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The Planet-Girded Suns: Man's View of Other Solar Systems  by Sylvia Engdahl (1974) ~ Page 5 of 8 |
Chapter Four
(Please read the Introduction
if you haven't yet seen it.)By the middle of the eighteenth century, plurality of worlds was no longer a fad among educated people; the most fashionable enthusiams were for other things. But the belief in extrasolar planets had become a basic one that was to endure unchanged for more than a hundred years.
One proof that this belief was well established is the mention of it in books for children. Adults do not buy nonfiction books for children unless they consider them factual, so the successful ones must have been approved by most authorities. Such a book was published by John Newbery, the first well-known publisher of children’s books in England. In 1758 he brought out a book entitled The Newtonian System of Philosophy Adapted to the Capacities of Young Gentlemen and Ladies . . . Being the Substance of Six Lectures read to the Lilliputian Society, by Tom Telescope, and Collected by their Old Friend Mr. Newbery in St. Paul’s Church-Yard. “Tom Telescope” was, of course, a fictional character, and scholars believe the book was probably written by John Newbery himself. It was a best-seller and had many later editions. The following statement comes from an edition of 1812: “Some philosophers have concluded, and I think not without reason, that every fixed star is a sun that has a system of planets revolving round it, like our solar system. And if so, how immensely great. how wonderfully glorious is the structure of this universe, which contains many thousand worlds as large as ours, suspended in aether, rolling like the earth round their several suns, and filled with animals, plants, and minerals, all perhaps different from ours, but all intended to magnify the Almighty Architect.”
Like Fontenelle’s Plurality of Worlds and other popular science books of the time. Newbery’s was written in the form of dialogue between imaginary people, interspersed with narrative—in this case, between Tom Telescope and a group of children. After Tom Telescope’s speech quoted above, “The fervor and air of piety with which this was delivered silenced every disposition to levity and ridicule . . . Master Wilson, who had before been very impertinent, began now to feel abashed.” Books written in the eighteenth century lost no opportunity to bring in a moral.
Another book for children that had many editions was Easy Introduction to Astronomy for Young Gentlemen and Ladies, by James Ferguson. who also wrote one of the best-known astronomy books for adults. The Easy Introduction was first published in 1768 in London, but the quotations here are from a Philadelphia edition of 1819. In this book the conversations were between a brother and sister. The girl, Eudosia, wanted her brother—who had just come home from college—to teach her something about “the sublime science of Astronomy,” but she was a little afraid to ask him. “Perhaps you may think me too vain,” she ventured, “in wanting to know what the bulk of mankind think our sex have no business with . . . Shall I not be laughed at for attempting to learn what men say is fit only for men to know?”
“Never by any man who thinks right,” her brother assured her, “and I hope you are above minding what those say who think wrong.” After he had told her a great many technical details about astronomy, such as how to predict eclipses, they discussed inhabitants of other worlds.
At first Eudosia was troubled by the thought of some planets receiving more light than others, for she did not believe God would be partial. “I cannot imagine the inhabitants of our earth to be better than those of other planets,” she protested. “On the contrary, I would fain hope they have not acted so absurdly, with respect to him, as we have done.” Her brother then explained that the eyes of different planets’ people would be adapted to the amount of sunlight each planet received. This was in reference to the planets of our own solar system. When he began to speak of others, Eudosia was astonished, and exclaimed. “What! other suns, and planetary worlds belonging to them! You amaze me!”
Familiar as the idea was to people with knowledge of astronomy, the majority had no such knowledge. And girls still had little opportunity to study science at all; Eudosia sighed “because there is not an university for ladies as well as for gentlemen.” In 1768, when Ferguson wrote, such developments were yet to come.
His book continued to sell during the early nineteenth century, but by then more up-to-date ones existed also: for example, Young Ladies’ Astronomy . . . Designed Particularly for the Assistance of Young Ladies in that Interesting and Sublime Study, though Well Adapted to the Use of Common Schools, published in 1825. That one had a question-and-answer format:
For what purpose are these multiplied s stems of worlds supposed to have been created?Today, most science books do not mention the Bible, since people’s religious beliefs are kept separate from information about science. That was not the case in past centuries. Though there were people then who did not feel that the Bible had any bearing on the matter, just as there are now, they did not think it strange for an astronomy book to point out that nothing in the Bible prevented those who considered it an authority from believing in such worlds. The book was not connected with any church. Nor was it one that appealed only to space enthusiasts. It was a recommended text for the “common schools,” and its preface included an endorsement signed by the Governor of the State of New York, who stated that he had read most of the proof-sheets.They are supposed to have been designed for the abode of animal life; and if so, they are probably inhabited, at this moment, by an innumerable number of accountable beings.
