Читать книгу Man's Place in the Universe - Alfred Russel Wallace, Alfred Russel Wallace - Страница 6

MODERN IDEAS AS TO MAN'S RELATION TO THE UNIVERSE

The beliefs as to the subordinate position held by sun, moon, and stars in relation to the earth, which were almost universal down to the time of Copernicus, began to give way when the discoveries of Kepler and the revelations of the telescope demonstrated that our earth was not specially distinguished from the other planets by any superiority of size or position. The idea at once arose that the other planets might be inhabited; and when the rapidly increasing power of the telescope, and of astronomical instruments generally, revealed the wonders of the solar system and the ever-increasing numbers of the fixed stars, the belief in other inhabited worlds became as general as the opposite belief had been in all preceding ages, and it is still held in modified forms to the present day.

But it may be truly said that the later like the earlier belief is founded more upon religious ideas than upon a scientific and careful examination of the whole of the facts both astronomical, physical, and biological, and we must agree with the late Dr. Whewell, that the belief that other planets are inhabited has been generally entertained, not in consequence of physical reasons but in spite of them. And he adds:—'It was held that Venus, or that Saturn was inhabited, not because anyone could devise, with any degree of probability, any organised structure which would be suitable to animal existence on the surfaces of those planets; but because it was conceived that the greatness or goodness of the Creator, or His wisdom, or some other of His attributes, would be manifestly imperfect, if these planets were not tenanted by living creatures.' Those persons who have only heard that many eminent astronomers down to our own day have upheld the belief in a 'Plurality of Worlds' will naturally suppose that there must be some very cogent arguments in its favour, and that it must be supported by a considerable body of more or less conclusive facts. They will therefore probably be surprised to hear that any direct evidence which may be held to support the view is almost wholly wanting, and that the greater part of the arguments are weak and flimsy in the extreme.

Of late years, it is true, some few writers have ventured to point out how many difficulties there are in the way of accepting the belief, but even these have never examined the question from the various points of view which are essential to a proper consideration of it; while, so far as it is still upheld, it is thought sufficient to show, that in the case of some of the planets, there seem to be such conditions as to render life possible. In the millions of planetary systems supposed to exist it is held to be incredible that there are not great numbers as well fitted to be inhabited by animals of all grades, including some as high as man or even higher, and that we must, therefore, believe that they are so inhabited. As in the present work I propose to show, that the probabilities and the weight of direct evidence tend to an exactly opposite conclusion, it will be well to pass briefly in review the various writers on the subject, and to give some indication of the arguments they have used and the facts they have set forth. For the earlier upholders of the theory I am indebted to Dr. Whewell, who, in his Dialogue on the Plurality of Worlds—a Supplement to his well-known volume on the subject—refers to all writers of importance known to him.

The earliest are the great astronomers Kepler and Huygens, and the learned Bishop Wilkins, who all believed that the moon was or might probably be inhabited; and of these Whewell considers Wilkins to have been by far the most thoughtful and earnest in supporting his views. Then we have Sir Isaac Newton himself who, at considerable length, argued that the sun was probably inhabited. But the first regular work devoted to the subject appears to have been written by M. Fontenelle, Secretary to the Academy of Sciences in Paris, who in 1686 published his Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds. The book consisted of five chapters, the first explaining the Copernican Theory; the second maintaining that the moon is a habitable world; the third gives particulars as to the moon, and argues that the other planets are also inhabited; the fourth gives details as to the worlds of the five planets; while the fifth declares that the fixed stars are suns, and that each illuminates a world. This work was so well written, and the subject proved so attractive, that it was translated into all the chief European languages, while the astronomer Lalande edited one of the French editions. Three English translations were published, and one of these went through six editions down to the year 1737. The influence of this work was very great and no doubt led to that general acceptance of the theory by such men as Sir William Herschel, Sir John Herschel, Dr. Chalmers, Dr. Dick, Dr. Isaac Taylor, and M. Arago, although it was wholly founded on pure speculation, and there was nothing that could be called evidence on one side or the other.

