Astronomy for Amateurs by Camille Flammarion (ereader for android .TXT) 📖
- Author: Camille Flammarion
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It is here, above all, that we find ourselves in presence of the greatest problems. Life is the goal, it is Life that produces the conditions of Thought. Without Thought, where would be the Universe?
We feel that without life and thought, the Universe would be an empty theater, and Astronomy itself, sublime science, a vain research. We feel that this is the truth, veiled as yet to actual science, and that human races kindred with our own exist there in the immensities of space. Yes, we feel that this is truth.
But we would fain go a little further in our knowledge of the universe, and penetrate in some measure the secret of our destinies. We would know if these distant and unknown Humanities are not attached to us by mysterious cords, if our life, which will assuredly be extinguished at some definite moment here below, will not be prolonged into the regions of Eternity.
A moment ago we said that nothing is left of the body. Millions of organisms have lived, there are no remains of them. Air, water, smoke, dust. Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem revertebis. Remember oh man! that dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return, says the priest to the faithful, when he scatters the ashes on the day after the carnival.
The body disappears entirely. It goes where the corpse of Cæsar went an hour after the extinction of his pyre. Nor will there be more remains of any of us. And the whole of Humanity, and the Earth itself, will also disappear one day. Let no one talk of the Progress of Humanity as an end! That would be too gross a decoy.
If the soul were also to disappear in smoke, what would be left of the vital and intellectual organization of the world? Nothing.
On this hypothesis, all would be reduced to nothing.
Our reason is not immense, our terrestrial faculties are sufficiently limited, but this reason and these faculties suffice none the less to make us feel the improbability, the absurdity, of this hypothesis, and we reject it as incompatible with the sublime grandeur of the spectacle of the universe.
Undoubtedly, Creation does not seem to concern itself with us. It proceeds on its inexorable course without consulting our sensations. With the poet we regret the implacable serenity of Nature, opposing the irony of its smiling splendor to our mourning, our revolts, and our despair.
Que peu de temps suffit pour changer toutes choses!
Nature au front serein, comme vous oubliez!
Et comme vous brisez dans vos métamorphoses
Les fils mystérieux où nos cœurs sont liés.
D'autres vont maintenant passer où nous passâmes;
Nous y sommes venus, d'autres vont y venir,
Et le songe qu'avaient ébauché nos deux âmes,
Ils le continueront sans pouvoir le finir.
Car personne ici-bas ne termine et n'acheve;
Les pires des humains sont comme les meilleurs;
Nous nous éveillons tous au même endroit du rêve:
Tout commence en ce monde et tout finit ailleurs.
Répondez, vallon pur, répondez, solitude!
O Nature, abritée en ce désert si beau,
Quand nous serons couchés tous deux, dans l'attitude
Que donne aux morts pensifs la forme du tombeau,
Est-ce que vous serez à ce point insensible,
De nous savoir perdus, morts avec nos amours,
Et de continuer votre fête paisible
Et de toujours sourire et de chanter toujours?[16]
Note.—Free Translation.
How brief a time suffices for all things to change! Serene-fronted Nature, too soon you will forget!... in your metamorphoses ruthlessly snapping the cords that bind our hearts together!
Others will pass where we pass; we have arrived, and others will arrive after us: the thought sketched out by our souls will be pursued by theirs ... and they will not find the solution of it.
For no one here begins or finishes: the worst are as the best of humans; we all awake at the same moment of the dream: we all begin in this world, and end otherwhere.
Reply, sweet valley, reply, solitude; O Nature, sheltering in this splendid desert, when we are both asleep, and cast by the tomb into the attitude of pensive death.
Will you to the last verge be so insensible, that, knowing us lost, and dead with our loves, you will pursue your cheerful feast, and smile, and sing always?
Yes, mortals may say that when they are sleeping in the grave, spring and summer will still smile and sing; husband and wife may ask themselves if they will meet again some day, in another sphere; but do we not feel that our destinies can not be terminated here, and that short of absolute and final nonentity for everything, they must be renewed beyond, in that starry Heaven to which every dream has flown instinctively since the first origins of Humanity?
