V. imagination has been so self-flattering as to deem it LETTER the most precious of all.18 This position and estimation of our state was indeed a prepossession very difficult to eradicate from the human mind. That the earth, instead of being fixed in the centre of the universe, was but a moving planet, like the others, was so strange an idea in England so late as the end of the reign of Charles II., that Bishop Wilkins makes the first proposition of the book he wrote to enforce it, to be, that the seeming novelty and singularity of this opinion can be no sufficient reason to prove it erroneous.'19 A little before this, the same zealous prelate composed and published fourteen propositions to convince his countrymen that the moon may be a world,20 tho Orpheus had intimated the same truth above twenty-five centuries before." But the natural fact was so immediately nullified by the infatuation of making it a divinity, that it never obtained a general credit. Orpheus himself led the way to this delirious absurdity,22 which continued 18 The Cinghalese Raja Vali states, "There are an infinite number of worlds, whereof 100,000 lacs of worlds are more precious than the others, and 10,000 worlds are still more precious than these. But this world, called Magol Sakwell (the earth), is more precious than all the rest.' This book is translated in the Annals of Oriental Literature, p. 385. 19 See A Discourse concerning a new Planet, tending to prove that it is probable our earth is one of the Planets.' By John Wilkins, late Lord Bishop of Chester. Lond. 1684. 20 See his 'Discovery of a new World, to prove there may be another habitable World in the Moon.' Fifth Edit. 1684. 21 Proclus has preserved these Orphic verses on this point. Which the immortals call Selene, and men the Moon. 2 In the Orphic Hymn to her she is addressed,— 'Hear me, O Goddess Queen! Light-bearer! He LETTER down to the days of Plutarch, and would have still prevailed if Christianity had not abolished it.23 V. The creation of the stars has been for purposes connected with themselves, and independent of our earth. But that they are seen by us, is a fact which proves that it has been one principle of the Divine system, both in our and their formation, that we should, by their visibility, be prevented from considering ourselves as the only beings in existence. The other planets must, from the same cause, be under the same impression, and this result could not have occurred unless it had been specially provided for. The perception thus given to every one of the wonderful extent of Creation, has been produced by causing each starry world, to be an island in an immense ocean of what we call space; and by keeping this in such subtle tenuity or transparency, that it no where precludes our eyesight from receiving luminous sensations from these celestial orbs, altho they are at a distance from us so prodigious as The two last words of this line, εç λokepη, have given some trouble to the commentators, the word λokepη having no meaning. Scaliger proposed to strike them out, and Rhunkenius to alter them into deo kaon, and τες into ays, by which, Gesner says, he has mended versum desperatum feliciter, p. 191. These learned men seem to me to have missed an emendation which requires neither omission nor change. If we join the es to the λokson, we shall have the applicable compound εoλokepη, which will have the very probable meaning of 'O good virgin!' from soλoç, good, Dorice for 0λog; it will then stand, as translated above, Σώζεσα τες ικετας, εσλοκέρη ! 23 Plutarch remarks, 'The moon has not lost its divinity (To Octov), nor the sentiment of veneration for it.' De Fac. Lun. p. 1723. V. to be quite unascertainable. This system has the LETTER double effect of magnifying our conceptions of our Creator, and of precluding all disproportioned and inflated notions of ourselves; for if none of the heavenly hosts had been visible to us, how greatly would our ideas of Him have been diminished, and how much should we not have misconceived the importance of ourselves, from the inference which would then have been unavoidable, that the human race composed the whole of existing nature." Of the planets which are connected with our Sun, two of them, Mars and Venus, are the most likely to have on them animated beings of some analogy 24 How prone the human mind has been to exaggerate its own importance and that of its little earth, we see from the opinions of such men as Seneca and the Stoics, who had, nevertheless, altogether, upon a fair balance of error and truth, a larger portion of sound mind than most of the other philosophers. Seneca says, what his School believed, 'all the heavens, which the fiery ether, the highest part of the universe, includes; all those stars, whose number cannot be told; all this host of heavenly bodies, their sun running his course so near us, draw their nourishment from the earth (alimentum ex terreno trahunt), and share it among them; nor are they sustained by any thing else than by the breath of the earth (nec ullo alio quam halitu terrarum sustinentur.') Nat. Quest. 1. vi. c. 16. Only 200 years ago, Dubartas found this old opinion still so favored and maintained, as to think it necessary to attack it in his poem on Creation. The passage is thus translated by Sylvester: And therefore smile I at these fable forgers, Whose busy, idle style, so stiffly urges The heaven's bright sapphires to be living creatures, Still sucking up, in their eternal motion, The earth for meat, and for their drink the ocean. Nor can I see how earth and sea should feed V. LETTER With those which inhabit our earth. They are sufficiently near the sun to have several resemblances to us; but yet our men of science distinguish so many diversities, that we cannot positively infer that their population has the same bodies of flesh and blood, as invest our vital principle here. ours. No identity with a nature like ours can be presumed as to the inhabitants of Mercury, on account of its greater proximity to the solar radiance: nor as to those of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, because their remoteness and discernible peculiarities imply great dissimilarities to us and to our globe: neither can their vegetable animals, if any, be the same as Hence their external worlds must be unlike that from which we derive our sensations and our knowlege. They must severally have modes of being, component parts and substance, impressions, ideas and inclinations, very different from all that we are conscious of here. Yet they may, notwithstanding this diversity of their natures, be sentient and intelligent beings. We cannot deny this probability, tho we are entitled to infer that they do not feel and act as we do; if they reason, it must be on ideas we do not possess; if they think, it cannot be on the subjects which occupy our thoughts. Their sensations will be the materials of their mental powers, and these must be taken from their own external worlds, and not from ours. Their desires and pursuits will correspond with the impressions they receive in their respective abodes, as ours arise from the objects on our surface; and thus we and they must be unlike each other in knowlege, habit and nature, whatever kind of beings they may be. V. From these reflections, we seem to be justified in LETTER considering it to be another principle of the Divine economy, under which we live, that there shall not be human beings at present any where but on this earth; for it is the peculiar construction and position of our planet, its substances, organized classes, laws and course of things, which, with our bodily frame and figure, combine to make us what we are. These not being the same in any other orb above us, human nature must be distinguished by their effects, from all other modes of sentient existence. In the bony, arterial, fleshy and nervous systems of our frame, we resemble the birds and quadrupeds about us. But our configuration, limbs and motivities, have no parallel among these, but transcend them with a superiority that never can be lessened, except by that wilful debilitation and self-degradation, which gross sensualities or habitual intoxication cannot be continued without producing. It is also a part of the system of our creation, which we do not know to prevail in any other orb, that we consist of a double nature, united in a temporary and dissoluble union, but which never ends until our present life closes. It is this association of our spirit, or thinking principle, with the material body into which we grow, that constitutes human nature. It is the continuance of this combination which makes our human life; it is the termination of it which causes death. Tho eastern stories amuse our imagination with some magician characters, who can dart their soul into other bodies, abandoning for a time their own; yet this, in sober truth, we know to be impossible. The union of the reasoning and feeling mind with the corporeal form that we are born with, is inseparable |