THE BOSTON HEE5LD. TV 



-/9 The Folly of It /f/^- ' 



(By CAMILLE FLAMMARION, FRENCH ASTRONOMER.) 

 It is impossible coolly to consider this reality 

 (the vastness of the universe) without being struck 

 with the astonishing and inexplicable illusion in 

 which the majority of mankind slumbers. Behold a 

 little globe whirling in the infinite void. Round this 

 globule vegetate 1450 millions of so-called reason- 

 able beings — or rather talkers — who know not 

 whence they come nor whither they go, each of them, 

 moreover, born to die very soon; and this poor hu- 

 manity has resolved the problem, not of living hap- 

 pily in the light of nature, but of suffering constantly 

 both in body and mind. It does not emerge from its 

 native ignorance, it does not rise to the intellectual 

 pleasures of art and science, and torments itself per- 

 petually with chimerical ambitions. Strange social 

 organization! This race is divided into tribes subject 

 to chiefs, and from time to time we see these tribes, 

 afflicted with furious folly, arrayed against each 

 other, obeying the signal of a handful of sanguinary 

 evildoers who live at their expense, and the infamous 

 hydra of war mows down its victims, who fall like 

 ripe ears of corn on the blood-stained fields. Forty 

 millions of men are killed regularly every century in 

 order to maintain the microscopical divisions of a 

 little globule into several anthills. * * * When 

 men know something of the earth, and understand 

 the modest position of our planet in infinity; when 

 they appreciate better the grandeur and the beauty 

 of nature, they will be fools no longer, as coarse on 

 the one hand as credulous on the other; but they will 

 live in peace, in the fertile study of Truth, in the 

 contemplation of the Beautiful, in the practice of the 

 Good, in the progressive development of the reason, 

 and in the noble exercise of the higher faculties of 

 intelligence. 



