en now there may be messages in that
beam undeciphered. With a turn of the heliograph, a mere turn of
the wrist, a message is easily flashed twenty miles to the observer.
You cannot tell what knowledge may not be pouring down in every ray;
messages that are constant and perpetual, the same from age to age.
These are physical messages. There is beyond this just a possibility
that beings in distant earths possessed of greater knowledge than
ourselves may be able to transmit their thoughts along, or by the
ray, as we do along wires. In the days to come, when a deeper
insight shall have been gained into the motions and properties of
those unseen agents we call forces, such as magnetism, electricity,
gravitation, perhaps a method will be devised to use them for
communication. If so, communication with distant earths is quite
within reasonable hypothesis. At this hour it is not more impossible
than the transmission of a message to the antipodes in a few minutes
would have been to those who lived a century since. The inhabitants
of distant earths may have endeavoured to communicate with us in
this way for ought we know time after time. Such a message is
possibly contained sometimes in the pale beam which comes to my
bedside. That beam always impresses me with a profound, an intense
and distressful sense of ignorance, of being outside the
intelligence of the universe, as if there were a vast civilization
in view and yet not entered. Mere villagers and rustics creeping
about a sullen earth, we know nothing of the grandeur and
intellectual brilliance of that civilization. This beam fills me
with unutterable dissatisfaction. Discontent, restless longing,
anger at the denseness of the perception, the stupidity with which
we go round and round in the old groove till accident shows us a
fresh field. Consider, all that has been wrested from light has been
gained by mere bits of glass. Mere bits of glass in curious
shapes--poor feeble glass, quickly broken, made of flint, of the
flint that mends the road. To this almost our highest conceptions
are due. Could we employ the ocean as a lens we might tear truth
from the sky. Could the greater intelligences that dwell on the
planets and stars communicate with us, they might enable us to
conquer the disease and misery which bear down the masses of the
world. Perhaps they do not die. The pale visitor hints that the
stars are not the outside and rim of the universe, any more than the
edge of