What are these vast stellar systems out in the universe showing us? And what is their purpose? Do these millionfold oceans of stars exist merely in order to appear to the citizens of the Earth as tiny shining points in the darkness of night, as was believed in days of old? No, there is almost no one who believes this today. We know that the Earth is not the centre of the universe in the way we perceived it to be in the old dogmatic world pictures of the religions. We know that these galaxies and solar systems are of such gigantic dimensions and that the Earth is so tiny in relation to them that it would be a strange waste of the forces of Nature if all these heavenly bodies were to exist merely for the sake of the Earth or for mankind in particular. Nature does not squander its forces; on the contrary, everything is used and is in its own way of benefit to the whole. Here on Earth it is impossible to find anything whatsoever that goes to waste in Nature's housekeeping. Do we not see that the withered leaves in the autumn are recycled, that waste products become useful manure, and that dung contributes to producing bread grain? Even a drop of water is teeming with life, with tiny beings that we can observe through microscopes and whose manifestation of life proves to be absolutely essential in the great context of life.
      The manifestation of the vital force can be traced everywhere, all the way down to the world of atoms and electrons, which of course are regarded even by science as a kind of microscopic solar systems. Could the world exist without the power of the atom? It could not. Neither people, the Earth, the solar system nor the galactic systems would exist if the atomic systems, of which everything is build up, did not exist. No particle in the microcosmos, however tiny, exists without being of benefit to the whole. With what logical justification can we then suppose that the gigantic particles in the universe that we call planets, solar systems and galactic systems, should not be subject to the same laws and principles manifested on a larger scale? Many of these constellations and heavenly bodies are not planets in the ordinary sense but vast oceans of burning matter, boiling metals representing a movement and manifestation of force that cannot be measured in current terms for force. Here it is not a matter of the manifestation of hundreds or thousands of horsepower, but of millions, indeed, billions upon billions of horsepower. To believe that all these manifestations of force, which reciprocally influence one another, are merely coincidental and that the gigantic heavenly bodies should follow their law-bound courses or cycles in the universe during immeasurable periods of time through immense distances for nothing whatever or merely in order to be gazed at from our Earth, is an expression merely of naivety and narrow-mindedness. Our little Earth is like nothing more than a grain of dust in relation to the gigantic heavenly bodies and galactic systems, and we ourselves are, in relation to these giants of force, just as microscopic as the electrons in the atoms that make up our flesh and blood are microscopic in relation to our entire organism.