THE HORROR OF ASTRONOMY.
IF the impression produced on mankind in general by the perusal of Dr. Huggins's Presidential address to the British Association could be truthfully disclosed, we expect it would be something very nearly akin to horror. Most people are shy of confessing even to themselves that they have ex- perienced in regard to any intellectual conception the real sense of horror,—the sense which benumbs and oppresses the intellect with a dull ache. If, however, the civilised portion of the human race could be put to the question, we believe that the majority would be found to experience this feeling in regard to the facts and deductions of astronomy. Every human being knows what it is to feel at times a sudden nameless horror,—a shivering-fit of the soul as well defined as an ague of the body. The mental agitation and distress caused by doubts, forebodings, and difficulties connected with religion, or with the sense of misconduct, is something very different. The sensation we mean is neither a matter of -melancholy, of religious opinion, nor of remorse. It is instead, if we may be allowed the expression, a physical experience of the intellect. For some reason or other, this formless sense of horror is evoked more strongly by the science of astronomy than by any other. That it is not due to fear, in the ordinary sense of the word, is quite obvious. Astronomy may have disclosed certain risks run by mankind, but they are nothing when compared with those that are made known by plenty of other sciences. The notion that we may some day be rammed by a comet can perhaps be rendered alarming; but, as a rule, the alarms of astronomy concern a distant age, when the sun shall have cooled, or when a new force of attraction shall have arisen to lead the errant earth into a dangerous and untravelled path. Again, many of the astronomical facts which most easily conjure up this sense of awe and terror have little or no relation to our planet. What is so heart-shaking as the thought of a star that has foundered and gone out in the mid-firmament of heaven ? We may be reasoned into regarding it as commonplace, but at first it is terrific and awe-inspiring in no ordinary degree. Yet even if, when the lost star cooled or burst into a million meteorites, or was cannoned into space by the impact of some other world, it contained ten thousand million of inhabitants, no ground exists for any special regret. If subject to death, they would have been dead by now. The catastrophe of the heavens which overtook them'only shortened their lives. It is clear that it is not merely pity for the possible inhabitants that causes the sensation. Again, the sensation is called up equally acutely by thought of the vastness and the
solitude of space, by the height and fury of the flames that are leaping from the sun, and by the thought that the whole Solar System, and all the million systems that are its neighbours, are hurrying from some unknown and unknowable starting- point to some equally unknown and unknowable goal. What we would fain discover is the reason why these thoughts stun and intimidate the soul.
We believe that one explanation is to be found in the un- familiarity of the facts of astronomy. They appal because we cannot easily make them fit in with our general conception of existence. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the human brain maps out its conceptions in a kind of order, and gives each its relative importance. It happens, however, that though most men learn the elementary facts of astronomy, they give them very little attention. These facts are not, as a role, retained in active memory and worked upon auto- matically by the mind. Hence, when any new discovery or fresh point of view in regard to astronomy is presented to the mind, it produces, as it were, a disturbing element.
It does not fit in with or square with ordinary human thought. The mind resists its reception just as it resists an experience which is believed to be supernatural. A man who sees a ghostly manifestation and believes it to be a hoax, is naturally enough not inspired by any sense of horror or awe. Another, however, who for some reason thinks the manifestation supernatural, at once feels a sensation akin to that which we are trying to analyse. He is face to face with a fact which will not fit in with his ordinary intellectual conceptions, and so is disturbed and bewildered, —and disturbed and bewildered so acutely as to experience an actual sense of pain. That this is the cause of the sense of mental disturbance produced in many people by astronomy, is also shown by the fact that those who study astronomy and make themselves familiar with the science of the heavens, do not feel it. They have mapped out their mental conceptions on the proper scale, and the march of the Solar System through space is a phenomenon as little dis- turbing as the fall of an apple to the ground. Familiarity and the power of properly adjusting their mental outlook, have made them insensible to the horror of the stars. . After all, there is nothing essentially more awe-inspiring in the facts of astro- nomy, than in the tendency of water to ran down-hill.
That it is the consciousness of something unfamiliar, of something that has not been mentally assimilated, which primarily produces sensations which at first sight seem so inexplicable, is also shown in the fact that many people experience as great a horror at the discoveries of the micro- scope as of the telescope. There is something intellectually horrible in the thought of the infinite multiplication of life in a drop of dirty water. If each drop contains a universe of its own, how appalling is the sum-total of vitality in the pond.
The student of microscopic investigation gets his ideas on these matters into order, but the ordinary man suddenly con- fronted with them is easily horrified. The infinities inside our world become as awesome as the infinities of space. Yet, in reality, both series of facts and deductions have only got to be properly known and understood to lose all their horror.
In the case of astronomy, however, we cannot help thinking that the horror is to a certain extent intensified by the thought
of the insignificance of man as compared with the world of the stars. There must, we should imagine, be something oppres- sive even to the astronomer in the vastness of his field of study and the pettiness of man. The Laureate's thought,— "What is it all but a trouble of ants, in the gleam of a million million of suns ?"
must sometimes give even the Astronomer-Royal a momentary scorn for his kind. No doubt reason will soon bring him a correc- tive, by asking what littleness or bigness has got to do with it; but this philosophic balance must, one would think, be at times upset by keeping the eyes and thoughts always on vastness.
For the mass of mankind, in some form or other, a certain horror will at any rate cling to the stare,—or, rather, to the mental conceptions which attach to them. Matters so momentous, yet so aloof from our ordinary thought, are sere to perplex and disturb us.
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