§417 the vastness of heaven 239
days and the times of day called morning, noon, evening, and night.
Not only that, some of them have moons called satellites, which have
their own periodic orbits around their sphere the way the moon orbits
our earth. The planet Saturn, which is very far from the sun, has also a
huge luminous belt that gives a great deal of light to that planet, even
though it is refl ected light. How could anyone who knows all this and
thinks rationally say that these are empty bodies?
[ 4 ] Then too, I have talked with spirits about the fact that people
could realize that there is more than one earth in the universe from the
fact that the starry heaven is so immense. There are so incomprehensi-
bly many stars in it, each one a sun in its own place and its own system,
like our sun, of different magnitudes. If people think this through care-
fully, they will come to the conclusion that this whole vast universe can-
not be anything but a means to an end, which is the goal of creation, a
heavenly kingdom in which the Divine can dwell with angels and with
us. The visible universe, the heaven spangled with so incomprehensibly
many stars that are all suns, is in fact simply a means for the production
of planets with people on them who can make up a heavenly kingdom.
Given all this, rational people cannot help thinking that such a
vast means toward such an end did not come into being for the sake of
a human race on one earth. What would that be for a divine being, an
infi nite being, for whom thousands or tens of thousands of planets, all
fully inhabited, would be so slight as to be practically nothing?
There are spirits whose special passion is to learn at fi rst hand,
because this is the only kind of knowledge that gives them any plea-
sure. [ 5 ] These spirits are therefore allowed to travel around and even
to leave this solar system and visit others, to gather fi rsthand knowl-
edge there. They have told me that there are inhabited planets not only
in our solar system but also outside it in the starry sky—a vast number
of them. These spirits are from the planet Mercury.
[ 6 ] By a preliminary calculation, if there were a million planets in
the universe with three hundred million people on each one, and two
hundred generations over six thousand years, and if each person or
spirit were allotted three cubic ells, and if all these people or spirits
were gathered into one place, they would not even fi ll the volume of
our earth, hardly more than a satellite of one of the planets. This would
be such a small space in the universe as to be barely visible, since we
can scarcely see those satellites with the naked eye. What would this be
for the Creator of the universe, for whom it would not be enough if the
whole universe were fi lled? For the Creator is infi nite.