This was the state of public opinion when an anonymous work appeared (in 1853) under the somewhat misleading title of The Plurality of Worlds: An Essay. This was written, as already stated, by Dr. Whewell, who, for the first time, ventured to doubt the generally accepted theory, and showed that all the evidence at our command led to the conclusion that some of the planets were certainly not habitable, that others were probably not so, while in none was there that close correspondence with terrestrial conditions which seemed essential for their habitability by the higher animals or by man. The book was ably written and showed considerable knowledge of the science of the time, but it was very diffuse, and the larger part of it was devoted to showing that his views were not in any way opposed to religion. One of his best arguments was founded on the proposition that 'the Earth's Orbit is the Temperate Zone of the Solar System,' that there only is it possible to have those moderate variations of heat and cold, dryness and moisture, which are suitable for animal life. He suggested that the outer planets of the system consisted mainly of water, gases, and vapour, as indicated by their low specific gravity, and were therefore quite unsuitable for terrestrial life; while those near the sun were equally unsuited, because, owing to the great amount of solar heat, water could not exist on their surfaces. He devotes a great deal of space to the evidence that there is no animal life on the moon, and taking this as proved, he uses it as a counter argument against the other side. They always urge that, the earth being inhabited, we must suppose the other planets to be so too; to which he replies:—We know that the moon is not inhabited though it has all the advantage of proximity to the sun that the earth has; why then should not other planets be equally uninhabited?

He then comes to Mars and admits that this planet is very like the earth so far as we can judge, and that it may therefore be inhabited, or as the author expresses it, 'may have been judged worthy of inhabitants by its Maker.' But he urges the small size of Mars, its coldness owing to distance from the sun, and that the annual melting of its polar ice-caps will keep it cold all through the summer. If there are animals they are probably of a low type like the saurians and iguanodons of our seas during the Wealden epoch; but, he argues, as even on our earth the long process of preparation for man was carried on for countless millions of years, we need not discuss whether there are intelligent beings on Mars till we have some better evidence that there are any living creatures at all.

Several of the early chapters are devoted to an attempt to minimise the difficulties of those religious persons who feel oppressed by the immensity and complexity of the material universe as revealed by modern astronomy; and by the almost infinite insignificance of man and his dwelling-place, the earth, in comparison with it, an insignificance vastly increased if not only the planets of the solar system, but also those which circle around the myriads of suns, are also theatres of life. And these persons are further disquieted because the very same facts are used by sceptics of various kinds in their attacks upon Christianity. Such writers point out the irrationality and absurdity of supposing that the Creator of all this unimaginable vastness of suns and systems, filling for all we know endless space, should take any special interest in so mean and pitiful a creature as man, the imperfectly developed inhabitant of one of the smaller worlds attached to a second or third-rate sun, a being whose whole history is one of war and bloodshed, of tyranny, torture, and death; whose awful record is pictured by himself in such books as Josephus' History of the Jews, the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and even more forcibly summarised in that terrible picture of human fiendishness and misery, The Martyrdom of Man; while their character is indicated by one of the kindest and simplest of their poets in the restrained but expressive lines:—

It is for such a being as this, they say, that God should have specially revealed His will some thousands of years ago, and finding that His commands were not obeyed, His will not fulfilled, yet ordained for their benefit the necessarily unique sacrifice of His Son, in order to save a small portion of these 'miserable sinners' from the natural and well-deserved consequence of their stupendous follies, their unimaginable crimes? Such a belief they maintain is too absurd, too incredible, to be held by any rational being, and it becomes even less credible and less rational if we maintain that there are countless other inhabited worlds.

