3. With regard to the bearing of a merely _intellectual_ nature on such questions, it does not appear that any considerable difficulty would be _at once_ occasioned in our religious views, by supposing such a nature to belong to other creatures, the inhabitants of other planets, as well as to man. The existence of our own minds directs us, as I have said, to a Supreme Mind; and the nature of Mind is conceived to be, in all its manifestations, so much the same, that we can conceive minds to be multiplied indefinitely, without fear of confusion, interference, or exhaustion. There may be, in Jupiter, creatures endowed with an intellect which enables them to discover and demonstrate the relations of space; and if so, they cannot have discovered and demonstrated anything of that kind as true, which is not true for us also: their Geometry must coincide with ours, as far as each goes:--thus showing how absurdly, as Plato long ago observed, we give to the science which deals with the relations of space, a name (_geometry_), borrowed from the art of measuring the earth. The earth with its properties is no more the special basis of geometry, than are Jupiter or Saturn, or, so far as we can judge, Sirius or Arcturus and their systems, with their properties. Wherever pure intellect is, we are compelled to conceive that, when employed upon the same objects, its results and conclusions are the same. If there be intelligent inhabitants of the Moon, they may, like us, have employed their intelligence in reasoning upon the properties of lines and angles and triangles; and must, so far as they have gone, have arrived, in their thoughts, at the same properties of lines and angles and triangles, at which we have arrived. They must, like us, have had to distinguish between right angles and oblique angles. They may have come to know, as some of the inhabitants of the earth came to know, four thousand years ago, that, in a right-angled triangle, the square on the larger side is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. We can conceive occurrences which would give us evidence that the Moon, as well as the Earth, contains geometers. If we were to see, on the face of the full moon, a figure gradually becoming visible, representing a right-angled triangle with a square constructed on each of its three sides as a base; we should regard it as the work of intelligent creatures there, who might be thus making a signal to the inhabitants of the earth, that they possessed such knowledge, and were desirous of making known to their nearest neighbors in the solar system, their existence and their speculations. In such an event, curious and striking as it would be, we should see nothing but what we could understand and accept, without unsettling our belief in the Supreme and Divine Intelligence. On the contrary, we could hardly fail to receive such a manifestation as a fresh evidence that the Divine Mind had imparted to