philosopher, did I not have you as witness. For this reason, since we
are not going to-day, you will have plenty of leisure to explain to us
this eternal origin of the world with which you entertained us just
now. In recompense, I promise you that as soon as I return to the Moon,
whence my instructor"--I pointed to my demon--"will prove to you that I
came, I will disseminate your fame by relating the fine things you tell
me. I see that you laugh at this promise, because you do not believe
the Moon is a world and still less that I am one of its inhabitants.
But I can assure you that the people of that World take this one for a
Moon and will laugh at me when I say their Moon is a World, that it has
fields and inhabitants."
He only replied by a smile, and then he began to speak as follows:
"When we try to go back to the origin of this Great All we are forced
to run into three or four absurdities, and so it is reasonable to take
the path which makes us stumble least. The first obstacle that stops
us is the Eternity of the World. Men's minds are not strong enough to
conceive it and, because they are not able to imagine that so vast, so
beautiful, so well regulated an Universe could have made itself, they
take refuge in Creation. But, like one who plunges into a river for
fear of being wet with rain, they run from the arms of a dwarf to the
pity of a giant; and they do not even escape the difficulty, for they
give to God the eternity they took from the world because they could
not understand it. As if it were easier to imagine it in the one than
in the other! This absurdity, then, or this giant of which I spoke, is
Creation; for, tell me truly, has it ever been conceived how something
could be made from nothing? Alas! There are such infinite differences
between Nothing and one single atom that the acutest brain could not
penetrate them. To escape this inexplicable labyrinth you must admit a
Matter co-eternal with God, and then it is unnecessary to admit a God,
since the World could have existed without Him. But, you will say, even
if I grant you this Eternal Matter, how did this chaos become order of
itself? Well, I shall explain it to you.
"My little Animal, after you have mentally separated each little
visible body into an infinity of little invisible bodies, you are to
imagine that the infinite Universe is composed of nothing but these
infinite atoms which are very solid, very incorruptible, and very
simple. Some are cubes, some parallelograms, some angular, some round,
some pointed, some pyramidal, some hexagonal, some oval, and all act
differently according to their shape. And to prove this, place a very
round ivory ball upon a very smooth surface; and at the slightest
movement you give it, it will be a half-quarter of an hour before it
stops; to which I add that if it were as perfectly round as some of the
atoms of which I speak, it would never stop. Then if art is capable
of inclining a body to perpetual motion, why should we not believe
that Nature can do it? It is the same with other shapes; one, like the
square, demands perpetual rest; others, a movement sideways; others,
a half-movement like palpitation. When the round, whose nature is to
move, joins with the pyramidal, it perhaps makes what we call fire,
because fire not only moves without resting but pierces and penetrates
easily. Moreover, fire produces different effects according to the size
and quantity of the angles where the round shape is joined; the fire of
pepper is different from the fire of sugar, the fire of sugar from that
of cinnamon, the fire of cinnamon from that of cloves, and this in turn
from the fire of a faggot. Well then, fire, which is the constructor
and destructor of the parts and of the whole of the Universe, gathers
into an oak the quantity of shapes necessary for the composition of
that oak. But, you will say, how could mere chance collect in one place
all the things necessary to produce this oak? I reply that it is not
extraordinary that matter so placed should make an oak, but it would
have been very much more marvellous if an oak had not been formed when
matter was thus disposed. Had there been a little less of certain
shapes, it would have been an elm, a poplar, a willow, an elder-tree,
heather or moss; a little more of certain other shapes and it would
have been a sensitive plant, an oyster in a shell, a worm, a fly, a
frog, a sparrow, a monkey, a man. When you throw three dice on the
table and they all turn up twos; or three, four, five; or two sixes
and a one; do you say: 'What a miracle! each die has turned up the same
number, when so many other numbers might be turned up; what a miracle!
