The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (32 page)

“There is a great chasm betwixt the nature of men and angels,” he wrote.

“It may be the inhabitants of the planets are of a middle nature between both these. It is not impossible that God might create some of all kinds, that so he might more completely glorify his nature.” If these creatures were not human, Wilkins continued, then they would not need to be saved by Christ. If they were human, then perhaps they had not sinned and were not in need of saving. And even if the creatures of other worlds were indeed human and were in need of salvation, then Christ might have died for them as well. What churchman would be willing to state with certainty that the influence of the Son of God was limited to the earth alone, and could not extend even into space?

The pluralist position was further enhanced in the middle of the following century, when the Scottish astronomer James Ferguson published his
Astronomy Explained upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles.
The book’s title notwithstanding, Ferguson took pluralism far beyond Newton’s own speculations, proclaiming the certainty of life throughout the reaches of space. The universe, he contended, contains “thousands of thousands of Suns . . . attended by ten thousand times ten thousand Worlds . . . peopled with myriads of intelligent beings, formed for endless progression in perfection and felicity.” Among those peopled worlds was unquestionably the moon, Ferguson declared, the surface of which, with its mountains and valleys, more closely resembled the earth than did any other celestial body.

Ferguson had a gift for communicating complex concepts to laypeople, and
Astronomy Explained
eventually appeared in seventeen editions.

Among its devoted readers was the Bath church organist William Herschel, who purchased the book in 1773 and is said to have taken it to bed with him along with “a bason of milk or a glass of water” (as noted by his sister Caroline) for several months as he worked his way through it. By the time he discovered Uranus in 1781, Herschel was already a confirmed pluralist, and in his letters and published papers he made numerous references to the inhabitants of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the planet of his own discovery. By the 1790s he was developing his remarkable thesis that the sun was not an immense fireball but a “large and lucid planet,” composed of a cool, dark nucleus surrounded by a luminous layer of clouds that shielded the interior from the tremendous light and heat generated by
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the exterior. (He thought sunspots were regions of the dark nucleus glimpsed through holes in the clouds.) From this idea Herschel proceeded to the even more striking supposition that the sun might be inhabited. “Its similarity to the other globes of the system,” he wrote in a 1795 issue of the Royal Society’s
Philosophical Transactions,
“leads us to suppose that it is most probably . . . inhabited . . . by beings whose organs are adapted to the peculiar circumstances of that vast globe.”

By the early decades of the nineteenth century, pluralism had made the leap from heresy to conventional wisdom—preached in sermons, printed in textbooks, evoked in poems. (Pluralist sentiments can be found in the work of, among other poets, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Cole-ridge.) Not only did the idea seem to better comport with modern scientific discoveries, such as the discovery of microscopic creatures, but it seemed to posit a grander, more expansive notion of God as truly infinite and omnipotent, caring for unimaginably tiny animals even as he oversaw the vastness of the heavens. The Glasgow minister Thomas Chalmers made this point explicitly in his highly influential collection of sermons published in 1817 as
A Series of Discourses on the Christian Revelation
Viewed in Connection with the Modern Astronomy.
The telescope “led me to see a system in every star,” Chalmers wrote, while the microscope “leads me to see a world in every atom.” God was certainly capable of caring for the earth amid the plenitude of the heavens, for “magnitude does not overpower him, minuteness cannot escape him, and variety cannot bewilder him.” Thomas Chalmers was so mesmerizing a speaker that crowds would wait for hours to hear him preach, and his written work was just as popular.
Astronomical Discourses
(as the book came to be known) sold twenty thousand copies in its first year of publication, six thousand in its first ten weeks alone. The impact of Chalmers’s book, reported the British critic William Hazlitt, “ran like wild-fire through the country.” It met an equally enthusiastic reception in the United States; first published there in 1817, it stayed in print for more than four decades. “All the world,” proclaimed Edward Hitchcock, the president of Amherst College, “is acquainted with Dr. Chalmers’ splendid Astronomical Discourses.”

In the early nineteenth century, any tension between the dictates of science and religion—one grounded on experiment, the other on revelation—

was felt less in astronomy than in the much younger science of geology.

Fossils were being found deep in the earth and on the tops of mountains,

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and their location and apparent age both seemed to call into question the biblical account of the Great Flood, a centerpiece of Christian natural history. Moreover, many of the fossils were clearly of animals that no longer existed (for a while some theologians tried to argue that living examples of these animals had simply not yet been discovered on earth, but the fossilized remains of mammoths were not so easily explained away), which inevitably raised the issue of why God had mandated the extinction of species in a world that he had created according to his own design and, having finished, pronounced “good.” Perhaps most troubling was the growing understanding among geologists of how the layers of the earth had been formed, as the result of infinitesimal changes taking place over very long periods of time, which indicated that the earth itself was far older than had ever been imagined, indeed many millions of years old, and had not in fact been created (as was famously calculated by James Ussher, the archbishop of Armagh, Ireland) on October 23, 4004 B.C.— sometime in the midafternoon.

Some theologians would try to reconcile old dogma and new science with the theory of “progressive” creation, in which God provides new species to replace ones that have been lost. But this idea was neither scientifically adequate nor theologically satisfying, and eventually the fric-tion between the opposing ideas became insupportable and the ground gave way, as in one of those earthquakes that science had come to understand as a prime cause of geological change, cleaving the terrain and leaving the two camps to gaze warily at each other across the divide. On one side were those who no longer believed in the literal truth of the Bible’s creation story, having determined that the earth was colossally old (an understanding that would prepare the way for the theory of evolution), and on the other, those who insisted on a six-thousand-year-old earth in the face of all the scientific evidence to the contrary.

