translated with least ugliness and least falsity the true state of
the world which is invisible to you. There are gods, that is to say, a
race of men as superior to other men as you are superior to the most
intelligent or the best domesticated animals. You have conquered the
earth; my ancestors conquered space, and colonised the greater number
of the planets that gravitate round the sun. Our possible domain does
not extend beyond the solar system; our actual domain does not stretch
beyond Jupiter, where my father dwells, and its limit in the direction
of the sun is this earth upon which we are. For a great number of
centuries I have chosen Mars as a resting-place, and this brought me
near you, and gave me certain humane inclinations. The other planets,
by reason either of their distance from or of their nearness to the
sun, are inaccessible to me, almost as much so as to yourselves. I do
not know what goes on in them. As for the infinite worlds which are
spread beyond our sphere, they are for me as for you the unknown and
the unknowable.
What I have just told you will not seem very new. Many of your
philosophers have had imaginations that at some point touched this
truth. Voltaire made Micromegas to tease you; but, submitting to the
appearances of physical laws, he made an immoderate giant of him. Why
so? Are not the ants, next to men, the most intelligent of terrestrial
animals? I think I remember that at a far-distant epoch, that your
geologists call, I believe, the coal age, the termites displayed on
your globe a sort of genius. These little beings, so fragile, were cut
short in their development by the lowering of the temperature. They no
longer live but with a slackened vitality, like other insects; their
intelligence, no longer nourished by an abundant physical activity, has
congealed; they stopped at a point thenceforth impassable for them,
and what they once accomplished by choice and will, they now no longer
do except mechanically. But let us leave Micromegas....
I Micromegas has almost ceased to interest us. You have said, a little
quickly for my intelligence, many things that would delight me if I
better understood them. This slackened life ....
HE
Terrestrial life is precarious since it is at the mercy of
atmospherical circumstances. Animals that have not a very high
temperature are destined to expend their strength in a perpetual
labour of adaptation. If the original heat had increased instead of
diminishing, the termites and the ants would perhaps be two great
nations, sharing between them the empire of the world, and man would
be one of their preys. But you discovered the art of fire and raised
yourself above all other animals. Fire, in giving you a constant
summer, also gave you leisure. Thence your civilisations, proud
daughters of idleness, who deny their mother. It is from idleness that
everything has been born among men. From the year in which one of
your ancestors was able to pass the winter beside his fire, date the
arts, the sciences, games, love, all delights. Leisure is indeed the
greatest and the most beautiful of man's conquests. But, though you
have known how to conquer, though you have known how to create, you
have scarcely ever known how to use your conquests or your creations.
After conquering leisure, you disdained it, and slaves, ashamed of the
inactivity of their domesticated hands, set themselves to preach among
you the sanctity of labour. Poor madmen! And are you not already on
the way to spoil woman? Have you not already succeeded in insinuating
into her heart the shameful principles of Jewish morality? Have you
not resolved, in your narrow masculine pride, to undo the work of your
ancestors and to reduce to the position of mean and lesser men these
creatures who used to dominate you with all their beauty and with
all their tenderness? You educate them; you teach them the useless
stupidities that make your own brains ugly; soon you will forbid them
ornament, you will forbid them love, you will forbid them to make you
happy! But I will take up this discourse later. It is a digression due
to your curiosity. We were speaking of Micromegas. Well, I am, if you
will, Micromegas, reduced to our human proportions. No more than he
have I absolute power over men; I cannot even crush them, like that
Titan, in absent-mindedness or in pleasure. I have scarcely any power
over men: I can, when I strongly wish it, insinuate into them some
few of my ideas. It is this that men have called my incarnations. I
have never become incarnate. My own flesh, almost immortal, and almost
incorruptible, suffices me.
I
Almost....
HE
The gods are born and die, so my father has told me. I have not seen
one die, I have not seen one born. But I was born, since I have a
father and a mother.
I
Your mother Mary....
