Camille Flammarion

“ Look at the sky, the sea, those foot-hills of the Alps, those rosy evening clouds, those luminous perspectives towards the Italian coast,—all that is one. There is unity in everything. And since molecular philosophy demonstrates that there is no longer any body, that even the atoms in a bar of steel or platinum do not touch each other, no one will be the loser, provided our souls are left us."
"Yes, it is a fact against which no prejudice can prevail,—living beings are souls clothed with air. I pity the worlds deprived of their atmosphere." ”

“ If we are immortal, what do we do with ourselves through endless eternity? Where shall I be a hundred years from now? Where will all the present dwellers of the earth be? To die, for ever and ever; to have existed but for a moment! What a mockery! Would it not be better a hundred times over never to have been born? But if it be our fate to live eternally and never to be able to change anything of the fatality that carries us along,—having endless eternity always before us,—how can we bear the burden of such a destiny? ”

“ Death seemed to her a cruel injustice. She never thought of her mother lying on her death-bed in the ripe beauty of her thirtieth year,—taken away to the green and fragrant cemetery, filled with the songs of birds, while the roses were in full bloom; crossed off the book of life while all Nature still sang, still bloomed and shone,—she never thought of her mother's pale face, as I said, without a sudden shudder creeping all over her from head to foot. No, her mother was not dead! She would not die at thirty, or at any time! And he? He die! ”

“ The constructive elements of the body draw upon Nature and are returned to Nature, and each one of us bears in himself atoms which have formerly belonged to other bodies.
Ah, well! Do you think that can be all of humanity? Do you think it may not have left something nobler, grander, and more spiritual? Does each of us give the universe, when we breathe our last, nothing but sixty or eighty kilos of flesh and bone which will disintegrate and return to the elements? Does not the soul which animates us endure by the same right as each molecule of oxygen or nitrogen or iron? ”

“ The Uranian way is open to all; but the soul becomes truly Uranian only when it has entirely shaken off the weight of material life. The day will come, even on your planet, when there will be no other belief, no other religion, than the knowledge of the universe and the certainty of immortality in its infinite regions, in its eternal domain."
"What a strange thing," said I, "that no one on the Earth should know these sublime truths! No one looks at the sky; we live as though our little isle alone existed in the universe."
"Terrestrial humanity is young," answered Spero. ”

“ What a panorama with the rising sun! Flowers, fruits, perfumes, fairy-like palaces rose on the islands with their orange vegetation; the waters stretched themselves out like limpid mirrors, and joyous aerial couples were whirling down to these enchanting shores. There, all material work is done by machines, and directed by a few perfected races of animals whose intelligence is very nearly of the same order as that of mankind on the Earth. The inhabitants live only for and by the mind ”

“ And thus everything hurries on through all eternity perhaps, without being able ever to reach the unexisting limits of infinity.... Motion, activity, light, life everywhere. Happily so, without doubt. If all these innumerable suns, planets, earths, moons, comets, were fixed and immovable, petrified kings in their eternal tombs, how much more formidable, but also more mournful, would be the aspect of such a universe! Can you imagine the whole creation stopped, benumbed, mummified? ”

“ The brows of thinkers; eyes which have looked, smiled, and wept; mouths which have sung of love, rosy lips, and marble bosoms; mothers' flesh and blood; the arms of toilers; the muscles of men, good and bad,—all who have lived, all who have thought, lie in the same earth. It would be difficult now to take a single step on the planet [203] without walking on the remains of the dead; it would be difficult to breathe without inhaling the breath of the dead. ”

“ Formerly, when the sky was looked upon as a dome crowning the massive and unlimited Earth, the very idea of supposing it to be in motion would have been not only absurd but untenable. But from the time that we could see it in our minds, placed like a globe in the centre of celestial motion, the idea of imagining that perhaps this globe could revolve on itself, so as to avoid obliging the whole sky and the immense universe to perform this daily task, might come naturally into a thinker's mind ”