Three dice have turned up three successive numbers; what a miracle! Two
sixes and the opposite of the other six has turned up!' I am certain
that a man of wit like you would not make these exclamations, for
since there are only a certain quantity of numbers on the dice, it is
impossible but that one of them should turn up. You are surprised that
this matter, mixed up pell-mell by chance, should have built up a man,
since so many things are necessary to the construction of his being.
But you do not know that this matter, moving towards the design of a
man, has stopped a hundred million times on the way to form sometimes a
stone, sometimes lead, sometimes coral, sometimes a flower, sometimes
a comet, according to the excess or deficiency of certain shapes
necessary or unnecessary to compose a man. It is not marvellous that
an infinite quantity of matter changing and moving continually should
have met together to make the few animals, vegetables and minerals
which we see, any more than it is marvellous for a royal pair to turn
up in a hundred throws of the dice; and it is impossible but that
something should be made from this movement. This thing will always be
wondered at by a scatterbrain who will not comprehend how nearly it
was not made at all. When the large river [Image] turns a mill,
moves the works of a clock, and the little rivulet [Image] does
nothing but run and sometimes overflow, you will not say the river has
intelligence, because you know it has met with things so placed as to
cause all these masterpieces. If a mill had not been placed in its
path, it would not have ground the corn; if it had not met the clock it
would not have marked the hours; and if the rivulet I spoke of had met
the same things it would have performed the same miracles. It is the
same with fire, which moves by itself; for when it found organs proper
for the agitation necessary to reason, it reasoned; when it found those
proper to feel only, it felt; when it found those proper to vegetation,
it vegetated. And to prove this, tear out the eyes of a man who is
enabled to see by this fire or this soul, and he will cease to see,
just as our river will not mark the hours if the clock is destroyed.
"In fine, these first and indivisible atoms make a circle upon which
the most embarrassing difficulties of physics roll without difficulty.
Even the operation of the senses, which nobody yet has been able to
understand, I explain very easily with these little bodies. Let us
begin with sight, which, as the most incomprehensible, deserves our
first attention. As I suppose, the coverings of the eye, whose openings
are like those of glass, transmit the fire-dust we call visual rays,
which is stopped by some opaque matter making it rebound; for this
fire-dust meets on the way the image of the object which repulses
it and, as this image is simply an infinite number of little bodies
continually thrown off in equal superficies from the subject looked at,
the image thrusts back the rays to our eyes.
"You will not fail to object to me that glass is an opaque and
closely-packed body; yet instead of throwing back these other little
bodies it allows them to pierce it. But I reply that the pores of glass
are made in the same shape as these atoms of fire which pass through
it; and just as a wheat-sieve is not fit to sift oats, nor an oat-sieve
to sift wheat, so a deal box thin enough to transmit sound is not
penetrable by sight and a piece of transparent crystal which allows
itself to be pierced by sight is not penetrable by hearing."
I could not prevent myself from interrupting: "But how do you explain
by these principles, sir, the fact that we are reflected in a mirror?"
"It is very easy", he replied, "you must suppose that the rays of
our eyes pass through the glass and meet behind it a non-diaphanous
body which casts them off; they return the way they came and they
find spread out upon the mirror the little bodies that move in
equal superficies from our own and carry them back to our eyes. Our
imagination, which is hotter than the other faculties of the soul,
attracts the most subtle of them, with which it makes a reduced
portrait.
"The operation of hearing is no more difficult to understand. To be
more succinct, let us consider it only in harmony. Suppose then a
lute touched by the hands of a master of the art. You will ask me
how it happens that I perceive a thing I do not see, so far from me?
