Psalm 104. 24
In these Words are two Clauses, in the first whereof the Psalmist admires the Multitude of God’s works, How Manifold are thy Works O Lord? In the second he celebrates his Wisdom in the creation of them; In Wisdom hast thou made them all.
Of the first of these I shall say little, only briefly run over the Works of this visible world, and give some guess at the Number of them. Whence it will appear, that upon this account they well deserve Admiration, the Number of them being uninvestigable by us; and so affording us a demonstrative Proof of the unlimited extent of the Creators Skill, and the foecundity of his Wisdom and Power. That the Number of corporeal Creatures is unmeasurably great, and known only to the Creator himself, may thus probably be collected: First of all, The Number of fixt Stars is on all hands acknowledged to be next to infinite; Secondly, Every fixt Star in the now received Hypothesis is a Sun or Sunlike body, and in like manner encircled with a Chorus of Planets moving about it; Thirdly, Each of these Planets is in all likelihood furnished with as great variety of corporeal Creatures animate and inanimate as the Earth is, and all as different in Nature as they are in Place from the terrestrial, and from each other. Whence it will follow that these must be much more infinite than the Stars; I do not mean absolutely according to the Philosophick exactness infinite, but only infinite or innumerable as to us, or their number prodigiously great.
That the fixt Stars are innumerable may thus be made out: Those visible to the naked Eye are by the least account acknowledged to be above a Thousand, excluding those towards the South Pole which are not visible in our Horizon: Besides these, there have been incomparably more detected and brought to light by the Telescope; the Milky Way being found to be (as was formerly conjectured) nothing but great Companies or Swarms of minute Stars singly invisible, but by reason of their proximity mingling and confounding their Lights and appearing like lucid Clouds. And it’s likely that, had we more perfect Telescopes, many Thousands more might be discovered; and yet after all an incredible Multitude remain, by reason of their immense distance beyond all Ken by the best Telescopes that could possibly be invented or polished by the Wit and Hand of an Angel. For if the World be, as Des Cartes would have it, indefinitely extended; that is, so far as no Human Intellect can fancy any bounds of it, then what we see or can come to see must be the least part of what is undiscoverable by us; the whole Universe extending a Thousand times farther beyond the utmost Stars we can possibly descry, than those be distant from the Earth we live upon. This Hypothesis of the fixt Stars being so many Suns, &c. seems more agreeable to the Divine Greatness and Magnificence: But that which induces me much to doubt of the Magnitude of the Universe and immense Distance of the fixed Stars, is the stupendious Phaenomena of Comets, their sudden accension or appearance in full Magnitude, the length of their Tails and swiftness of their Motion, and gradual diminution of Bulk and Motion, till at last they disappear: Neither do I think the Universe indefinitely extended, as Des Cartes upon a false ground [that the formal ratio of a Body was nothing but Extension into length, breadth and profundity, or having partes extra partes, and that Body and Space were synonimous terms] assert ed: For it may as well be limited this way as in the old Hypothesis; which places the fixt Stars in the same spherical Superficies; according to which (old Hypothesis) they may also be demonstrated by the same mediums to be innumerable, only instead of their distance substituting their Smalness for the reason of their Invisibility.
But leaving the celestial Bodies, I come now to the terrestrial; which are either inanimate or animate. The inanimate are the Elements, Meteors and Fossils of all sorts, at the Number of which last I cannot give any probable guess; Bur if the rule, which some considerate Philosophers deliver, holds good; viz. how much more imperfect any Genus or Order of Beings is, so much more numerous are the Species contained under it; as for Example: Birds being a more perfect kind of Animals than Fishes, there are more of these than of those, and for the like reason more Birds than Quadrupeds, and more Insects than of any of the rest; and so more Plants than Animals: Nature being more sparing in her more excellent Productions. If this Rule I say holds good; then should there be more Species of Fossils or generally of inanimate Bodies than of Vegetables; of which there is some reason to doubt. unless we will admit all sorts of formed Stones to be distinct Species.