6. But, in fact, the view which we have given of the mode of existence
of the human species upon the earth, as being a progressive existence,
even in the development of the intellectual powers and their results,
necessarily fastens down our thoughts and our speculations to the earth,
and makes us feel how visionary and gratuitous it is to assume any
similar kind of existence in any region occupied by other beings than
man. As we have said, we have no insuperable difficulty in conceiving
other parts of the Universe to be tenanted by animals. Animal life
implies no progress in the species. Such as they are in one century,
such are they in another. The conditions of their sustentation and
generation being given, which no difference of physical circumstances
can render incredible, the race may, so far as we can see, go on
forever. But a race which makes a progress in the development of its
faculties cannot thus, or at least cannot with the same ease, be
conceived as existing through all time, and under all circumstances.
Progress implies, or at least suggests, a beginning and an end. If the
mere existence of a race imply a sustaining and preserving power in the
Creator, the progress of a race implies a guiding and impelling power; a
Governor and Director, as well as a Creator and Preserver. And progress,
not merely in material conditions, not merely in the exercise of bodily
faculties, but in the exercise of mental faculties, in the intellectual
condition of a portion of the species, still more implies a special
position and character of the race, which cannot, without great license
of hypothesis, be extended to other races; and which, if so extended,
becomes unmeaning, from the impossibility of our knowing what is
progress in any other species;--from what and towards what it tends. The
intellectual progress of the human species has been a progress in the
use of thought, and in the knowledge which such use procures; it has
been a progress from mere matter to mind; from the impressions of sense
to ideas; from what in knowledge is casual, partial, temporary, to what
is necessary, universal, and eternal. We can conceive no progress, of
the nature of this, which is not identical with this; nothing like it,
which is not the same. And, therefore, if we will people other planets
with creatures, intelligent as man is intelligent, we must not only give
to them the intelligence, but the intellectual history of the human
species. They must have had their minds unfolded by steps similar to
those by which the human mind has been unfolded; or at least, differing
from them only as the intellectual history of one nation of the earth
differs from that of another. They must have had their Pythagoras, their
Plato, their Kepler, their Galileo, their Newton, if they know what we
know. And thus, in order to conceive, on the Moon or on Jupiter, a race
of beings intelligent like man, we must conceive, there, colonies of
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