who can live in an extremely rarefied atmosphere; but what struck me even more forcibly was its rapid revolution round the Earth, at the rate of 1,000 yards at each beat of the clock, making 38 miles a minute, 2,280 an hour, 53,800 a day, or 1,500,000 miles for each lunar month.

I saw in my mind the Moon revolving round us from west to east in less than a month, and at the same time I felt, so to speak, the daily movement of the Earth about its axis, also from west to east, which makes the sky appear to move in the opposite direction. While I was still reflecting, indeed, the Moon had actually shifted and descended in the west towards the steeple of the Chiesa. These terrestrial and celestial movements, softer than those of the gondolas gliding on the limpid waters, bear us along through reality as through a dream. They measure the days and the years as we pass, like fleeting shadows, while they endure for ever. The silent Moon, sphinx of the sky, shone already on the waters silvered by her splendour millions of years ago, while terrestrial humanity was still awaiting its slow unfolding in the limbo of future possibilities. Strange animals peopled the forests which covered the continents, fantastic fishes pursued each other in the floods, vampires clove the air, and two-footed crocodiles, which seem to be the ancestors of those of Egyptian mythology, showed themselves in the clearings on the banks of the rivers. Later the same Moon shone on the birth of the flowers, on the nests of the first birds. But how many nights had she not illuminated with pale beams before the first glance from a human eye fell upon her, before the first human thought ascended towards her! To-night she shines upon a populous and active humanity, flourishing cities, marble palaces, built amid the clouds. Just now, at my feet, in a gondola a pair of lovers called upon her to witness their eternal vows, forgetting that her rapid phases are the symbol of our changefulness and our shortness of life. Yes, she has been the confidante of many mysteries, and for a long time yet will radiant youth sing under her sky its eternal song of love. But one day, a poor, enfeebled lamp, she will only shine upon a cemetery of ice; there will be no more clocks for measuring hours nor human beings to count them. Thus I mused, in the bright moonlight which seemed to intensify all the shadows and to deepen all the abysses between the palaces plunging into the black water. This neighbouring world exists at a distance of 240,000 miles from us. Our thoughts fly thither in a flash. With the speed of light, the distance is covered in 1⅓ second. In imagination I took flight up to the distant luminary. I forgot Venice, the Adriatic, and the Earth, and I felt myself carried beyond the confines of the terrestrial atmosphere.

(1) TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY THOUSAND MILES
FROM THE EARTH

I seemed to approach the pale Phœbe and to arrive suddenly above the immense chain of the lunar Apennines, which separate the “Sea of Vapour” from the “Sea of Rain,” not far from the central meridian. I recognised, just as I had so often observed them in the telescope, the amphitheatres and craters of Archimedes, Autolycus, and Aristillus, and I hovered for some time over the steep cliffs of the “Sea of Serenity.” I saw the traces of old submersions and I distinguished several craters almost obliterated by formidable land-slides. I got accustomed to this view the more rapidly for the fact that astronomical instruments have long familiarised us with this neighbouring world, and that certain details of lunar geography are better known than are many points of terrestrial geography. Those immense amphitheatres, those yawning craters, those steep-walled mountains, those deep valleys, those numerous cracks in the soil--we have studied them all and we know them. We find there the geographical result of considerable volcanic activity, craters 2 miles in depth and 60, 100, or 150 miles wide, mountain peaks 4 or 5 miles high, plains and valleys where the traces of successive selenological epochs are traceable. In the lower depths I observed the effects of a sensible atmosphere, surface changes produced over immense stretches of ground by the action of the Sun’s rays during days fifteen times as long as ours, changes of aspect due to the frost of the long lunar night and the thaw under the midday Sun, long white streaks traversing the circular plains; something like geysers in activity; short-lived plants without any terrestrial analogy--a whole world still alive, apparently in its last death-struggle. My thought and my gaze rested on the pale figure of the Earth’s satellite, and I asked myself whether there was not alive at that moment, in some ancient city at the bottom of a crater or a valley, some thinking being, with its eyes raised to the sky, contemplating the Earth where we are and asking the same question: whether any intelligent beings lived on the surface of that immense globe throning for ever over their heads, and presenting to their minds the same riddle which their abode presents to us.

While I thus reflected about our neighbour in space, the orb of night had sunk in the west, and I saw at some distance from it on the left a star shining with a reddish glow, shedding rays of fire over the heavenly vault. I was not long in recognising in this ardent star our neighbour the planet Mars, and I forgot the moon over this other celestial island, the sister of our own, which has so many analogies with our planet.

Here, said I to myself, is the planet of greatest interest to ourselves, the one we know best. It gravitates round the sun along an orbit traced at a mean distance of 143 million miles from the central luminary. Our Earth passes through its annual revolution at a distance of 92 million miles. There are, therefore, on an average, 51 million miles between the two orbits. On the night of my vigil, Mars happened to be at its minimum distance from the Earth. Fortunately, as the two orbits are neither circular nor parallel, the real distance is sometimes reduced to 37 million miles. Light, which takes 1⅓ second to traverse the distance between the Earth and the Moon, takes 200 seconds, or 3 minutes 20 seconds, to cross the celestial abyss which separates Mars from the Earth, It seemed to me that I really spent those 3 minutes in flying the distance, and I entirely forgot the high window of my Venetian palace over the aspect of the new world to which the flight of my thought had brought me.

(2) THIRTY-SEVEN MILLION MILES PROM THE EARTH

It is not very far, astronomically speaking. It is, in fact, quite near, a few paces away. The world of Mars is the first station of the solar system, the first planet we meet on leaving the Earth to visit the remote regions of the heavens. The farther we move away from the Earth, the smaller grows the apparent size of our own world. Seen from the Moon, our planet hangs in the sky like an enormous moon, four times the size of our own satellite, and sixteen times as luminous, for it is isolated in space and reflects the light received from the Sun, as is done by the Moon and the various planets of the solar system. From about 250,000 miles, therefore, the Earth still appears of a considerable size, being about four times the size of the full Moon. At 2½ million miles it appears ten times smaller in diameter, but still shows a perceptible disc. At the distance of the orbit of Mars, at the time when the planets are in greatest proximity (37 million miles), the Earth no longer shows a sensible disc, but is still the biggest and brightest star in the entire heavens. The inhabitants of Mars, therefore, admire us as a brilliant star in the sky, showing aspects similar to those which Venus shows to us. We are their morning and evening star, and no doubt their mythology has erected altars to us.

When I arrived on that planet, it was about midday on its central meridian. I noticed two small moons revolving rapidly in their sky, and I alighted on the slope of a mountain overlooking a distant sea. The sea was shallow and full of water-plants. The panorama reminded me of that which one sees from the terrace of the Nice Observatory, and I seemed to see a Mediterranean of calm water, of a rather dark bluish-green colour. But it was a different element, and I saw that the plants were of a species unknown on Earth. Airy navies consisting of a sort of bird-fishes glided through the atmosphere, and I soon found that the inhabitants of this celestial territory have received by natural evolution the enviable privilege of flying through the air, and that their method of locomotion is particularly aviation. Gravity is feeble on the surface of the planet, and hence the density of beings and objects on that planet is much less than it is with us. Engineering science has for many centuries reached a high degree of perfection. They have carried out immense works, incomparably superior to those achieved on our planet during the last century, and they have transformed their globe by gigantic operations which earthly astronomers are just beginning to appreciate by means of the telescope. One may easily understand, indeed, that that world should be more advanced than ours, because it is more ancient chronologically, and because, being smaller than our globe, it has cooled down more rapidly and has run through the phases of organic evolution at a greater rate. Its years are nearly twice as long as ours, in the proportion of 365 days to 687. While we count 37 years on Earth, the Martian only counts 20, and a man of 79 years on Earth is only 40 Martian years old. This is an advantage of 88 per cent. Its condition of habitability, its climate and meteorology, its days and its nights, are analogous to ours. Even from where we are we can observe its continents, its polar snows which melt in the spring, its canals which also change with the seasons, its humid plains periodically varied by vegetation, its clouds, generally very light, but dense enough towards the polar regions, its mists in the mornings and especially in the evening, above all, the perpetual changes, incomparably more intense than those of the Earths surface--in a word, all those manifestations of an activity greater than that of our own home of the present day.

I only delayed on Mars for the time necessary to form a general idea of the life which animates our neighbouring globe and to make sure that it is more active than that of terrestrial humanity, and I found myself, some moments later, transported to the annular world of Saturn.

(3) AT SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLION MILES

The conception of time, the appreciation of duration, are essentially relative to the state of our mind. If we sleep profoundly for seven or eight hours, that time will have made a gap in our life of no greater length than that produced by ten minutes of sleep. The miners who by the collapse of a shaft are entombed for five or six days before being rescued, always believe that they have not been cut off for more than twenty hours. Buried on a Tuesday, for instance, they will not believe that they have had to wait till Sunday. On the other hand, one may seem to pass several hours, very slowly, in a dream of a few seconds. A friend of mine told me that one day, as he was riding through a wood, his horse bolted and threw him into a ravine. He said his fall had certainly not taken more than three seconds, but that during those three seconds he had passed in review at least ten years of his life in all their successive details and without any apparent hurrying of events. Then, again, who has not observed how long the minutes may seem during some hours of waiting?

The orbit of the Earth round the Sun being 92 million miles, and that of Saturn 888 million, there are 796 million miles between the two orbits. Light traverses this gap in 70 minutes. My fancy flew this distance with the speed of light, and I was aware of these 2,240 seconds required to cover the distance at the rate of 186,000 miles a second. Yet I am sure that I did not spend all that time in traversing the distance to Saturn, nor even the lesser time corresponding to the distance between Mars and the ringed planet, for the first stroke of ten had sounded on the old clock when I forgot Mars and fixed my attention on Saturn, and I arrived at my destination before the hour had finished striking.

