At the same time, our memory will be enriched by a number of new subjects. The soul, beholding and understanding the worlds which surround it, will be able to fix the geography of all those different places in its memory. It will know the physical revolutions, the populations, and the legislation of these thousand countries. The superhuman being will know what exists in such planets and their satellites as come within his reach, or as he shall visit. Just as, in order to gain information, we visit America or Australia, so the superhuman being visits Mars or Venus, and furnishes his memory with millions of facts, which it retains and reproduces at will. What immense power must memory, always supplied and always ready at call, bestow on the mind and reason!
Languages are only the expression and the assembling of ideas. Condorcet has said that a science always reduces itself to a well-constructed language. The mathematical sciences employ a language which is perfect, because the science of mathematics is perfect. The language spoken in the planetary spaces must be perfect, because it expresses all the knowledge of superhuman beings, and this knowledge is immense. The more the mind knows, the better it expresses:--the superhuman being, who is highly informed, will have a very expressive language, which will also be universal.
The language of mathematics is understood by the peoples of both hemispheres. Algebra can be read by a Frenchman or a German, as well as by an Australian or a Chinese, on account of the simplicity and perfection of the conventional signs which it uses. The language of mathematics, which is truly universal, makes us infer that the language spoken in the planetary space must be also universal, and common, without distinction, to all the inhabitants of the ethereal worlds.
Owing to the immense scope of their faculties, and to the perfection of their language, in itself a certain means of increasing and exalting their knowledge, superhuman beings have a power of reasoning, and a clearness of judgment, which, added to the immense number of facts stored in their memory, place them in possession of absolute science. Arduous questions, before which the mind of man humbly confesses its powerlessness, or which drive him mad if he persists in the effort to solve them, such as the thought of the Infinite, the idea of the First Cause of the Universe, the Essence of Divinity, all these problems, forbidden to us, are easily accessible to these mighty thinkers. He who is regarded by mankind as a genius of the first order, an Aristotle, a Keppler, a Newton, a Raphael, a Shakespeare, a Molière, a Mozart, a Lavoisier, a Laplace, a Cuvier, a Victor Hugo, would be among them a babbling child. No science, no moral idea is above their conception. Beneath their feet rolls the earth, with the splendid train of the planets, its sisters; they behold the planets of our solar system gravitating in harmonious order round the great central star, which deluges them with its light. From the height of their sublime abode they witness the infinitely various spectacles furnished by the elemental strife of our poor globe, and those which resemble it; and, happier than terrestrial humanity, they admire the works of God, while knowing the secret of their mechanism. In the moral order they have penetrated the great _Wherefore_! They know why man exists, and why they themselves exist. They know whence they come, and whither they are going; and we, alas! know neither. Where, to our eyes, there is only confusion, they perceive harmony and order. The designs of God are distinctly apparent to them, and also the events of the lives of nations and individuals, which often seem to us cruel, unjust, and bad on the part of God; but they understand that these events are just and useful, and worthy of our heartfelt gratitude.