2 8o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



The stars send us not only that visible and gross light which 

 strikes our bodily eyes, but from them also comes to us a light far 

 more subtle, which illuminates our minds and whose effects I shall 

 try to show you. You know what man was on the earth some thou- 

 sands of years ago, and what he is to-day. Isolated amidst a nature 

 where everything was a mystery to him, terrified at each unexpected 

 manifestation of incomprehensible forces, he was incapable of see- 

 ing in the conduct of the universe anything but caprice; he at- 

 tributed all phenomena to the action of a multitude of little genii, 

 fantastic and exacting, and to act on the world he sought to con- 

 ciliate them by means analogous to those employed to gain the good 

 graces of a minister or a deputy. Even his failures did not enlighten 

 him, any more than to-day a beggar refused is discouraged to the point 

 of ceasing to beg. 



To-day we no longer beg of nature; we command her, because we 

 have discovered certain of her secrets and shall discover others each 

 day. We command her in the name of laws she can not challenge 

 because they are hers; these laws we do not madly ask her to change, 

 we are the first to submit to them. Nature can only be governed 

 by obeying her. 



What a change must our souls have undergone to pass from the 

 one state to the other! Does any one believe that, without the lessons 

 of the stars, under the heavens perpetually overclouded that I have just 

 supposed, they would have changed so quickly? Would the meta- 

 morphosis have been possible, or at least would it not have been 

 much slower? 



And first of all, astronomy it is which taught that there are laws. 

 The Chaldeans, who were the first to observe the heavens with some 

 attention, saw that this multitude of luminous points is not a con- 

 fused crowd wandering at random, but rather a disciplined army. 

 Doubtless the rules of this discipline escaped them, but the har- 

 monious spectacle of the starry night sufficed to give them the im- 

 pression of regularity, and that was in itself already a great thing. 

 Besides, these rules were discerned by Hipparchus, Ptolemy, Coper- 

 nicus, Kepler, one after another, and finally, it is needless to recall 

 that Newton it was who enunciated the oldest, the most precise, the 

 most simple, the most general of all natural laws. 



And then, taught by this example, we have seen our little ter- 

 restrial world better and, under the apparent disorder, there also 

 we have found again the harmony that the study of the heavens 

 had revealed to us. It also is regular, it also obeys immutable laws, 

 but they are more complicated, in apparent conflict one with an- 

 other, and an eye untrained by other sights would have seen there 

 only chaos and the reign of chance or caprice. If we had not known 



