From An Observatory

It will be some time yet before the rising of the moon. Looking down
from the observatory one can see the pathways across the park dotted out
in yellow lamps, each with a fringe of dim green; and further off, hot
and bright, is the tracery of the illuminated streets, through which the
people go to and fro. Save for an occasional stirring, or a passing
voice speaking out of the dimness beneath me, the night is very still.
Not a cloud is to be seen in the dark midwinter sky to hide one speck of
its broad smears of star dust and its shining constellations.

As the moon rises, heaven will be flooded with blue light, and one after
another the stars will be submerged and lost, until only a solitary
shining pinnacle of brightness will here and there remain out of the
whole host of them. It is curious to think that, were the moon but a
little brighter and truly the ruler of the night, rising to its empire
with the setting of the sun, we should never dream of the great stellar
universe in which our little solar system swims--or know it only as a
traveller's tale, a strange thing to be seen at times in the Arctic
Circle. Nay, if the earth's atmosphere were some few score miles higher,
a night-long twilight would be drawn like an impenetrable veil across
the stars. By a mere accident of our existence we see their multitude
ever and again, when the curtains of the daylight and moonlight, and of
our own narrow pressing necessities, are for a little while drawn back.
Then, for an interval, we look, as if out of a window, into the great
deep of heaven. So far as physical science goes, there is nothing in the
essential conditions of our existence to necessitate that we should have
these transitory glimpses of infinite space. We can imagine men just
like ourselves without such an outlook. But it happens that we have it.

If we had not this vision, if we had always so much light in the sky
that we could not perceive the stars, our lives, so far as we can infer,
would be very much as they are now; there would still be the same needs
and desires, the same appliances for our safety and satisfaction; this
little gaslit world below would scarcely miss the stars now, if they
were blotted out for ever. But our science would be different in some
respects had we never seen them. We should still have good reason, in
Foucault's pendulum experiment, for supposing that the world rotated
upon its axis, and that the sun was so far relatively fixed; but we
should have no suspicion of the orbital revolution of the world. Instead
we should ascribe the seasonal differences to a meridional movement of
the sun. Our spectroscopic astronomy--so far as it refers to the
composition of the sun and moon--would stand precisely where it does,
but the