We know of the existence of thirty millions of stars or suns, many of them much more magnificent than the one which gives light to our system. The majority of them are not visible to the eye, or even recognizable by the telescope, but sensitized photographic plates--which are for this purpose eyes that can stare unwinking for hours at a time--have revealed their existence beyond all doubt or question, though most of them are almost inconceivably distant, thousands or tens of thousands of times as far off as our sun. A telegraphic message, for example, which would reach the sun in eight minutes, would not reach some of these stars in eighteen hundred years. The human mind, of course, does not really conceive such distances, though they can be expressed in formula which the human mind has devised, and the bewildering statement is from one point of view singularly depressing. It reduces so greatly the probable importance of man in the universe. It is most improbable, almost impossible, that these great centers of light should have been created to light up nothing, and as they are far too distant to be of use to us, we may fairly accept the hypothesis that each one has a system of planets around it like our own. Taking an average of only ten planets to to each sun, that hypothesis indicates the existence, within the narrow range to which human observation is still confined, of at least three hundred millions of separate worlds, many of them doubtless of gigantic size, and it is nearly inconceivable that those worlds can be wholly devoid of living and sentient beings upon them. Granting the to us impossible hypothesis that the final cause of the universe is accident, a fortuitous concourse of self-existent atoms, still the accident which produced thinking beings upon this little and inferior world must have frequently repeated itself: while if, as we hold, there is a sentient Creator, it is difficult to believe, without a revelation to that effect, that he has wasted such glorious creative power upon mere masses of insensible matter. God cannot love gases. The high probability, at least, is that there are millions of worlds--for, after all, what the sensitized paper sees must be but an infinitesimal fraction of the whole--occupied by sentient beings.[A] [Footnote A: Self Culture for March, 1899.] On this subject Richard A. Proctor, in his "Other Worlds Than Ours," also remarks: