250 Prof. De Morgan's Account of the Speculations 



where throughout the whole Universe, niterspersed Modules 

 of every Creation, as our Divines tell us, Man is the Image 

 of God himself. 



"Thus, Sir, you have had my full Opinion, without the least 

 Reserve, concerning the visible Creation, considered as Part 

 of the finite Universe; how far I have succeeded in my de- 

 signed Solution of the Via Lactea, upon which the Theory of 

 the Whole is formed, is a Thing will hardly be known in the 

 present Century, as in all probability it may require some 

 Ages of Observation to discover the Truth of it." 



The eighth and ninth letters, which are on the modes of 

 conceiving space and time, and contain general reflections on 

 the whole scheme, contain nothing which need be quoted. 

 Wright seems to have been the first who started the idea of 

 representing the solar system by selected objects on the earth. 

 Representing the sun by the dome of St. Pauls, a sphere of 

 eighteen inches diameter at Marylebone will be the earth, and 

 so on. There is internal evidence that these letters were 

 written in London. 



I should sum up by saying that Wright appears to have 

 been a man of great ingenuity, and of moderate learning, of a 

 strong turn for the invention of hypothesis, and great power 

 of appreciating its probability. He had a firm persuasion that 

 astronomical discovery was then very imperfect, both in quan- 

 tity and quality, a persuasion which regulated even his ordi- 

 nary expressions. It is not often, in his day, that we find, as 

 in his works, the planets described as the k?iown platiets, im- 

 plying an assumption that there might be more. He gave the 

 theory of the milky way which is now considered as established, 

 contended for what is now called the central sun, inclining 

 strongly to the belief of an actual central body, though he 

 sometimes qualifies it by stating the alternative of a central 

 body or a central point. He contends for the probability of 

 different creations of the kind of which the milky way is one ; 

 but he does not seem to have known of more than half a dozen 

 nebulae, and he does not push his views so far as to conjecture 

 that these " cloudy spots " are themselves other such creations: 

 lie rather refers them to condensations occurring in the mass 

 of stars to which our sun belongs. His prediction of the ulti- 

 mate resolution of Saturn's rings into congeries of small satel- 

 lites remains to be verified ; but it is thought by some to be 

 most probable that such is the truth. It is hardly necessary 

 to say that Wright supposes mutual gravitation to be the 

 connecting agent between star and star, as well as between 

 stars and their planets. 



Kant adds to what he probably learnt from the review of 