It is very difficult for the religious man to make any adequate reply to such an attack as this, and as a result many have felt their position to be untenable and have accordingly lost all faith in the special dogmas of orthodox Christianity. They feel themselves really to be between the horns of a dilemma. If there are myriads of other worlds, it seems incredible that they should each be the object of a special revelation and a special sacrifice. If, on the other hand, we are the only intelligent beings that exist in the material universe, and are really the highest creative product of a Being of infinite wisdom and power, they cannot but wonder at the vast apparent disproportion between the Creator and the created, and are sometimes driven to Atheism from the hopelessness of comprehending so mean and petty a result as the sole outcome of infinite power.

Whewell tells us that the great preacher, Dr. Chalmers, in his Astronomical Discourses, attempted a reply to these difficulties, but, in his opinion, not a very successful one; and a large part of his own work is devoted to the same purpose. His main point seems to be that we know too little of the universe to arrive at any definite conclusions on the question at issue, and that any ideas that we may have as to the purposes of the Creator in forming the vast system we see around us are almost sure to be erroneous. We must therefore be content to remain ignorant, and must rest satisfied in the belief that the Creator had a purpose although we are not yet permitted to know what it was. And to those who urge that in other worlds there may be other laws of nature which may render them quite as habitable by intelligent beings as our world is for us, he replies, that if we are to suppose new laws of nature in order to render each planet habitable, there is an end of all rational inquiry on the subject, and we may maintain and believe that animals may live on the moon without air or water, and on the sun exposed to heat which vaporises earths and metals.

His concluding argument, and perhaps one of his strongest, is that founded upon the dignity of man, as conferring a pre-eminence upon the planet which has produced him. 'If,' he says, 'man be not merely capable of Virtue and Duty, of universal Love and Self-Devotion, but be also immortal; if his being be of infinite duration, his soul created never to die; then, indeed, we may well say that one soul outweighs the whole unintelligent creation.' And then, addressing the religious world, he urges that, if, as they believe, God has redeemed man by the sacrifice of His Son, and has given to him a revelation of His will, then indeed no other conception is possible than that he is the sole and highest product of the universe. 'The elevation of millions of intellectual, moral, religious, spiritual creatures, to a destiny so prepared, consummated, and developed, is no unworthy occupation of all the capacities of space, time, and matter.' Then with a chapter on 'The Unity of the World,' and one on 'The Future,' neither of which contains anything which adds to the force of his argument, the book ends.

The publication of this able if rather vague and diffuse work, contesting popular opinions, was followed by a burst of indignant criticism on the part of a man of considerable eminence in some branches of physics—Sir David Brewster, but who was very inferior, both in general knowledge of science and in literary skill, to the writer whose views he opposed. The purport of the book in which he set forth his objections is indicated by its title—More Worlds than One, the Creed of the Philosopher and the Hope of the Christian. Though written with much force and conviction it appeals mainly to religious prejudices, and assumes throughout that every planet and star is a special creation, and that the peculiarities of each were designed for some special purpose. 'If,' he says, 'the moon had been destined to be merely a lamp to our earth, there was no occasion to variegate its surface with lofty mountains and extinct volcanoes, and cover it with large patches of matter that reflect different quantities of light and give its surface the appearance of continents and seas. It would have been a better lamp had it been a smooth piece of lime or of chalk.' It is, therefore, he thinks, prepared for inhabitants; and then he argues that all the other satellites are also inhabited. Again he says that 'when it was found that Venus was about the same size as the Earth, with mountains and valleys, days and nights, and years analogous to our own, the absurdity of believing that she had no inhabitants, when no other rational purpose could be assigned for her creation, became an argument of a certain amount that she was, like the Earth, the seat of animal and vegetable life.' Then, when it was found that Jupiter was so gigantic 'as to require four moons to give him light, the argument from analogy that he was inhabited became stronger also, because it extended to two planets.' And thus each successive planet having certain points of analogy with the others becomes an additional argument; so that when we take account of all the planets, with atmosphere, and clouds, and arctic snows, and trade-winds, the argument from analogy becomes, he urges, very powerful;—'and the absurdity of the opposite opinion, that planets should have moons and no inhabitants, atmospheres with no creatures to breathe in them, and currents of air without life to be fanned, became a formidable argument which few minds, if any, could resist.'

