that each one has a system of planets around it like our own. Taking an average of only ten planets to to each sun, that hypothesis indicates the existence, within the narrow range to which human observation is still confined, of at least three hundred millions of separate worlds, many of them doubtless of gigantic size, and it is nearly inconceivable that those worlds can be wholly devoid of living and sentient beings upon them. Granting the to us impossible hypothesis that the final cause of the universe is accident, a fortuitous concourse of self-existent atoms, still the accident which produced thinking beings upon this little and inferior world must have frequently repeated itself: while if, as we hold, there is a sentient Creator, it is difficult to believe, without a revelation to that effect, that he has wasted such glorious creative power upon mere masses of insensible matter. God cannot love gases. The high probability, at least, is that there are millions of worlds—for, after all, what the sensitized paper sees must be but an infinitesimal fraction of the whole—occupied by sentient beings.
[A]
