st of the universe.

We must cherish no illusions as to the importance of our natal world. It
is true that the Earth is not wanting in charm, with its verdant plains
enameled in the delicious tones of a robust and varied vegetation, its
plants and flowers, its spring-time and its birds, its limpid rivers
winding through the meadows, its mountains covered with forests, its
vast and profound seas animated with an infinite variety of living
creatures. The spectacle of Nature is magnificent, superb, admirable
and marvelous, and we imagine that this Earth fills the universe, and
suffices for it. The Sun, the Moon, the stars, the boundless Heavens,
seem to have been created for us, to charm our eyes and thoughts, to
illumine our days, and shed a gentle radiance upon our nights. This is
an agreeable illusion of our senses. If our Humanity were extinguished,
the other worlds of the Heavens, Venus, Mars, etc., would none the less
continue to gravitate in the Heavens along with our defunct planet, and
the close of human life (for which everything seems to us to have been
created) would not even be perceived by those other worlds, that
nevertheless are our neighbors. There would be no revolution, no
cataclysm. The stars would go on shining in the firmament, just as they
do to-day, shedding their divine light over the immensity of the
Heavens. Nothing would be changed in the general aspect of the Universe.
The Earth is only a modest atom, lost in the innumerable army of the
worlds and suns that people the universe.

* * * * *

Every morning the Sun rises in the East, setting fire with his ardent
rays to the sky, which is dazzling with his splendor. He ascends through
space, reaches a culminating point at noon, and then descends toward the
West, to sink at night into the purple of the sunset.

And then the stars, grand lighthouses of the Heavens, in their turn
incandesce. They too rise in the East, ascend the vault of Heaven, and
then descend to the West, and vanish. All the orbs, Sun, Moon, planets,
stars, appear to revolve round us in twenty-four hours.

This journey of the orbs around us is only an illusion of the senses.

Whether the Earth be at rest, and the sky animated with a rotary
movement round her, or whether, on the contrary, the stars are fixed,
and the Earth in motion, in either case, for us appearances are the
same. If the Earth turns, carrying all that pertains to it in its
motion