I alighted on the tenth satellite, whence one can easily appreciate the grandeur of the Saturnian system. The enormous planet of, a diameter more than 9½ times that of our globe, with a surface 90 times that of the Earth, and a bulk 745 times that of our floating home, is surrounded by gigantic rings measuring 178,000 miles across. Girt by this multiple ring, the planet presides over a retinue of ten satellites revolving round it in a system having a radius of 8 million miles, a system which in itself constitutes a universe larger than that known to the ancients. Until the age of truth inaugurated by the conquests of modern astronomy, nobody on our planet, no poet, no philosopher, no thinker, had guessed the real grandeur of the proportions on which the universe is constructed. How small our Earth appears seen from the Saturnian system! It is barely seen, once in six months, as a small luminous dot near the sun, shining for a few minutes in the evening after sunset, or a few minutes in the morning before sunrise.

(4) TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED MILLION
MILES FROM THE SUN

In the depths of space, at a distance from the sun more than 30 times our own, under a glow of light and heat 900 times feebler than that which we enjoy, there roams the world of Neptune, among conditions of life quite different from those which obtain on Earth. Those short-sighted naturalists who affirmed even quite recently, with professorial emphasis, that the abysses of the ocean are condemned to an eternal sterility, because the conditions of light and pressure are absolutely different from the conditions near the surface, have received from Nature herself the rudest contradiction which can be inflicted upon the pedantic science of pretenders to infallibility. This contradiction, however direct and absolute, has not discouraged them all, for there are still some who declare that life can only exist on worlds having conditions identical with ours. Always the reasonings of the fish who affirms--quite sincerely--that it is impossible to live outside water! Let us leave these teachers to their illusions and continue our ascent. Astronomy must be the great teacher of philosophy.

The distant world of Neptune, on which every year equals nearly 165 of our years, and where ten years represent the whole historical interval which separates us from the Romans (we must remember than 1,650 years ago the Romans reigned at Paris and in Gaul, and neither France nor any of the present-day nations were thought of), this neighbouring world, I say, is well fitted to teach us to enlarge our narrow and personal conceptions, especially as regards the measurement of time. The calendar of that planet is just as exact, just as precise, as ours, and a Neptunian year is not longer to those slow and reflective beings who inhabit the place than is a terrestrial year to those hurrying and agitated persons who swarm in our turbulent cities. Yet a Neptunian adolescent of 20 has really lived nearly 3,300 terrestrial years, without knowing that such a time is called “very long” by the inhabitants of our planet, whom such a life would carry back to the epoch of Homer and ancient Greece.

It would be impossible even with the most careful examination to discover any point of comparison between the beings which live on the Neptunian world and those which we know on Earth. None of our classifications, whether of the animal kingdom, vast and diversified though it be, or of the vegetable kingdom, highly complex in itself, could be applied to them. It is another world, absolutely different from this one. Spectrum analysis indeed establishes the fact that its chemical composition is quite other than that of our terrestrial home. The organisms which live on the surface of the different planets are the resultant of the forces acting upon them. The origin of the human form lies in the ancestral forms of the long animal series whence it has gradually emerged, and of which it is the highest perfection, and these primitive animal forms go back in an unbroken chain to the rudimentary organisms unprovided with the senses which are the glory of man, organisms which inaugurated the manifestations of life, but which can hardly be described as living. They are neither animals nor plants. They appear to be organised substances, already distinct from the inorganic kingdom, but as yet only simple chemical combinations endowed with a sort of diffused vitality, an elementary protoplasm, the germ of all developments of terrestrial life, both animal and vegetable. The first organised beings were formed in the bosom of the warm waters of the oceans which covered the entire surface of the earth at the time when the geological periods began. Their intrinsic nature, their properties, their faculties, were already the resultant of the chemical composition of those waters, of the density and temperature of the surrounding medium; the variation of this medium and of the condition of existence have brought about corresponding changes in the development of this genealogical tree, and, according to the habitat of the organisms, whether in the deep, middle, or upper regions of the waters, on the sea-shore, in the low-lying plains, on sunny slopes or mountain-tops, the genealogical tree gave rise to more and more diversified organisms. Present-day terrestrial humanity is the last flower, the last fruit of this tree. But all this life is terrestrial from root to summit, and on every planet the tree is different. Life is Neptunian on Neptune, Uranian on Uranus, Saturnian on Saturn, Sirian on the system of Sirius, Arcturian on that of Arcturus, appropriate to every medium, or rather, more strictly speaking, produced and developed by each world according to its physical state and in harmony with that primeval law which all nature obeys: the law of progress.