What reason have we to warrant the supposition that all the worlds which astronomy contemplates are inhabited?
From what is known respecting our own system . . . we infer that all the other systems are similarly constructed and adapted to the support of human creatures, and that they of course are really inhabited.
But will not the conclusion militate against the acknowledged truths of the Bible?
That sacred volume, it is true, does not expressly admit of a plurality of worlds, nor does it any where deny their existence; we cannot thence conclude that they do not exist.
What would be the tendency of a total rejection of a plurality of worlds?
The tendency would be to discredit a system harmonizing and beautiful in all its parts . . . The tendency would also be to narrow our conceptions of God’s character, and to rob him of some of those exalted attributes assigned him by the unlettered savage.
Another kind of evidence for widespread belief in extrasolar worlds during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries comes from casual statements made by famous men of that time whose main interests were in other fields. These statements are hard to locate; they are rarely mentioned by historians and most can therefore be found only in complete sets of such men’s works. Nevertheless, many exist, of which the following are typical examples.
Quite a few notable men of colonial America referred to the belief. For instance, a book called The Christian Philosopher was written by the Puritan minister Cotton Mather, who is most famous today for his involvement in the Salem witchcraft trials. He was not the sort of man who would be expected to have much interest in extrasolar planets. Yet his book devoted many pages to the subject. Unlike most, Cotton Mather did not claim to know the purpose of other planets, though he assumed they were inhabited. He wrote: “Great GOD, what a Variety of Worlds hast thou created! How astonishing are the Dimensions of them! How stupendous are the Displays of thy Greatness, and of thy Glory, in the Creatures with which thou hast replenished those Worlds! . . . Who can tell what Uses those marvellous Globes may be designed for.”
Benjamin Franklin was also a firm believer both in other solar systems and in the superiority of their inhabitants to man. In 1728 he wrote: “I believe that Man is not the most perfect Being but One, rather, that as there are many Degrees of Beings his Inferiors, so there are many Degrees of Beings superior to him. Also, when I stretch my Imagination thro’ and beyond our System of Planets, beyond the visible fix’d Stars themselves, into that Space that is every Way infinite, and conceive it fill’d with Suns like ours, each with a Chorus of Worlds for ever moving round him, then this little Ball on which we move seems, even in my narrow Imagination, to be almost Nothing.”
This was part of a statement about his private religious beliefs, in which speculations about other solar systems played a large part. But he mentioned extraterrestrial beings in connection with science, too. In Poor Richard’s Almanac for September, 1749, Benjamin Franklin wrote, “It is the opinion of all the modern philosophers and mathematicians that the planets are habitable worlds.” In the middle of a letter to a friend explaining his own hypothesis about magnetism, he said, “Superior beings smile at our theories, and at our presumption in making them.” To another friend he expressed the wish that the friend’s idea of happy conduct might “grow and increase till it becomes the governing philosophy of the human species, as it must be that of superior beings in better worlds.”
Thomas Jefferson, despite great interest in science, did not say much about extrasolar planets in his writings; but the catalog of his library shows that he owned the books on plurality of worlds by Fontenelle, Huygens, and William Derham. So he must have thought about the subject. Once, in a personal letter, he spoke of the “new scene” presented by the thought of planets orbiting variable stars.
The diary of John Adams, who became the second president of the United States, also contains references to other solar systems. On the 24th of April, 1756, he wrote, “Astronomers tell us, with good Reason, that . . . all the unnumbered Worlds that revolve round the fixt Starrs are inhabited, as well as this Globe of Earth.” That day and the next, he went on to reflect upon whether all the “different Ranks of Rational Beings” in those worlds had committed moral wickedness, and if so, whether any church leaders would think they must be “consigned to everlasting Perdition.” It is evident that he himself did not think so.
Some people of today find it surprising that everyone who considered extrasolar worlds in past centuries immediately connected the subject with religion. After all, many were not especially religious in everyday life. John Adams, for example, was mainly concerned with law, politics and government; he devoted most of his time and attention to those affairs. Certainly plenty of men thought about religion only on Sunday, and not even then if they were not church-goers.