As our planet is only a province of the Infinite Heavens, so our actual existence is only a stage in Eternal Life. Astronomy, by giving us wings, conducts us to the sanctuary of truth. The specter of death has departed from our Heaven. The beams of every star shed a ray of hope into our hearts. On each sphere Nature chants the pæan of Life Eternal.
THE END
INDEXA
Aberration, 300
Adams, 168
Agnesi, Marie, 5
Alcar, 34
Aldebaran, 44, 66
Alexandria, 3
Algol, 39
Ancients, views of, 30
Andrew Ellicot, 195
Andromeda, 37, 38
Angles, 289
Antares, 45, 66, 70
Antipodes, 208
Arago, 275
Arcturus, 39, 66
Asteroids, 146, 195
Astronomie des Dames, 9
Attraction, 208
Aureole, 279
Autumn Constellations, 54
Axis, 225
B
Babylonian Tables, 30
Bartholomew Diaz, 176
Bear, Little, 35
Great, 32, 34, 35
Betelgeuse, 49, 66
Biela's Comet, 189, 198
Bode's law, 167
Bolides, 201
C
Cancer, 72
Capella, 38, 66
Cassiopeia, 36
Castor, 44, 68
Catalogue of Lalande, 65
Catharine of Alexandria, 3
Centaur, 52, 64, 65, 80
Ceres, 147
Chaldean pastors, 30
Chaldeans, 271
Chariot of David, 32
Charioteer, 38
Chart of Mars, 140
Châtelet, Marquise du, 4
Chiron, The Centaur, 30, 51
Chromosphere, 102
Clairaut, 3
Clerke, Agnes, 7
Cnidus, 31
Coggia's Comet, 187
Comet of Biela, 197
of 1811, 186
of 1858, 174
Comets, 111, 185
Constellations, 28
figures of, 31
Autumn, 54
Constellations, Spring, 52
Summer, 53
Winter, 51
Copernicus, 125
Corona Borealis, 40
Corona of the Sun, 104
Cygnus, 40
D
de Blocqueville, Madame, 5
de Breteuil, Gabrielle-Émilie, 4
de Charrière, Madame, 5
Deneb, 41
des Brosses, 5
Diaz, Bartholomew, 176
Dipper, 32, 34
Donati, 187
Double star, stellar dial of, 86
Double stars, 68, 70
Dragon, 36
du Châtelet, Marquise, 4
E
Eagle, 41
Earth, 205
ancient notions of, 19
distance from the sun, 215
how sustained, 21
inclination, 224
in space, 20
motion of, round the Sun, 222
movement of, 217
rotundity of, 206
viewed from Mars, 144
viewed from Mercury, 119
viewed from Venus, 130
weight, 210
Eclipse of Sun, May, 1900, 273
Eclipses, 259
Ellicot, Andrew, 195
Entretiens sur la Pluralité des mondes, 9
Equator, 225
Eudoxus, 31
Evening Star, 123
F
Faculæ, 98, 100
Fire-balls, 198
Flammarion's Lunar Ring, 253
Fleming, Mrs., 7
Fontenelle, 9
Foucault, 219
G
Galileo, 95, 98, 125, 244
Galle, 168
Globe, divisions of, 226
Great Bear, 32, 34, 35
Great Dog, 50
Grecian Calendar, 229
Greek alphabet, 33
H
Hall, Mr., 143
Halley, 181
Halley's Comet, 3, 175
Heavens, map of, 61
Hercules, 41, 66, 79
Herdsman, 39
Herschel, Caroline, 6
Hevelius, 246
Hipparchus, 31
Houses of the Sun, 43
Huggins, Lady, 8
Huyghens, 49
Hyades, 44
Hypatia, 3
J
Janssen, 102
Jupiter, 148
satellites, 155
telescopic aspect of, 150
K
Klumpke, Miss, 7
Kovalevsky, Sophie, 6
L
Lacaille, 292
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