in your refined culinary apparatus, for they are connected with their
system of nourishment. Those opaque azure clouds, to which you saw a few
minutes ago one of those beings directing his course, are works of art
and places in which they move through different regions of their
atmosphere and command the temperature and the quantity of light most
fitted for their philosophical researches, or most convenient for the
purposes of life. On the verge of the visible horizon which we perceive
around us, you may see in the east a very dark spot or shadow, in which
the light of the sun seems entirely absorbed; this is the border of an
immense mass of liquid analogous to your ocean, but unlike your sea it is
inhabited by a race of intellectual beings inferior indeed to those
belonging to the atmosphere of Saturn, but yet possessed of an extensive
range of sensations and endowed with extraordinary power and
intelligence. I could transport you to the different planets and show
you in each peculiar intellectual beings bearing analogies to each other,
but yet all different in power and essence. In Jupiter you would see
creatures similar to those in Saturn, but with different powers of
locomotion; in Mars and Venus you would find races of created forms more
analogous to those belonging to the earth; but in every part of the
planetary system you would find one character peculiar to all intelligent
natures, a sense of receiving impressions from light by various organs of
vision, and towards this result you cannot but perceive that all the
arrangements and motions of the planetary bodies, their satellites and
atmospheres are subservient. The spiritual natures therefore that pass
from system to system in progression towards power and knowledge preserve
at least this one invariable character, and their intellectual life may
be said to depend more or less upon the influence of light. As far as my
knowledge extends, even in other parts of the universe the more perfect
organised systems still possess this source of sensation and enjoyment;
but with higher natures, finer and more ethereal kinds of matter are