Heaven and Hell - Swedenborg Foundation

HEAVEN AND HELL 335
the sun and following in the path of the zodiac, thus making years
and seasons of the year, spring, summer, autumn, and winter, also
revolving on their axes like our earth, making days and times of the
day, morning, midday, evening, and night; also from some of them
having moons, called satellites, that revolve around their earth at
stated times, as the moon does around ours; while the planet
Saturn, being at a greater distance from the sun, has also a large
luminous belt which gives much light, though reflected, to that
earth. Who that knows all this and thinks rationally can ever say
that the planets are empty bodies? Moreover, I have said to spirits
that man might believe that there are more earths in the universe
than one, from the fact that the starry heaven is so immense, and
the stars there so innumerable, and each of them in its place or in
its system a sun, resembling our sun, although of a varying
magnitude. Anyone who duly weighs the subject must conclude
that such an immense whole must needs be a means to an end that
is the final end of creation; and this end is a heavenly kingdom in
which the Divine may dwell with angels and men. For the visible
universe or the heaven illumined by stars so numberless, which are
so many suns, is simply a means for the existence of earths with
men upon them from whom the heavenly kingdom is derived.
From all this a rational man must needs conclude that so immense
a means to so great an end could not have been provided merely
for the human race on a single earth. What would this be for a
Divine that is infinite, to which thousands and even myriads of
earths, all of them full of inhabitants, would be little and scarcely
anything? There are spirits whose sole pursuit is the acquisition of
knowledges, because their delight is in this alone; and for this
reason they are permitted to wander about, and even to pass out of
our solar system into others, in acquiring knowledge. These spirits,
who are from the planet Mercury, have told me that there are
earths with men upon them not only in this solar system but also
beyond it in the starry heaven in immense numbers. It was
calculated that with a million earths in the universe, and on each
earth three hundred millions of men, and two hundred generations
in six thousand years, and a space of three cubic ells allowed to
each man or spirit, the total number of so many men or spirits
would not fill the space of this earth, and scarcely more than the
space of one of the satellites about one of the planets—a space in
the universe so small as to be almost invisible, since a satellite can
scarcely be seen by the naked eye. What is this for the Creator of
the universe, to whom it would not be sufficient if the whole
universe were filled, since he is infinite? I have talked with angels
about this, and they said that they had a similar idea of the fewness
of the human race compared with the infinity of the Creator,
although their thought is from states, not from spaces, and that in
their thought earths amounting to as many myriads as could