HE
Credulous and inattentive child! What matter the successive names that
are given us by men? The Greeks called my mother Latona; they knew
me under the name of Apollo. Their religion was full of fables, but
they were not ignorant of the essence of things. I know nothing of how
the elementary truths were revealed to them. Perhaps my father, in
primitive ages.... I did not begin to busy myself with men until about
the time of Pythagoras. I inspired him with some happy ideas; he passed
for divine, and is one of the rare disciples for whom I have never had
to blush. Pythagoras civilised the shores of the Mediterranean. His
thought, sustained by me, hovered like a light white cloud over the
blue waves of that maternal sea.
But Epicurus was perhaps still nearer to my heart. His natural and
more genial sensibility produced, under my breath, a more beautiful
intellectual flower. He knew one part of wisdom, and was not the dupe
of analogies. Intelligent, he did not go and suppose a universal
intelligence, inventing systems, poems, and useful practices for the
happiness of man; he did not go and suppose a supreme creator. He
understood that the temperaments of men are diverse, and did not advise
a uniform pleasure. He taught pleasure, that is to say the art of being
happy according to one's nature. I loved Epicurus. I showed myself to
him in the form of an older friend, a traveller who wandered over the
world in search of wisdom. Once or twice a year, he saw me arrive with
joy, put his slaves at my orders, did not hide from me his wife, who
for a long time was pretty, and for whom I felt a tender friendship.
She was only jealous of her husband's tenderness, and never prevented
him from enjoying the caresses of a beautiful stranger. She herself was
insensible neither to Ionian nor to Asiatic beauty, and this pure and
charming couple often partook of pleasures that they did not give to
each other. I accepted these voluptuous customs; the indulgent night
more than once heard our sighs mingle with those of the sea which came
to break its perfumed waves at our feet.
These things occurred at the hour when the young slaves came, before
going to sleep, to wash away on the beach the stains of the day's
work. They played, they laughed, and we loved to join them in the
water, still warm from the fires of the afternoon. Tired by a long
philosophical talk, we found a singular refreshment in the caresses
of the waves, and a strength that we willingly abandoned in the arms
of the young women. Then they came and sat beside us on the sand, and
sang, while we dreamed of nature increate. These songs did not fail
to attract an ardent youth; we knew it, and when we were rested and
refreshed, we went and stretched ourselves upon our mats, letting new
pleasures be born, new flowers, in place of those we had plucked.
My friend, the teachers who poison your sensibility and stifle your
intelligence have made you believe for some centuries past that the
pleasure of Epicurus was a pleasure wholly spiritual. Epicurus had too
much wisdom to disdain any kind of pleasure. He wished to know, and
he knew, all enjoyments that may become human enjoyments; he abused
nothing but made use of everything in his harmonious life.
It was during the early hours of one of those happy evenings that we
found, a result of long meditations, of long discussions, the atomic
system. It was a great intellectual achievement, the greatest that has
ever been produced among you or outside your sphere. To conceive the
world as the product of a series of accidents, that is to say of a
series of facts rebounding to infinity one on another, is a conclusion
at which the noblest minds of your time dare hardly stop, although it
attracts them. Twenty centuries of Platonism have so deranged man's
understanding that the simple truths no longer find a footing in it.
And yet, all the systems that you have imagined can be disproved, and
that of Epicurus cannot. Would you like me to explain it to you, not as
your professors of philosophy have defaced it, but as we established it
in our Ionian evenings?
I
We scarcely know the system of Epicurus but by Lucretius' poem....
HE
The most beautiful, perhaps, of the works of men.... Ah! if men had
chosen for Bible that admirable book!
I
Ought we to recognise in it a little of your thought?
HE
Much, my friend, much. It was I who guided the young Lucretius towards
Zeno, from whose mouth he learnt to love and understand our Epicurus.
