CHAPTER XII. THE HE arguments for a plurality of worlds, contained in the preceding chapters, are so various, and have such different degrees of force, that different views of the subject will be taken by many who thoroughly believe in the general doctrine. We can easily understand why some persons may believe that all these planets which have satellites are inhabited, while they deny the inhabitability of those that have none, and also of the Sun and the satellites themselves. There are individuals, too, though we doubt their faith in sidereal astronomy, who readily believe that the whole of our planetary system is the seat of life, while they are startled by the statement that every star in the heavens, and every point in a nebula which the most powerful telescope has not separated from its neighbour, is a sun surrounded by inhabited planets like our own; and that immortal beings are swarming through universal space more numerous than drops of water in the ocean, or the grains of sand upon its shores. But if these persons really believe in the distances and magnitudes of the stars, and of the laws which govern the binary systems of double stars, they must find it equally, if not more difficult to comprehend why innumerable suns and worlds fill the immensity of the universe, revolving round one another, and discharging their light and heat into space, without a plant to spring under their influence, without an animal to rejoice in their genial beams, and without the eye of reason to lift itself devoutly to its Creator. In peopling such worlds with life and intelligence, we assign the cause of their existence ; and when the mind is once alive to this great truth, it cannot fail to realize the grand combination of infinity of life with infinity of matter. In support of these views, we have already alluded to the almost incredible fact, that there are in our own globe hills and strata miles in length, composed of the fossil remains of microscopic insects; and we need scarcely remind the least informed of our readers, that the air which they breathe, the water which they drink, the food which they eat, the earth on which they tread, the ocean which encircles them, and the atmosphere above their heads, are swarming with universal life. Wherever we have seen matter we have seen life. Life was not made for matter, but matter for life; and in whatever spot we see its atoms, whether at our feet, or in the planets, or in the remotest star, we may be sure that life is there -life to enjoy the light and heat of God's bounty, to study His works, to recognise His glory, and to bless His name. Those ungenial minds, or "Low Souls," as the poet calls them, that can be brought to believe that the Earth is the only inhabited body in the universe, will have no difficulty in conceiving that it also might have been without inhabitants. Nay, if such minds are imbued with geological inferences, they must admit that for myriads of years the Earth was without inhabitants; and hence we are led to the extraordinary result, that for myriads of years there was not an intelligent creature in the vast dominions of the universal King; and that before the formation of the protozoic strata, there was neither a plant nor an animal throughout the infinity of space! During this long period of universal death, when nature herself was asleep, the Sun with his magnificent attendants, the planets with their faithful satellites, the stars in the binary systems, the Solar system itself, were performing their daily, their annual, and their secular movements, unseen, unheeded, and fulfilling no purpose that human reason can conceive,-lamps lighting nothing,-fires heating nothing,-waters quenching nothing,-clouds screening nothing,— breezes fanning nothing, and everything around, mountain and valley, hill and dale, earth and ocean, all meaning nothing. The Stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space. To our apprehension, such a condition of the Earth, of the Solar system, and of the sidereal universe, would be the same as that of our own globe, if all its vessels of war and of commerce were traversing its seas with empty cabins and freightless holds, as if all the railways on its surface were in full activity without passengers and goods,—all our machinery beating the air, and gnashing their iron teeth without work performed. A house without tenants, a city without citizens, present to our minds the same idea as a planet without life, and a universe without inhabitants. Why the house was built, why the city was founded, why the planet was made, and why the universe was created, it would be difficult even to conjecture. Equally great would be the difficulty were the planets shapeless lumps of matter poised in ether, and still and motionless as the grave but when we consider them as chiselled spheres teeming with inorganic beauty, and in full mechanical activity, performing their appointed motions with such miraculous precision, that their days and their years never err a second of time in hundreds of centuries, the difficulty of believing them to be without life is, if possible, immeasurably increased. To conceive any one material globe, whether a gigantic clod slumbering in space, or a noble planet equipped like our own, and duly performing its appointed task, to have no living occupants, or not in a state of preparation to receive them, seems to us one of those notions which could be harboured only in an ill-educated and ill-regulated mind, a mind without faith and without hope but to conceive a whole universe of moving and revolving worlds in such a catagory, indicates, in our apprehension, a mind dead to feeling, and under the influence of that intellectual pride which the poet so justly denounces, Ask for what end the heavenly bodies shine, : Earth for whose use ? Pride answers, ""Tis for mine: My footstool Earth,-my canopy the skies." 1-POPE. 1 Dr. Warton remarks on this passage, that it is the highest absurdity to think that the heavenly bodies were lighted up princi pally for our use. |