L'inconnu = The unknown / By Camille Flammarion.

  • Flammarion, Camille, 1842-1925.
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: L'inconnu = The unknown / By Camille Flammarion. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

    16/515
    But, again, let us not concern ourselves with such different opinions. What can these studies concerning psychical problems lead to, after all ? says some one. We answer : They tend to show that the soul exists and that our hopes of immortality are not chimeras. Materialism is an hypothesis which cannot be sustained, now that we know more about matter. It does not afford us the solid jJOint d'ajjp^ii it was once supposed to do. Bodies are composed of millions of millions of mobile atoms, which do not even touch one another, and are in perpetual move- ment round each other : these infinitely minute atoms are now considered centres of force. Where, then, is matter ? It disappeared under dynamism. An intellectual law controls the universe in which our planet holds a humble place. Such is the law of progress. I showed in my work Le Monde avant la Création de l'Homme that the evolution of Lamarck and Darwin is only a recog- nition of facts, and not a cause (the product can never be superior to what generates it), and in my work La Fin du Monde I also showed that nothing can end, since all that had existence in past eternity exists still. The law of progress which regulates all life, the physical organism of this life itself, the instinctive foresight of plants, insects, birds, etc., to assure the propagation of these species, and an examination of the principal facts in natural history will result, as Oersted has told us, in convincing us that there is a spirit in nature. The current of our daily life shows us no power of thought except in the brains of men and animals. Thence physiologists have concluded that thought is a product of the brain. And we are told that without brain there is no thought. Now nothing authorizes us to think that the sphere of our observations is universal—that it comprises all the possibili- ties of nature in all other worlds. No one has a right to insist that there can be no thought without a brain. If one or another of the millions of microbes that'inhabit