ABSTRACT
Five hundred years ago the human mind was limited to a tiny patch of space, and the universe must have seemed even smaller after Magellan's men had girdled the earth. The heavenly bodies were known to be distant, but it was not clear that celestial distances were so much greater than terrestrial. So Cassini's proof, in a.d. 1672, that the sun was nearly a hundred million miles away was at first too shocking a fact for the mind to accept. For many thousands of millions of years it probably shone as a lonely star unaccompanied by planets. religion will inevitably alter its standpoint, even if some of its fundamental beliefs survive. On a planet more than a thousand million years old it is hard to believe—as do Christians, Jews, Mohammedans, and Buddhists—that the most important event has occurred within the last few thousand years, when it is clear that there were great civilizations before that event.
