_Realities_.[16]

In this way those regions become to him matters of knowledge as
definite, as certain, as familiar, as if he should travel to Africa in
ordinary fashion, explore its deserts, and return to his own land the
richer for the knowledge and experience gained. A seasoned African
explorer would care but little for the criticisms passed on his report
by persons who had never been thither; he might tell what he saw,
describe the animals whose habits he had studied, sketch the country
he had traversed, sum up its products and its characteristics. If he
was contradicted, laughed at, set right, by untravelled critics, he
would be neither ruffled nor distressed, but would merely leave them
alone. Ignorance cannot convince knowledge by repeated asseveration
of its nescience. The opinion of a hundred persons on a subject on
which they are wholly ignorant is of no more weight than the opinion
of one such person. Evidence is strengthened by many consenting
witnesses, testifying each to his knowledge of a fact, but nothing
multiplied a thousand times remains nothing. Strange, indeed, would it
be if all the Space around us be empty, mere waste void, and the
inhabitants of earth the only forms in which intelligence could clothe
itself. As Dr. Huxley said:

Without stepping beyond the analogy of that which is known,
it is easy to people the cosmos with entities, in ascending
scale, until we reach something practically indistinguishable
from omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience.[17]

If these entities did not have organs of sense like our own, if their
senses responded to vibrations different from those which affect ours,
they and we might walk side by side, pass each other, meet each other,