by Voltaire
I have no doubt that if some captain in the great Grenadiers ever reads this work, he will raise by at least two good feet the height of his company’s bearskin bonnets; but I can tell him now that try as he may, he and his men will never be more than infinitesimally small.18
What marvellous skill was required, then, for our philosopher from Sirius to spy out the atoms I have just been describing! When Leeuwenhoek and Hartsoeker19 first saw, or thought they saw, the seed from which we all grow, they were making a far less astonishing discovery. What pleasure Micromégas felt in seeing these tiny machines moving about, in scrutinizing their comings and goings, in following them in all their operations! How he shouted out! With what joy he handed one of his microscopes to his travelling companion!
‘I can see them!’ they both cried out at once. ‘Look at them ferrying their loads, bending down and straightening up again!’
As they spoke their hands trembled with the excitement of seeing such novel objects and with the fear of losing them. The Saturnian, passing from extreme scepticism to extreme credulity, thought he could see some of them engaged in propagating themselves. ‘Aha!’ he said, ‘I have caught nature in the act.’ But he was deceived by appearances, which happens all too often, whether one uses microscopes or not.
CHAPTER VI
How they fared in the company of humans
Micromégas, a far better observer of things than his dwarf, could clearly see that the atoms were talking to one other; he drew the attention of his companion who, ashamed at his mistake over procreation, was now somewhat reluctant to credit such species with the power to communicate ideas. He had the gift of languages as much as the Sirian; but since he could not hear these human atoms talking, he concluded that they could not talk. Besides, how should such imperceptible beings have speech organs, and what could they possibly have to say to each other? In order to speak one must be able to think, more or less. But if they could think, they must have the equivalent of a soul. Now to attribute the equivalent of a soul to this species seemed to him absurd.
‘But’, said the Sirian, ‘just now you thought they were making love. Do you think one can make love without having thoughts, without uttering the odd word here and there, without at least making oneself understood? Do you further suppose that it is a harder thing to produce an argument than an infant? To my mind how one does either is a great mystery.’
‘I no longer dare to believe or disbelieve,’ said the dwarf. ‘I have no opinions left. We must endeavour to examine these insects, and reason afterwards.’
‘Very well said,’ Micromégas replied, and he immediately took out a pair of scissors. With these he cut his nails, and with a clipping from his thumbnail he fashioned on the spot a sort of large speaking-trumpet shaped like a vast funnel, the smaller end of which he placed to his ear. The rim of the funnel embraced the ship and its entire company. The faintest voice could be picked up by the circular fibres of the nail; such that, thanks to his industry, the philosopher up above now heard perfectly the buzzing of the human insects down below. Within a few hours he could distinguish words, and succeeded finally in understanding French. The dwarf did likewise, though with greater difficulty. The astonishment of the visitors redoubled by the minute. They were listening to tiny microbes making reasonable sense: this trick on the part of nature seemed wholly unaccountable. You may imagine the impatience with which the Sirian and his dwarf burned to engage these atoms in conversation; but the latter feared that his thunderous voice, not to mention that of Micromégas, would deafen the microbes without being understood by them. They must find a way of diminishing its force. Each therefore placed in his mouth a sort of miniature toothpick, whose finely sharpened end reached down close to the ship. The Sirian held the dwarf on his knee and the ship and company on one nail. He bent his head and began speaking in a low voice. With the aid of these precautions and many more, he addressed them at last:
‘Invisible insects, whom the hand of the Creator has been pleased to bring to life in the abyss of the infinitely small, I give thanks to Him for deigning to reveal to me secrets which had seemed impenetrable. Perhaps nobody at my court would deign to look upon you; but I disdain no creature, and I hereby offer you my protection.’
