The Day After Death; Or, Our Future Life According to Science (New Edition)Figuier, Louis
Religion
The Day After Death; Or, Our Future Life According to Science (New Edition)
Figuier, Louis
Cosmology; Future life; Transmigration
We can also arrive at some idea of the perfection of the senses
attained by resuscitated man, by considering the accession of power
which our own senses may receive by the assistance of science and art.
Before the invention of the microscope, no one ever imagined that the
eye could penetrate the mysteries of that world in miniature well named
the _Infinitely Little_, until then absolutely unknown; no one had
ever divined, for instance, that in one drop of water might be seen
myriads of living beings. These beings have existed throughout all
time, but man has been able to contemplate them for only two centuries.
Our visual power over microscopic beings was until then unknown. The
least enlightened, the most careless student of this day, regards with
indifference things which Aristotle, Hippocrates, Pliny, Galienus,
Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon could not have contemplated, or even
suspected to exist. The discovery of the telescope, in the days of
Kepler and Galileo, hurled back the boundaries of the human intellect
and threw open to its investigation a domain hitherto sealed from its
sight. There, where Hipparchus and Ptolemy had seen nothing, Galileo,
Huyghens, Kepler, made, in a few nights, by the aid of the telescope,
discoveries of hitherto unsuspected celestial splendour. The satellites
of Jupiter and Saturn, a multitude of new stars, the phases of Venus,
and, at a later period, the discovery of new planets only to be seen by
the telescope, the observation of spots on the sun, and the revolution
of the nebulæ into collections of stars, were the almost immediate
consequences of the invention of the telescope. Thus we learned that,
by the aid of art, the human eye can penetrate the most distant regions
of heaven.
Let us now suppose all the powers of the telescope and all those of the
microscope concentrated in the sense of vision; that is to say, that in
addition to all objects placed at ordinary distances, it can discern
all microscopic objects, and at the same time all the celestial bodies
invisible to the naked eye, and you will have an idea of what the
sense of sight is, in the superhuman being.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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