A. How can we define space and time?
B. Where is the origin of the various substances existing in the world?
C. What is the nature of the ethereal fluid that fills the space?
Text for reading
313. The spirit world is also part of creation and fulfills its destiny according to the august prescriptions of the Lord. Concerning the way of creation of spirits, however, I can deliver no more than a very restricted teaching due to my own ignorance. Moreover, I must keep silent regarding certain issues, although I myself have been allowed to delve into them.
314. To those who wish to know and are humble before God, I will say, beseeching them not to base any premature theory on my words: the spirit does not receive divine illumination, which gives it free will and consciousness along with the notion of its higher destiny, without having passed through divinely unavoidable series of lower beings, among which the labor of its individualization is slowly developed. It is only from the day when the Lord imprints on its forehead his august seal that the spirit takes its place within the ranks of humankind.
315. Once more, do not build your ideas upon my words, so sadly notorious in the history of metaphysics. I would a thousand times rather to remain silent about such high matters, which are above our ordinary meditations, than to lead you to distort the meaning of my teaching, and immerse you, through my fault, in the inextricable maze of deism or fatalism.
316. Suns and planets – Now, at some point in the Universe, lost among the myriads of worlds, the cosmic matter condenses into the form of immense nebula. The universal laws that govern matter animate this nebula. Under those laws, notably the molecular force of attraction, it takes the shape of a spheroid, the only one that a mass of matter in insulated space can assume. The circular motion produced by gravity, exactly the same in all molecular zones towards the center, soon it modifies the primitive sphere to lead it, motion in motion, to the lenticular shape (we speak of the nebula as a whole).
317. Two new forces have emerged as a result of this movement of rotation: the centripetal force and centrifugal force, the former tending to bring all parties to the center, the latter tending to push them away. However, with the movement accelerating as the nebula condenses, and its radius increasing as it approaches the lenticular shape, the centrifugal force developed by these two endlessly causes soon prevails over the attraction at the center. In the same way that a very rapid movement of the sling breaks the cord and sets the bullet free to a great distance, the predominance of the centrifugal force detaches the equatorial circle from the nebula and from this ring forms a new mass isolated from the first, but nevertheless subject to its control. This mass retains its equatorial motion, which when modified, will become its translational movement around the solar body. Furthermore, its new state gives it a rotation movement around its own center.
318. The generatrix nebula, which gave birth to this new world, has condensed and returned to spherical shape. However, since the primitive heat developed by its diverse movements weakens extremely slowly, the phenomenon we have just described will be reproduced often and over a long period, as the nebula does not become dense or solid enough to offer any effective resistance to the changes of shape that its rotation movement successively imprints on it.
319. Consequently, the nebula will have given birth not to one heavenly body only, but to hundreds of the worlds detached from the focal center, having sprung from the nebula through the mode of formation mentioned above. Now each of these worlds, endowed like the original world with the natural forces that govern the creation of universes, successively engender new globes gravitating henceforth around it, just as itself gravitates around the focal point of their existence and life. Each of these worlds will be a sun, the center of a vortex of planets exiting successively from its equator. These planets will receive a special life, particularly, although dependent on the star that generated them.
320. Thus, planets are formed from masses of condensed matter that has not yet solidified, detached from the central mass by the action of centrifugal force, and by virtue of the laws of movement, taking on a spheroid shape that is more or less elliptical, depending on the degree of fluidity they have kept. One of those planets will be Earth, which before cooling off and covered with a solid crust, will give birth to the moon through the same process of astral formation to which itself owes its own existence.
321. Moons - Before the planetary masses had reached a level of cooling enough for their solidification, smaller masses, true liquids globules, became detached from some at the equatorial plane, where the centrifugal force is greatest, and by virtue of the same laws, acquired a translational movement around the planet that generated it, as happened to those planets around their generating star. That is how the earth gave birth to its moon, whose considerably lesser mass underwent a more rapid cooling. Now then, the laws and forces that presided over its detachment from the earth’s equator and its translational movement on the same plane acted in such a way that, rather than taking the spheroidal form, it took a shape of an ovoid globe, i.e., the elongated shape of an egg whose center of gravity would be fixed in the lower part.
322. The conditions under which the detachment of the moon enabled it to barely move away from the Earth and constrained it to remain perpetually suspended in its earth’s sky like an ovoid figure, whose heavier parts formed the lower face toward the earth and whose less dense parts constituted the top (if one means the side opposite to earth and pointed towards the heavens). This is what makes this moon always show the same face to us. To better understand its geological state, it can be compared to a ball of cork whose base, facing the earth, would be made of lead.
323. Hence, there are two essentially distinct natures to the lunar surface: one without any analogy to ours, because its fluidic and ethereal bodies are unknown; the other, in light relation to the earth, since the less-dense substances settled in that hemisphere. The former perpetually facing the earth, no water and no atmosphere, except maybe here and there within the limits of this sub-terrestrial hemisphere; the latter rich in fluids perpetually turned away from our world.