Do sponges go out of my ears to suck up this music and bring it to
me? Or does this lute player beget in my head another little player
with another little lute, who has been ordered to sing me the same
airs? No. This miracle is caused by the vibrating chord striking the
little bodies which compose the air and so driving them into my brain
and gently piercing it with these little corporeal nothings. When
the string is stretched, the sound is high, because it drives the
atoms more vigorously; and the organ so penetrated gives the fantasy
sufficient of them to make its picture. If there is not enough, our
memory does not complete its image and we are forced to repeat the
same sound to it, so that for example it may take from the materials
given it by the strains of a saraband enough to complete the portrait
of that saraband. But this operation is almost nothing. The wonderful
thing is that by this means we are moved sometimes to joy, sometimes to
rage, sometimes to pity, sometimes to reflection, sometimes to pain.
This happens, I imagine, when the movement received by these little
bodies meets within us other little bodies moving in the same way or,
on account of their shape, capable of the same motion. The new-comers
excite their hosts to move with them and so, when a violent tune
meets the fire of our blood (which is disposed to the same movement)
it incites this fire to thrust its way out. This is what we call the
ardour of courage. If a sound is gentler and has only strength enough
to raise a slighter, more wavering flame (because the matter is more
volatile), it moves along the nerves, membranes and channels of our
flesh and excites the tickling we call joy. The ebullition of the other
passions happens in the same way according to whether the little bodies
are thrown against us more or less violently, whether they receive
movement by meeting other vibrations, and according to what they find
to move within us.
"The demonstration of touch is not more difficult. There is a perpetual
emission of little bodies from all palpable matter; the more we touch
it the more they are evaporated, because we squeeze them out of the
object we handle like water from a sponge when we compress it. Hard
bodies report to the organ their solidity; supple bodies, their
softness; the rough, their harshness; the burning, their heat; the
frozen, their cold. And as a proof of this, observe that hands hardened
by labour are not so sensitive in discerning by the touch, and this
is because of the thickness of the callus, which is neither porous nor
animated and therefore transmits with great difficulty these fumes of
matter. Some will desire to know where the organ of touch resides. For
my part, I think it extends over all the superficies of our mass, since
it happens through the agency of our nerves; and our skin is merely an
imperceptible and continuous texture of nerves. I imagine, however,
that the nearer to the head the limb with which we touch, the sooner we
perceive. You may make the experiment as follows: if we close our eyes
and touch something with the hand we discover what it is immediately,
but if on the contrary we touch it with the foot we are some time in
finding out what it is. The reason for this is that our nerves, whose
matter is no more compact than that of our skin (which is everywhere
pitted with little holes), lose many of these little atoms on the way
through the small channels of their texture before the atoms reach the
brain, the end of their journey.
"It remains for me to prove that smell and taste are caused also by
the agency of these same little bodies. Tell me, then, when I taste a
fruit, is it not through the moisture of my mouth melting it? Admit
then that since there are different salts in a pear, which by being
dissolved are split up into little bodies differing in shape from those
making the taste of a plum, they must pierce our palate in a different
way; just as the gash made by a pike piercing me is unlike that which
I endure from a pistol-bullet, and as a pistol-bullet causes me a pain
different from that of a steel arrow-head.
"I have nothing to say about smell, since even your philosophers admit
that it takes place through a continual emission of little bodies cast
off from their mass which strike our noses as they pass.
"On this principle I will now explain to you the creation, the harmony
and the influence of the celestial globes with the immutable variety of
meteors."
He was about to continue when our old host entered and turned
our philosopher's thoughts toward departure. He brought with him
crystals filled with glow-worms to lighten the room, but these little
fire-insects lose much of their light when they are not freshly
gathered and as these were ten days old they hardly shone at all. My
demon did not wait for the company to be inconvenienced by this; he
went up to his room and returned immediately with two fire balls, so
brilliant that we were all surprised he did not burn his fingers.
"These incombustible torches", said he, "will serve us better than
your clusters of worms. They are sun-rays which I have purged of their
heat; otherwise the corrosive qualities of its fire would have dazzled
and hurt your sight. I have extracted the light and shut it in these
transparent balls I am holding. This should not be a matter of great
surprise to you; I was born in the Sun and so it is no more difficult
for me to condense the rays which are the dust of that world than for
you to collect the dust or atoms which are the pulverised earth of this
world."
