part I

think the rogue will be the death of me; indeed on more than ten occasions I have been on the point of giving him my malediction."

Although I bit my lips I had great difficulty to keep myself from laughing at this world upside down. To break off this burlesque pedagogy, which no doubt would have made me burst forth in the end, I begged him to tell me what he meant by the journey of the Town he had just spoken of, whether the houses and the walls could move. He replied:

"My dear friend, our cities are divided into the mobile and the sedentary. The mobile, like that in which we are now, are constructed as follows: the architect builds each palace, as you see, of very light wood and inserts four wheels underneath it. In the thickness of one of the walls he places large and numerous bellows, whose nozzles pass in a horizontal line through the upper story from one gable to the other. When it is desired to move the town somewhere (for we change our air at every season), each one hangs out a number of large sails from one side of his house in front of the bellows; then he winds up a spring to make them play and in less than eight days the continuous blasts vomited by these windy monsters against the sails carry their houses, if they wish, more than a hundred leagues.

"The architecture of the second kind, which we call sedentary, is as follows: the houses are almost like your towers, except that they are made of wood and that in the middle they have a large strong screw which goes from the cellar to the roof to raise or lower them at will. Well, the earth underneath is hollowed out as deep as the building is high, and the whole thing is constructed in this manner so that when the frosts begin to fall cold from the sky, they can lower their houses to the bottom of the hole by turning them; and then they cover the tower and the hollow part about it with large skins and so shelter themselves from the inclemency of the air. But as soon as the soft breath of Spring makes the air milder, they return to the daylight by means of the large screw of which I spoke."

I think he wished to stop speaking there, but I began thus:

"Faith, sir, I should never have thought so expert a mason could be a philosopher, did I not have you as witness. For this reason, since we are not going to-day, you will have plenty of leisure to explain to us this eternal origin of the world with which you entertained us just now. In recompense, I promise you that as soon as I return to the Moon, whence my instructor"--I pointed to my demon--"will prove to you that I came, I will disseminate your fame by relating the fine things you tell me. I see that you laugh at this promise, because you do not believe the Moon is a world and still less that I am one of its inhabitants. But I can assure you that the people of that World take this one for a Moon and will laugh at me when I say their Moon is a World, that it has fields and inhabitants."

He only replied by a smile, and then he began to speak as follows:

"When we try to go back to the origin of this Great All we are forced to run into three or four absurdities, and so it is reasonable to take the path which makes us stumble least. The first obstacle that stops us is the Eternity of the World. Men's minds are not strong enough to conceive it and, because they are not able to imagine that so vast, so beautiful, so well regulated an Universe could have made itself, they take refuge in Creation. But, like one who plunges into a river for fear of being wet with rain, they run from the arms of a dwarf to the pity of a giant; and they do not even escape the difficulty, for they give to God the eternity they took from the world because they could not understand it. As if it were easier to imagine it in the one than in the other! This absurdity, then, or this giant of which I spoke, is Creation; for, tell me truly, has it ever been conceived how something could be made from nothing? Alas! There are such infinite differences between Nothing and one single atom that the acutest brain could not penetrate them. To escape this inexplicable labyrinth you must admit a Matter co-eternal with God, and then it is unnecessary to admit a God, since the World could have existed without Him. But, you will say, even if I grant you this Eternal Matter, how did this chaos become order of itself? Well, I shall explain it to you.

