Kosmos

“ Space is the manifest, limited, finite, organized germ that, feeding upon the enveloping chaos, exists in a perpetual state of alternate manifestation and non-manifestation—appearing, disappearing and reappearing indefinitely.
The appearance of the kosmos as an orderly elaboration of the involutionary phase of kosmogenesis, in so far as kosmic order may be said to be an accomplished fact, marked the turning point in that procedure whose function it was to make manifest a universe possessing certain definite characteristics of orderliness ”

“ Now, the grand region of Form is the Celestial Body — the vast, deep, perceivable, circular mass circumscribing the Kosmos, and enclosing, in and around its centre, Earth with the other three elements, tenanted by substances generated and perishable. This Celestial Body is the abode of divinity, including many divine beings who take part in its eternal rotations, viz. ”

“ It seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious [Pg 278] Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides. ”

“ Three distinct representations of the Universe, in its three distinct aspects, are impressed upon our thoughts by the Esoteric Philosophy: the Pre-existing, evolved from the Ever-existing, and the Phenomenal—the world of illusion, the reflection, and shadow thereof. During the great mystery and drama of life, known as the Manvantara, real Kosmos is like the objects placed behind the white screen upon which shadows are thrown. The actual figures and things remain invisible, while the wires of evolution are pulled by unseen hands. ”

“ Why from the smallest meteorite or satellite, to the largest star that shines in the firmament of heaven, there is nothing but motion; each satellite, planet, sun, and star moving on and on, ever and ever through the countless ages of time until its course is run and its existence ended. But rest, never! Such a thing as rest is unknown in the entire universe, whether it be in the atomic systems of matter, or the systems of stars and suns that form the universe of worlds. ”

“ And I showed that, so long as we are bound up in a Universe that centers about ourselves, we can get nowhere. It is impossible to gaze through the stars without finding more beyond them. Therefore, I maintained that we had better study the secret of our own solar atom, and find out, if possible, the secret force or cohesion that holds our solar system in its approximate relation to the rest of the stars. And I proposed to do this through the medium of a comet. ”

“ These are new worlds thrown off from the sun, in gaseous form, travelling through space for millions of ages before assuming a solid form or producing vegetation; and this was the process our earth had to pass through. In gazing beyond the planets we behold millions of stars, all worlds, many of far greater magnitude than ours, while far beyond these and Neptune are other solar systems of worlds stretching out through illimitable space.
You "created" not these, O God; but we created you. You are made in the image of man; in the image of man are you made. ”

“ It deals with the law of the stars—the word “star” being understood, in its widest signification, as including every heavenly body of whatever kind. The earth itself is such a body. Since we happen to live on the earth, it becomes our standpoint in space, from which we look out at the others. But, if we lived on some other planet, we would see the earth as a distant body in the sky, just as we now see Jupiter or Mars.
Astronomy teaches us that everything in 4the universe, from the sun and the moon to the most remote star or the most extraordinary nebula, is related to the earth. ”

“ The telescope resolved the whitish nebulæ in the sky into myriads of stars, worlds, solar and planetary systems; and the earth with its inhabitants, hitherto imagined to be the crown and centre of existence, was degraded from its imaginary height to be a mere atom moving in universal space. The distances of the celestial bodies are so immense that our intellect wonders at the contemplation of them, and becomes confused. Light, moving with a velocity of millions of miles in a minute, required no less than two thousand years to reach the earth from the galaxy! ”

“ If everything in the universe is ordered according to law, how is it possible for miracles, and in a more general sense, answers to prayer, to take place? Perhaps the comet may help us here. Could anything seem more miraculous, more to contradict the general experience of the solar system, with its planets ever revolving in closed orbits round the sun, than the appearance of a body which rushed straight toward the sun, took one half-turn round it, and then receded from it by a different path, never, never to return? ”

“ Few people without training in science can realize the huge isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets swims in vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty billion times a million miles. ”

“ Many quadrillions of miles away, so far that your most powerful telescopes have not yet caught a glimmer, rests in its serene grandeur a star that we call Cosmos, because it is the centre of this universe. Its diameter is as great as the diameter of Cassandra's orbit, and notwithstanding its terrific heat, its specific gravity, on account of the irresistible pressure at and near the centre, is as great as that of the planet Mercury. ”

“ Instead then of one Sun and one World only in the Universe, as the unskilful in Astronomy imagine, that Science discovers to us such an inconceivable number of Suns, Systems, and Worlds, dispersed through boundless Space, that if our Sun, with all the Planets, Moons, and Comets belonging to it were annihilated, they would be no more missed out of the Creation than a grain of sand from the sea-shore. ”

“ And now we observe that this star that we have drawn near to has attending it a number of minute satellites, faintly shining specks, that circle about it as if charmed, like night-wandering insects, by its splendor. It is manifest to us at the first glance that without the sun these obedient little planets would not exist; it is his attraction that binds them together in a system, and his rays that make them visible to one another in the abyss of space. Although they vary in relative size, yet we observe a striking similarity among them. ”

“ For, viewing their surroundings through the vision plate, it seemed as if they swam through a sea of radiant light where every star was a beacon, each planet a steadfast buoy of glowing color. And in this gleaming pattern was a regularity, an orthodoxy as painstaking as if some master craftsman had allocated each glowing sphere with precise care.
Regularly discernible against the omnipresent back-drop of space were the solar galaxies, each a complete entity, aloof, removed from its fellows and confined to its own definite segment of space. Some galaxies were younger than others. ”