When we had finished praising this child of the Sun, it was late, and
the young host sent his father home with the two philosophers, with
a dozen balls of glow-worms hanging from his four legs. The rest of
us, that is to say, the young host, my Instructor and I, went to bed
by order of the Physionome. This time he put me in a room of violets
and lilies and had me tickled in the usual way to send me to sleep.
The next morning about nine o'clock my demon came in and told me he
had just returned from the palace, whence he had been sent for by
[Image], one of the Queen's waiting-women. She had inquired
after me and said she still persisted in keeping her word, which is to
say that she would gladly follow me if I would take her with me to the
other World.
"I was greatly edified", he continued, "when I found that the principal
motive for her journey was directed towards making herself a Christian.
I have promised to help her design with all my ability and for this
purpose to invent a machine capable of holding three or four persons,
in which you can rise up together. From to-day onwards I shall apply
myself seriously to the execution of this project. To amuse you during
my absence here is a book which I brought from my native land. It is
called _A Voyage to the Sun_. I am also giving you another, which I
rate more highly, the _Great Works of the Philosophers_, composed
by one of the greatest Wits of the Sun. He proves in it that all
things are true and shows the way to unite physically the truths of
each contradiction; for example, that white is black and black is
white, that you can be and not be at the same time, that there can
be a mountain without a valley, that nothing is something and that
all things which exist do not exist. But notice that he proves these
unheard-of paradoxes without any sophistry or captious reasoning.
When you are tired of reading you can take a walk or converse with
your companion, our young host. His mind has many charms; but what
displeases me in him is his impiety. If he scandalizes you or shakes
your faith by his reasoning do not fail to come at once and tell them
to me; I will resolve the difficulties for you. Another would tell
you to leave his company directly he began to philosophize on these
matters, but he is extremely vain and I am certain he would take your
flight for a defeat and would imagine your belief to be contrary to
reason if you refused to listen to his reasons. Remember to live free."
With this phrase he left me, for in that country it is the method of
leave-taking; and, in the same way, "Good day," or "Your servant, sir",
is expressed by the compliment: "Sage, love me, since I love you."
He had scarcely left me when I began to examine attentively my books.
The boxes, that is to say their covers, seemed to me admirable for
their richness; one was carved from a single diamond incomparably more
brilliant than ours, the second appeared to be a monstrous pearl cleft
in two. My demon had translated these books into the language of that
world; but as I have not yet spoken of their printing, I will explain
the construction of these two volumes.
At the opening of the box I found something in metal almost similar
to our clocks, filled with an infinite number of little springs and
imperceptible machines. It is a book indeed, but a miraculous book
without pages or letters; in fine, it is a book to learn from which
eyes are useless, only ears are needed. When someone wishes to read
he winds up the machine with a large number of all sorts of keys;
then he turns the pointer towards the chapter he wishes to hear, and
immediately, as if from a man's mouth or a musical instrument, this
machine gives out all the distinct and different sounds which serve as
the expression of speech between the noble Moon-dwellers.[48]
[Footnote 48: The likeness to a gramophone is obvious.]
When I had reflected on this miraculous invention in book-making I
was no longer surprised that the young men of that country possessed
more knowledge at sixteen or eighteen than grey-beards in our World.
Since they know how to read as soon as they speak, they are never
without reading. Indoors, out of doors, in town, travelling, on foot,
or on horseback, they can have in their pocket or hanging from their
saddle-bows as many as thirty of these books, and they have only to
wind up a spring to hear a chapter, or several chapters, if they are in
the mood to hear a whole book. In this way you have continually about
you all great men, living or dead, and you hear them viva voce.