In astronomy, though, the ground was still reasonably stable, and the sky above looked as full of life as ever. Much of the most popular and highly regarded astronomical writing of the time was being produced by theologians, while the astronomers were, by and large, a pious lot who would have readily concurred with the assertion made in 1802 by William Paley in his landmark
Natural Theology
that astronomy “raises to sublimer views of the Deity than any other subject affords” and “shows, beyond all other sciences, the magnificence of his operations.”

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Even among astronomers, it was widely held that science was not an equal partner with religion, but rather—in the commonly used trope of the time—its handmaiden. The belief was perhaps most forcefully expressed in the work of the Scottish schoolteacher Thomas Dick, especially in his first book,
The Christian Philosopher; or, the Connection of Science
and Philosophy with Religion.
(Among that book’s many readers was Richard Adams Locke, who paid special attention to its appendix on the probability of life on the moon.) Theology, wrote Dick, “ought to be viewed as the most varied and comprehensive of the sciences; as embrac-ing, within its extensive grasp, all the other departments of useful knowledge, both human and divine,” while science was properly “subservient to the elucidation of the facts and doctrines of religion, and to the accomplishment of its benevolent designs.” For Dick, there could be no genuine conflict between faith and reason because God had designed the laws by which the universe functioned; careful inquiry would allow the scientist to lift the veil of ignorance and perceive ever more clearly the greatness of God’s work.

Published in 1823,
The Christian Philosopher
became an instant hit in Great Britain and the United States and established Thomas Dick as the most eloquent advocate of the idea of extraterrestrial life. The Almighty Being, Dick insisted, would not have created an entire universe devoid, except for one tiny planet, of creatures capable of receiving his moral government. Nor would he have created an infinitude of stars and planets, most of which exist beyond our sight, simply to provide a twinkling canopy for the earth’s night sky. (This was the assertion John Herschel would later echo in
A Treatise on Astronomy.
) The stars were made not for useless splendor, but for the enjoyment of their own intelligent beings, on whom God can bestow his benevolence and who can, in return, adore him and sing his praises. In Dick’s cosmology, the universe is not the cold, silent, desolate expanse imagined by those who believe the earth to be the only world in all of creation; it is instead a joyfully buzzing place inhabited by an inconceivably large number of creatures (in a later work he would estimate the number to be sixty quadrillion in the visible universe alone) that together encompass a thrilling variety of orders, from the tini-est animalculum all the way up to the seraph and the archangel. Intelligent life exists literally everywhere: on each planet, on every star, on comets, possibly on asteroids, likely on the sun, and—most assuredly—on the moon.

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Unlike some of his German colleagues, Thomas Dick was skeptical about the idea of communicating with the lunarians by means of a large geometrical figure, not so much for the absurdity of the project as for the unlikelihood of its ever getting built. “Our terrestrial sovereigns are much too engaged in plunder and warfare to think of spending their revenues in so costly an experiment,” he declared; “and, therefore, it is likely that, for ages to come, we shall remain in ignorance of the genius of the lunar inhabitants.” The “genius” of the inhabitants of the moon, their “intelligence,” their “sensitivity,” were assertions often repeated in Dick’s work; in a later book called
Celestial Scenery; or, the Wonders of the Planetary
System Displayed,
he went so far as to suggest that the moon “may contain a population of intelligent beings far more numerous, and perhaps far more elevated in the scale of intellect, than the inhabitants of our globe.”

Exactly how numerous? The mathematical calculation of extraterrestrials was one of Thomas Dick’s specialties, and in
Celestial Scenery
he determined that if the moon were as densely populated as England (exactly why it should be as crowded as England is left unstated) it would be home to no fewer than 4.2 billion inhabitants, more than five times the current population of the earth.

For Dick, the intelligence of those inhabitants was directly related to the physical conditions in which they lived. That was perhaps the central tenet of his philosophy: God would not create beautiful worlds without also placing there beings intelligent enough to appreciate them. In
The Christian Philosopher
Dick referred only in passing to the “sublime scenery” of the moon, but in a later book,
The Sidereal Heavens,
he lavished praise on its “beautiful diversity . . . of plains and valleys surrounded with circular ramparts of hills; of mountains towering far above; and vales and caverns sinking far below the general level of the lunar surface, with many other varieties.” All this, he noted, could be espied through a telescope; one had only to imagine those grand contours being covered with vegetation (grass, flowers, and trees) to create on the moon “a scene of picturesque beauty and magnificence.” Like Johann Schröter, Dick believed that the moon contained an atmosphere—different in composition from the earth’s but capable of sustaining life nonetheless—and that the atmosphere was cloud-less, for, as he noted, “all the parts uniformly present a clear, calm, and serene aspect, as if its inhabitants enjoyed a perpetual spring.”

Dick took bitter exception to the theory (by this time widely agreed on by scientists) that the moon’s surface was pocked with the remains of

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extinct volcanoes. Volcanoes, he reminded his readers, were not a feature of the original earth, when man existed in paradise; rather, they were brought forth only after the Great Flood, along with other natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes, as a representation of man’s sinful nature. “To suppose, therefore,” Dick declaimed, “that such destructive agents exist in the moon, would be virtually to admit that the inhabitants of that planet are in the same depraved condition as the inhabitants of this world.” This was a notion he found unthinkable (he was deeply offended by Gruithuisen’s claim to have seen fortifications on the moon, which he called a “pretended discovery”). As opposed to the intelligence of the lunar creatures, though, for the innocence of lunar creatures Dick marshaled no evidence, presented no lines of reasoning; he maintained the idea simply as an article of faith, an expression of his confidence in the benevolence of God’s design. If the inhabitants of the moon were morally corrupt, then so might be those on all the other stars that beautify the night sky—and the idea of a fallen universe, populated by untold billions of sinners, was more than he could bear.