“The Wonders of the Heavens,” Book I., Chap. ii., translated by Mrs. Norman Lockyer.

THERE are truths before which human thought feels itself humiliated and perplexed, which it contemplates with fear, and without the power to face them, although it understands their existence and necessity: such are those of the infinity of space and eternity of duration. Impossible to define, for all definition could only darken the first idea which is in us,—these truths command and rule us. To try and explain them would be a barren hope; it suffices to keep them before our attention in order that they may reveal to us, at every instant, the immensity of their value. A thousand definitions have been given; we will, however, neither quote nor recall one of them. But we wish to open space before us and employ ourselves there, in trying to penetrate its depth. The velocity of a cannon ball from the mouth of the cannon makes swift way, 437 yards per second. But this would be still too slow for our journey through space, as our velocity would scarcely be 900 miles an hour. This is too little. In nature there are movements incomparably more rapid,—for instance, the velocity of light. This velocity is 186,000 miles per second. This will do better; thus we will take this means of transport. Allow me, then, by a figure of speech, to tell you that we will place ourselves on a ray of light and be carried away on its rapid course.

  Taking the earth as our starting point, we will go in a straight line to any point of the heavens. We start. At the end of the first second we have already traversed 186,000 miles; at the end of the second, 372,000. We continue. Ten seconds, a minute, ten minutes have elapsed—111,600,000 miles have been passed. Passing, during an hour, a day, a week, without ever slackening our pace, during whole months, and even a year, the time which we have traversed is already so long that, expressed in miles, the number of measurement exceeds our faculty of comprehension, and indicates nothing to our mind: they would be trillions, and millions of millions. But we will not interrupt our flight. Carried on without stopping by this same rapidity of 186,000 miles each second, let us penetrate the expanse in a straight line for whole years, fifty years, even a century…. Where are we? For a long time we have gone beyond the last starry regions which are seen from the earth, the last that the telescope has visited; for a long time we travel in other regions, unknown and unexplored. No mind is capable of following the road passed over; thousands of millions joined to thousands of millions express nothing: at the sight of this prodigious expanse the imagination is arrested, humbled. Well! this is the wonderful point of the problem: we have not advanced a single step in space. We are no nearer a limit than if we had remained in the same place; we should be able again to begin the same course starting from the point where we are, and add to our voyage a voyage of the same extent; we should be able to join centuries on centuries in the same itinerary, with the same velocity, to continue the voyage without end and without rest; we should be able to guide ourselves in any part of space, left, right, forward, backward, above, below, in every direction; and when, after centuries employed in this giddy course, we should stop ourselves, fascinated, or in despair before the immensity eternally open, eternally renewed, we should again understand that our secular flights had not measured for us the smallest part of space, and that we were not more advanced than at our starting point. In truth, it is the infinite which surrounds us, as we before expressed it, or the infinite number of worlds. We should be able to float for eternity without ever finding anything before us but an eternally open infinite.

  Hence it follows that all our ideas on space have but a purely relative value. When we say, for instance, to ascend to the sky, to descend under the earth, these expressions are false in themselves, for being situated in the bosom of the Infinite, we can neither ascend nor descend: there is no above or below; these words have only an acceptation relative to the terrestrial surface on which we live.

  The universe must, therefore, be represented as an expanse without limits, without shores, illimited, infinite, in the bosom of which float suns, like that which lights us, and earths like that which poises under our steps. Neither dome, nor vaults, nor limits of any kind; void in every direction, and in this infinite void an infinite number of worlds.