The work is full of such weak and fallacious rhetoric and even, if possible, still weaker. Thus after describing double stars, he adds—'But no person can believe that two suns could be placed in the heavens for no other purpose than to revolve round their common centre of gravity'; and he concludes his chapter on the stars thus:—'Wherever there is matter there must be Life; Life Physical to enjoy its beauties—Life Moral to worship its Maker, and Life Intellectual to proclaim His wisdom and His power.' And again—'A house without tenants, a city without citizens, presents to our minds the same idea as a planet without life, and a universe without inhabitants. Why the house was built, why the city was founded, why the planet was made, and why the universe was created, it would be difficult even to conjecture.' Arguments of this kind, which in almost every case beg the question at issue, are repeated ad nauseam. But he also appeals to the Old Testament to support his views, by quoting the fine passage in the Psalms—'When I consider Thy heavens the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained; what is man that Thou art mindful of him?' on which he remarks—'We cannot doubt that inspiration revealed to him [David] the magnitude, the distances, and the final cause, of the glorious spheres which fixed his admiration.' And after quoting various other passages from the prophets, all as he thinks supporting the same view, he sets forth the extraordinary idea as a confirmatory argument, that the planets or some of them are to be the future abode of man. For, he says—'Man in his future state of existence is to consist, as at present, of a spiritual nature residing in a corporeal frame. He must live, therefore, upon a material planet, subject to all the laws of matter.' And he concludes thus:—'If there is not room, then, on our globe for the millions of millions of beings who have lived and died on its surface, we can scarcely doubt that their future abode must be on some of the primary or secondary planets of the solar system, whose inhabitants have ceased to exist, or upon planets which have long been in a state of preparation, as our earth was, for the advent of intellectual life.'

It is pleasant to turn from such weak and trivial arguments to the only other modern works which deal at some length with this subject, the late Richard A. Proctor's Other Worlds than Ours, and a volume published five years later under the title—Our Place Among Infinities. Written as these were by one of the most accomplished astronomers of his day, remarkable alike for the acuteness of his reasoning and the clearness of his style, we are always interested and instructed even when we cannot agree with his conclusions. In the first work mentioned above, he assumes, like Sir David Brewster, the antecedent probability that the planets are inhabited and on much the same theological grounds. So strongly does he feel this that he continually speaks as if the planets must be inhabited unless we can show very good reason that they cannot be so, thus throwing the burden of proving a negative on his opponents, while he does not attempt to prove his positive contention that they are inhabited, except by purely hypothetical considerations as to the Creator's purpose in bringing them into existence.

But starting from this point he endeavours to show how Whewell's various difficulties may be overcome, and here he always appeals to astronomical or physical facts, and reasons well upon them. But he is quite honest; and, coming to the conclusion that Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, cannot be habitable, he adduces the evidence and plainly states the result. But then he thinks that the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn may be habitable, and if they may be, then he concludes that they must. One great oversight in his whole argument is, that he is satisfied with showing the possibility that life may exist now, but never deals with the question of whether life could have been developed from its earliest rudiments up to the production of the higher vertebrates and man; and this, as I shall show later, is the crux of the whole problem.

With regard to the other planets, after a careful examination of all that is known about them, he arrives at the conclusion that if Mercury is protected by a cloud-laden atmosphere of a peculiar kind it may possibly, but not probably, support high forms of animal life. But in the case of Venus and Mars he finds so much resemblance to and so many analogies with our earth, that he concludes that they almost certainly are so.

