Micromegas and Other Short Fictions (Penguin ed.)

by Voltaire

  ‘What astonishes me and delights me most,’ said I, ‘is that by means of this incomprehensible art, two machines always produce a third; I am very sorry not to have done likewise with Miss Fidler, but I see that it was arranged from all eternity that Miss Fidler should make use of a machine other than myself.’

  ‘What you say’, replied Mr Sidrac, ‘has been said before and said better: which probably means that you are thinking correctly. Yes, it is most amusing that two beings should produce a third; but that is not true of all beings. Two roses do not produce a third by exchanging kisses; two stones, two metals, do not produce a third; and yet a metal and a stone are things which all human industry could not make. The great, the beautiful and constant miracle is that a boy and girl should make a child together, that a nightingale should make a little nightingale with his nightingale mate, and not with a warbler. We ought to spend half our lives in imitating them, and the other half in blessing Him who invented this procedure. Reproduction harbours a thousand strange secrets. Newton says that Nature is everywhere like herself: Natura est ubique sibi consona. This is not true of Love: fish, reptiles, birds, do not make love as we do – there is infinite variety. The workings of acting and sentient beings delight me. Vegetables also have their value. I am always amazed that a grain of wheat cast on the ground should produce several others like it.’

  ‘Ah!’ said I, like the fool I then was, ‘that is because the wheat must die to be born again, as they say in the Schools.’2

  Mr Sidrac laughed circumspectly and replied: ‘That was true in the time of the Schools, but the meanest labourer today knows that the thing is ridiculous.’

  ‘Ah, Mr Sidrac, I beg your pardon. I have been a theologian, and a man cannot shake off old habits immediately.’

  CHAPTER III

  Some time after these conversations between poor Parson Goodman and the excellent anatomist Sidrac, the latter ran into him in St James’s Park looking pensive and preoccupied, with an air more embarrassed than a mathematician who has just made an error of calculation. ‘What is the matter?’ said Sidrac. ‘Have you pains in your bladder or colon?’ ‘No,’ ‘said Goodman, ‘only in my gall-bladder. I have just seen the Bishop of Gloucester3 ride by in a fine carriage; he is an insolent and whiffling pedant. Meanwhile I was on foot, and it irritated me. I remembered that, if I wanted to have a bishopric in this realm, ten thousand chances to one I should fail, since there are ten thousand parsons in England. Since the death of Lord Chesterfield (who was deaf) I have had no patron. Let us suppose that the ten thousand Anglican parsons each have two patrons; the odds are then twenty thousand to one against my obtaining a bishopric. That is annoying, when one thinks of it.

  ‘I remembered that long ago it was suggested I go to India as a cabin-boy; I was assured I should make a great fortune there, but I did not feel cut out to become an admiral. So, having considered all the professions I have remained a parson, without being good for anything.’

  ‘Give up being a priest,’ said Sidrac, ‘and turn yourself into a philosopher. It is an occupation which neither demands nor bestows wealth. What is your income?’ ‘I have only thirty guineas a year, and after the death of my old aunt I shall have fifty.’ ‘My dear Goodman, that is enough to live in freedom and to think. Thirty guineas makes six hundred and thirty shillings – nearly two shillings a day. Philips4 only needed one. With that amount of guaranteed income a man may say whatever he thinks about the East India Company, Parliament, the Colonies, the King, life in general, Man and God – all of which is a great source of amusement. Come and dine with me, which will save you money. We shall talk, and your thinking faculty will have the pleasure of communicating with mine by means of speech, which is a marvellous thing insufficiently admired by men.’

  CHAPTER IV

  Conversation between Dr Goodman and Sidrac the Anatomist, concerning the soul and other matters

  GOODMAN: But, my dear Sidrac, why do you always speak of my thinking faculty? Why not just say my soul? It is easier to say, and I should understand you just as well.

  SIDRAC: But I should not understand myself. I feel, I know, even, that God has given me the faculty of thinking and speaking; but I neither feel nor know that he has given me an entity called a soul.