Religion, however, is not merely what is believed by those who belong to some specific group with specific traditions. In its broad sense, it is a way of interpreting the mysteries of the universe. One modern dictionary lists “concern over what exists beyond the visible world” as its first definition of the word. Until the twentieth century, it did not occur to anyone that science could find out anything about worlds of other suns. Science knew that stars were suns, and that was all. So scientists, politicians, and everybody else assumed that ideas concerning distant solar systems were religious ideas. They did not all associate those ideas with the official views of any church, but they nevertheless associated them with their own religious views. There was no other category in which to put them.
The author Philip Freneau is known chiefly as “the poet of the American Revolution” because that was the subject he wrote most about. But in a poem about nature he spoke of
A power, that every blessing gives,He and most others who contemplated such a power called it God. Yet even those who did not use that name believed that the many worlds of the universe belonged to a pattern, a pattern science could not describe.
Who through eternal ages lives,
All space inhabits, space his throne,
Spreads through all worlds, confin’d to none.
Scientists tried to describe the pattern, of course, and with respect to its physical aspects they made progress. Sometimes the progress was initiated by people whose view was not particularly scientific. In 1750 an Englishman, Thomas Wright, published a book called An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe. Though his lengthy arguments for inhabited planets of other suns were common ones, in addition he argued for an idea that was indeed new: the idea that the stars themselves revolved around a central point. He declared that the Milky Way was an orderly system of stars that included our sun. In other words, he introduced the concept of galaxies.
After calculating that there must be “within the whole celestial Area 60,000,000 planetary Worlds like ours,” Thomas Wright said: “In this great Celestial Creation, the Catastrophy of a World such as ours, or even the total Dissolution of a System of Worlds, may possibly be no more to the great Author of Nature, than the most common Accident in Life with us, and in all Probability such final and general Doom-Days may be as frequent there as even Birthdays, or Mortality with us upon the Earth. This Idea has something so cheerful in it, that I own I can never look upon the Stars without wondering why the whole World does not become Astronomers.”
This thought does not strike most people as cheerful. But Wright felt that it turned men’s attention from “all the Vicissitudes of adverse Fortune, which make so many narrow-minded Mortals miserable.” Above all, it made him want to reconcile the spiritual heaven with the physical universe again. He believed heaven was a place equally accessible to souls from the worlds of all suns. It was on that basis, as well as on the basis of analogy between order within solar systems and a larger order of stellar ones, that he developed his idea about the Milky Way. To Wright, the center around which suns moved was “far superior to any other Point of Situation in the known Universe;” unlike earlier thinkers who had assumed a central position to be “low,” he envisioned the middle as the throne of God.
Most astronomers had long before abandoned the idea of a physical location for heaven, so Wright’s book did not have much influence, despite the fact that his view of the galaxy—and of nebulae as other galaxies—was amazingly correct. However, he was given credit by the first man to present a theory of galaxies in scientific terms.
That man was the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. In his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, written in 1755, Kant observed that scientific cosmology had not changed since the time of Huygens, when, though it was recognized that “infinite space swarms with worlds,” the fixed stars “were looked upon as filling all the heavens . . . without order and without intention.” He then went on to discuss his theory of the Milky Way, and of the nebulae as similar but vastly more distant star-systems, saying of it: “With what astonishment are we transported when we behold the infinite multitude of worlds and systems which fill the extension of the Milky Way! But how is this astonishment increased, when we become aware of the fact that all these immense orders of star-worlds again form but one of a number whose termination we do not know . . . There is here no end but an abyss of a real immensity, in presence of which all the capability of human conception sinks exhausted.”
Overwhelming as this enlarged concept of the universe may seem, it was less dismaying to most minds than the presumed lack of order in the stellar regions had been. The thought of there being no center had disturbed people more than the removal of the earth from the center. Kant’s theory restored a “universal centre of the attraction of the whole of nature.” This led him to another new and significant concept: he believed that the universe was formed from the center outward. “The sphere of developed nature is incessantly engaged in extending itself. Creation is not the work of a moment. Millions and whole myriads of millions of centuries will flow on, during which always new worlds and new systems of worlds will be formed after each other in the distant regions away from the centre of nature, and will attain to perfection . . . While nature thus adorns eternity with changing scenes, God continues engaged in incessant creation in forming the matter for construction of still greater worlds.”
Such ideas as these, which Kant elaborated in detail, have much in common with some present-day cosmological theories. Moreover, Kant was ahead of his time in still another way. He did not think all planets were necessarily inhabited. That, he felt, “would be as if one were to make the wisdom of God a reason for doubting the fact that sandy deserts occupy wide areas of the earth’s surface and that there are islands in the sea without human inhabitants; for a planet is a much smaller thing in comparison with the whole creation than a desert or an island in comparison with the earth’s surface.” And he also felt that it was likely “that celestial bodies which are not yet inhabited will be hereafter, when their development has reached a later stage.”
