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Brewster, Sir David - More Worlds than One (book 1854)
Identifier
028525
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Brewster was fascinated by whether other planets and suns were habitable or not and inevitably his views changed as more about the planets became known.
But what is especially intriguing is that he would not be drawn on the statement by other scientists that beings did not inhabit the Sun. Brewster became aware of the case of a Dr Elliot who was ‘mad’ - insane according to the medical assessments of the day. But Dr Elliott had submitted a paper to the Royal Society claiming the Sun to be inhabited. The case was published in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1787 July. One may laugh at such a notion, but on this site we have cases of people who are indeed ‘mad’ who also say the same thing because they appear to be witnessing via their sixth sense other levels and layers. In other words at different levels of vibrational energy the Sun becomes a habitable object. Every time the science of the day decided that habitability was impossible, Brewster held back, largely because of some underlying spiritual understanding that we are not perceiving everything that exists.
In his review of Whewell’s Bridgewater treatise, Brewster not only defended the idea of the plurality of habitable realms, but argues in favour of far more of them than Whewell . Brewster’s unwillingness to set limits on the number of habitable realms had a counterpart in microscopic life where he imagined orders of life progressively more and more diminutive “there may be other living beings, which man, with his present organs and instruments may never be able to discover”.
Brewster also recognised the possibility of the Ages of Man.
Brewster came to the conclusion that this planet and the force of gravity [attraction] between human beings and the earth itself had to have been worked out – designed
‘just sufficiently great to give them stability and not so great as to deprive them of the power of free and rapid motion…….’ He goes on to include the temperature, the angle of the axis of the earth to the sun and so on.
In other words integrated design was at work, the creator was an engineer. On this basis the integrated design of both environment and beings living in that environment was key and it could not have been achieved by random evolution because of the need for integration of the entire design.
By similar acts of reason he deduced the fact that one could never exclude the possibility that a being of some sort lived on any planet or heavenly body. In other words, other systems of life were possible.
A description of the experience
More Worlds than One
The probability of the sun being inhabited is doubtless greatly increased by the simple consideration of its enormous size…. It is difficult to believe that a globe of such magnificence 8,882,000 miles in diameter, upwards of 111 times the size of the earth and 1,284,472 times its bulk, should occupy so distinguished a place without Inteligent beings to study and admire the grand arrangements which exist around them, and it would be still more difficult to believe, if it is inhabited, that a domain so extensive, so blessed with perpetual light, is not occupied by the highest orders of Intelligence