I found again in this sombre Roman genius something of the voluptuous
habit of mind that ennobled Epicurus, a similar desire of knowledge,
and at the same time a respect for the secret movements of life. His
existence would have been that of a dreamer, if the future had not
tormented him with his passions. He was loved, and was persecuted by
jealousy, he, who asked nothing from his mistress but peace for his
flesh and peace for his thought. He loved. Love made an observer of
the dreamer. He wished to learn the cause of love, and learnt that
love was life itself; he wished to learn the cause of life, and learnt
that life, that is to say eternal movement, was its own cause. The
great adventures of ambition that he witnessed also did much to
detach him from social pleasures. The actions of animals, so simple,
so precise, seemed to him more interesting than the bloody combats of
a few madmen who bought by a crime the certainty of dying by a crime.
At the time when he wrote his poem, I was almost his only guest at
his villa Lucretia, not far from Albanum. It was a farm rather than a
pleasure-house, and often, returning from a walk, we lent a hand in the
harvest or the vintage. Memmius, if he was there, watched us or played
with the girls. Memmius was a mundane sage and rather libertine. In the
evening we took up our talk again. I revealed to him in their entirety
the mysteries that Zeno, very jealous, had half hidden from him. On my
next visit he read me the last pages of the poem, and I recognised with
joy in this language, less supple but more solid than the Greek, the
ideas and the genius of the noble Epicurus: "Ancestress of the Romans,
O joy of men and gods, noble Venus, it is thou who, under the vault of
heaven where the stars revolve, dost people the ship-carrying sea and
the fruit-bearing earth; to thee all that has life owes its birth and
its sight of the light of the sun....
I
"At thy coming, O goddess, the winds take flight, and the clouds
retire....
HE
"For thee the earth scatters the scent of her flowers, for thee laugh
the waves of the deep...."
I
Lucretius is now but lightly valued among men. He is held immoral,
having spoken of love without hypocrisy and of death without illusions.
HE
Yes, he knew too many things wounding to your childish sensibility.
I
I remember a sentence of Bossuet, a sentence that implies a scorn of
antiquity: "As soon as the cross began to appear in this world, all
that men used to adore on the earth was buried in oblivion. The world
opened its eyes and was astonished at its ignorance...."
HE
And it is I! It is I! So many absurdities in my name!... But our young
women have fallen asleep, their hair mingled with the flowers they were
arranging. Let them be. Take away these lilacs which would give them
headaches. O divine creatures, you know all, knowing love, and you have
no need of our vain philosophies.
He rose, and, walking round the table, kissed all three upon the cheek.
Then he sat down again beside me, and spoke:
HE
I shall not tell you what matter is; I do not know. Matter is that
which is, that which has always been, that which will always be.
With Epicurus, I conceived it as an infinity of atoms, or of points,
meeting at hazard, and forming groups here and there; it appears to me
now more like a tissue, but that comes to the same thing, since there
must always be space between the continuous elements of this tissue.
Otherwise we should have a mass, immobile, and consequently inert. One
cannot suppress space, whose reality, however, it is impossible to
conceive; for if space is empty it is nothing, and yet without this
nothingness nothing could exist.
In admitting matter in the form of a tissue, we suppose an infinity of
lines cutting each other in all ways; but a line is made up of points.
Let us return then to points; that is clearer, though not much so.
Your chemistry believed that it reached the limits of analysis, in
discovering the molecules that it counts and weighs. But it is evident
that a ponderable point can be cut into two points equally ponderable,
and so on to infinity, and so on without limit of space or of time.
There would be, then, two infinites: one above us, since every number
can be increased; the other below us, since every number can be
diminished. However, since space must be considered as an absolute
void, as a perfect nothingness, as nothing, it is possible that each of
these two infinites would abut sharply on this void, on this nothing.
The world is perhaps limited. This tissue is, perhaps, a sphere
isolated in the midst of the nothingness. As one does not well see how
something can come out of the nothingness, or how something can become
nothingness, we shall conclude that the eternity of matter coincides
with the eternity of this nothingness. In this way we shall have being
and not-being. But, as not-being is perfectly inconceivable though
necessary to the existence of being, we shall leave it aside; what else
should we do with it?