This farsighted picture of evolving worlds and an evolving universe did not become prevalent until long after Immanuel Kant’s time. Moreover, most of what Kant wrote about other worlds’ inhabitants was omitted from his book when it was [first] translated into English. He believed that peoples of planets far from their suns must be morally superior to those of warmer worlds, an opinion later scientists did not share; perhaps they thought his speculations on such matters unlikely to enhance his reputation as one of the world’s greatest philosophers. Kant gained that reputation mainly from what he wrote on topics other than cosmology. Only his hypothesis about the Milky Way and the nebulae was adopted by the astronomers of his era.
Foremost among those astronomers was Sir William Herschel [pictured above], the first man to study the stars systematically with a telescope. His many achievements, which included the discovery of the planet Uranus, made him well known to the general public. Although his writings were technical ones, published in scientific journals, his discoveries and opinions were widely reported in newspapers and magazines. Everyone who had an interest in astronomy admired Herschel. And Herschel’s belief in a multitude of inhabited worlds was even stronger than most people’s. Unlike other notable astronomers he was convinced that the moon, and even the sun, were inhabited as well as the planets. This conviction he naturally applied to other suns also. Because Sir William Herschel was an observational astronomer instead of a mere speculator, his voice carried great weight—although of course, his thoughts about the inhabitants of planets and suns were as speculative as anybody else’s. He did not pretend to have observed any inhabitants. People who were not scientists, however, frequently assumed that he knew more than he had any way of knowing.
Herschel had no means of knowing more about extraterrestrial life than his contemporaries. On the other hand, it should not be thought—as it was by scientists at one time—that his reasoning was less sound than theirs. He was aware that life of the same kind as Earth’s could not exist on the sun, although he did think that the interior of the sun was cooler than the luminous exterior. What he believed was that “it is most probably inhabited, like the rest of the planets, by beings whose organs are adapted to the peculiar circumstance of that vast globe.” Since the time of Giordano Bruno speculators about life on other worlds have been divided into those who have held that it must be confined to environments similar to ours, and those who have seen no reason to impose such a limitation. From the scientific standpoint, the question is one of biology, not astronomy. Astronomy cannot settle it now any more than it could two hundred years ago, when William Herschel lived.
It is difficult to determine whether the idea of countless solar systems was as popular throughout the rest of the world as it was in England and America. Most of the writing about it is in books or magazines now relatively rare, and not of the sort usually translated. One would have to be able to read many languages, and visit large foreign libraries, to find out what the prevailing opinion among educated people in other countries was. The great scientists and philosophers of Western civilization, however, came from many nations, and quoted each other’s works; in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a number of them referred to the existence of extrasolar planets as undisputed fact. Those who did not seem to have been silent on the subject.
Much less information is available about Eastern civilization. Vedic scriptures spoke of many worlds. So did ancient Buddhist writings, and the thirteenth-century Chinese scholar Tong Mu wrote: “Empty space is like a kingdom and heaven and earth no more than a single individual person in that kingdom. Upon one tree there are many fruits, and in one kingdom many people. How unreasonable it would be to suppose that besides the heaven and earth which we can see there are no other heavens and no other earths!”
In China, people never believed in Aristotelian cosmology with its enclosed system of crystal spheres; throughout medieval times they pictured space as containing other worlds. Western scholars who visited China in the seventeenth century learned this, so European books about plurality of worlds written in that century often mentioned China. But the Chinese then thought of “other worlds” in a general sense rather than of solar systems. English books do not seem to tell when they, or other Eastern peoples, began to believe that planets circled the stars.
Eighteenth-century Russia had close cultural ties with Western Europe, and both Fontenelle’s book and Huygens’ were translated into Russian. The Russian scientist and poet Mikhail Lomonosov was especially interested in extrasolar life. He mentioned it in one of his best-known poems, “Evening Meditations on Seeing the Aurora Borealis.”
Science tells me that each twinkling starIn Sweden, the most famous writer about other worlds was Emanuel Swedenborg, a distinguished scientist who later became a mystic and theologian. His book The Earths in our Solar System, which are called Planets, and the Earths in the Starry Heaven was not science, but an account of his mystic experiences. He believed that he had conversed with the spirits of other worlds’ inhabitants and had traveled—in a spiritual rather than a bodily sense—to many distant planets. In the book he gave detailed descriptions of them. Swedenborg was a learned man of high reputation, one who had made significant inventions and proposed advanced theories in both physics and physiology. His beliefs were sincere, although the majority of people did not share them, and after he died a church was founded based on his theological writings. One of his principal teachings was that the peoples of all worlds were human.
