Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/392

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374
A THOUSAND YEARS HENCE.

chemical ways, only the exact kind and quantity of the nutriment needed for the system, there is neither excrement nor excrementary passage; and of course there is never either the worry or the savour of a sewage question in Upper Solardom.

These Upper Solars are supposed to have complete knowledge of all physical science, but, on principle, to withhold such advanced knowledge from the Lower Solars, in order that, by gradual self-progress, the social and moral advance may accompany the scientific. With their advanced science, they might travel from system to system as easiy and quickly, perhaps, as we now master mere interplanetary distances; but, as matter of fact, they never do so, simply because there seems to them no need for such time and labour-wasting effort, seeing their communications by mind are already perfect and constant with all Upper Solar life throughout the universe, or, more strictly, throughout that section of it in which they live. Having attained to all physical science, their chief study is the science of mind; and the chief occupation there is the sublime study of Deity, in its relation to eternity past and future, to infinity, and to the visible universe. In this high question our own more limited capacity can but catch up one or other of the outside extremities of the true idea—namely, on the one hand, a personal God, necessarily local and limited; and, on the other, a pantheistic expanse, as necessarily nothing at all. In endeavouring, with their higher capacity, to grasp the true mean of the Divine relationship, these Upper Solars have before them a grand question, in which the race is ever making a satisfying because