I am aware that one of your learned men has lately been able to speak
with a certain logic of the final annulment of matter; I do not think
that this idea has a really perceptible meaning, either for men or
for gods. What is, is. Disintegration, moreover, does not signify
destruction, but change. The face of things has changed and will change
again, but the very essence of things is as eternal as chance. This
universe is only one of the innumerable tricks of chance, one of the
fortuitous moments in the eternal movement ... You find this tedious?
I
What is more interesting, next to our personal life, than the personal
life of the world?
HE
You will die, and the world as you see it will die also. The movement
that created it by accident will destroy it by its own continuity.
The vulgar eternity that you conceive is only a moment. Have you seen
a top spinning? There is a moment, about the middle of its gyration,
when the circles described by one of the points on its circumference
are all described with a sensibly equal speed. The solar system, by
its precision, should make us admit that the top of which we form some
of the atoms is pretty nearly half way through its spin. Motion is not
perpetual, as you know; so the gyration will go on with necessarily
slackening speed, until the top lies down on its side and dies.
I
Oh! our dreams of eternity!
HE
Do I touch them? A man dies, a man is born. A world dies, a world is
born.
I
Renewal is not eternity.
HE
It is not of eternity you dream, but of immobility. The eternity you
have conceived is only a stoppage of movement. What should be conceived
is the perpetuity of movement. Men, gods, and worlds; eternal movement
walks us for a moment among the infinities of chance.
I
And so all human effort, our philosophies, our sciences, the dolorous
and superb edifice of our civilisations....
HE
Destiny is more beautiful than all civilisations.
I
But, if they must perish, let their memory at least remain in the
intelligence of the gods!
HE
Can the gods survive the world that gave them birth? We are your
brothers in mortality. Epicurus knew it. He never considered the gods
as other than provisional immortals. Nor had he the singular idea of
a unique god, infinite, eternal, &c. That belief had already been
imported from Asia into Greece, but the Greeks, not understanding it,
presented their whole pantheon in a body with an ironic immortality.
Plato and Aristotle took it up, and tried to make it reasonable, but
only succeeded in showing more clearly its philosophical inanity. I did
not let Epicurus, whom I loved, lose his way in this metaphysic. God is
a dream, charming or cruel, useful or dangerous according to the heads
in which it reigns, but no more than a dream. Need I explain to you the
impossibility of God? God for men is a matter not of reasoning but of
sentiment. Your better philosophers have understood him so well that
after denying him in their intellects they have hurried to affirm him
in their hearts. That is what I should do, perhaps, if we had to remain
on the level of humanity; but I am come to raise you above men,--for an
instant, before letting you fall back again.
I
Master, have I displeased you?
HE
Almost all those whom I have raised above the earth have fallen again.
The happiest died, some moments before their perjury; the others
denied me. But listen. Have you ever reflected on the incontestable
mathematical truths? In any case, you know that one is one, and that
nothing in the world can make one two, or two one. In the human brain,
every impression, every sensation, every image, every idea, must find
for lodging a separate habitation. Who then has imagined a central cell
to replace the soul? A useless imagination, since this cell could only
be a reduction of the brain, as the brain is a reduction of the world.
A unique centre of knowledge is an absurd conception; this unique
centre is necessarily composed of as many receptive as there are
knowable elements. In the same way, God cannot be conceived as a simple
being. If he existed, he could exist only in complexity; he would be
much like a man, he would be much like me, who am a superman. Multiply
yourself to infinity and you have the only really conceivable Almighty.
The religions and modest philosophies that have imagined God in the
form of a perfect man have at least remained within the limits of a
reasonable analogy. I, the one of the gods whom men adore, I tell it
you in all divine humility: I am a man and God is a man. You will never
transcend this respectable conception without going into the absurd.
What is the God of your metaphysicians? An abstraction whose reality is
no more possible than that of heat, good, penetrability, truth, beauty,
or weight.