  GOODMAN: Really, when I think about it, I see that I know nothing more than you about the matter, and that I have long been rash enough to think I did know. I have noticed that the oriental peoples call the soul by a name which means Life. Following their example, the Romans first used the word anima to mean the life of an animal. The Greeks used to speak of the respiration of the soul. This respiration is a breath, and the Latins translated the word breath by spiritus; whence the word equivalent to spirit among nearly all modern nations. Since nobody has ever seen this breath, this spirit, it has been made into an entity which no one can see or touch. It has been said to reside in our body without occupying any place there, and to move our organs without touching them. What has not been said? It seems to me that all our talk is founded on ambiguities. I see the wise Locke felt that these ambiguities in all languages had plunged human reason into chaos. He includes no chapter on the soul in his book, the only sensible work of metaphysics ever written.5 And if he chances to use the word in certain passages, he only uses it to mean our intelligence.

  Indeed, everyone clearly feels he has an intelligence, that he receives ideas, which he associates and dissociates; but nobody feels that he has within him another entity which gives him movement, sensations and thoughts. It is ridiculous to use words we do not understand and to admit entities of which we cannot have the slightest idea.

  SIDRAC: We are agreed then about a matter which has been the subject of dispute for so many centuries.

  GOODMAN: And I marvel that we are in agreement.

  SIDRAC: It is not so surprising; we are honestly searching for the truth. If we were on the benches of the Schools, we should be arguing like Rabelais’s characters.6 If we lived in the terrible dark ages which for so long engulfed England, one of us would probably have the other burned. But we live in an age of reason; we easily find what seems to us to be the truth, and we dare to express it.

  GOODMAN: Yes, but I fear this truth is a very paltry affair. In mathematics we have achieved prodigies which would astonish Apollonius and Archimedes,7 and would make them our pupils. But what have we discovered in metaphysics? Our own ignorance.

  SIDRAC: And is that nothing? You admit that the great Being has given you the faculty of feeling and thinking, as he has given your feet the faculty of walking, your hands the power of doing a thousand things, your intestines the power of digesting, your heart the power of pumping blood along your arteries. We hold everything from Him; we could not do anything for ourselves, and we shall always remain ignorant of the manner in which the Master of the universe manages to guide us. For my part, I give thanks to him for having taught me that I know nothing of first principles.

  Men have always enquired how the soul acts upon the body. They ought first of all to have established whether we have a soul. Either God has bestowed this gift on us, or He has imparted something to us which is its equivalent. However He went about it, we are under His hand. He is our master, and this is all I know.

  GOODMAN: But tell me at least what you suspect to be the case. You have dissected brains, you have looked upon embryos and foetuses; have you discovered any sign of a soul in them?

  SIDRAC: Not in the least, and I have never been able to understand how an immortal, immaterial entity can spend nine months uselessly hidden in an evil-smelling membrane between urine and excrement. I have found it difficult to conceive that this so-called simple soul could exist prior to the formation of its body. For what can it have been doing down the centuries before being a human soul? And how are we to imagine a simple entity, a metaphysical entity, which waits for an eternity for its turn to animate a piece of matter for a few minutes? What becomes of this unknown entity, if the foetus it is meant to animate dies in the womb?


  It seems to me still more ridiculous that God should create a soul at the moment a man lies with a woman, and blasphemous that He should await the consummation of an adultery, or an incest, to reward such turpitudes by creating souls in their image. It is worse still when I am told that God conjures immortal souls out of nothingness to make them suffer incredible tortures for all eternity. What! Burn simple entities, which have nothing burnable about them! How should we go about burning the sound of a voice, or a wind which has just passed? Even so, this sound and this wind were material for the brief moment of their passage; but what of a pure spirit, a thought, a doubt? I am at sea here. Whichever way I turn, I find nothing but obscurity, contradiction, impossibility, ridiculousness, delusions, extravagance, chimera, absurdity, idiocy, charlatanism.

  But I am perfectly at ease when I say to myself: God is the master. He who causes stars without number to gravitate towards each other, He who made the light, is certainly powerful enough to give us feelings and notions without our needing a small, foreign, invisible atom called a soul.

