SEVENTH CHAPTER. 



OF THE CREATION IN THE WHOLE EXTENT OF 

 ITS INFINITUDE IN SPACE AS WELL AS IN 

 TIME. 



THE universe, by its immeasurable greatness and the 

 infinite variety and beauty that shine from it on all sides, 

 fills us with silent wonder. If the presentation of all this 

 perfection moves the imagination, the understanding is 

 seized by another kind of rapture when, from another 

 point of view, it considers how such magnificence and 

 such greatness can flow from a single law, with an eternal 

 and perfect order. The planetary world in which the sun, 

 acting with its powerful attraction from the centre of all 

 the orbits, makes the moving spheres of its system revolve 

 in eternal circles, has been wholly formed, as we have 

 seen, out of the originally diffused primitive stuff that 

 constituted all the matter of the world. All the fixed 

 stars which the eye discovers in the hollow depths of the 

 heavens, and which seem to display a sort of prodigality, 

 are suns and centres of similar systems. Analogy thus 

 does not leave us to doubt that, these systems have 

 been formed and produced in the same way as the one 

 in which we find ourselves, namely, out of the smallest 



