What grander idea can
the mind of man form to itself than a prodigious, glorious and firy globe
hanging in the midst of an infinite and boundless space surrounded with
bodies of whom our earth is scarcely any thing in comparison, moving their
rounds about its body and held tight to their respective orbits by the
attractive force inherent to it while they are suspended in the same space
by the Creator's almighty arm! And then let us cast our eyes up to the
spangled canoply of heaven, where innumerable luminaries at such an immense
distance from us cover the face of the skies. All suns as great as that
which illumines us, surrounded with earths perhaps no way inferior to the
ball which we inhabit and no part of the amazing whole unfilled! System
running into system, and worlds bordering on worlds! Sun, earth, moon,
stars be ye made, and they were made!
- Edmund Burke, at age 15 praising the 'noble science' of astronomy