In our little sphere of terrestrial observation we see that, through all the transformations of matter and motion, the same quantity of each remains, though under new forms. Living beings afford a perpetual illustration of this: they are born, they grow by appropriating substances from the world without, and when they die they break up and restore to nature the elements of which they are composed. But by a law whose action never ceases other bodies are constituted from these same elements. Every star may be likened to an organized being, even as regards its internal heat. A body is alive so long as respiration and the circulation of the blood makes it possible for the various organs to perform their functions. When equilibrium and repose are reached, death follows; but after death all the substances of which the body was formed are wrought into other beings. Dissolution is the prelude to recreation. Analogy leads us to believe that the same is true of the cosmos. Nothing can be destroyed.
There is an incommensurable Power, which we are obliged to recognize as limitless in space and without beginning or end in time, and this Power is that which persists through all the changes in those sensible appearances under which the universe presents itself to us.
For this reason there will always be suns and worlds, not like ours, but still suns and worlds succeeding each other through all eternity.
And for us this visible universe can only be the changing appearance of the absolute and eternal reality.
Α
It is in virtue of this transcendent law that, long after the death of the Earth, of the giant planets and the central luminary, while our old and darkened sun was still speeding through boundless space, with its dead worlds on which terrestrial and planetary life had once engaged in the futile struggle for daily existence, another extinct sun, issuing from the depths of infinity, collided obliquely with it and brought it to rest!
Then in the vast night of space, from the shock of these two mighty bodies was suddenly kindled a stupendous conflagration, and an immense gaseous nebula was formed, which trembled for an instant like a flaring flame, and then sped on into regions unknown. Its temperature was several million degrees. All which here below had been earth, water, air, minerals, plants, atoms; all which had constituted man, his flesh, his palpitating heart, his flashing eye, his armed hand, his thinking brain, his entrancing beauty; the victor and the vanquished, the executioner and his victim, and those inferior souls still wearing the fetters of matter—all were changed into fire. And so with the worlds of Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and the rest. It was the resurrection of visible nature. But those superior souls which had acquired immortality continued to live forever in the hierarchy of the invisible psychic universe. The conscious existence of mankind had attained an ideal state. Mankind had passed by transmigration through the worlds to a new life with God, and freed from the burdens of matter, soared with an endless progress in eternal light.
The immense gaseous nebula, which absorbed all former worlds, thus transformed into vapor, began to turn upon itself. And in the zones of condensation of this primordial star-mist, new worlds were born, as heretofore the Earth was.
So another universe began, whose genesis some future Moses and Laplace would tell, a new creation, extraterrestrial, superhuman, inexhaustible, resembling neither the Earth nor Mars, nor Saturn, nor the Sun.
And new humanities arose, new civilizations, new vanities, another Babylon, another Thebes, another Athens, another Rome, another Paris, new palaces, temples, glories and loves. And all these things possessed nothing of the Earth, whose very memory had passed away like a shadow.
And these universes passed away in their turn. But infinite space remained, peopled with worlds, and stars, and souls, and suns; and time went on forever.
For there can be neither end nor beginning.
Endnotes
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For about 300 years the observatory of Paris had ceased to be an observing station, and had been perpetuated only as the central administrative bureau of French astronomy. Astronomical observations were made under far more satisfactory conditions upon mountain summits in a pure atmosphere, free from disturbing influences. Observers were in direct and constant communication by telephone with the central office, whose instruments were used only to verify certain discoveries or to satisfy the curiosity of savants detained in Paris by their sedentary occupation. ↩
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It is needless to remind the reader that the language of the twenty-fifth century is here translated into that of the nineteenth. ↩
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St. Matthew, xxiv and xvi; St. Mark, xiii; St. Luke, xvii and xxi. ↩
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In the nineteenth century, researches in natural history had revealed the fact that secular vertical oscillations, vary with the locality, were taking place in the earth’s crust, and had proved that, from prehistoric times, the soil of western and southern France had been slowly sinking and the sea slowly gaining upon the land. One after another, the islands of Jersey, of Minquiers, of Chaussey, of Écrehou, of Cezembre, of Mont-Saint-Michel, had been detached from the continent by the sea; the cities of Is, Helion, Tommen, Portzmeûr, Harbour, Saint Louis, Monny, Bourgneuf, La Feillette, Paluel and Nazado had been buried beneath its waves, and the Armorican peninsula had slowly retreated before the advancing waters. The hour of this invasion by the sea had struck, from century to century, also for Herbavilla; to the west of Nantes; for Saint-Denis-Chef-de-Caux, to the north of Havre; for Saint-Etienne-de-Paluel and for Gardoine, to the north of Dol; for Tolente, to the west of Brest; more than eighty habitable cities of Holland had been submerged in the eleventh century, etc., etc. In other regions the reverse had taken place, and the sea had retired; but to