This immense symphony of life, adapted to every world according to conditions of space and time, develops like a universal choir, the parts of which are separated from each other by deserts of space and by eternities of time. It appears to us discontinuous because we can only hear one note at a time. But in reality there is no absolute separation either in space or time. Jupiter will not be inhabited by thinking beings for millions of years to come; from the point of view of the Absolute, the interval is not greater than that which separates yesterday from to-day.

All this happens and accomplishes itself naturally, and as if God did not exist. And indeed the being whom the inhabitants of the Earth have hitherto defined as God does not exist. The Buddha of the Chinese, the Osiris of the Egyptians, the Jehovah of the Hebrews, the Ormuzd and Ahriman of the Persians, the Teutates of the Gauls, the Jupiter of the Greeks, “God the Father” or “God the Son” of the Christians, or the great Allah of the Mussulman, are human conceptions, personifications invented by man in which he has embodied not only his highest aspirations and his sublimest virtues, but also his grossest prevarications and ugliest vices.

Man has conceived as God in his own likeness. It is in the name of this pretended God that monarchs and pontiffs have in all the ages and under cover of all religions bound humanity in a slavery from which it has not yet freed itself. It is in the name of this God who “protects Germany,” “protects England,” “protects France,” “protects Italy,” “protects Russia,” “protects Turkey,” protects all the divisions and all the barbarities, that even in our own day the so-called civilised people of our planet have been armed in war against each other and, like mad dogs, have hurled themselves upon one another in a conflict over which falsehood and hypocrisy, seated on the steps of the thrones, figure a “God of Armies” as presiding, a God who blesses the daggers and plunges his hands in the smoking blood of victims to mark the foreheads of kings. It is to this God that altars are raised and Te Deums are chanted. It is in the names of the Gods of Olympus that the Greeks condemned Socrates to drink the hemlock; it is in the name of Jehovah that the high-priests and Pharisees crucified Jesus. It is in the name of Jesus, himself become God, that fanaticism ignominiously condemned to the stake men like Giordano Bruno, Vanini, Étienne Dolet, John Huss, Savonarola, and so many other heroic victims; that the Inquisition ordered Galileo to belie his conscience; that thousands and thousands of unfortunates accused of witchcraft were burnt alive in popular ceremonies; that Ravaillac stabbed Henry the Fourth. It was with the express benediction of Pope Gregory the Thirteenth that the butchery of St. Bartholomew drenched Paris in blood and the free thinkers of the reformation were chased out of France; it is for the extermination of supposed heresies that many thousands of brave people have been burnt alive; it was with cross in hand that the peaceful natives of America were savagely massacred by the Spaniards; it was in the names of the gods worshipped in Rome that the Christian martyrs suffered the most awful tortures; it was in the name of the Christian God that the fanatics, led by Bishop St. Cyril, stoned the beautiful and learned Hypatia, and that in later times the Bishop of Beauvais led the virgin of Domremy to the stake; it was in the name of the Bible that the kings of God’s “chosen people” savagely exterminated their neighbours; it was in the name of Allah that the standards of Mahomet covered Europe with armies of assassins and that even now millions of fanatics are ready to rise against the Europeans on the cry of a “Holy War,” that Mahomet the Second painted the walls of St. Sophia with the blood of his steed, that Genghis Khan and Tamerlane marked their paths of conquest with pyramids of severed heads; it is to the glory of these imaginary deities that even now so many and useless souls condemn themselves to strange penances in the convents, that the Russian stropzi mutilate themselves, that the howling and dancing Dervishes writhe in mad contortions, that certain sects kill their babies and drink their blood. Religious wars have been the most horrible and odious of all, and the most insensate. People have killed each other for the sake of a word or its interpretation, for the sake of an adjective, for the “consubstantiality” of the Father and the Son of the Trinity, for “homoousios” against “homoiousios,” for a thousand other crotchets placed above the most elementary reason and proclaimed articles of faith in the name of a God! This symbol of the oppressions of peoples, of murder and robbery, this infamous being, does not exist, and has never existed.

In making a god in their likeness, as miserable as themselves, men resemble monkeys, who, raising themselves to the idea of God, would figure him as a Grand Ape, dogs who would make him a Grand Dog, fleas who would represent him in the shape of a Grand Flea. But it does not follow that, because this inferior god does not exist, therefore the universe goes on without thought, without a destiny, and without laws. If the believers of all religions are in error, those who deny the existence of any intellectual principle in the world are equally mistaken. Yes, the evolution of nature takes place without the acts of an anthropomorphic deity, without malice and without miracles. The only name which would fit God would be the Unknowable. God remains hidden by the very perfection of nature’s mechanism. In a healthy body we do not feel the passage of the blood through the heart, nor the circulation of blood in the brain, nor that of the air in the lungs, nor the liver, nor the kidneys, nor the stomach, nor the bowels. The attention is not directed to those organs unless they work badly. The world is so arranged that they appear to work by themselves, and that is its divine quality. Everything functions regularly by means of a perfect construction, the gearing of which is invisible and silent, but which we can only judge by the infinitesimal fraction of which we form a part, and the author of which is a transcendental thought, impenetrable to mankind. Force governs matter; _mens agitat molem_; but Thought guides nature.

