a sense of orientation, an organ
able to perceive the ethereal vibrations of the infra-red or
ultra-violet, or permitted them to hear at a distance, or to see through
walls? We eat and digest like coarse animals, we are slaves to our
digestive tube: may there not be worlds in which a nutritive atmosphere
enables its fortunate inhabitants to dispense with this absurd process?
The least sparrow, even the dusky bat, has an advantage over us in that
it can fly through the air. Think how inferior are our conditions, since
the man of greatest genius, the most exquisite woman, are nailed to the
soil like any vulgar caterpillar before its metamorphosis! Would it be a
disadvantage to inhabit a world in which we might fly whither we would;
a world of scented luxury, full of animated flowers; a world where the
winds would be incapable of exciting a tempest, where several suns of
different colors--the diamond glowing with the ruby, or the emerald with
the sapphire--would burn night and day (azure nights and scarlet days)
in the glory of an eternal spring; with multi-colored moons sleeping in
the mirror of the waters, phosphorescent mountains, aerial
inhabitants,--men, women, or perhaps of other sexes,--perfect in their
forms, gifted with multiple sensibilities, luminous at will,
incombustible as asbestos, perhaps immortal, unless they commit suicide
out of curiosity? Lilliputian atoms as we are, let us once for all be
convinced that our imagination is but sterility, in the midst of an
infinitude hardly glimpsed by the telescope.

One important point seems always to be ignored expressly by those who
blindly deny the doctrine of the plurality of worlds. It is that this
doctrine does not apply more particularly to the present epoch than to
any other. _Our_ time is of no importance, no absolute value. Eternity
is the field of the Eternal Sower. There is no reason why the other
worlds should be inhabited _now_ more than at any other epoch.

What, indeed, is the Present Moment? It is an open trap through which
the Future falls incessantly into the gulf of the Past.

The immensity of Heaven bears in its bosom cradles as well as tombs,
worlds to come and perished worlds. It abounds in extinct suns, and
cemeteries. In all probability Jupiter is not yet inhabited. What does
this prove? The Earth was not inhabited during its primordial period:
what did that prove to the inhabitants of Mars or of the Moon, who were
perhaps observing it at th