“ You will never make peaches grow on a thorn-bush. Remember that the most exquisite beauties, to whom you alluded just now, are but coarse monsters compared to the aerial women of Mars, who live on our spring air, the perfume of our flowers, and are so captivating in the very quivering of their wings, in the ideal kiss of a mouth which has never eaten, that if Dante's Beatrice had [222] been of such a nature, the immortal Florentine would never have been able to write two of the parts of his 'Divine Comedy;' he would have begun with Paradise, and could never have left it. ”

“ Nature. Thoughtful mankind was obliged to wait until the sixteenth century, or, to speak more correctly, until the seventeenth century, to learn our planet's true position in the universe, and to know by supported proofs that it has a double movement,—daily about itself, and yearly about the Sun. From that time only, from the time of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, has real astronomy existed.
And yet again, that was but a beginning, for the great remodeller of the world's system, Copernicus himself, had no suspicion of the Earth's other motions, or of the distances of the stars. ”

“ Just as the species of your planet have changed in succeeding ages from the uncouth creatures of the first geological periods to the appearance of man, and as even now the animal and vegetable population of the Earth is still composed of the most widely varying forms, from man to the coral, from bird to fish, from an elephant to a butterfly, so on an incomparably vaster scale the forces of Nature have given birth to an infinite diversity of beings and things throughout the innumerable worlds of heaven. ”

“ These milliards of celestial bodies have their respective movements for the purpose of stability, and mutually lean upon each other across the void which separates them. The mind which could eliminate time and space would see the Earth, the planets, the Sun, the stars, rain down from a limitless sky in all imaginable directions, like the drops carried away by the whirlwinds of a gigantic tempest, and drawn, not by a common basis, but by the attraction of each and all ”

“ Life and death are both in the air we breathe, and perpetually succeed each other by the exchange of gaseous molecules; the molecule of oxygen which this old oak exhales will fly away to the lungs of a child in its cradle. The last sighs of a man will weave the brilliant [298] corolla of a flower, or expand like a smile over the verdant meadow. And thus by an infinite series of partial deaths, the atmosphere incessantly nourishes the universal life spread over the surface of the world. ”

“ After realizing the boundlessness of space, and recognizing that the same laws govern all places simultaneously and make the vast universe one grand unit, you will learn that the centuries of the past and of the future are linked with the present, and that thinking monads will live forever through successive and progressive changes. You will learn that minds exist incomparably superior to the greatest minds of earthly humanity, and that all things advance toward supreme perfection. ”

“ We rose still higher. The Sun and its system were rapidly passing. The Earth was but a little spot now; Jupiter himself, that colossal world, had melted away, like Mars and Venus, to a tiny little dot scarcely larger than the Earth. We passed within sight of Saturn, surrounded [21] by his gigantic rings, whose study alone would be sufficient to prove the immense and unimaginable variety reigning in the universe. Saturn is a whole system in itself, with its rings composed of particles torn from it in its dizzy revolution, and with its eight satellites accompanying it like a celestial retinue. ”

“ In whatever direction we look, all about us are sources of light, heat, and life in inexhaustible variety,—suns of every lustre, of all magnitudes, all ages, upheld in the eternal void, in the luminous ether, by the mutual attraction of all and the motion of each. Your Sun moves and bears you away toward the constellation of Hercules ”

“ For millions of years, during the long historic series of the primary, secondary, and tertiary periods, there was not a single eye on the earth to see these grand sights, a single human mind to contemplate them. Progress has slowly raised the inferior souls of plants and animals; man is quite recent on the planet. Nature is in ceaseless progress, the universe is a perpetual growth, ascent is the supreme law. ”

“ I admit that human beauty (and of course female loveliness in particular) truly represents the most perfect thing that Nature has produced on our planet. But do you know what I most admire in that being? It is not its artistic or æsthetic aspect, it is the scientific proof it gives of a simply wonderful fact. In that beautiful body I see a soul clothed with air. ”

