The plurality of inhabited worlds

A study setting forth the conditions of habitability of the celestial lands, discussed from the standpoint of Astronomy and Physiology; by Camille Flammarion, calculator of the Imperial Observatory of Paris, attached to the Bureau of Longitudes, etc.

Although this work does not deal with Spiritism, the subject is one of those that fall within the scope of our observations and of the principles of the doctrine. Our readers will be grateful to us for having called their attention to it, for we are, above all, convinced of the immense interest they will take in this reading, doubly captivating, by its form and by its substance. In it they will find, confirmed by Science, one of the capital revelations made by the Spirits. Mr. Flammarion is one of the members of the Spiritist Society of Paris, and his name figures as a medium in the remarkable dissertations signed by Galileo, which we published last September, under the title of Uranographic Studies. By this twofold title we feel happy to make special mention of him, which, most assuredly, will be ratified. The author devoted himself to gathering all the elements of Nature that support the opinion of the plurality of inhabited worlds, while combating, at the same time, the contrary opinion. After having read him, one wonders how it is possible to cast doubt upon this question. Let us add that considerations of the highest scientific order do not exclude the grace nor the poetry of the style. This can be judged by the following passage, where he speaks of the intuition that most men, on contemplating the celestial vault, have of the habitability of the worlds:

“…But the admiration that the most moving scene of the spectacle of Nature excites in us soon transforms itself into a feeling of indescribable certainty, because we are strangers to those worlds, where an apparent solitude reigns, and which cannot give rise to the immediate impression by which life binds us to the Earth. We feel the need to people those globes apparently forgotten by life and, over those eternally deserted and silent shores, we seek glances that respond to our own, just as a bold navigator, who for a long time explored in his dreams the deserts of the ocean, seeking the land that was revealed to him, traversing with his eagle eye the vastest distances and audaciously crossing the limits of the known world, to lose himself, at last, in the immense plains where, for ages and ages, the New World had lain. His dream was realized. May ours rid itself of the mystery that still surrounds it and, upon the vessel of thought, may we ascend to the heavens, in search of other lands.” The work is divided into three parts. In the first, entitled Historical Study, the author reviews the immense series of philosophers and scientists, ancient and modern, religious and profane, who professed the doctrine of the plurality of worlds, from Orpheus to Herschel and the learned Laplace.

“Most of the Greek sects,” he says, “taught it, whether openly to all the disciples, without distinction, or in secret, to the initiates of philosophy. If the poems attributed to Orpheus are indeed his, we may consider him as the first to teach the plurality of worlds. It is implicit in the Orphic verses, where it is said that each star is a world and, notably, in these words preserved by Proclus: ‘God built an immense land, which the immortals call Selene and which men call the Moon, upon which rises a great number of dwellings, mountains, and cities.’ “The first of the Greeks who bore the name of philosopher — Pythagoras — taught in public the immobility of the Earth and the movement of the heavenly bodies around it as the single center of Creation, while he declared to the advanced adepts of his doctrine the belief in the movement of the Earth, as a planet, and in the plurality of worlds. Later, Democritus, Heraclitus, and Metrodorus of Chios, the most illustrious of his disciples, propagated from the height of the chair the opinion of their master, which became that of all the Pythagoreans and of most of the Greek philosophers. Philolaus, Nicetas, and Heraclitus were among the most ardent defenders of this belief; the latter even went so far as to maintain that each star is a world which, like our own, has a land, an atmosphere, and an immense extent of etherized matter.” Further on he adds:

“Laplace says that the beneficial action of the Sun causes the animals and plants that cover the Earth to be born. Analogy leads us to believe that it produces similar effects on other planets, for it is not natural to think that matter, whose fecundity we see developing in so many ways, should be sterile on a planet as large as Jupiter, which, like the terrestrial globe, has its days, its nights, and its years, and upon which observations indicate changes that presuppose very active forces… Made for the temperature he enjoys on Earth, man could not, according to all appearances, live on other planets. But must there not be an infinity of organizations relative to the various temperatures of the globes and of the universes? If the mere difference of the elements and of the climates is responsible for so many varieties in the terrestrial productions, how much more must those of the planets and satellites differ!” The second part is consecrated to the astronomical study of the constitution of the various celestial globes, in accordance with the most positive data of Science, from which it results that the Earth is not, neither by its position, nor by its volume, nor by the elements of which it is composed, in an exceptional situation that could have earned it the privilege of being inhabited to the exclusion of so many other worlds, more favored in various respects. The first part is one of erudition; the second, of science.

The third part treats the question from the physiological standpoint. By making known the movement of the seasons, the fluctuations of the atmosphere, and the variability of the temperature in most of the worlds that compose our solar whirlwind, the astronomical observations point out that the Earth is in one of the least favored conditions, an orb whose inhabitants must suffer the most vicissitudes and where life must be the most painful. From this the author concludes that it is not rational to admit that God reserved for the dwelling of man one of these less favored worlds, while the better endowed ones would be condemned to shelter no living being. All this is established not upon a systematic idea, but upon positive data, to which all the sciences have contributed: Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, Meteorology, Geology, Zoology, Physiology, Mechanics, etc. He adds: “Of all the planets, the most favored, in every respect, is the magnificent Jupiter, whose seasons, scarcely distinct, have still the advantage of lasting twelve times longer than ours. This planetary giant seems to glide in the heavens like a challenge to the frail inhabitants of the Earth, giving them a glimpse of the pompous pictures of a long and gentle existence.

“For us, who are bound to the little terrestrial ball by chains that we cannot break, we see our days successively extinguished by the rapid time that consumes them, by the capricious periods that divide them, by those disharmonious seasons whose antagonism is perpetuated in the inequality of day and night and in the inconstancy of the temperature.”

After the eloquent picture of the struggle that man must sustain against Nature, in order to provide for his subsistence, of the geological revolutions that alter the surface of the globe and threaten to annihilate it, he adds: “After such considerations, can it still be maintained that this globe, even for man, is the best of possible worlds, and that many other celestial bodies cannot be infinitely superior to it and, better than it, unite the conditions favorable to the development and the long duration of human existence?”

Then, leading the reader through the worlds in the infinity of space, he makes him see a panorama of such immensity that we cannot help finding ridiculous and unworthy of the power of God the supposition that, among so many trillions, our little globe, unknown even to a great part of our planetary system, should be the only inhabited land; and we identify ourselves with the thought of the author, when he says, in concluding:

“Ah! if our sight were penetrating enough to distinguish, where we only catch a glimpse of brilliant points against the black background of the sky, the resplendent suns that gravitate in the vastness and the inhabited worlds that accompany their course! If it were given us to embrace at a glance those myriads of solidary systems and if, advancing with the speed of light, we crossed during centuries and centuries that unlimited number of suns and spheres, without ever encountering the limits of that prodigious immensity, where God has made the worlds and the beings to germinate; and if, turning our gaze backward, but without knowing at what point of the infinite to find again that grain of dust which is called Earth, we should halt, fascinated and confounded before such a spectacle and would unite our voice to the concert of universal Nature, saying, from the depths of our soul: Mighty God! How foolish we were to think that there was nothing beyond the Earth, and that our poor dwelling alone had the privilege of reflecting thy grandeur and thy power!” For our part, we shall conclude with one observation: it is that, seeing the sum of ideas contained in this little work, one is astonished that a young man, at an age when others are still on the school benches, has had time to make them his own and, with all the more reason, to delve deeply into them. It is for us the evident proof that his Spirit is no beginner or that, in spite of himself, he was assisted by another Spirit.

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