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Aliens and the Enlightenment
In the 18th century the existence of extraterrestrial life went from debatable hypothesis to fundamental tenet of Enlightenment thought. For millennia everybody knew that human beings enjoy a privileged, unique position at the centre of the universe.
The debates went viral in 1686, when a young French poet called Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle published Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, a series of nighttime chats between an eloquent philosopher and a beautiful (if naive) marquise as they stroll beneath the stars. Imagine, declared the marquise’s didactic escort, that the cosmos is a giant theatre controlled from behind the scenes by an invisible puppeteer – but for English readers, Behn introduced a subversive preface protesting that Fontenelle ‘ascribes all to Nature, and says not a Word of God … one would almost take him to be a Pagan ’. Relying on those handy argumentative devices ‘analogy and conjecture’, Soame Jenyns MP described the tiny gradations leading from stones and plants up through birds and animals to ‘the brutal Hottentot’, then ever upwards to reach first the terrestrial summit – ‘a Bacon or a Newton’ – and eventually ‘the inhabitants of other planets, to angels, and archangels’.
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