Yes, the supreme being is unknowable. The human mind cannot comprehend the infinite, eternal, immutable spirit, the organising power of that All of which the Earth and Man are but particles as imperfect as they are mediocre. This Infinite is to the infantile deity imagined by man as the midday sun is to the muddy obscurity of a mole-burrow under the roots of meadow grass. His existence is proved by the universal organisation. Everything is organised, from the humblest leaf to the world system. An invisible, immaterial element of a spiritual nature, as yet imperfectly revealed by our means of investigation, manifests itself within us and around us. This spiritual principle should be revered as enveloping the world and enfolding us. But the clergy of all religions, of all times and of all countries, have always monopolised the idea of God and appropriated it to their exclusive and intolerant purpose of domination. When they speak of God, they mean their own God. The free spirits who do not acknowledge their figure-head are treated as atheists and hated and persecuted as such. They will not admit that one may be a Deist and yet anticlerical. But they are not too unintelligent to know that it is an injustice, a stupidity, and a lie to treat as atheists those thinkers who deny the divinity of Jesus. The people who dare to reduce God to their size and even to put Him in their pocket are the greatest blasphemers.

It is strange that Man, still in a coarse, savage, and barbarous state, hardly emerged from the primitive shell of ignorance, incapable of knowing even his own body, hardly able to spell the great book of the universe, should have considered himself capable of describing God. He does not know his own little ant-heap and he pretends to discover the unknowable. At a time when nothing was known, when astronomy, physics, chemistry, natural history, and anthropology were as yet unborn, when the feeble and meandering human mind was still surrounded by illusions and errors, human audacity conceived the so-called religions and the gods placed at their heads.

That Confucius, Buddha, Moses, Socrates, Jesus, or Mahomet should have striven to give to mankind a code of morals destined to deliver them from barbarism and to teach them the idea of good, such efforts and achievements cannot but receive the homage and admiration of all who value the intellectual and moral progress of humanity. That the founders and organisers of religious rites should place at the head of every cult an ideal, an inviolable being in whose name they pretend to govern, even that can be recognised as a work of social utility, of a value not rising above the worldly standard, and having no object beyond the general good of man and societies. But that those gods invented by man should be considered as really existing, and in an absolutely imaginary heaven which perished in the first conquests of astronomy, that they should have been, and are still, adored by a certain portion of the human race, and that even in our time legislators of all nations dare to base their politics on divine right, to show the “finger of God” in the most monstrous plagues of the social body, and decorate their battle-flags with a local providence, as in the time of Joan of Arc, of Constantine, or of David--that is the shocking anachronism, a mixture of imposture and credulity, of hypocrisy and stupidity unworthy of the era of sincere and positive research in which we live, and which should load the functionaries who live at the expense of such a system with the contempt of every independent man.

Definitions are misleading. Were pagans like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus, not more spiritual than Pope Alexander the Sixth or Cardinal Dubois, who were true atheists?

The search for the nature of the First Cause--I do not say the “knowledge of God,” which would be an expression worthy of a “theologian” and absurd in itself--but simply the search for the Absolute Being, for the origin of the energy which sustains, animates, and governs the universe, for the intelligent force which acts everywhere and perpetually through infinity and eternity and gives rise to the appearances which strike our eyes and are studied by our science--this _search_, I say, could not be undertaken nor even properly conceived before the first discoveries of astronomy and modern physics, that is to say, before the investigations of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. It is only two centuries ago that the purely religious idea, free from idolatries, from all sorts of mythologies, of errors and superstitions produced by primitive ignorance--it is only during the last two centuries that it was possible for this idea to arise out of modern scientific evolution. All the religions existing at the present day have been founded during ages of ignorance, when we knew nothing about the earth or the heavens. True religion, i.e. the union of free spirits in the search for truth, can only be the work of an epoch like ours, in which some courageous and disinterested spirits free from the hypocrisy of false doctrines, yet without falling into the puerile atheism of superficial minds which only see the outer shell, will sincerely and freely apply all branches of science to the search for the intimate constitution of the universe and of the human being. The future will teach us. To-day we know but little; we are only beginning to learn. The unknown God conceived by the thinkers, by Socrates, by Plato, by Marcus Aurelius, by Voltaire (as ardent a Deist as he was a violent anticlerical), by Newton, by Descartes, by Linné, by Euler, by Spinoza, by Kant, by all pure Deists, surpasses in his grand immensity all the poor inventions of the clergy of all denominations. One cannot see the creator of the hundred million suns of the Milky Way looking down upon a small village in Judea and inspiring Judith to seduce Holophernes with the object of cutting off his head after betraying him with her caresses; or conferring on Joshua the power of arresting the movement of the solar system to give him time to exterminate the besiegers of Gibeon! What sort of opinion had such writers of the Supreme Being? And what opinion of him is still held by those preachers who continue to teach this “Holy Scripture”?