If ever there was astonishment, it was to be found among the company who heard these words, and who could not imagine where they were coming from. The ship’s chaplain fell to reciting the prayers for casting out devils; the sailors swore; the philosophers on board invented a system: but whatever the system, they could not explain who was talking to them. The dwarf from Saturn, whose voice was gentler than Micromégas’s, informed them briefly as to what manner of beings they were dealing with. He recounted the voyage from Saturn, put them in the picture as to the identity of Monsieur Micromégas, and, after commiserating with them for being so small, enquired whether they had always been in this miserable condition bordering on nothingness and what were they doing on a planet which appeared to be run by whales, whether they were happy, whether they multiplied, whether they had a soul, and a hundred other such questions.
One quibbler on board, bolder than the rest and offended at having doubts cast upon his soul, scrutinized their interlocutor through sights mounted on his quadrant, took two bearings, and on the third said:
‘You appear to think, sir, that because you measure a thousand fathoms from head to toe, you are therefore –’
‘A thousand fathoms!’ exclaimed the dwarf. ‘Good heavens! How can he possibly know my height? A thousand fathoms! He is not an inch out in his calculation. What! This atom has actually measured me! He is a geometer, and he knows my size; whereas I, who can only see him through a microscope, have yet to discover his!’
‘Yes, I have your measure,’ said the physicist, ‘and what’s more I am now going to measure your big friend.’
This proposal was accepted, and His Excellency stretched out full length on the ground, since had he remained standing his head would have been too far above the clouds. Our philosophers planted a tall tree into him, at a spot which the good Dr Swift would call by its name but which I shall certainly refrain from specifying, out of my great respect for the ladies. Next, by a series of triangulations, they deduced that they were in fact looking at a young man one hundred and twenty thousand royal feet long.
Micromégas now spoke again: ‘I see more than ever that one must not judge anything by its apparent size. O God, who has endowed with intelligence forms of matter that seem so contemptible, the infinitely small evidently costs you as little effort as the infinitely great; moreover, if there can possibly exist creatures smaller than these, they may well be of greater intelligence than those superb animals I have seen in the heavens, whose foot alone would cover this globe on which I have landed.’
One of the philosophers replied that he could rest assured; there were indeed intelligent beings far smaller than man. He described for him, not Virgil’s fabulations about the bees,20 but what Swammerdam has discovered and Réaumur21 dissected. Lastly he informed him that there are creatures which are to bees as bees are to humans, or as the Sirian himself was to those prodigious animals he had mentioned, and as those animals are to yet other forms, beside which they seem but atoms. By degrees the conversation began to flow, and Micromégas spoke as follows.
CHAPTER VII
Conversation with the humans
‘O intelligent atoms, in whom the Supreme Being has been pleased to manifest His skill and His might, the joys you experience on your globe must doubtless be extremely pure; for, having so little matter and being apparently all mind, you must pass your lives in thinking and loving – in leading the true life of the spirit. Nowhere have I witnessed real happiness, but surely it is to be found here.’
At this all the philosophers shook their heads, and one of them, more forthright than the rest, owned frankly that, except for a small number of individuals held in low esteem, the rest were a confederacy of the mad, the bad and the miserable.
‘
We have more than enough matter to do plenty of evil, if evil comes from matter; and too much spirit, if evil comes from the spirit. For instance, do you realize that as I speak a hundred thousand lunatics of our species, wearing hats, are busy killing or being killed by a hundred thousand other animals in turbans,22 and that almost everywhere on Earth this is how we have carried on since time immemorial?’
The Sirian shuddered and asked what could be the subject of such terrible quarrels between such puny creatures.
‘It is all for the sake of a few mud-heaps’,23 replied the philosopher, ‘no bigger than your heel. Not that any of the millions who are cutting each other’s throats lay claim to the least particle of these heaps. The issue is simply whether it shall belong to one man known as “Sultan” or to another known, for some reason, as “Tsar”. Neither man has ever seen or ever will see the little piece of land in question, and almost none of the creatures slaughtering each other has ever seen the animal on whose behalf they are slaughtering.’
