Camille Flammarion

“ One of the finest achievements of astronomy is having made man a citizen of the heavens. The planet which we inhabit is a heavenly body, just as is Venus, Mars, or Jupiter, and far from occupying the centre of creation, it lies in the depths of infinite space as do the most distant stars of the Milky Way. Venus possesses no more light of her own than does the Earth; she simply receives the rays of the Sun and sheds them into space as the Moon does. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus recently on our own Earth shone the life of Babylon, of Thebes, of Memphis, of Nineveh, of Carthage, the glory of Semiramis, Sesostris, Solomon, Alexander, Cambyses, and Cæsar; and to-day the silence of funeral solitude reigns supreme over the ruins of the palaces and temples, in the slumber of the invading night. In the history of the universe it is not only peoples, kingdoms, and empires which have disappeared, but it is whole worlds, groups of worlds, archipelagoes of planets, visible universes! ”

“ Venus, the brightest star which ever shines in the limpid glory of the western sky, is not a star, strictly speaking; it is a planet, a world like ours, and of the same size, which only shines by reflecting the Sun’s light into space. When one remembers that it is the same with us, and that, seen from the distance of some ten million miles, our Earth shines with a similar lustre, one is forced to admit that we are much more beautiful from afar than we are close by. ”

“ Then, in the infinite night I perceived above me another universe which appeared in space as a pale and distant nebula, and I understood that all we can see with our eyes in the clearest night and all that telescopic vision has yet allowed us to discover represent nothing but a local region in an animated immensity, and that there are other universes besides that of which our Sun forms a star. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Jupiter having, like Venus, a beneficent influence upon man, everything there is perfect: the air is pure and wholesome, the waters crystal-clear, and the soil itself as bright as silver. On Mars, on the other hand, everything is of a warlike roughness, forbidding and terrible, rivers of boiling pitch overflow their banks and envelop the country in thick and suffocating smoke. Saturn, as a planet, is particularly accursed; everything looks like a deserted grave. The planets are not inhabited by human beings, but by angels or genii who rule them. ”

“ As I contemplated those panoramas of time and space, as the bygone ages passed slowly across my view, with their long trails of past glories, and as the races which peopled the worlds arose from the depths of space, shedding their winding-sheets and walking again in the flowery paths of life, all this prodigious secular past became present, and the millions of suns extinguished through the ages lighted up and shone again. The sky was bright with innumerable stars which our eyes had never seen, and the light of life shed its rays on celestial shores stretching away to infinity! ”

“ For them the end of the world was to have meant the end of the living universe and the establishment of a celestial and infernal world. For every one of the mortals inhabiting the future globe of which we speak, life passed with the fugitive and inexorable speed of the river which flows from its source to the sea, day by day, month by month, year by year, so swiftly that at the end of its course all the moments of that life seem to touch. ”

“ In 100 million years, the earth where we live will no longer exist, or if any wreck of it remains, it will only be a funereal desert. The various worlds of our system will have achieved their circle of life, the histories of its human race will long ago have been finished, our own Sun, no doubt, will have lost its light and will roll along a dark star, through the realms of night. ”

“ When, on a fine starry night, we examine this world through the telescope, when we see the polar snows which melt in the spring, the finely marked continents, the mediterraneans with long gulfs, the eloquent and varied geographical configuration, one cannot help asking whether the Sun which illuminates that world as it does ours shines on nothing living, whether those rains fertilise anything, whether that atmosphere is breathed by any living being, and whether that world of Mars which rolls swiftly through space resembles a railway train travelling empty without either goods or passengers. ”

“ The inhabitants of the world of Andromeda lived on their immense globe and occupied themselves with their personal affairs as if our Earth had never existed and without suspecting that long before them, in the past, our human race had played the game of destiny, cradled in the illusion that they existed alone in the world. Nobody thought, amid the common people, that worlds succeeded each other in time as well as in space. ”

“ But as we have already repeated so often in this book, and what we must thoroughly absorb, is the importance of time as well as of space. Just as our world is nothing but a small island, a point in the universe, so also our era is nothing but a moment in eternity. The present moment has no more importance than the moments which have preceded or those which are to come. There is no reason to believe that such and such other worlds are inhabited at present simply because we live at present and can observe them. One world has been inhabited in the past, another will be inhabited in the future. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What is past is past. Neither terrestrial humanity nor its abode remained. All had disappeared, all had been suppressed, except the spirit. The universal spirit still reigned. But the metamorphoses of matter had transformed everything. The entire history of our globe had been wiped off the slate by the sponge of Time; and the sidereal universe went on as if that history had never been written.
* * * * *
For several millions of centuries, the Sun had been a globe of gas, shedding light and heat around it. ”