“ The astronomer, I assert, can neither from any data at his command postulate nor prove the beginning nor the end of the reverberating motion that exists in his solar system, which is itself the fragment of a system that is circulating and revolving in and about itself, and in which, since the birth of man, the universe he knows has not passed the first milestone in the road that universe is traveling in space immensity. ”

“ If a comet were to strike this globule of ours, and to knock it into a billion fragments, which were splashed all over the solar system--if its fiery breath were to lick up the earth's surface until it was peeled like an orange, still at the end of a hundred millions of years every tiniest particle of our bodies would exist--in other forms and combinations, it is true, but still those very atoms which now form the forefinger which traces these words. ”

“ Who can contemplate the power which produced the solar system, at once so magnificent, beautiful, and delightful, without astonishment and admiration? The planets are kept in a regular motion, and retained in an invariable course round the sun, by the power of this luminary’s attraction or gravity. These bodies have a projectile force, being propelled forwards in a right line, which is the nature of all simple motion; but the sun’s attraction combining with their own projectile force, withdraws them from their rectilineal courses, and preserves the most perfect harmony in the system. ”

“ What do we know of the satellites of Jupiter and of the rings of Saturn? How was Uranus discovered? What was the intellectual triumph which brought the planet Neptune to light? Then, as to the other bodies of our system, what are we to say of those mysterious objects, the comets? Can we discover the laws of their seemingly capricious movements? Do we know anything of their nature and of the marvellous tails with which they are often decorated? What can be told about the shooting-stars which so often dash into our atmosphere and perish in a streak of splendour? ”

“ We have traversed a distance which even on [Pg 135] the wings of light we could only accomplish in many thousands of years, and now stand on the outskirts of our great star cluster, in the same way, and I hope with the same aspirations, as when we paused the last time on the confines of our Solar System. Behind us are myriads of shining orbs, in such countless numbers that human thought cannot even suggest a limit, and yet each of these is a mighty globe like our Sun, the centre of a planetary system, dispensing light and heat under conditions similar to what we are accustomed to here. ”

“ Every other object—sun, star, or planet—is hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of times as far off as the moon. It is right that we should desire to learn all we can about the bodies in space. We know that the earth is a great ball, and we see that there are many other such bodies. Some of them are much larger, and some of them are smaller than the globe on which we dwell; some of them are dark bodies like the earth, and among them the moon is one. ”

“ In the glowing globe now appeared our universe, a great galaxy of stars floating in space like their own. Swiftly, with shifting thoughts, I showed them its throngs of peopled worlds, the traffic that swept between its suns, the ordered life of its teeming, dissimilar races. Then as my thoughts shifted again they saw the first five thousand serpent-ships rushing in upon that galaxy, destroying all our fleet and settling upon the suns and worlds of the Cancer cluster, saw us fleeing inward and then turning to capture one of the serpent-ships by boarding it in mid-space. ”

“ In the consideration of the gradual transformation of the heavens, I have found it convenient to speak as if the earth, or rather the solar system to which the earth belongs, occupied a fixed position in space. But when we have learned that some or all of the stars are in movement, it seems right to inquire whether the sun might not also participate in the motion. May not the sun be engaged in some mighty voyage through the celestial spaces, taking in its company the earth and the other planetary bodies by which it is attended? Here is, indeed, a grand problem ”

“ In fact, such a trifle is it in the organism of the Universe, that if some celestial body collided with it—say a comet with a sufficiently solid nucleus—and the heat developed by the impact turned it into a mass of blazing gas, an astronomer on Neptune, one of our own planets, wouldn't even notice the accident, unless he happened to be watching the earth through a powerful telescope at the time. ”

“ When we come to the perturbations caused by the mutual attractions of the sun, nine planets, twenty moons, one hundred and ninety-two asteroids, millions Page 14 of comets, and innumerable meteoric bodies swarming in space, and when we add to all these, that belong to one solar system, the attractions of all the systems of the other suns that sparkle on a brilliant winter night, we are compelled to say, "As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high above our thoughts and ways must be the thoughts and ways of Him who comprehends and directs them all." ”

“ Beyond the Milky Way.—Each additional step into the depths of space brings us into a region of which less is known, and what lies beyond the Milky Way is largely a matter of conjecture. We shrink from thinking it an infinite void, endless emptiness, and our intellectual sympathies go out to Lambert's speculation of a universe filled with stellar systems, of which ours, bounded by the galaxy, is only one. ”

“ Everything that is created is subject to destruction. And further, since the Cosmos exists by the goodness of God it follows that God must always be good and the world exist. Just as light coexists with the Sun and with fire, and shadow coexists with a body.
Of the bodies in the Cosmos, some imitate Mind and move in orbits; some imitate Soul and move in a straight line, fire and air upward, earth and water downward. Of those that move in orbits the fixed sphere goes from the east, the Seven from the west. ”

“ If we grant that the solar system is the only one in which small planets exist revolving around their sun in nearly circular orbits, then indeed we seem to have closed all the outer universe against such beings as the inhabitants of the earth. Beyond the sun's domain only whirling stars, coupled in eccentric orbits, dark stars, some of them, but no planets—in short a wilderness, full of all energies except those of sentient life! ”

“ Round this focus of light and heat, but at various distances, revolve more than a hundred secondary bodies—Planets, some of which are accompanied by smaller ones—Satellites. Not self-luminous, they would be invisible to us, if the light, which they receive from the sun, were not reflected toward the earth, making them also appear as luminous points spread over the celestial vault like so many stars. Such would be the appearance of the earth seen in space, at a distance sufficiently great. ”