The existence of higher beings and of a Highest Being is a fundamental element in every religious creed. There is no scientific reason for imagining it possible that man is the highest intelligent existence—there is no reason to suppose that we dwellers on this planet know more about the universe than any other existing creature. Such an idea, strictly speaking, is absurd. Science has investigated our ancestry and shown that we are the product of planetary processes. We may be, and surely must be, something more, but this we clearly are—a development of life on this planet earth. Science has also revealed to us an innumerable host of other worlds, and has relegated the earth to its now recognised subordinate place as one of a countless multitude of worlds.

Consider a spherical region bounded by the distance of the farthermost stars visible in the strongest telescope, or say with a radius corresponding to a parallax of one-thousandth of a second of arc, so that the time taken by light to travel right across it is 6000 years:—Lord Kelvin, treating of such a portion of Universe, says:

“There may also be a large amount of matter in many stars outside the sphere of 3×10¹⁶ kilometres radius, but however much matter there may be outside it, it seems to be made highly probable, by §§ 11-21, that the total quantity of matter within it is greater than 100 million times, and less than 2000 million times, the sun’s mass” (Philosophical Magazine, August 1901).

It does not follow that all this matter is distributed in masses like our sun with its attendant planets; but, on the average, that is as likely an arrangement as another, and it corresponds with what we know.

So, given, on this hypothesis, the existence of some thousand million solar systems or families of worlds, within our ken, and knowing what we do about the exuberant impulse towards vital development wherever it is possible, we must conclude that those worlds contain life; and if so, it is against all reasonable probability that the only world of which we happen to know the details contains the creature highest in the entire scale. It would be just as reasonable to imagine, what we happen to know is false, that our particular sun is the largest, and our particular planet the brightest of all, as it is to conjecture that this world is the highest and best, or the only one in existence.

The self-glorifying instinct of the human mind has resented this negative conclusion, and for long clung to the Ptolemaic idea that the earth was no mere planet among a crowd of others, but was the centre of the universe; and that the sun and all the stars were subsidiary to it. A Ptolemaic idea clings to some of us still—not now as regards the planet, but as regards man; and we, insignificant creatures, with senses only just open to the portentous meaning of the starry sky, presume—some of us—to deny the existence of higher powers and higher knowledge than our own. We are accustomed to be careful as to what we assert; we are liable to be unscrupulous as to what we deny. It is possible to find people who, knowing nothing or next to nothing of the Universe, are prepared to limit existence to that of which they have had experience, and to measure the cosmos in terms of their own understanding. Their confidence in themselves, their shut minds and self-satisfied hearts, are things to marvel at. The fact is that no glimmer of a conception of the real magnitude and complexity of existence can ever have illuminated their cosmic view.