The arguments he brings forward are strictly scientific, and such as to appeal even to a materialistic mind, which would remain unmoved by such thoughts as those of Sir David Brewster. Flammarion, the well-known French Astronomer. Laplace and Herschell believed it, though they wisely abstained from imprudent speculation and the same conclusion has been worked out and supported with an array of scientific considerations by C. Still the fact remains that most of the planets, as the stars beyond our system, are inhabited, a fact which has been admitted by the men of science themselves. Mme Blavatsky also commented on Flammarion's scientific arguments that the conditions necessary for life are present on other planets: Yet such great adept astronomers were the Scientists of the earliest races of the Aryan stock, that they seem to have known far more about the races of Mars and Venus than the modern Anthropologist knows of those of the early stages of the Earth. With the exception of Flammarion and a few mystics among astronomers, even the habitableness of other planets is mostly denied. About the Aryan Root-Race and its origins, Science knows as little as of the men from other planets. In The Secret Doctrine she wrote:Įven the question of the plurality of worlds inhabited by sentient creatures is rejected or approached with the greatest caution! And yet see what the great astronomer, Camille Flammarion, says in his Pluralité des mondes. Blavatsky also held Flammarion in esteem with respect to contemporary Science.
Flammarion, "would itself undertake the task of demolition by producing a tidal wave of earth particles instead of an aqueous tide." This last idea must not be regarded as countenanced by occult science except so far as it may serve to illustrate the loss of molecular cohesion in the material of the earth.
And becoming like a corpse, which, abandoned to the work of destruction, leaves each molecule composing it free to separate itself from the body, and obey in future the sway of new influences, "the attraction of the moon,” suggests M. Hence its constituent masses cease to obey those laws of cohesion and aggregation which held them together. Its period of child-bearing has gone by its progeny are all nurtured its term of life is finished. In consequence of what he treats as secular refrigeration, but which more truly is old age and loss of vital power, the solidification and desiccation of the earth at last reaches a point when the whole globe becomes a relaxed conglomerate. The facts are, I am informed, with slight modifications, much as he surmises. The French astronomer Flammarion, in a book called La Résurrection et la Fin des Mondes, has approached a conception of this ultimate materiality. Sinnett includes Flammarion's ideas about a planet reaching the end of its life: In the eleventh chapter of Esoteric Buddhism called "The Universe", A.
The facts are as he surmises with slight modifications. I mean the celebrated French astronomer Flammarion - "La Resurrection et la Fin des Mondes" (Chapter 4 res.). You have among the learned members of your society one Theosophist who without familiarity with our occult doctrine, has yet intuitively grasped from scientific data the idea of a solar pralaya and its manwantara in their beginnings. His first wife was Sylvie Petiaux-Hugo Flammarion, and his second wife was Gabrielle Renaudot Flammarion, also a noted astronomer.įlammarion died at Juvisy Observatory, Paris, on June 3, 1925.įlammarion was a member of the General Council of the Theosophical Society in 1880. He was a founder and the first president of the Société Astronomique de France, which originally had its own independent journal, BSAF ( Bulletin de la Société Astronomique de France), first published in 1887. He was the brother of Ernest Flammarion (1846–1936), founder of the Groupe Flammarion publishing house. Camille Flammarion was born in Montigny-le-Roi, Haute-Marne, France.