Homepage
Login
Profile
BookClubs
dmBox
Read Ebook: Micromegas by Voltaire Phalen Peter Translator
Font size:
Background color:
Text color:
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page Prev Page
Ebook has 87 lines and 8486 words, and 2 pages
Crimea, which all the same was not reunited with Russia until 1783. B.
"Oh! Cruel fate!" cried the Sirian with indignation, "who could conceive of this excess of maniacal rage! It makes me want to take three steps and crush this whole anthill of ridiculous assassins."
"Do not waste your time," someone responded, "they are working towards ruin quickly enough. Know that after ten years only one hundredth of these scoundrels will be here. Know that even if they have not drawn swords, hunger, fatigue, or intemperance will overtake them. Furthermore, it is not they that should be punished, it is those sedentary barbarians who from the depths of their offices order, while they are digesting their last meal, the massacre of a million men, and who subsequently give solemn thanks to God."
The voyager was moved with pity for the small human race, where he was discovering such surprising contrasts.
"Since you are amongst the small number of wise men," he told these sirs, "and since apparently you do not kill anyone for money, tell me, I beg of you, what occupies your time."
"We dissect flies," said the philosopher, "we measure lines, we gather figures; we agree with each other on two or three points that we do not understand."
It suddenly took the Sirian and the Saturnian's fancy to question these thinking atoms, to learn what it was they agreed on.
"What do you measure," said the Saturnian, "from the Dog Star to the great star of the Gemini?"
They responded all at once, "thirty-two and a half degrees."
"What do you measure from here to the moon?"
"60 radii of the Earth even."
"How much does your air weigh?"
He thought he had caught them, but they all told him that air weighed around 900 times less than an identical volume of the purest water, and 19,000 times less than a gold ducat. The little dwarf from Saturn, surprised at their responses, was tempted to accuse of witchcraft the same people he had refused a soul fifteen minutes earlier.
The edition I believe to be original reads "put them off" in place of "caught them."
Finally Micromegas said to them, "Since you know what is exterior to you so well, you must know what is interior even better. Tell me what your soul is, and how you form ideas." The philosophers spoke all at once as before, but they were of different views. The oldest cited Aristotle, another pronounced the name of Descartes; this one here, Malebranche; another Leibnitz; another Locke. An old peripatetic spoke up with confidence: "The soul is an entelechy, and a reason gives it the power to be what it is." This is what Aristotle expressly declares, page 633 of the Louvre edition. He cited the passage.
Here is the passage such as it is transcribed in the edition dated 1750: "Entele'xeia' tis esi kai' lo'gos to? dy'namin e'xontos toude' ei'nai."
"I do not understand Greek very well," said the giant.
"Neither do I," said the philosophical mite.
"Why then," the Sirian retorted, "are you citing some man named Aristotle in the Greek?"
"Because," replied the savant, "one should always cite what one does not understand at all in the language one understands the least."
The Cartesian took the floor and said: "The soul is a pure spirit that has received in the belly of its mother all metaphysical ideas, and which, leaving that place, is obliged to go to school, and to learn all over again what it already knew, and will not know again."
"It is not worth the trouble," responded the animal with the height of eight leagues, "for your soul to be so knowledgeable in its mother's stomach, only to be so ignorant when you have hair on your chin. But what do you understand by the mind?"
"You are asking me?" said the reasoner. "I have no idea. We say that it is not matter--"
"But do you at least know what matter is?"
"Certainly," replied the man. "For example this stone is grey, has such and such a form, has three dimensions, is heavy and divisible."
"Well!" said the Sirian, "this thing that appears to you to be divisible, heavy, and grey, will you tell me what it is? You see some attributes, but behind those, are you familiar with that?
"No," said the other.
"--So you do not know what matter is."
So Micromegas, addressing another sage that he held on a thumb, asked what his soul was, and what it did.
"Nothing at all," said the Malebranchist philosopher. "God does everything for me. I see everything in him, I do everything in him; it is he who does everything that I get mixed up in."
"It would be just as well not to exist," retorted the sage of Sirius. "And you, my friend," he said to a Leibnitzian who was there, "what is your soul?"
"It is," answered the Leibnitzian, "the hand of a clock that tells the time while my body rings out. Or, if you like, it is my soul that rings out while my body tells the time, or my soul is the mirror of the universe, and my body is the border of the mirror. All that is clear."
A small partisan of Locke was nearby, and when he was finally given the floor: "I do not know," said he, "how I think, but I know that I have only ever thought through my senses. That there are immaterial and intelligent substances I do not doubt, but that it is impossible for God to communicate thought to matter I doubt very much. I revere the eternal power. It is not my place to limit it. I affirm nothing, and content myself with believing that many more things are possible than one would think."
Illiad, I, 599. B.
The edition that I believe to be original, and the one dated 1750, reads, "philosophical book, that would teach them of admirable things, and show them the goodness of things."
Although this scene occurs in 1737, as one saw in pages 177 to 188, one could assign the epithet of "old" to Fontenelle, who was 80 at that point, and who died 20 years later. In 1740 he resigned from his position as perpetual secretary.
END OF THE HISTORY OF MICROMEGAS.
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page Prev Page