33. Or is the objection this; that if we suppose the earth only to be occupied by inhabitants, all the other globes of the universe are wasted;--turned to no purpose? Is waste of this kind considered as unsuited to the character of the Creator? But here again, we have the like waste, in the occupation of the earth. All its previous ages, its seas and its continents, have been wasted upon mere brute life; often, so far as we can see, for myriads of years, upon the lowest, the least conscious forms of life; upon shell-fish, corals, sponges. Why then should not the seas and continents of other planets be occupied at present with a life no higher than this, or with no life at all? Will it be said that, so far as material objects are occupied by life, they are not wasted; but that they are wasted, if they are entirely barren and blank of life? This is a very arbitrary saying. Why should the life of a sponge, or a coral, or an oyster, be regarded as a good employment of a spot of land and water, so as to save it from being wasted? No doubt, if the coral or the oyster be there, there is a reason why it is so, consistently with the attributes of God. But then, on the same ground, we may say that if it be not there, there is a reason why it is not so. Such a mode of regarding the parts of the universe can never give us reasons why they should or should not be inhabited, when we have no other grounds for knowing whether they are. If it be a sufficient employment of a spot of rock or water that it is the seat of organization--of organic powers; why may it not be a sufficient employment of the same spot that it is the seat of attraction, of cohesion, of crystalline powers? All the planets, all parts of the universe, we have good reason to believe, are pervaded by attraction, by forces of aggregation and atomic relation, by light and heat. Why may not these be sufficient to prevent the space being wasted, in the eyes of the Creator? as, during a great part of the earth's past history, and over large portions of its present mass, they are actually held by Him sufficient; for they are all that occupy those portions. This notion, then, of the improbability of there being, in the universe, so vast an amount of waste spaces, or waste bodies, as is implied in the opinion that the earth alone is the seat of life, or of intelligence, is confuted by the fact, that there are vast spaces, waste districts, and especially waste times, to an extent as great as such a notion deems improbable. The avoidance of such waste, according to our notions of waste, is no part of the economy of creation, so far as we can discern that economy, in its most certain exemplifications.