Conversation between the inhabitant of Sirius and that of Saturn.
After his excellency laid himself down to rest the secretary
approached him.
"You have to admit," said Micromegas, "that nature is extremely
varied."
"Yes," said the Saturnian, "nature is like a flower bed wherein the
flowers--"
"Ugh!" said the other, "leave off with flower beds."
The secretary began again. "Nature is like an assembly of blonde and
brown-haired girls whose jewels--"
"What am I supposed to do with your brown-haired girls?" said the
other.
"Then she is like a gallery of paintings whose features--"
"Certainly not!" said the voyager. "I say again that nature is like
nature. Why bother looking for comparisons?"
"To please you," replied the Secretary.
"I do not want to be pleased," answered the voyager. "I want to be
taught. Tell me how many senses the men of your planet have."
"We only have 72," said the academic, "and we always complain about
it. Our imagination surpasses our needs. We find that with our 72
senses, our ring, our five moons, we are too restricted; and in spite
of all our curiosity and the fairly large number of passions that
result from our 72 senses, we have plenty of time to get bored."
"I believe it," said Micromegas, "for on our planet we have almost
1,000 senses; and yet we still have a kind of vague feeling, a sort
of worry, that warns us that there are even more perfect beings. I
have traveled a bit; and I have seen mortals that surpass us, some
far superior. But I have not seen any that desire only what they
truly need, and who need only what they indulge in. Maybe someday I
will happen upon a country that lacks nothing; but so far no one has
given me any word of a place like that."
The Saturnian and the Sirian proceeded to wear themselves out in
speculating; but after a lot of very ingenious and very dubious
reasoning, it was necessary to return to the facts.
"How long do you live?" said the Sirian.
"Oh! For a very short time," replied the small man from Saturn.
"Same with us," said the Sirian. "we always complain about it. It
must be a universal law of nature."
"Alas! We only live through 500 revolutions around the sun," said the
Saturnian. (This translates to about 15,000 years, by our standards.)
"You can see yourself that this is to die almost at the moment one is
born; our existence is a point, our lifespan an instant, our planet
an atom. Hardly do we begin to learn a little when death arrives,
before we get any experience. As for me, I do not dare make any
plans. I see myself as a drop of water in an immense ocean. I am
ashamed, most of all before you, of how ridiculously I figure in this
world."
Micromegas replied, "If you were not a philosopher, I would fear
burdening you by telling you that our lifespan is 700 times longer
than yours; but you know very well when it is necessary to return
your body to the elements, and reanimate nature in another form,
which we call death. When this moment of metamorphosis comes, to have
lived an eternity or to have lived a day amounts to precisely the
same thing. I have been to countries where they live a thousand times
longer than we do, and they also die. But people everywhere have the
good sense to know their role and to thank the Author of nature. He
has scattered across this universe a profusion of varieties with a
kind of admirable uniformity. For example, all the thinking beings
are different, and all resemble one another in the gift of thought
and desire. Matter is extended everywhere, but has different
properties on each planet. How many diverse properties do you count
in yours?"
"If you mean those properties," said the Saturnian, "without which we
believe that the planet could not subsist as it is, we count 300 of
them, like extension, impenetrability, mobility, gravity,
divisibility, and the rest."
"Apparently," replied the voyager, "this small number suffices for
what the Creator had in store for your dwelling. I admire his wisdom
in everything; I see differences everywhere, but also proportion.
Your planet is small, your inhabitants are as well. You have few
sensations; your matter has few properties; all this is the work of
Providence. What color is your sun upon examination?"
"A very yellowish white," said the Saturnian. "And when we divide one
of its rays, we find that it contains seven colors."
"Our sun strains at red," said the Sirian, "and we have 39 primary
colors. There is no one sun, among those that I have gotten close to
that resembles it, just as there is no one face among you that is
identical to the others."
After numerous questions of this nature, he learned how many
essentially different substances are found on Saturn. He learned that
there were only about thirty, like God, space, matter, the beings
with extension that sense, the beings with extension that sense and
think, the thinking beings that have no extension; those that are
penetrable, those that are not, and the rest. The Sirian, whose home
contained 300 and who had discovered 3,000 of them in his voyages,
prodigiously surprised the philosopher of Saturn. Finally, after
having told each other a little of what they knew and a lot of what
they did not know, after having reasoned over the course of a
revolution around the sun, they resolved to go on a small
philosophical voyage together.