In the case of the fixed stars, now that we know by spectroscopic observations that they are true suns, many of which closely resemble our sun and give out light and heat as he does, Mr. Proctor argues, that 'The vast supplies of heat thus emitted by the stars not only suggest the conclusion that there must be worlds around these orbs for which these heat-supplies are intended, but point to the existence of the various forms of force into which heat may be transmuted. We know that the sun's heat poured upon our earth is stored up in vegetable and animal forms of life; is present in all the phenomena of nature—in winds and clouds and rain, in thunder and lightning, storm and hail; and that even the works of man are performed by virtue of the solar heat-supplies. Thus the fact that the stars send forth heat to the worlds which circle around them suggests at once the thought that on those worlds there must exist animal and vegetable forms of life.' We may note that in the first part of this passage the presence of worlds or planets is 'suggested,' while later on 'the worlds which circle round them' is spoken of as if it were a proved fact from which the presence of vegetable and animal life may be inferred. A suggestion depending on a preceding suggestion is not a very firm basis for so vast and wide-reaching a conclusion.

In the second work referred to above there is one chapter entitled, 'A New Theory of Life in other Worlds,' where the author gives his more matured views of the question, which are briefly stated in the preface as being 'that the weight of evidence favours my theory of the (relative) paucity of worlds.' His views are largely founded on the theory of probabilities, of which subject he had made a special study. Taking first our earth, he shows that the period during which life has existed upon it is very small in comparison with that during which it must have been slowly forming and cooling, and its atmosphere condensing so as to form land and water on its surface. And if we consider the time the earth has been occupied by man, that is a very minute part, perhaps not the thousandth part, of the period during which it has existed as a planet. It follows that even if we consider only those planets whose physical condition seems to us to be such as to be able to sustain life, the chances are perhaps hundreds to one against their being at that particular stage when life has begun to be developed, or if it has begun has reached as high a development as on our earth.

With regard to the stars, the argument is still stronger, because the epochs required for their formation are altogether unknown, while as to the conditions required for the formation of planetary systems around them we are totally ignorant. To this I would add that we are equally ignorant as to the probability or even possibility of many of these suns producing planets which, by their position, size, atmosphere, or other physical conditions can possibly become life-producing worlds. And, as we shall see later, this point has been overlooked by all writers, including Mr. Proctor himself. His conclusion is, then, that although the worlds which possess life at all approaching that of our earth may be relatively few in number, yet considering the universe as practically infinite in extent, they may be really very numerous.

It has been necessary to give this sketch of the views of those who have written specially on the question of the Plurality of Worlds, because the works referred to have been very widely read and have influenced educated opinion throughout the world. Moreover, Mr. Proctor, in his last work on the subject, speaks of the theory as being 'identified with modern astronomy'; and in fact popular works still discuss it. But all these follow the same general line of argument as those already referred to, and the curious thing is that while overlooking many of the most essential conditions they often introduce others which are by no means essential—as, for instance, that the atmosphere must have the same proportion of oxygen as our own. They seem to think that if any of our quadrupeds or birds taken to another planet could not live there, no animals of equally high organisation could inhabit it; entirely overlooking the very obvious fact that, supposing, as is almost certain, that oxygen is necessary for life, then, whatever proportion of oxygen within certain limits was present, the forms of life that arose would necessarily be organised in adaptation to that proportion, which might be considerably less or greater than on the earth.

The present volume will show how extremely inadequate has been the treatment of this question, which involves a variety of important considerations hitherto altogether overlooked. These are extremely numerous and very varied in their character, and the fact that they all point to one conclusion—a conclusion which so far as I am aware no previous writer has reached—renders it at least worthy of the careful consideration of all unbiassed thinkers. The whole subject is one as to which no direct evidence is obtainable, but I venture to think that the convergence of so many probabilities and indications towards a single definite theory, intimately connected with the nature and destiny of man himself, raises this theory to a very much higher level of probability than the vague possibilities and theological suggestions which are the utmost that have been adduced by previous writers.

In order to make every step of my argument clearly intelligible to all educated readers, it will be necessary to refer continually to the marvellous extension of our knowledge of the universe obtained during the last half-century, and constituting what is termed the New Astronomy. The next chapter will therefore be devoted to a popular exposition of the new methods of research, so that the results reached, which will have to be referred to in succeeding chapters, may be not only accepted, but clearly understood.