This present occupied me for more than an hour, and then hanging them
upon myself like earrings I went out to walk in the town. I had not
passed out of the street which ran opposite our house when towards
the other end I met a large number of mournful people. Four of them
carried on their shoulders a sort of coffin wrapped in black. I asked
a bystander what was the meaning of this procession so similar to a
funeral in my own country. He replied that the wicked [Image],
whose name was expressed among the people by a blow on the right knee,
had been convicted of envy and ingratitude: yesterday he had died and
the Parliament had condemned him more than twenty years ago to die a
natural death in his bed and to be buried after his death. I began to
laugh at this reply and he asked me: "Why?"
"You surprise me", I replied, "by telling me that a long life, a
peaceful death and a pompous burial which in our World are signs of
benediction, serve in this as an exemplary punishment."
"What! You consider burial a mark of benediction?" retorted this man.
"On your honour now, can you conceive anything more terrible than a
corpse moving under swarms of worms, at the mercy of toads which gnaw
its cheeks; in fine, the plague dressed in a man's body. Good God! The
mere thought that even when dead my face should be wrapped in a cloth
and I should have five feet of earth on my mouth makes it difficult
for me to breathe! That wretch you see carried there, in addition to
the infamy of being cast into a pit, was condemned to have his funeral
accompanied by a hundred and fifty of his friends, and as a punishment
to them for having loved a man who was envious and ungrateful they were
bidden to appear at his burial with mournful faces. Had it not been
for the mercy of the judges who imputed his crimes in part to his lack
of intelligence, his friends would have been commanded to weep. Except
for criminals every one here is burned. And this is a very decent and a
very reasonable custom, for we think that fire separates the pure from
the impure. Moreover, its heat draws to it by sympathy that natural
heat which composed the soul and gives it the power to rise continually
until it reaches some star, the earth of people more immaterial than
we and more intellectual, because their temperament must correspond to
and participate in the purity of the globe they inhabit. This radical
flame, being rectified still more by the subtlety of that world's
elements, finally composes one of the citizens of that burning country.
"However, this is not our best method of burial. When one of our
philosophers comes to an age where he feels his mind grow weak and the
ice of years impede the movements of his soul, he gathers his friends
together for a sumptuous banquet. Then he puts before them the motives
which have made him resolve to take leave of Nature, the small hope
he has of being able to add anything to his good actions: they either
grant him the favour, that is they order him to die, or they severely
command him to live. When the majority have placed the disposition of
his life in his hands, he announces the day and place to his dearest
friends. They purge themselves and fast for twenty-four hours. When
they come to the sage's house, they sacrifice to the Sun and enter the
room where the hero awaits them lying upon a ceremonial bed. Each one
in turn flies to embrace him. When it comes to his best friend, the
friend kisses him tenderly, leans upon his stomach, joins mouth to
mouth, and with his right hand, which he keeps free, bathes a dagger in
his heart. The Lover does not remove his lips from those of his Beloved
until he feels he is dead. He then withdraws the steel from his breast,
places his mouth on the wound, and drinks his blood and continues to
suck until he can swallow no more. Another succeeds him immediately and
they carry the first to a bed; when the second is satiated he is taken
away to a bed and gives place to a third. Finally, when they are all
satiated, after about four or five hours, they bring to each a girl of
about sixteen or seventeen. During the next three or four days they
enjoy the pleasures of love and they are fed exclusively on the dead
man's flesh, which they eat raw, so that if anything is born from these
embraces they may be almost sure it is their friend who lives again."
I did not give this man the opportunity of discoursing further, for
I left him there and continued my walk. Although I cut it short, the
time I spent on the peculiarities of the sights and in visiting certain
districts of the town made me arrive more than two hours after dinner
was ready. They asked me why I came so late.
"It is not my fault", I replied to the cook, who was complaining of it,
"several times in the street I asked what time it was, but they only
answered by opening the mouth, clenching the teeth and writhing the
face askew."
"What!" cried everybody, "you did not know they were telling you the
time that way?"
"Faith", I replied, "they might show their great noses to the Sun all
they would before I should have learnt it."