The Infinite cannot be comprehended by the Finite.

He who has made the tour of the world, who has visited Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, reasons in a manner wider beyond comparison with the state of humanity than he who has never left his country. Between the narrow, incomplete, and false ideas of the latter and the judicious, exact, and just appreciations of the former there is the difference of night and day.

Unfortunately we preach to the deaf. For one man who reasons there are a hundred who do not. The struggle against the domination of the spiritual directors is very platonic and the clergy despise it. The Church has organised marriage, birth, and death into ceremonies which seduce the imagination and please the women. Compare the civil marriage and the religious marriage; the former cold, dull, insipid; the latter impressive and attractive with the altar garlanded with flowers, and the enchantment of the music which makes the creator descend into the bosom of the spouse, “_Veni, Creator Spiritus_.” It will be centuries before the religious form of marriage is entirely replaced by the civil. A certain free-thinking father refrained from having his four boys baptized so as to leave them entire liberty of conscience. All four got baptized on the eve of their marriage as their brides wished to be married in church. Faith or convention, that is how the world goes--and the priests smile at the simplicity of the layman.

What is Sunday for most Christians but a day for fine clothes?

Tradition has created a distinguished society often permeated with hypocrisy, but to belong to which is “good form.” Ancient errors are preserved without being credited. Convention governs the “well-disposed” people.

Independence of spirit is the rarest of phenomena. All religions are sacred and respectable if they raise our thoughts to a higher ideal, when they console the afflicted and relieve misery. But let them not be exploited, and let there be no killing in their name! Ideal and sentiment are part of the domain of thought, with as much right as Reason. It is a mistaken policy to suppress them, and it plays into the hands of reactionaries, who profit by the errors. To claim that science demonstrates the non-existence of God and of the soul is an unscientific argument. An education without ideals or responsibility, which neglects conscience and proclaims rights without duties, is as false as that of the Catechism which teaches the creation of Adam and Eve, the temptation of the serpent, the universal deluge, the incarnation of God, the Virgin Birth, the resurrection and ascension of Jesus to the right hand of God the Father, or the resurrection of our bodies (articles of faith which cannot, without heresy, be interpreted as symbols, but must be taken literally), and it is socially more dangerous, as we see by its fruits for the last thirty years, the gradual increase of crime and the rule of the Apaches and anarchists of all sorts. Why not follow the way of enlightened wisdom? If the socialists were permeated with spiritual truth, they would hold the world; they would continue the work of their predecessor, Jesus Christ, in the light and with the positive methods of modern science. The false gods invented by man, the legends, the superstitions, the errors, lies, and hypocrisies, are not necessary to secure a place in the educational system for the sense of honour, of duty, of justice, and of personal conscience; and this is often forgotten by modern educators who have suppressed everything without putting anything in its place.

Let us have no sectaries of any kind!

Humanity grows up. We are no longer children.

At the distance from the Earth which suggested such reflections, the distance of the planet Neptune, the farthest limit of the solar system known at present to astronomy, our judgment on the works of man is quite different from that which satisfied us before we left our country. We contemplate the solar system in all its grandeur, we recognise the smallness of our own little planet compared with the vast space in which it moves, and the short time of its revolution round the Sun, and we feel that our ordinary terrestrial estimates have hitherto been based upon those narrow and limited sentiments circumscribed by the horizon of the church tower. We free ourselves from them and find ourselves in a position to judge the immensity of creation with greater liberty, independence, and integrity. But far as Neptune is from our terrestrial home, it still forms, like ourselves, part of the solar family. Other planets still unknown to terrestrial astronomy gravitate beyond Neptune, the first of them probably at a distance 48 times as great as the distance between the Earth and the Sun, that is to say, at 7,500 million miles, in an immense orbit which it takes at least 330 years to accomplish. The celestial voyage which I have begun takes me beyond the outermost regions of the solar system. Flinging myself into the infinite heavens, I arrived at another system by penetrating into the cosmic domain of a star.

(5) AT TWENTY-FIVE BILLION MILES

Every star is a sun shining by its own light. The Sun which illuminates us has 1,300,000 times the volume of the Earth and weighs 333,000 times as much. The dimensions and the masses of the stars are of the same order. A large number of them are much more voluminous and their masses are still more considerable.

Whatever star we approach, we find in it a sun like a blinding furnace. These innumerable centres of light, heat, electricity, and gravitational attraction only appear to us as small luminous points on account of the immense abysses which separate us from them. The nearest sun, our nearest star in space, burns at 276,000 times the distance which separates us from the Sun, i.e. 25 billion miles from here.

Travelling with the speed of an express train flung into space at 40 miles an hour towards the nearest star without any stoppage or any slowing down, we should not arrive at our destination until after an uninterrupted flight of 75 million years.

