THE DESTINY OF MAN. 



I. 



Mans Place in Nature, as affected by the 

 Copernican Theory. 



||HEN we study the Divine Comedy 

 of Dante that wonderful book 

 wherein all the knowledge and 

 speculation, all the sorrows and yearnings, 

 of the far-off Middle Ages are enshrined in 

 the glory of imperishable verse we are 

 brought face to face with a theory of the 

 world and with ways of reasoning about 

 the facts of nature which seem strange to 

 us to-day, but from the influence of which 

 we are not yet, and doubtless never shall 

 be, wholly freed. A cosmology, grotesque 

 enough in the light of later knowledge, yet 

 wrought out no less carefully than the 