324. The number and state of the moons of each planet varied according to the special conditions in which they were formed. Some planets did not give birth to any secondary heavenly body (the case of Mercury, Venus and Mars), while others like Earth, Jupiter and Saturn formed one or more moons.
325. In addition to its satellites or moons, the planet Saturn displays the special phenomenon of its ring system, which seen from afar, appears to surround it like a white halo. This formation is a new demonstration of the universality of the laws of nature. The ring is in fact the result of a separation that operated at the equator of Saturn, still in primitive times, in the same way that an equatorial zone escaped Earth to form its moon. The difference is that the ring of Saturn formed in all parts of homogeneous molecules, probably already in some state of condensation, and could thus continue its rotation in the same direction and in time almost equal to what animates the planet. If one of the points of this ring had been denser than another, one or many clusters of substance would suddenly operated and Saturn would have had many more moons. Since the time of its formation, this ring has solidified in the same way as the other planetary bodies.
326. Comets - Wandering heavenly bodies, even more so than the planets, which retained the etymological denomination, comets are the guides that will help us overcome the limits of the system to which the earth belongs in order to carry us to distant regions in the sidereal expanse.
327. These bearded heavenly bodies have often been seen as being infant worlds, brewing in their primordial chaos the conditions for life and existence that are bestowed on the inhabited worlds. Others imagined that these extraordinary bodies to be worlds in a state of destruction, and for many, their singular appearance that have been cause for erroneous assessments about their nature, to the point that it was not even in judicial astrology, some used to consider them as portents of disasters sent by providential decrees to the trembling and astonished earth.
328. The law of variety applies on such a large scale in the works of Nature that one wonders how naturalists, astronomers and philosophers could have made so many theories to give comets a status equivalent to planetary bodies, and to see them as nothing but heavenly bodies in greater or lesser degree of development or decay. However, the pictures of nature should be ample enough to prevent the observer from the need to look for relationships that do not exist, and to leave to comets the modest but useful role of wandering heavenly bodies, serving as scouts for the solar domain. Because the heavenly bodies of which they are made are very diverse from that of planetary bodies, they do not have a purpose of serving as housing humanities. They travel successively from suns on sun, enriching themselves, at times with planetary fragments reduced to the vapor state, drawing to themselves the life-giving principles and renewing principles they shed over terrestrial worlds.
329. If, when one of those heavenly bodies approaches our tiny globe to traverse its orbit and return to its peak situated at an immeasurable distance from the sun, we were to follow it through by thought to visit with it the sidereal regions, we would cross the prodigious extension of ethereal matter that separates the sun from the nearest stars, and in observing the combined movements of this heavenly body - which we could assume as being astray in the infinite desert – we would find there another eloquent proof of the universality of the laws of nature carried out at distances that the most active imagination can hardly conceive. There, the elliptical shape takes the parabolic shape and its motion becomes so slow that the comet travels no more than a few meters in the same amount of time, which in its perigee, it travelled many thousands of miles. Perhaps a more powerful sun, more important than the one it has just left behind, will exercise over this comet a major attraction and receive it in the category of its own subjects.
Answers to Proposed Questions
A. How can we define space and time?
The main definition of space has been given: space is the expanse that separates two bodies. From this, certain sophists concluded that where there is no body there is no space. Space has also been defined where the worlds move about, the void that matter acts etc.
Space is one of those terms which represent a self-evident, primitive and axiomatic idea, and which the many definitions that may be given to it serve only to obscure it. "We all know - says the Spirit of Galileo - what space is and I just want to affirm that it is infinite, so that in our subsequent studies there will be no barrier opposing the investigation of our objective."
Time, like space, is a self-defining word One can get a more exact idea of it by relating it to the infinite whole. Time is the succession of things. It is connected to eternity in the same way that things are connected to infinity. (Genesis, Ch. VI, items 1 and 2)
B. Where is the origin of the various substances existing in the world?
We can establish as an absolute principle that all substances, known and unknown, are in fact just different ways in which the matter is presented, nothing more than varieties in which it transforms under the direction of the innumerable forces that govern it. There, in the whole universe there is only one primitive substance: the cosmos or cosmic matter of uranographers. (Genesis, Ch. VI, items 3, 4 and 7)
C. What is the nature of the ethereal fluid that fills the space?
This fluid is ether or primitive cosmic matter, the generator of the universe and beings. Inherent to this ether are the forces that preside over the metamorphosis of matter, the necessary and immutable laws that govern the universe. These multiple forces indefinitely varied according to the combinations of matter are know on Earth under the names of gravity, cohesion, affinity, attraction, magnetism and electricity. The vibratory movements of this agent are known as sound, light, heat, etc. In other worlds, they appear in other aspects and reveal other characteristics unknown on earth, and in the vast expanse of the heavens, indefinite number forces have been developed on an unimaginable scale, which greatness we are unable to assess. (Genesis, Ch. VI, items 10 and 11)