  God has certainly given feeling, memory and activity to all animals. He has given them life, and it is as noble to give life as to give a soul. It is generally agreed that animals are alive; it is proved that they have feeling, since they have organs of feeling. And if they have all that without a soul, why should we wish to have one at all costs?

  GOODMAN: Perhaps from vanity. I am convinced that if a peacock could speak, he would boast of having a soul and would say his soul is in his tail. I am much inclined to suspect with you that God made us to eat, to drink, to walk, to sleep, to feel, to think, to be full of passions, pride and misery, without telling us one word of His secret. We do not know any more on this subject than the peacock I mentioned; and he who said that we are born, live and die without knowing how, expressed a great truth.

  Likewise he8 who calls us the puppets of Providence seems to me to have defined us well. After all, for us to exist there needs must be an infinity of movements. But we did not create movement; we did not establish its laws. There is someone who, having made the light, makes it travel from the sun to our eyes in seven minutes. It is only through movement that my five senses are stirred; it is only through my five senses that I have ideas: therefore it is the Author of movement who gives me my ideas. And when He tells me how He does this, I shall render Him my humblest thanks. Already I give Him great thanks for allowing me to contemplate for a few years the magnificent spectacle of this world, as Epictetus9 says. It is true that He could make me happier and let me have a good ecclesiastical living and my mistress, Miss Fidler; but even as I am, with my income of six hundred and thirty shillings, I am still greatly indebted to Him.

  SIDRAC: You say that God might have given you a good living and that he could make you happier than you are. There are some people who would not allow you to get away with such an assertion. Do you not remember how you yourself complained of Fate? A man who intended to be a parson is not allowed to contradict himself. Do you not see that, had you obtained the parsonage and the woman you asked for, it would have been you and not your rival who gave Miss Fidler a child? This child might have been a cabin-boy, become an admiral, won a naval battle at the mouth of the Ganges, and completed the dethronement of the Great Mogul. That alone would have changed the make-up of the universe. A world entirely different from ours would need to have been created in order that your competitor should not have the living, should not marry Miss Fidler, and that you should not have been reduced to six hundred and thirty shillings while awaiting the death of your aunt. Everything is linked, and God will not break the eternal chain for the sake of my friend Goodman.

  GOODMAN: I did not expect this line of reasoning when I spoke of Fate; but after all, if things are thus, God is as much a slave as I am?

  SIDRAC: He is the slave of His will, of His wisdom, of the laws He himself made, of His necessary nature. He cannot infringe all this, because He cannot be weak, inconstant and fickle as we are; the necessarily Eternal Being cannot behave like a weathercock.

  GOODMAN: Mr Sidrac, what you are saying leads straight to irreligion. For if God can change nothing in the affairs of this world, what is the use of singing His praises and addressing prayers to Him?

  SIDRAC: And who told you to pray to God, and praise Him? Much does He care about your praise and petitions! We praise a man because we think him vain; we pray to him when we think him weak and hope to make him change his mind. Let us do our duty to God, adore Him, act justly; that is true praise and true prayer.

  GOODMAN: Mr Sidrac, we have covered a lot of ground; for, without counting Miss Fidler, we have discussed whether we have a soul, whether there is a God, whether He can change, whether we are destined to two lives, whether… these are profound reflections and perhaps I should never have thought about them if I had been a parson. I must go deeper into these necessary and sublime matters, since I have nothing else to do.

  SIDRAC: Well, Dr Grou is coming to dine with me tomorrow: he is a very well-informed doctor; he went round the world with Banks and Solander; 10 he must certainly understand God and the soul, the true and the false, the just and the unjust, far better than those who have never left Covent Garden. Moreover, Dr Grou saw almost the whole of Europe in his youth; he witnessed five or six revolutions in Russia; he visited the pasha comte de Bonneval,11 who, as you know, became a confirmed Muslim in Constantinople. He was intimate with the Irish papist priest MacCarthy12 who had his foreskin cut off in honour of the Prophet, and with our Scottish Presbyterian Ramsay,13 who did the same, and afterwards served in Russia and was killed in a battle against the Swedes in Finland. Dr Grou has moreover conversed with the reverend Father Malagrida,14 who has since been burned at Lisbon because the Holy Virgin revealed to him everything she did when she was in the womb of her mother, St Anne. So you can see that a man like Dr Grou, who has seen so much, must be the greatest metaphysician in the world. Tomorrow, then, at my house for dinner.

