The difference between stars and planets

One way to look at a real teacher, a person like Jan Cox, is that such figures are stars, in the galactic sense, and those who can hear them, those who typically lack the purpose to become more than followers, are like planets. Here is the text which prompted this picture:

From a recent article: 

Quote

...
In 1835, the French philosopher Auguste Comte wrote of the unknowable nature of stars:

On the subject of stars, all investigations which are not ultimately reducible to simple visual observations are … necessarily denied to us. While we can conceive of the possibility of determining their shapes, their sizes, and their motions, we shall never be able by any means to study their chemical composition or their mineralogical structure … Our knowledge concerning their gaseous envelopes is necessarily limited to their existence, size … and refractive power, we shall not at all be able to determine their chemical composition or even their density…

He was, famously, wrong.

He couldn’t have envisioned the range of tools available to modern astronomers. It’s a beautiful thing that, nowadays, astronomers can not only learn about the compositions of stars via their studies of their spectra, but also probe the deeper mysteries, going all the way to the births of these colossal, self-luminous balls in space.

End quote.

Self-luminous balls.

Such a appropriate description of the rare Real Teacher.

And about the authors of this article, an interesting way they reveal their own "planetary" nature, is by their unspoken presumption that they are more advanced than Comte. The actuality is that man's knowledge is always partial. So partial as to preclude any presumptions of superiority.