“ Thinking souls are the inheritance of the intellectual life. They preserve humanity's patrimony, and increase it for the future. Without this immortality of human souls which are conscious of their existence and live through the mind, all the history of the earth would end in nothing, and the whole creation, that of the most sublime worlds as [117] well as that of our mean little planet, would be a deceptive absurdity, more miserable and pitiable than the cast of an earthworm. That has a right to be; but the universe would not have. ”

“ And then, how much reason is there in this strange vanity, that we imagine that science has told us all; that we know all there is to know; that our five senses are sufficient to appreciate the nature of the universe? From what we can make out among the forces acting about us,—attraction, heat, light, electricity,—does it follow that there may not be other forces which escape us, because we have no senses to perceive them? It is not this hypothesis which is absurd, it is the simplicity of pedants. ”

“ It would be less bold to think that matter does not exist, that all is dynamism, than to pretend to affirm the existence of an exclusively material universe. As to the material support of the world, it disappeared—a somewhat interesting observation—precisely with the conquest of Mechanics, which proclaim the triumph of the invisible. The fixed point vanishes in the universal balance of powers, in the ideal harmony of ether vibrations; the more one seeks it, the less one finds it; and the last effort of our thought has for a last support, for supreme reality, the Infinite. ”

“ Every one is called to receive the light, every one is thirsting for it,—especially the humble, those on whom fortune frowns, for these are the persons who think most; these are eager for knowledge, while the contented ones of the century do not suspect their own ignorance, and are almost proud of staying in it. Yes, the light of astronomy must be diffused [56] throughout the world; it must filter through the strata of humanity to the popular masses, enlighten their consciences, elevate their hearts. ”

“ What upholds the earth, the sun, and all the stars of the universe in the eternal void? What upholds that heavy iron beam thrown between two walls, and upon which several stories are to be built? What keeps all bodies in shape? ”

“ Isolated in space like a child's balloon floating in the air, and more absolutely too, for the balloon is carried by aerial waves, while worlds gravitate in the void, the Earth is a toy for the invisible cosmic forces which it obeys,—a real soap-bubble, sensitive to the faintest breath. ”

“ Smaller than the smallest of the satellites, it showed no appreciable disk, but its light was dazzling. It looked out from the evening sky as Venus in her most [211] brilliant season beams in our own heavens, when the "shepherd's star" reigns like a queen over balmy evenings in spring, and weaves the fabric of happy dreams.
The more brilliant stars were already lighting up the sky. I recognized Arcturus with its golden rays, Vega so white and pure, the seven stars of the Septentrion, and several of the zodiacal constellations. ”

“ Look at the thousands of suns analogous to that which gives life to the earth, which like it are sources of light, motion, activity, and splendor! Ah! that is the object of the science to come,—the study of universal and eternal life. Until now, no one has ever entered the temple. Figures are not an end, but a means; they do not represent Nature's structure, only [48] the methods, the scaffoldings. You are to see the dawn of a new day. Mathematical astronomy will yield her place to physical astronomy, to the true study of Nature. ”

“ A little farther away my celestial guide pointed out a world in which organisms enjoy a precious faculty: the soul may change its body without passing through the often disagreeable and always sad experience of death. A savant who has labored all his life for the instruction of mankind, and feels that his end is drawing near before he has been able to complete his noble undertaking, can change bodies with a youth, and begin a new life still more useful than the first. ”

“ Mythology tells us that Pygmalion became the lover of a statue of his own creation. Not so! Pygmalion, Praxiteles, Michael Angelo, Benvenuto, and Canova created nothing but statues. The force that can construct the living body of man and woman is more sublime.
"But this force is immaterial, invisible, intangible, imponderable, like the attraction which lulls the worlds in the universal melody; and the body, however material it may seem to us, is in itself only a harmonious grouping, formed by the attraction of this interior force. ”