Commending these trifling discrepancies to Sir David’s attention, while manufacturing his planetary inhabitants in conformity with them, shall we now follow his flight beyond the solar system, and get among the Fixed Stars? Here we are gazing at the Dog-Star! “I allow,” says a pensive objector to the Essayist,[95] “that if you disprove the existence of inhabitants in the planets of our system, I shall not feel much real interest in the possible inhabitants of the Sirian system. Neighbourhood has its influence upon our feelings of regard,—even neighbourhood on a scale of millions of miles!” Here our Pluralist is quite at home, and evidently in great favour. The stars twinkle and glitter with delight at his gleeful approach, to elevate them into moral and intellectual dignity, and at the same time, perhaps, select “some bright particular” one, to be hereafter distinguished as the seat of his own personal existence; whence he is to spend eternity in radiating astronomical emanations throughout infinitude. “Then, unembodied, doth he trace, By steps each planet’s heavenly way? A Thing of Eyes, that all survey, ... A Thought Unseen, yet seeing all!”[96] He stands in the starry solitude, waving his wand, and lo! he peoples each glistening speck with intellectual existence, with the highest order of intelligence, as in the case of that little star, the sun, which he has quitted. Now as to these same FIXED STARS, we can easily guess the steps of Sir David’s brief and satisfactory argument. _If_ the stars be suns, they are inhabited like our sun; and if they be suns, each has its planets, like our sun; and if they have planets, they are inhabited like our planets; and if they have satellites like some of ours, they are also inhabited. But the stars _are_ suns, and they all have planets, and at least some of these planets, satellites; therefore, all the fixed stars, with their respective planetary systems, are inhabited (Q. E. D.) Here are Sir David’s words:—“We are compelled to draw the conclusion that wherever there is a sun, there must be a planetary system; and wherever there is a planetary system, there must be Life and Intelligence.”[97] This is the way in which, it seems, we worms of the earth feel ourselves at liberty to deal with our Almighty Creator: dogmatically insisting that every scene of existence in which He may have displayed His omnipotence, is but a repetition of that particular one in which we have our allotted place! As if He had but one pattern for Universal Creation! Only one scheme for peopling and dealing with infinitude! O, that _the clay_ should think thus of _Him that fashioneth it_![98] Forgetting, in an exulting moment of blindness and presumption, His own awful words, _My thoughts are not as your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways. For as the Heavens are higher than the Earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your