‘Ah! The devils!’ cried the Sirian indignantly. ‘Is such fanatical fury conceivable? I am tempted to take three strides and with each stride to trample this whole ant-hill of ridiculous assassins.’
‘Spare yourself the trouble,’ came the reply. ‘They are making a fair job of their own destruction. The truth is that, ten years on, there is never one in a hundred of the wretches left; even those who have not drawn a sword are carried off by hunger, exhaustion or debauchery. Besides, it is not they who should be punished, but the sedentary barbarians holed up in their offices, who command the massacre of a million men while digesting a good meal, and afterwards have a Te Deum offered up in thanks to God.’
The traveller felt moved to pity for this tiny species, in whom he was discovering such surprising contradictions.
‘Since you are among the few who are enlightened,’ he said to these gentlemen, ‘and seem not to murder people for a living, tell me, how do you pass your time?’
‘We dissect flies,’ said the philosopher, ‘we measure lines, we combine numbers, we agree upon the two or three things that we do understand, and argue over the two or three thousand that we do not.’
Immediately it occurred to both Sirian and Saturnian to elicit from these thinking atoms what it was that they did agree upon.
‘What do you reckon to be the distance’, the former asked, ‘from the Dog Star to the great star in Gemini?’
‘Thirty-two and a half degrees,’ they answered in unison.
‘And from here to the moon?’
‘Sixty times the radius of the Earth, in round numbers.’
‘And how heavy is your air?’
He intended to catch them out, but they all replied that air weighs approximately nine hundred times less than the equivalent volume of the lightest water, and nineteen hundred times less than gold for ducats. The little dwarf from Saturn, amazed at their answers, was inclined to take for sorcerers the same people to whom a quarter of an hour earlier he had refused a soul.
Finally Micromégas said to them:
‘Since you know so much about what is outside of you, no doubt you know even more about what is within. Tell me what your soul is, and how you form your ideas.’
The philosophers all replied in unison, as before; but now they all gave different answers. The oldest cited Aristotle, another uttered the name of Descartes, another Malebranche, another Leibniz, and yet another Locke.
An aged peripatetic confidently declared in loud tones: ‘The soul is an “entelechy”,24 and is the reason by which it has the power to be what it is. So Aristotle specifically states, on page 633 of the Louvre edition: ’E, etc.’
‘My Greek is limited,’ said the giant.
‘Mine too,’ said the philosophizing microbe.
‘Why, then,’ pursued the Sirian, ‘do you cite this Aristotle fellow in Greek?’
‘Because’, replied the scholar, ‘one should always cite what one does not understand in the language one least understands.’
The Cartesian now spoke up: ‘The soul is pure spirit; it imbibes all metaphysical ideas in the mother’s womb, on leaving which it has to go to school, to relearn from scratch what it knew so well and will never know again.’25
‘So,’ replied the animal eight leagues tall, ‘there was little point in your soul being so learned inside your mother’s womb, if it was to become so ignorant by the time you had some hairs on your chin. And what do you mean by spirit?’
‘What a question!’ said the theoretician. ‘I have no idea. They say it is not the same thing as matter.’
‘Do you at least know what matter is?’
‘Certainly,’ the man replied. ‘This stone, for example, is grey and of a certain shape, has three dimensions and weight, and is divisible.’
‘So!’ said the Sirian. ‘This thing which seems to you divisible, weighty and grey – would you mind telling me what it is? You observe some of its attributes, but do you know what it is in itself?’
‘No,’ said the other.
‘Then you have no idea what matter is.’
Monsieur Micromégas now addressed another of the sages perched on his thumb, asking him what his soul was and what it did.
‘Not a thing,’ replied this disciple of Malebranche.26 ‘It is God who does everything for me. I see everything in Him, I do everything through Him. It is He who arranges everything, without my involvement.’
‘One might as well not exist,’ countered the sage from Sirius. ‘And you, my friend,’ he said to a Leibnizian who was present, ‘what is your soul?’