  GOODMAN: And again the day after tomorrow, my dear Sidrac, for more than one dinner is needed to become a man of learning.

  CHAPTER V

  The next day the three thinkers dined together; and, as they became a little merrier towards the end of the meal, which is the custom of philosophers at dinner, they amused themselves by talking of all the miseries, the follies, the horrors which afflict the animal kind from Australia to the Arctic Pole, and from Lima to Macao. The variety of human abominations is nevertheless very diverting. It is a pleasure unknown to stay-at-home citizens and parish curates, who know nothing beyond their own church spire and who think that the rest of the universe is like Exchange Alley in London, or the Rue de la Huchette in Paris.

  ‘I have noticed’, said Dr Grou, ‘that in spite of the infinite variety of this globe, all the men I have seen – whether blacks with woolly hair, blacks with straight hair, browns, reds, greyish-browns who are called whites – all of them have two legs, two eyes and a head on their shoulders, despite St Augustine who asserts in his thirty-seventh sermon that he had seen acephalous, in other words headless, men or monoculous men with only one eye, and monopeds who have only one leg. As to cannibals, I admit there are swarms of these, and that everyone was a cannibal once.

  ‘I have often been asked if the inhabitants of the immense country called New Zealand, who are today the most barbarous of all barbarians, were baptized. I have always replied that I did not know, but that it might be so; that the Jews, who were yet more barbarous, had two baptisms instead of one, the baptism of justice and the baptism of domicile.’15

  ‘I am well acquainted with both,’ said Mr Goodman, ‘and have had long disputes with those who think that we Christians invented baptism. No, gentlemen, we have invented nothing; we have only patched things up. But pray tell me, Dr Grou, among the eighty or hundred religions you have seen in your travels, which seemed the most pleasant? That of the New Zealanders, perhaps, or of the Hottentots?’

  DR GROU: That of the island of Tahi
ti, without any doubt. I have travelled through both hemispheres, and I never saw anything like Tahiti and its religious Queen. It is in Tahiti that Nature dwells. Elsewhere I have seen nothing but masks, scoundrels deceiving fools, charlatans cheating others of their money to gain authority, and cheating authority so as to have money with impunity; who sell you spiders’ webs in order to eat your partridges, and promise you riches and pleasures when we are all dead, so that you will turn the spit for them while they are alive.

  By heavens! It is not like that in the Isle of Tahiti. This island is much more civilized than New Zealand or the country of the Kaffirs, or, dare I say it, than our own England, because Nature has granted it a more fertile soil; she has given it the bread-fruit tree, a gift as wonderful as it is useful, which she has bestowed only upon a few islands in the South Seas. Moreover, Tahiti possesses numerous edible birds, vegetables and fruits. In such a country it is not necessary to eat one’s neighbour; there is a gentler, more natural, more universal necessity which the religion of Tahiti commands shall be satisfied in public. It is certainly the most respectable of all religious ceremonies; I have been an eye-witness, together with the whole crew of our ship. This is no missionary fable, such as are to be found in the Edifying and Curious Letters of the reverend Jesuit Fathers.16 Dr John Hawkesworth17 is as we speak completing the publication of our discoveries in the southern hemisphere. I have frequently accompanied that worthy young man, Banks, who has devoted his time and money to the observation of Nature in the regions of the Antarctic Pole, while Dawkins and Wood18 were returning from the ruins of Palmyra and Baalbek where they had been excavating the most ancient monuments of the arts, and while Hamilton was teaching amazed Neapolitans the natural history of their own Mount Vesuvius.19 With Banks, Solander, Cook and a hundred others, I have seen what I am about to describe to you.