Travelling with the speed of the swiftest projectile which the most ingenious man-killers have yet constructed, a speed which we can reckon as double that of sound, or 2,200 feet per second, we should yet require a million and a half years to cover that distance.

If that star were to burst with a terrific explosion, and if the noise of the catastrophe could be transmitted to us at the ordinary speed of sound in air, we should not hear that explosion until three million years had elapsed after its occurrence.

We should see the star shining steadily in the sky for four years after the catastrophe which had destroyed it, because light travels through space with a speed of 186,000 miles a second, and it would have to travel with this constant velocity more than four years before reaching us.

Seen from that distance, our brilliant Sun is reduced to the rank of a simple star. The planets which gravitate around it, the Earth, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and their brothers of the solar family, are crowded up against it by the perspective of the distance and are invisibly lost in its rays.

Considered at that distance in the sidereal universe, these provinces of the solar empire are recognised as insignificant even by the most optimistic spirit. Even if they did not exist at all, the suns of infinite space would none the less shed their rays of life and light all around. Our planet, which to us seems so important, becomes a microscopic point impossible to discover by means of senses such as ours, and its history told at that distance becomes like the flight of a dragon-fly or even less, since we should never suspect its existence if we did not know it. It is at such moments especially that the pretensions of Pontiffs and the dogmatic assurance of their adepts show forth in all their absurdity.

I felt transported into the system of that star, the nearest of all those whose distances have been measured, a star belonging to the constellation of the Centaur; it is the Alpha of that constellation. This system is curious and more interesting than ours. Instead of a single sun corresponding to that which shines upon us, two twin suns gravitate one round the other in a time equalling 81 of our years, and separated from each other by a distance of 2,000 million miles. These twin suns are both of considerable brightness (first and second magnitude, seen from here), and greatly superior to the central hearth of our own system. Planets circulate around each of these luminaries under their protecting wings, and receive from their radiation the sources of their fertility and their life. They are illuminated by two different suns, sometimes united in the same sky, sometimes separated and alternating, differing in magnitude and brightness according to the variation of the distances in consequence of the revolutions of these worlds round their respective centres.

These are very different conditions of existence from those which govern the destinies of the Earth and of the planets of our group. Two suns! What curious alternations of seasons! What variations in the climates! What transformations in the doubtlessly very rapid changes of their vitality! What complications of their calendars, in the succession of their years, their summers and winters, their days and nights! The sole fact of the existence of such a system, relatively near to us and already well-known to terrestrial astronomers, testifies to the infinite variety disseminated in the starry depths of the cosmos.

What multiplicity of manifestations of the diverse forces of nature must have been produced in this wealth of solar development--manifestations strange to the phenomena studied on our planet, and which are doubtlessly felt and appreciated by means of senses differing absolutely from those existing in terrestrial organisms, senses awakened, determined, and developed in those distant worlds by their own natural forces.

On worlds illuminated, heated, and regulated by two suns life can only have appeared and organised itself in forms very different from those on Earth, having no doubt an alternating double life, served by other modes of perception, other organs, and other senses. The thinker, the astronomer, the physiologist, can no longer regard terrestrial life as the type of all life. All we could learn, study, or know on Earth will never be more than an infinitesimal and absolutely insufficient part of the immense reality embodied in the innumerable creations of the Infinite.

Yet it is a point which must be insisted upon before pursuing our terrestrial investigations further, that whatever may be the variety of stellar systems, the differences of volume, temperature, density, illumination, electrification, movement, chemical constitution, etc., of the various globes which people the immensity of the universe, all these worlds are linked amongst themselves by the same invisible and imponderable Power which combines them all in a network of extreme sensitiveness. The prodigious extent of the distances which separate these systems one from the other does not prevent their being connected together by some sort of maternal link. The distance from the Earth to the Moon is 240,000 miles. The Moon acts constantly upon all the molecules of our globe and upon the entire Earth, and every one of us weighs a little less when that body shines over our heads than when it is on the horizon. The distance from the Sun to the Earth is 92 million miles; the Sun makes our planet move with a speed corresponding to that distance, and the Earth in its turn displaces the Sun in the heavens. The distance from the Sun to Neptune is over 2,500 million miles. The central globe acts upon that distant world and makes it revolve round it, and on the other hand Neptune makes the Sun revolve round their common centre of gravity, which is at a distance of 144,000 miles from the centre of the Sun. Jupiter displaces the Sun by 460,000 miles, and Saturn by 25,000 miles. The Moon disturbs the Earth to the extent of 2,900 miles. At the same time Jupiter acts upon the Earth, the Earth upon Venus, and so on. On account of this reciprocal influence of all the heavenly bodies upon each other, not a single point can remain in repose for an instant, and no heavenly body can ever come back to the place it previously occupied. All that we call matter is in perpetual motion under the irresistible power of invisible, intangible, and imponderable force.

We have here a fact of capital importance, the consideration of which must always be associated with the conception we can form of the real nature of the universe. We have seen just now that the distance which separates our Sun from the star Alpha Centauri is 25 billion miles. But this distance is traversed by gravitational attraction. In reality the two suns are not absolutely separated.