“ Since an hour ago, every one of us, reader or writer, rich or poor, wise or ignorant, infant or greybeard, whether we are active or asleep—since an hour ago every one of us has described in the sky an invisible track of more than 60,000 miles, for our planet traces out 580 million miles per annum merely by its revolution round the Sun, and a centenarian lives to mark out a distance of 58,000 million miles. ”

“ There is no old age. On reaching a ripe age one goes to sleep and the body dissolves like a cloud, which becomes invisible by the change of state of its molecules.
No law has instituted the marriage bond. As it would be impossible to contract for interest, because there are neither castes nor fortunes, love alone guides the choice. On rare occasions the years reveal some divergence of character sufficient to lead to a desire for another choice, but when this divergence shows itself there is no chain to break. Besides, they always remain lovers and never become married. ”

“ The little star of which we spoke before, an enormous sun a million times the size of the Earth moves at such a distance that the fastest express train would take at least 325 million years to reach it. Yet it is one of our neighbouring stars. One can go still farther and farther and proceed with any speed through any number of centuries in any direction of space without ever coming to an end, without ever advancing a single pace, since the centre is everywhere, the circumference is nowhere, and eternity itself does not suffice to vanquish infinity. ”

“ This, as we have often repeated, would be a strange interpretation of the language of Nature, considering that our small planet is too small a cup to contain the whole of life, that that life abounds everywhere, fills the waters, swarms in the air, covers the entire surface of the globe, and that the fertility of Nature is such that she multiplies parasitic life at the expense of life itself, rather than get tired of producing. And the spectacle is the same for all the immense duration of the geological eras. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For eternity did not begin, it was never begun. The forces of Nature have never been inactive. For Nature itself, our measures of time, our conceptions of duration, do not exist. She has no past and no future, but a perpetual present. She remains immutable throughout her incessant manifestations and transformations. We pass away; She remains.
One can hardly think without terror of the innumerable beings which have lived on the worlds now lost, of all the leading spirits who [Pg 70] have thought, acted, guided humanity in the path of progress, light, and liberty. ”

“ Whoever follows these thoughts will be afraid of himself and, considering himself sustained by the weight which nature has given him, between those two abysses of the infinite and nothing, he will tremble in face of those marvels, and I believe that as his curiosity changes to admiration, he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to seek them with presumption.
“For indeed what is man in nature? A nothing in comparison with the infinite, a universe in comparison with nothing, a mean between nothing and all. ”

“ Stars and atoms bring us face to face with an immense symphony. Those who only see the orchestra without hearing anything are the deaf. Behind the visible world, our minds must feel the presence of the invisible world upon which we are based. All that we see is appearance: the real is the invisible, the force, the energy, which moves all and carries all through infinity and eternity. ”

“ On Mercury, everything takes place gaily and joyously, since all those who are born under its influence are inclined to lightness and mischief. On Venus, everything is even better—or worse: he finds everything gracious and charming; a soft rosy light is spread over the planet, perfumes are wafted about everywhere, zephyrs mingle their murmurings with those of the brooks, and gold and precious stones sparkle everywhere. ”

“ Its density, nearly equal to that of the Sun, is barely greater than that of water. A globe of vapour varied by mountains of clouds, impalpable Himalayas, aerial Alps in convulsions, fluid and constantly agitated Pyrenees! Its colossal bulk has prevented its cooling as fast as our Earth, and it will no doubt take tens of hundreds of millions of years to arrive at a temperature fit for inhabitants. In all probability there is nobody yet on Jupiter, neither men nor animals nor plants. This immense world is in its primordial state and prepares itself for the future. ”

“ The Earth swings round the Sun carried along with a speed of 1,600,000 miles per day, meanwhile rotating on its axis, animated by a dozen different sorts of movements, lighter and more mobile than a child’s balloon floating in the air, solicited by the attractions of various neighbouring bodies, a veritable plaything of cosmic forces which carry us along in an immense whirlpool. The Moon revolves round the Earth, constantly deranging us in our progress and subjecting us to perpetual undulations. ”

“ Just as, before the birth of the Earth, other worlds had flourished in space, so also after the death of our planet will the universe continue to exist, as it existed during the human era. And in the world of which we speak, a new and flourishing humanity shone in the joy of another sun. ”

“ Venus is no longer for us an allegorical symbol lost in the incense of the clouds and reigning over enslaved hearts; the Earth is no longer an inferior abode controlled by celestial influence; the horizon is grown wider, our planet has been liberated in unlimited space ”

“ 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. ”

“ Night fills all; but it is not darkness; it is the soft light shed by millions of stars. We can thus better appreciate how everything is in vibration. The movements of every atom on earth and in the heavens are the mathematical result of all the ethereal undulations which arrive in time from the abysses of infinite space. The moon attracts the Earth, the Earth attracts her sister-planets, these beckon and call her, the stars attract the Sun ”