PLANETARY SPIRITS.

 

When a spirit says it has come from another planet, it should be received with distrust. My firm belief is that no spirit has come from another planet, and, further, there is every reason to believe that the planets are uninhabitable by any beings like to man. The conditions on those nearest approaching the earth, as Mars, are so different that a being conforming thereto would be incomprehensible to us. There have been communications from these purporting planetary spirits which showed unmistakably that they knew nothing about the planets they claimed for their homes, and were so ignorant that they did not comprehend the absurdity of their pretensions. Other worlds may be inhabited, but living beings are the outgrowth of the conditions of birth and maintenance, and differ exactly as these differ. It is the fashion of pseudo-science to people all worlds of space with human intelligences, and it is taken for granted that everything is made for man, and if he fails to be present, it is a mistake and blunder. There is, however, no reason to infer that the universe was made for man—no one knows its purpose. Here on the earth are conditions for his evolution. He is the perfect type of the conditions prevailing on the earth. He could not live for a moment on any other planet. Granting there are beings on Mars sufficiently like men to make mutual understanding possible, to converse across the hundreds of millions of miles of space which intervenes would be as impossible as stretching a railroad to the moon.