They know each other, they feel each other’s attraction, and they feel the attraction of all the other suns of infinite space. They both roam about, our own Sun with a speed calculated at about 200 million miles per annum and Alpha Centauri with a speed of approximately 400 million. The other suns of which we know the distance and the movement rush on with similar speeds. Some of them fly with incomparably greater velocities, which attain 200 miles a second, 11,000 miles per minute, 600,000 miles an hour, 15 million per day, and 5 or 6 thousand million miles per annum, veritable starry projectiles of the heavenly fields.

But our whole sidereal universe itself is moving with its hundred million stars through the immensity of infinite space. The movements which we measure are relative and not absolute.

Our sun and its companions are driven through space by some initial force and by the combined attraction of the innumerable stars of our visible universe. Whether this force of attraction is a property inherent in every atom of matter, whether these theoretical atoms by which we explain the appearance of matter in order to account for observed phenomena are centres of force, mathematical points of concentration, or nodes and crossings of ethereal vibrations and undulations, the fact which dominates our analytical contemplation of the universe is that the innumerable worlds which people space are not isolated from each other, but are united by a perpetual and indestructible link.

Here we have a new and important conception of the unity of nature. And what is equally worthy of attention is that this sort of communication between the worlds cannot be defined better than by the word “attraction.”

Attraction is therefore the supreme law among the worlds, among atoms, and among beings. The stars which gravitate in the depth of space, the Earth which revolves in the solar rays, the Moon which raises the tides on the surface of the ocean, the molecules of stone or iron which cling together by molecular attraction, the plant which pushes its roots into the nourishing soil or raises its stem in response to light, the flower which turns towards the Sun, the bird which flies from branch to branch seeking a place for its nest, the nightingale which with incomparable song charms the sweet mistress of the night, the man whose heart is troubled at the appearance of a beloved being, the sound of a beloved voice, or a fond memory--all these beings, all these things obey the same law, that of universal attraction which in diverse forms governs all nature and guides it--whither? Towards yet another attraction, to the attraction of the unknown!

Amid the ignorance of the Absolute which surrounds us in spite of the manifold, courageous, and persevering efforts of science, the fact of the existence of such a force uniting all worlds together must be appreciated at its proper value. It would be impossible to exaggerate its importance. Let us then not forget it: the worlds are in mutual communication by means of attraction.

(6) AT SIXTY THOUSAND BILLION MILES

Continuing my celestial voyage, I left the system of Alpha Centauri to penetrate into the starry depths of the Southern Cross. I traversed sunny shores and deserts of night, passing from sun to sun, from system to system, flying past stars which blinded me one moment and then were engulfed by the infinite night. The normal state of the universe is night and silence. There is no light except round the suns and planets; there is no sound but in their immediate neighbourhood, in their atmosphere. In skirting stellar groups, I noticed enormous globes rolling in a strange light, and I often seemed to feel electric shocks, magnetic disturbances, certain indefinable sensations which warned me, by a sort of malaise, that such spheres are unsuitable for our mode of existence, and that they are inhabited by beings whose perceptions, feelings, and thoughts differ from ours. I remember particularly having seen in the course of my flight a group of many-hued worlds illuminated by three suns, one a ruby red, one an emerald green, and a third a sapphire blue, and so singularly illuminated by this false light--false to us, but natural to them--that I asked myself whether I was not the victim of an illusion and whether such creations really exist, though, indeed, having observed those well-known associations of coloured suns hundred of times in the telescope, I ought not to have been in doubt for an instant. I stopped and approached one of those worlds and saw that it was inhabited by beings who seemed to be woven out of light. To their eyes, certainly, the inhabitants of our planet would appear so sombre, heavy, and coarse that they might legitimately ask whether we were alive and whether we felt ourselves to be alive.

Those are worlds peopled by aerial organisms whose brightness surpasses the tint of the freshest roses and purest lilies. These beings live on the very atmosphere which they breathe, without being condemned, like the inhabitants of our planet, to be constantly killing innumerable animals with which to fill their bodies.

Their beauty, delicacy, and brightness reminded me by contrast of the conditions imposed by terrestrial life. I remembered that brute force reigns supreme here, that millions of beings are killed every day to assure the existence of the rest, that war is a natural law amongst animals, and that humanity is so little freed from animal barbarism that nearly all people continue to accept, as in primitive times, slavery and servitude. Being so far from the Earth, I judged of the colossal stupidity of the inhabitants of our planet. But if, down to our own times, the nations have made their greatest glory consist of international butcheries, that state is transitory. Every tree bears fruit after its kind. Tortoises and bears cannot aspire to the wings of the swallow or the song of the thrush. The military glories of Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, or Bismarck, being of the order of carnivorous animal instincts, last no longer than the brutal repast itself, and a few centuries suffice to efface them from the history of the planet.