‘It is the hand that tells the time, just as my body is the clock that chimes; or, if you prefer, it is what chimes while my body tells the time; in other words, my soul is the mirror of the universe and my body the frame on the mirror. That much is clear.’27
A tiny partisan of Locke was standing by, who, when spoken to at last, replied: ‘I do not know by what means I think, but I know that I have never thought except with the aid of my senses. That there are non-material intelligent substances I don’t doubt; but that God should be incapable of bestowing mind on matter I doubt very much. I revere the eternal power, and it is not for me to set bounds to it; I affirm nothing, and am content to believe that more things are possible than we think.’28
The animal from Sirius smiled. He found the last speaker by no means the most foolish; and the dwarf from Saturn would have embraced this follower of Locke but for their extreme disparity in size. Unfortunately for everyone, there was present a little animalcule in an academic square cap, who interrupted all the philosopher animalcules. He claimed he had all the answers, and that they were in the Summa of St Thomas Aquinas. He looked the two celestial visitors up and down, then informed them that everything – their persons, their worlds, their suns, their stars – had been created uniquely for Man.29
On hearing this speech, our two travellers fell upon each other, choking with that inextinguishable laughter which, according to Homer, is the portion of the gods. Their shoulders and stomachs heaved and fell, and during these convulsions the vessel, which the Sirian had been balancing on his finger-nail, fell into the Saturnian’s trouser pocket. These two good people spent a great deal of time searching for it; at last they found both ship and company, and set everything very neatly to rights again. The Sirian picked up the little microbes once more. He still spoke to them with great kindness, despite being privately a little vexed to find that the infinitely small should have a pride almost infinitely large. He promised to write a fine work of philosophy for them, in suitably tiny script, in which they would discover the nature of things. True to his word, he gave them the volume before leaving. It was taken to Paris, to the Academy of Sciences. But when the Secretary opened it, he found nothing but blank pages.
‘Aha,’ said he, ‘I suspected as much.’
The World As It Is
Babouc’s Vision
Written by Himself
CHAPTER I
Among the genies who presid
e over the empires of the world, Ithuriel holds one of the highest posts and has the department of Upper Asia. One morning he descended to the house of Babouc, a Scythian, on the banks of the Oxus, and said to him: ‘Babouc, the folly and excesses of the Persians have provoked our displeasure: an assembly of the genies of Upper Asia was held yesterday to decide whether we should punish Persepolis or destroy it. Go into that city and examine everything; then come back and render me an exact account and I shall decide on your report whether the city shall be chastised or exterminated.’ ‘But, my lord,’ said Babouc humbly, ‘I have never been to Persia; I don’t know anybody there.’ ‘So much the better,’ said the angel, ‘you will be quite impartial; Heaven has given you understanding, to which I shall add the gift of inspiring confidence. Walk around, look, listen, observe and fear nothing; you will be well received everywhere.’
Babouc mounted his camel and set out with his servants. After several days he encountered the Persian army near the plains of Sennaar, on its way to engage with the Indian army. He spoke first of all to a straggler, and asked what was the cause of the war. ‘By all the gods,’ said the soldier, ‘I have no idea. It’s not my affair: my business is to kill and be killed for a living; it doesn’t matter on which side I serve. I may even go over to the Indian camp tomorrow. They are said to give their soldiers nearly half a drachma of copper a day more than we get in this confounded Persian service. If you want to know why we are fighting, ask my captain.’
Babouc handed the soldier a small trifle and entered the camp. He soon made the acquaintance of the captain and asked him what the war was about. ‘How do you expect me to know,’ said the captain, ‘and what does this splendid topic have to do with me? I live two hundred leagues from Persepolis; I hear talk of war being declared; I immediately abandon my family and take off, as is our custom, in search of death or honour, since I have nothing else to do.’ ‘But surely your fellow-officers must be a little better informed?’ said Babouc. ‘No,’ said the officer; ‘scarcely anyone except our chief satraps knows precisely why we are cutting each other’s throats.’
