sensation in a matter of comparatively a pigmy and
diminutive extension?

All these questions an untrained and inquisitive mind will ask itself
in the propositions of astronomy. We must believe or not, as we think
proper or reasonable. We have no way of verifying the propositions by
the trial of our senses. There they lie, to be received by us in
the construction that first suggests itself to us, or not. They
are something like an agreeable imagination or fiction: and a sober
observer, in cold blood, will be disposed deliberately to weigh both
sides of the question, and to judge whether the probability lies in
favour of the actual affirmation of the millions of millions of miles,
and the other incredible propositions of the travelling of light, and
the rest, which even the most cautious and sceptical of the retainers of
modern astronomy, find themselves compelled to receive.

But I shall be told, that the results of our observations of the
distances of the heavenly bodies are unvaried. We have measured the
distances and other phenomena of the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus,
Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and their satellites, and they all fall into a
grand system, so as to convey to every unprejudiced mind the conviction
that this system is the truth itself. If we look at them day after day,
and year after year, we see them for ever the same, and performing
the same divine harmony. Successive astronomers in different ages and
countries have observed the celestial orbs, and swept the heavens, and
for ever bring us back the same story of the number, the dimensions,
the distances, and the arrangement of the heavenly bodies which form the
subject of astronomical science.

This we have seen indeed not to be exactly the case. But, if it were, it
would go a very little way towards proving the point it was brought to
prove. It would shew that, the sensations and results being similar, the
causes of those results must be similar to each other, but it would not
shew that the causes were similar to the sensations produced. Thus, in
the sensations which belong to taste, smell, sound, colour, and to those
of heat and cold, there is all the uniformity which would arise,
when the real external causes bore the most exact similitude to the
perceptions they generate; and yet it is now universally confessed that
tastes, scents, sounds, colours, and heat and cold do not exist out
of ourselves. All that we are entitled therefore to conclude as to