“Alike, but, oh! how different!” Sir David rebukes the sceptic for forming so low an opinion of Omnipotent Wisdom, as to assume that “the inhabitants of the planets must be either men, or anything resembling them;—is it,” he asks, “necessary that an immortal soul should be hung upon a skeleton of bone, or imprisoned in a cage of cartilage and skin? Must it see with two eyes, and hear with two ears, and touch with ten fingers, and rest on a duality of limbs? May it not rest in a Polyphemus with one eyeball, or in an Argus with a hundred? May it not reign in the giant forms of the Titans, and direct the hundred hands of Briareus?[89] The being of another world may have his home in subterranean cities, warmed by central fires; or in crystal caves, cooled by ocean tides; or he may float with the Nereids upon the deep; or mount upon wings as eagles; or rise upon the pinions of the dove, that he may flee away, and be at rest!”[90] Let us pause at this point, and see how the question stands on the showing of the respectively imaginative and matter-of-fact disputants themselves. Sir David Brewster, being bound to show that analogy forces us to believe Jupiter inhabited, is compelled to admit a series of signal discrepancies in physical condition; expecting his opponent, in turn, to admit such a series of essential alterations, both of inert matter and organisation, as will admit of what?—_totally different_ modes of animal and intellectual existence—so different, as to drive a philosopher into the fantastic dreams in which we have just seen him indulging. Not so the Essayist, a master of the Inductive Philosophy. He does not presume impiously to limit Omnipotence; but reverently owns His power to create whatever forms and conditions of existence He pleases. But when it is asserted that He has, in fact, made beings wholly different from any that we see, “he cannot believe this without further _evidence_.”[91] And on this very subject of the imaginary inhabitants of Jupiter, he says, after reading what his heated and fanciful opponent has advanced,—“You are hard,” he makes an objector say, “on our neighbours in Jupiter, when you will not allow them to be anything better than ‘boneless, watery, pulpy creatures.’” To which he answers, “I had no disposition to be hard on them when I entered upon these speculations. I drew, what appeared to me, probable conclusions from all the facts of the case. _If the laws of attraction, of light, of heat, and the like, be the same there as they are here, which we believe to be certain, the laws of life must also be the same; and, if so, I can draw no other conclusions than those which I have stated._”[92] Says the Essayist, I know that my Maker _can_ invest with the intellect of a Newton, each of “The gay motes that people the sunbeams;”