Are the Planets Inhabited?

obvious one: they were lights. There was a greater light to rule the

as then regarded as the fixed centre of the universe, but the Copernican theory has since deprived it of this pride of place. Yet from another point of view the new conception of its position involves a promotion, since the earth itself is now regarded as a heavenly body of the same o

s a world? This world teems with life; above all, it is the home of human life. Men and women, gifted with feeling, intelligence, and character, look upward from its surface and watch

years ago, and has been with us more or less ever since. It is the desire to recognize the presence in the o

vegetation and no fulness and complexity of animal life would justify an explorer in describing some land that he had discovered as being "inhabited" if no men were there, so we cannot rightly speak of any other world as being "inhabited" if it is not the home of intelligent life. If the life did not ri

ans for attaining such knowledge, we cannot discuss them. Nothing can be affirmed, nothing denied, concerning the possibility of intelligences existing on the Moon or even in the Sun if we are unable to ascertain under what limitations those particular intell

ess on the one hand; on the other, they must likewise have corporeal form. True, the form might be imagined as different from that we possess; but, as with ourselves, the intelligent spirit must be lodged in and expressed by a l

as urged that it was derogatory to the wisdom and goodness of the Creator to suppose that He would have created so many great and glorious orbs without having a definite purpose in so doing, and that the only purpose for which a world could be mad

ee how it should modify our religious beliefs. For example: explorers have made their way across the Antarctic continent to the South Pole but have found no "inhabitant" there. Has this fact any theological bearing? or if, on the contrary, a ra

pass in review: "Are its physical conditions, so far as we can ascertain them, such as would render the maintenance of life possible upon it?" The ques