Universal life.

All the religions that have succeeded one another in the history of Humanity, from the theogony of the Aryans, which seems to date back fifteen thousand years and offers us the most ancient type, down to the Babism of Asia, which arose in this century and which, nonetheless, does not count many sectaries; from the vastest and most consolidated theologies which, like Buddhism in Asia, Christianity in Europe, and Islamism in Africa, dominated immense regions over long centuries, down to the isolated and frustrated systems which, like the French church of the Abbot Chatel, n or the fusionist religion of Toureil, n or the positivist temple of Auguste Comte, lived no longer than the space of a morning; – all the religions, I say, have had no other object than the knowledge of eternal life.

Meanwhile, until today not one of them has been able to tell us what eternal life is; not one has even been able to teach us what present life is, in what it differs from or in what it is bound to eternal life; what the Earth on which we live is; what the heaven is, toward which all anxious eyes turn, to ask the secret of the great problem.

The incapacity of all religions, ancient and modern, to explain to us the system of the moral world, led philosophy, overwhelmed by silence and by fictions, to form within its bosom a school of skeptics, who not only doubted the existence of the moral world, but went so far as to deny the presence of God in Nature and the immortality of intellectual souls.

Our spiritualist philosophy of the sciences, founded upon the synthesis of the positive sciences and especially upon the metaphysical consequences of modern astronomy, is more solid than all the ancient religions, more beautiful than all the philosophical systems, more fruitful than all the doctrines, beliefs, and opinions put forth until now by the human spirit. Born in the silence of study, our doctrine grows in the shadow and goes on perfecting itself incessantly by an ever more developed interpretation of the knowledge of the Universe. It will outlive the theological and psychological systems of the past, because it is Nature itself that we observe, without preconceived ideas, without speculation, and without fear.

When, in the midst of a deep and silent night, our solitary soul rises toward those distant worlds that shine above our heads, we instinctively seek to interpret the rays that reach us from the stars, because we feel that those rays are so many fluidic bonds, linking the heavenly bodies to one another in the immense network of solidarity. Now that the stars are no longer for us nails of gold fixed upon the celestial vault; now that we know that those stars are so many suns analogous to our own, centers of varied planetary systems disseminated at incredible distances throughout the infinity of the spaces; now that the night is no longer for us a phenomenon extending to the entire Universe, but simply a passing shadow situated behind the terrestrial globe relative to the Sun, a shadow that extends to a certain distance, but not as far as the stars, and which we cross every day for a few hours by force of the daily rotation of the globe; – we apply this physical knowledge to the philosophical explanation of our situation in the Universe, and we find that we inhabit the surface of a planet which, far from being the center and the base of creation, is no more than a floating island of the great archipelago, swept along, at the same time as myriads of others like it, by the directive forces of the Universe, having been marked by the Creator with no special privilege. To feel ourselves swept along in space is a condition useful to the exact understanding of our relative place in the world; but, physically, we do not have and cannot have that sensation, for we are fixed to the Earth by its attraction and we share integrally in all its movements. The atmosphere, the clouds, all the movable or immovable objects that belong to the Earth are swept along by it, bound to it, and consequently relatively immobile. Whatever the height to which we may rise in the atmosphere, we shall never manage to place ourselves outside the terrestrial attraction and to isolate ourselves from its movement in order to verify it. The Moon itself, at 96,000 leagues from here, is swept along in space by the translation of the Earth. We cannot, then, feel the movement of our planet except by thought. Would it be possible for us to attain that curious sensation? Let us try.

To begin, let us imagine that the globe on which we find ourselves advances through the void at the rate of 660,000 leagues per day, or 27,500 leagues per hour! 30,550 meters per second: it is a speed more than fifty times faster than that of a cannonball (550 meters). Certainly we cannot exactly symbolize that unheard-of swiftness, but we can form an idea of it by representing a line 458 leagues in length and imagining that the terrestrial globe traverses it in a minute. Perpetually, without stopping, without respite, the Earth flies thus. Supposing ourselves placed in space, beside its path, in expectation of seeing it pass before us like an express train, we would see it arrive from afar in the form of a brilliant star. When it was no more than 600 or 700,000 leagues from us, that is, twenty-four hours before arriving, it would appear larger than any known star, smaller than the Moon appears to us: like a great bolide, similar to those that sometimes cross space. Four hours before its arrival, it appears about fourteen times more voluminous than the Moon and, continuing to swell beyond measure, soon it will occupy a quarter of the sky. Already we distinguish upon its surface the continents and the seas, the poles laden with snow, the bands of tropical clouds, Europe with its indented edges… and perhaps we distinguish a small greenish spot, which is no more than the thousandth part of the entire surface of the globe and which is called France… Already we note its movement of rotation upon its axis… but, growing, ever growing, suddenly the globe unfolds like a gigantic shadow across the entire sky, taking six and a half minutes to pass, which perhaps allows us to hear the cries of the wild beasts in the equatorial forests and the cannon of the human peoples, and then, drawing away with majesty into the depths of space, to plunge into the void and shrink in the immensity without end, leaving no other trace of its passage than a mixture of astonishment and terror in our terrified gaze. It is on this colossal ball of 3,000 leagues in diameter and 5,875 sextillion tons in weight that we are disseminated, small imperceptible beings, swept along with an indescribable energy by its various movements of translation, of rotation, of oscillation, and by its alternating inclinations, more or less as grains of dust adhere to a cannonball launched into space. To know and to feel this march of the Earth is to possess one of the first and most important conditions of cosmographic knowledge.