That smiles above us is a peopled sphere,
Or central sun, diffusing light afar;
A link of nature’s chain . . .
Vain is the inquiry—all is darkness, doubt:
This earth is one vast mystery to man.
First find the secrets of this planet out,
Then other planets, other systems scan!
The conviction that inhabited worlds surround other suns was unquestionably common to men and women of many nationalities and faiths, though a few cautioned against jumping to conclusions for which there was no proof. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, wrote: “It is our wisdom to be very wary how we pronounce concerning things we have not seen.” He said he did not contest the probability of other worlds being inhabited, but insisted—quite rightly—that no real evidence existed. “Be not so positive,” he continued, “especially with regard to things which are neither easy nor necessary to be determined.”
But as a rule, people did not doubt the truth of the predominant view. The president of Yale University, Timothy Dwight, stated unequivocally that the stars “are known with absolute certainty to be universally suns, resembling our own.” He went on to declare that systems of planets were “with the highest reason supposed to exist and to be, like the earth, the residence of intelligent beings.” When this idea first raised controversy again, the point at issue was not the assumption itself, but its implications. That issue became a heated one in 1794, following the publication of a book called Age of Reason by Thomas Paine.
Thomas Paine was one of the foremost patriots of the American Revolution. The things he had written before and during the Revolution had played a major part in shaping public opinion. He was no scholarly philosopher, writing mainly for an audience of other philosophers. His words were addressed to the general public—and he deliberately made them fervent, even shocking, in order to hold people’s attention. His name was well known to everyone. After America won independence, Paine continued to write about politics, and he became involved in the French Revolution, which led to his imprisonment in France.
While he was in prison, Thomas Paine thought he might not get out alive; so, fearing that he would never have another chance, he wrote a book about his religious beliefs. Actually those beliefs were not very different from those of many other educated eighteenth-century men, but such ideas had been expressed in scholarly works rather than popular ones, and had not reached average people. When Paine got out of prison and his book was published, it aroused a storm of protest.
Age of Reason presented to common men what had been discussed in literary and scientific circles for at least a century: the idea that knowledge of God should be sought in nature instead of in supernatural revelation. Many of them were furious. Many churchmen were furious also; though they had been willing to let a minority of philosophers and scientists think that way, they felt the faith of less educated people would be destroyed. In addition, Paine’s political enemies, who were anxious to discredit him, falsely accused him of being an atheist. The result of all this was that both the book itself and the angry replies to it were widely circulated. Because Paine had included a long description of a universe full of solar systems to make his point, the concept got more attention than ever before.
In the seventeenth century, statements in the Bible had been used as arguments against the new cosmology: Thomas Paine did the opposite: he used the new cosmology, which was no longer new, as an argument against statements in the Bible. “To believe that God created a plurality of worlds at least as numerous as what we call stars,” he wrote, “renders the Christian system of faith at once little and ridiculous, and scatters it in the mind like feathers in the air. The two beliefs cannot be held together in the same mind, and he who thinks he believes both, has thought but little of either.”
That was Thomas Paine’s honest opinion, but it was untrue. Many people believed both in plurality of worlds and in Christianity; many still do. Such people had often thought a great deal about it, and had reached conclusions unlike Paine’s. He asked, “From whence, then, could arise the solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependent on his protection, should quit the care of all the rest, and come to die in our world, because, they say, one man and one woman had eaten an apple? And on the other hand, are we to suppose that every world in the boundless creation had an Eve, an apple, a serpent and a redeemer?”
Besides seeming irreverent to people, this was open to attack on grounds of logic. Paine must have known that some Christians interpreted the story of the apple and the serpent as an allegory, yet the force of his argument depended on taking it literally. A more important logical flaw was that even to those who did take it literally, it was by no means a valid assumption that God abandoned all the other planets for the sake of ours. As one writer put it: “Mr. Paine seems to wish to have it thought that the doctrine of a multiplicity of inhabited worlds is a matter of demonstration; but the existence of a number of heavenly bodies, whose revolutions are under the direction of certain laws . . . does not prove that they are all inhabited by intelligent beings. I do not deny that, from other considerations, the thing may be highly probable; but it is not more than a probability . . . But I do not wish to avail myself of these observations, as I am under no apprehensions that the cause in which I engage requires them.”
