CAMILLE FLAMMARION
[To the Editor of the SPECT-ATOR.] SIR,—With the death of Camille Flammarion a great figure disappears. His long career was devoted to the popularization of Astronomy, and his books have interested and delighted hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic readers throughout the world.
Though living in an age of materialism is outrance, Flam- marion to the end—without identifying himself with any dogmatic school or religious sect—never ceased to uphold and vindicate the cause of survival of human personality after death, or, as it was formerly called, immortality. His clearly presented arguments in this respect were chiefly that man's mental conception of a higher form or plane of existence, his perpetual striving for truth and knowledge, and incessant quest of an ideal, his aspirations, cult of beauty and Art, even as that innate sense of eternal justice in us—these could not be the mere result of chemical, or purely material, reaction ; that to declare, in accordance with the materialistic theory, there was no Intelligent Purport in the working of the Universe, but that the latter was simply an infinity of blind forces, was an insult to that " infinitesimal spark of the divine in man " called reason. Were it otherwise, we were cheated, so to speak, and the whole thing became a colossal hoax.
From pure correlation and analogy he was a staunch advo- cate of the inhabitation of other worlds—with forms of life, of course, appropriate to their surroundings—by beings endowed with reason. That millions of worlds, more or less like ours, disseminated throughout vast space, in which we are also, should be pronounced ex cathedra devoid of intelligent inhabitants of some sort—such a pronouncement as coming from the " homunculus " (as he dubbed him) or " little matt " of this planet Earth—seemed to Flammarion the climax of arrogant, conceited ridicule.
One of his first works, The Pluratihj of Inhabited Worlds, had an enormous sale ; while his Popular Astronomy reached in 1922 its 129th thousand. As though conscious that his earthly mission was drawing to a close, Flammarion gave to the world as a legacy three years ago his last books, entitled Death and After Death, in which are embodied his full and final views anent these momentous questions.
May his unfettered spirit, always eager in solving the riddle of our destiny, roam now at leisure among those enchanted worlds which, in mortal life, he so fascinatingly attempted to
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