THE OVERCOMING OF APPEARANCES 29 



of the earth ; the sun is four hundred times the distance of the 

 moon ; Neptune, thirty times the distance of the sun ; the 

 nearest of the stars, nine thousand times the distance of 

 Neptune. 



Viewed from the rim of the solar machine the sun has shrunk 

 to a body no larger than Venus at its brightest. And outside 

 this outer planet is a sphere 800,000 million times more vast 

 than our whole solar system, within whose black and desert 

 emptiness there swims no star, no sun, to light the soul upon 

 its journey to a fairer world. 



Still undaunted, the mind of man, rising to horizons yet 

 more vast, questions still : What lies beyond ? 



We may, if we like, picture the emptiness which lies outside 

 our little solar world as a colossal hollow shell, enveloping it as 

 one sphere may be made to fit over another. We may more 

 than double the diameter of this shell, conceiving its outer 

 surface at half again the distance of Alpha Centauri, and still, 

 so far as present measures of parallax go, Alpha Centauri will 

 be the only other occupant of the void. Light travelling at 

 660,000 millions of miles per hour will be ten or twelve years in 

 crossing such a space from one boundary to the opposite. It 

 follows, therefore, that if we could suddenly materialise this 

 shell, so as to cut off the light of all the stars of heaven, it would 

 be at least three years and a half before we should become aware, 

 that it had been done. 



The number of the stars, we know, is as the sands upon the 

 shores of the sea ; not, there is some reason to think, infinite, 

 but perhaps even now, in a vague way, estimable. And if in 

 truth their number be finite and knowable, so then is the uni- 

 verse not boundless, but its extent and its shape may one day 

 be known. We are here upon the edge of the future. 



Some tentative calculations have already been made, ex- 

 quisite in their simplicity, confounding in their results. They 

 are as yet new ; they will doubtless be revised. Not improbably 

 there are stars a thousand times more distant than our nearest 

 neighbour stars ; remote from us thirty thousand years of 

 speeding light. The mind gropes in vain for units, mile-posts, 

 to fathom such immensity of space. To vary a simile now 

 grown a trifle antique, had these distant suns been extinguished 

 in those remote and charming days when the moon paused in 