The religion of the Greeks was charming, above all in later times;
your own has now and then given me some gratification. The Ancients
knew the religion of beauty and pleasure, you know that of grace
and tenderness. I scorn your philosophies, which are only adroit
intellectual structures; I have never been able to scorn your legends
and your superstitions, the traditional obeisance that your mind makes
to your sensibility. But this is the field reserved for the exercises
of the populace, children and timorous women. There are no noble human
creatures but those who are in love with themselves and study to
extract from their natures all the vain happiness contained in them.
Vain but real, and only reality. To know that one has but one life, and
that it is limited! There is one hour and only one for gathering the
grapes from the vine; in the morning the grape is sour; in the evening
it is too sweet. Lose your days neither in weeping for the past nor in
weeping for the future. Live your hours, live your minutes. Joys are
flowers that the rain will tarnish, or that will throw their petals to
the wind.
I
Epicurus! Epicurus!
HE
Yes, I wish you to be a new Epicurus, and to teach the men of to-day
what my friend taught long ago to the Athenians. Apostles have spoken
in my name who have succeeded in spreading over the earth a doctrine
of despair. They taught the scorn of all that is human, of all that
is genial, of all that is luminous. Unfitted for natural pleasures,
they sought pleasure in their own misery and in the misery in which
they plunged their brothers. They called the earth a valley of tears,
but the tears were those whose abundant flow was caused by their
own malignity. Baleful to themselves, they were baleful to the men
who became the slaves of their sombre dreams. After promising their
faithful an eternity of chimerical joys in return for the true and
simple joys they stole from them, they took even hope from the heart
of man, they imagined hell. Sons of the ancient priests of Baal, they
set up in my name the cruel idol of their fathers, and made of me the
hideous and prescient creator of those whose destiny was damnation.
These monsters, however, did not discourage me, and I sustained by my
inspiration every effort of natural wisdom that I saw among all these
horrors.
Alas! They hold you yet, and those who combat them, different priests,
are sometimes priests more baleful still. Your morality is to-day the
lowest and the saddest that has ever reigned. The external hell, in
which you now scarcely believe, has entered into your hearts, where it
devours all your joys.
I
Yes, we are sad. In us, the fear of sin has survived the belief in
sin. We dare not enjoy anything. We scorn the man who sits down in the
sunlight to drink the first rays of the Spring, but while we scorn him
we envy him his baseness, for we call all unproductive leisure base.
When we can no longer work, we go and watch those who are working.
HE
Your social state is an exhibition of madness. The Roman slaves had a
life less hard than that of many of your work-people. After the Semitic
fashion, you make even the women work! Rich and poor, all alike, you
know nothing of the joys of leisure. You give to work all the hours of
your days, some to get bread, others to achieve a pleasure that fatigue
prevents them from enjoying, and others again, the maddest of all, to
increase their wealth. You have reached that degree of imbecility in
which labour is looked upon as not only honourable but sacred, when,
actually, it is but a sad necessity. You have lifted this necessity
to the rank of the virtues, when it is, without doubt, no more than
the vice of a perverted being for whom life, short as it is, is only a
lengthy tedium.
I
And of this work, which at least allows us to breathe and to eat, there
is not enough for all. Thousands of beings in the most civilised towns
die every day of hunger, and with a slow death. They are in agony for
ten, for twenty years ...
HE
Increase and multiply. That is the work of my father. He was
seized with a sort of jealous and mischievous love for the Jews, a
sufficiently restless little people, and showed himself curious to
encourage their natural pride so far as to make it immoderate. The
result was comic and sad. These ignorant Bedouins believed themselves
destined to dominate the world, and then disappeared as a nation at the
very moment when this domination was accomplished. A singular fate for
the Jews, to have given mankind a religion in which they do not believe
themselves!
Alas! At the request of my ageing father, who began to find these
prolific barbarians tedious, after having tried to enlighten Jesus,
who had too many disciples, I interested myself in Saint Paul. I
came to him as I have come to you; he was dazzled, and believed that
the vision had given him a divine mission. I followed him in his
journeys. His energy amused me; but at Athens, I ranged myself with his
opponents, whose laughter I excited. Later on, I let him die without
consolations; his pride sufficed him.