This writer’s “cause” was to point out that plurality of worlds was not necessarily incompatible with Christianity, and a great many others engaged in it during the next few decades. As it happened, what some of them said restored in people’s minds the idea that Earth had a central position in the affairs of the universe spiritually if not physically. Most Christians of that time held either that only on Earth had the inhabitants sinned, using the parable of the Good Shepherd to suggest that God devoted special care to the one world that needed saving, or that Earth had been singled out as the site of events that affected the populations of all the other planets.
In addition, new emphasis was placed on the old idea of the other worlds being inhabited by angels. By no means everyone agreed with it, but it became popular among large groups that had formerly known little if anything about astronomy. The most celebrated presentation of this view was by Thomas Chalmers, whose book—usually known by its abbreviated title Astronomical Discourses— was a best-seller for many years during the nineteenth century. The British Review reported that the volume had “suspended for a time every other fashionable topic of the literary kind, and spread as far as any tale of unholy love, mysterious murder, or sentimental crime.”
Thomas Chalmers was a Scottish clergyman famed for his preaching ability, and the Astronomical Discourses were originally sermons given in Scotland in 1817. Many years later the author of a magazine article wrote: “One or two of these ‘Discourses’ . . . delivered in the Tron Church, Glasgow, at noon on the week-day, were heard by the writer of this paper, then a boy. He had to wait nearly four hours before he could gain admission as one of a crowd in which he was nearly crushed to death. It was with no little effort that the great preacher could find his way to his pulpit . . . In that enthusiasm the writer, young as he was, fully participated. He has never since witnessed anything equal to the scene.”
Dr. Chalmers presented the case for extrasolar worlds with great eloquence, and from his explanations of astronomy it is evident that his audience included people not already familiar with the subject. Today, his sermons would seem extremely long and repetitive; but so would all sermons of that era—and Dr. Chalmers was a more effective orator than most. He drew a vivid picture of Earth, “one of the smaller islets which float on the ocean of vacancy,” as the scene of a contest between angelic hosts and the legions of the devil. “Though we know little nothing of the moral economy of the other planets,” he said, “we are not to infer that the beings who occupy these wide extended regions . . . know little of ours . . . Angels have mightier reach of contemplation. Angels can look upon the world, and all which it inherits, as the part of a larger family: Angels were in the full exercise of their powers even at the fir infancy of our species . . . they regard us as heirs of the same destiny with themselves, to rise along with them in the scale moral elevation.”
Anyone who is inclined to dismiss this as a totally outmoded way of viewing the universe might find it interesting to compare Dr. Chalmers’ ideas with the modern concept of advanced interstellar civilizations that may, in the opinion of some scientists, be keeping a benevolent watch over relatively primitive planets.
Thomas Chalmers’ suggestions about angels were merely hypothesis; he did not claim to believe it as fact, and he also dealt with other possibilities concerning the inhabitants of extrasolar planets. He was in no way antagonistic to science; in fact he said: “Who shall assign a limit to the discoveries of future ages? Who can prescribe to science her boundaries, or restrain the active and insatiable curiosity of man within the circle of present acquirements? We may guess with plausibility what we cannot anticipate with confidence . . . To the men of other times we leave the full assurance of what we can assert with the highest probability, that yon planetary orbs are so many worlds, that they teem with life . . . Though this earth and these heavens were to disappear, there are other worlds that roll afar; the light of other suns shines upon them; and the sky which mantles them is garnished with other stars. Is it presumption to say that the moral world extends to these distant and unknown regions? that they are occupied with people? that the charities of home and neighbourhood flourish there?”
These words are as relevant in our time as they were when Thomas Chalmers first spoke them in a crowded Scottish church over 150 years ago.
Both Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason and Thomas Chalmers’
Astronomical Discourses were directed to a wider audience than the
works of philosophers, and both had extensive influence and appeal. Some
people agreed with Paine. The great poet Shelley, who described innumerable
solar systems in his poem “Queen Mab” and in his notes to it, was
even more emphatic in his belief that existing religions
were “irreconcilable with the knowledge of the stars.” But on the
whole, public opinion was on the side of Chalmers. Whichever side one
favors, the two books, taken together, show well the awe and excitement
shared by people of opposing views who reflected upon a vast, inhabited
universe. Their great popularity in their time is easier to understand than
the fact that they have been nearly forgotten; for similar emotions are
shared by people of opposing views today.
Lots more that I have written, or collected, about space! |
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