by François-Marie Arouet
CHAPTER II
Conversation Between the Inhabitant of Sirius
and that of Saturn
and that of Saturn
Illustration by Athanasius Kircher (1671)
One day, after the Sirian had laid down and the secretary had approached his face to facilitate conversation, Micromégas said, "I must confess that nature is full of variety."
"Yes," said the Saturnian, "nature is like a flower-bed, the blossoms of which—"
"Oh," said the other, "have done with your flower-bed!"
"She is," resumed the secretary, "like an assembly of blondes and brunettes, whose attire—"
"No, no," said the traveler. "Nature is like nature. Why do you search for comparisons?"
"To please you," answered the secretary.
"I do not want to be pleased," rejoined the traveler, "I want to be instructed, begin by telling me how many senses the men in your world possess."
"We have 72," said the academician, "and we are always complaining that they are so few. Our imagination soars beyond our needs, we find that with our 72 senses, our ring, and our five moons, that our range is too restricted, and, in spite of all our curiosity and the tolerably large number of passions which spring out of our 72 senses, we often feel bored."
"I can well believe it," said Micromégas, "for on our globe, though we have nearly a thousand senses, there lingers even in us a certain vague desire, an unaccountable restlessness, which warns us that we are of little account in the universe, and that there are beings much more perfect than ourselves. I have traveled, I have seen mortals far below us, and others greatly superior, but I have seen none who have not more desires than real wants, and more wants than they can satisfy. I shall someday, perhaps, reach the country where there is lack of nothing, but hitherto no one has been able to give me any positive information about it." The Saturnian and the Sirian thereupon exhausted themselves with ingenious yet futile conjectures on the subject, but were eventually obliged to return to facts.
"How long do you people live?" asked the Sirian.
"Ah! a very short time," replied the little man of Saturn.
"So too with us," said the Sirian. "We are always complaining of the shortness of life. This must be a universal law of nature."
"Alas!" quoth the Saturnian, "none of us live more than 500 annual revolutions of the Sun." (That amounts to about 15,000 years, according to our manner of counting.) "You see how it is our fate to die almost as soon as we are born, our existence is a point, our duration an instant, our globe an atom. Scarcely have we begun to acquire a little information when death arrives before we can put it to use. I myself do not venture to lay any schemes, I feel like a drop of water in a boundless ocean. I am ashamed, especially before you, of the absurd figure I make in this universe."
Micromégas answered: "Were you not a philosopher, I should fear to distress you by telling you our lives are 700 times as long as yours, but you know too well that when the time comes to give back one's body to the elements, and reanimate nature under another form—the process called death—when that moment of metamorphosis comes, it is precisely the same whether we have lived an eternity or only a day. I have been in countries where life is a thousand times longer than with us, and yet have heard murmurs of its brevity even there. But people of good sense exist everywhere, who know how to make the most of what they have, and to thank the Author of nature. He has spread over this universe abundant variety, together with a kind of admirable uniformity. For example, all thinking beings are different, yet resemble each other in the common endowment of thought and will. Matter is infinitely extended, but has different properties in different worlds. How many of these various properties do you reckon in the matter with which you are acquainted?"
"If you speak," replied the Saturnian, "of those properties without which we believe this globe could not subsist as it is, we count 300 of them, such as extension, impenetrability, mobility, gravitation, divisibility, etc."
"Apparently," rejoined the traveler, "this small number is sufficient for the Creator's purpose in constructing this little habitation. I admire His wisdom throughout, I see differences everywhere, but everywhere also a due proportion. Your globe is small, you who inhabit it are small likewise, you have few senses, the matter comprising your world has few properties, all this is the work of Providence. What color is your sun when carefully examined?"
"White deeply tinged with yellow," said the Saturnian, "and when we split up one of its rays, it consists of seven colors."
"Our sun has a reddish light," said the Sirian, "and we have 39 primary colors. There is not a single sun, among all those I have approached, which resembles any other, just as among yourselves there is not a single face which is not different from all the rest."
After several other questions of this kind, he inquired how many modes of existence essentially different were enumerated on Saturn. He was told that not more than 30 were distinguished, as God, space, matter, beings occupying space which feel and think, thinking beings which do not occupy space, those which possess penetrability, others which do not, etc. The Sirian, in whose world they count 300 of them, and who had discovered 3,000 more in the course of his travels, astonished the philosopher of Saturn. At length, after having communicated to each other a little of what they knew, and a great deal of that about which they knew nothing, and after having exercised their reasoning powers during a complete revolution of the Sun, they resolved to make a little exploratory tour together.
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