The arguments for a plurality of worlds, contained in the preceding chapters, are so various, and have such different degrees of force, that different views of the subject will be taken by persons who thoroughly believe in the general doctrine. We can easily conceive why some persons may believe that all the planets which have satellites are inhabited, while they deny the inhabitability of those that have none, and also of the Sun and the satellites themselves. There are individuals, too, though we doubt their faith in sidereal astronomy, who readily believe that the whole of our planetary system is the seat of life, while they are startled by the statement that every star in the heavens, and every point in a nebula which the most powerful telescope has not separated from its neighbour, is a sun surrounded by inhabited planets like our own; and that immortal beings are swarming through universal space more numerous than drops of water in the ocean, or the grains of sand upon its shores. But if these persons really believe in the distances and magnitudes of the stars, and of the laws which govern the binary systems of double stars, they must find it equally, if not more difficult to comprehend, why innumerable suns and worlds fill the immensity of the universe, revolving round one another, and discharging their light and heat into space, without a plant to spring under their influence, without an animal to rejoice in their genial beams, and without the eye of reason to lift itself devoutly to its Creator.