Thus the Earth flies in the sky. The description of this movement may seem to belong purely to the domain of Astronomy. We shall soon find that religious philosophy is highly interested in these facts and that, in reality, the knowledge of the physical universe gives the bases of the religion of the future. Let us continue the scientific examination of our planet.

Like any edifice, theologies cannot be built in the void. They have as their framework the ancient system of the world, which supposed the Earth immobile at the center of the Universe. In demonstrating the fatuity of the ancient illusion, modern astronomy demonstrates the presumption of the theologies founded upon it.

This planet is peopled by a considerable number of living species, classified into two great natural divisions: the vegetable kingdom and the animal kingdom. Each of these beings differs from purely material things, from inanimate objects, by virtue of being formed by a soul unity that governs its organism. Whether one considers a plant, an animal, or a man, one finds that what constitutes life is a special principle, endowed with the faculty of acting upon matter, of forming a determined being, a rosebush, for example, an oak, a lizard, a dog, a man; of fashioning organs such as a leaf, a pistil, a stamen, a wing, an eye, – a special principle whose distinctive character is to be personal.

To confine ourselves to the human race, which more than a hundred centuries ago established the reign of intelligence on this planet, we note that at present it is composed of 1,200,000,000 individuals, who on average live 34 years. In Europe, the average duration of life, which in the last century increased 9% with progress and well-being, is today 38 years. But there are still on Earth backward races, less removed from primitive barbarism, miserable and weak, whose average life does not exceed 28 years. In round figures, there die per year 32 million human individuals, 80,000 per day or roughly 1 per second. There are born 33 million per year, or a little more than 1 per second. Each beat of our hearts, corresponding more or less to the number of oscillations of the clock's pendulum, marks approximately the birth and the death of a being on Earth.

With everything running through space with the swiftness we recognized above, the Earth sees its human population renew itself constantly, with a swiftness that is likewise no less astonishing. Each second a soul incarnates into the corporeal world and another escapes from it. A sixth of children die in the first year, a quarter before the age of 4 years, a third by 14 years, and the half by 42 years. What law presides over births? What law presides over deaths? It is a problem that only Science will be able one day to resolve.

It is important for every man who seeks the truth to see things face to face, such as they are, thus acquiring exact notions about the order of the Universe. Before all else, let us verify the facts, purely and simply; then let us make use of reality to try to penetrate the unknown laws, of which the physical facts are the realization.

Well then! We verify, on the one hand, that the Earth is a heavenly body, in the same way as Jupiter or Sirius, and that it circulates in eternal space by means of movements that give us a measure of time: the years and the days – measures of time that these movements create of themselves and which do not exist in eternal space. On the other hand, we observe that living beings, particularly men, are formed by an organizing soul, which is the immaterial principle, independent of the conditions of space and of time and of the physical properties that characterize matter, and that human existences are not the end of creation, but rather give the idea of passages, of means. By itself, life on Earth lacks an object. This is what stands out incontestably from the very organization of life and death in this world.

Moreover, terrestrial life is neither a beginning nor an end. It is realized in the Universe, at the same time as a great number of other modes of existence, after many others that took place in the past worlds, and before many that will be effected in the future worlds. Terrestrial life is not opposed to another celestial life, as those theologians suppose who do not lean upon Nature. The life that flourishes on the surface of our planet is a celestial life, just as much as that which resplends on Mercury and Venus. We are at present in heaven, as exactly as if we inhabited the polar star or the nebula of Orion.

Thus the Earth, suspended in space by the thread of the solidary attraction of the worlds, sweeps along on its surface the human generations that are born, shine for a few years, and are extinguished. Everything is in movement, and the circulation of beings through time is no less certain, nor less swift, than their circulation through space. This aspect of the Universe surprises us, no doubt, and it seems difficult to us to define it with certainty. The apparent aspect with which men contented themselves during so many centuries was much simpler: the Earth, immobile, was the base of the physical and spiritual world. The Adamic race was the only human race of the Universe; it was placed here to live slowly, to pray and weep until the day when, the end of the world being decreed, the corporeal God, assisted by his saints and angels, would descend from the empyrean to judge the Earth and then transform the Universe into two great sections: heaven and hell. That system, more theological than astrological, was, I repeat, very simple and was based upon the venerable traditions of a fifteen-times-secular teaching. When, then, in this nineteenth century, I come to say: “In truth our ancient beliefs are founded upon deceptive appearances; now we must recognize no other religious philosophy than that which derives from Science,” we may not be ready to accept immediately the immense transformation that results from our modern studies and may wish to examine our doctrine severely before recognizing ourselves as its disciple. But that is precisely what we all desire; liberty of conscience must precede every judgment in souls, and all opinions must be freely, successively ordered according to the indications of the spirit and of the heart. The Earth is an inhabited heavenly body, hovering in the sky in the company of myriads of other heavenly bodies, inhabited like it. Our present terrestrial life forms part of the universal and eternal life, the same being true of the present life of the inhabitants of the other worlds. Space is peopled with human colonies living, at the same time, on globes far apart from one another and linked among themselves by laws, of which we doubtless still know only the most patent.

The general outline of our faith n in eternal life is composed, therefore, of the following points:

1st – The Earth is a heavenly body;

2nd – The other heavenly bodies are inhabited like it;

3rd – The life of terrestrial humanity is a department of universal life;

4th – The present existence of each one of us is a phase of his eternal life – eternal in the past as in the future.