"My little Animal, after you have mentally separated each little visible body into an infinity of little invisible bodies, you are to imagine that the infinite Universe is composed of nothing but these infinite atoms which are very solid, very incorruptible, and very simple. Some are cubes, some parallelograms, some angular, some round, some pointed, some pyramidal, some hexagonal, some oval, and all act differently according to their shape. And to prove this, place a very round ivory ball upon a very smooth surface; and at the slightest movement you give it, it will be a half-quarter of an hour before it stops; to which I add that if it were as perfectly round as some of the atoms of which I speak, it would never stop. Then if art is capable of inclining a body to perpetual motion, why should we not believe that Nature can do it? It is the same with other shapes; one, like the square, demands perpetual rest; others, a movement sideways; others, a half-movement like palpitation. When the round, whose nature is to move, joins with the pyramidal, it perhaps makes what we call fire, because fire not only moves without resting but pierces and penetrates easily. Moreover, fire produces different effects according to the size and quantity of the angles where the round shape is joined; the fire of pepper is different from the fire of sugar, the fire of sugar from that of cinnamon, the fire of cinnamon from that of cloves, and this in turn from the fire of a faggot. Well then, fire, which is the constructor and destructor of the parts and of the whole of the Universe, gathers into an oak the quantity of shapes necessary for the composition of that oak. But, you will say, how could mere chance collect in one place all the things necessary to produce this oak? I reply that it is not extraordinary that matter so placed should make an oak, but it would have been very much more marvellous if an oak had not been formed when matter was thus disposed. Had there been a little less of certain shapes, it would have been an elm, a poplar, a willow, an elder-tree, heather or moss; a little more of certain other shapes and it would have been a sensitive plant, an oyster in a shell, a worm, a fly, a frog, a sparrow, a monkey, a man. When you throw three dice on the table and they all turn up twos; or three, four, five; or two sixes and a one; do you say: 'What a miracle! each die has turned up the same number, when so many other numbers might be turned up; what a miracle! Three dice have turned up three successive numbers; what a miracle! Two sixes and the opposite of the other six has turned up!' I am certain that a man of wit like you would not make these exclamations, for since there are only a certain quantity of numbers on the dice, it is impossible but that one of them should turn up. You are surprised that this matter, mixed up pell-mell by chance, should have built up a man, since so many things are necessary to the construction of his being. But you do not know that this matter, moving towards the design of a man, has stopped a hundred million times on the way to form sometimes a stone, sometimes lead, sometimes coral, sometimes a flower, sometimes a comet, according to the excess or deficiency of certain shapes necessary or unnecessary to compose a man. It is not marvellous that an infinite quantity of matter changing and moving continually should have met together to make the few animals, vegetables and minerals which we see, any more than it is marvellous for a royal pair to turn up in a hundred throws of the dice; and it is impossible but that something should be made from this movement. This thing will always be wondered at by a scatterbrain who will not comprehend how nearly it was not made at all. When the large river [Image] turns a mill, moves the works of a clock, and the little rivulet [Image] does nothing but run and sometimes overflow, you will not say the river has intelligence, because you know it has met with things so placed as to cause all these masterpieces. If a mill had not been placed in its path, it would not have ground the corn; if it had not met the clock it would not have marked the hours; and if the rivulet I spoke of had met the same things it would have performed the same miracles. It is the same with fire, which moves by itself; for when it found organs proper for the agitation necessary to reason, it reasoned; when it found those proper to feel only, it felt; when it found those proper to vegetation, it vegetated. And to prove this, tear out the eyes of a man who is enabled to see by this fire or this soul, and he will cease to see, just as our river will not mark the hours if the clock is destroyed.

"In fine, these first and indivisible atoms make a circle upon which the most embarrassing difficulties of physics roll without difficulty. Even the operation of the senses, which nobody yet has been able to understand, I explain very easily with these little bodies. Let us begin with sight, which, as the most incomprehensible, deserves our first attention. As I suppose, the coverings of the eye, whose openings are like those of glass, transmit the fire-dust we call visual rays, which is stopped by some opaque matter making it rebound; for this fire-dust meets on the way the image of the object which repulses it and, as this image is simply an infinite number of little bodies continually thrown off in equal superficies from the subject looked at, the image thrusts back the rays to our eyes.

"You will not fail to object to me that glass is an opaque and closely-packed body; yet instead of throwing back these other little bodies it allows them to pierce it. But I reply that the pores of glass are made in the same shape as these atoms of fire which pass through it; and just as a wheat-sieve is not fit to sift oats, nor an oat-sieve to sift wheat, so a deal box thin enough to transmit sound is not penetrable by sight and a piece of transparent crystal which allows itself to be pierced by sight is not penetrable by hearing."

I could not prevent myself from interrupting: "But how do you explain by these principles, sir, the fact that we are reflected in a mirror?"

"It is very easy", he replied, "you must suppose that the rays of our eyes pass through the glass and meet behind it a non-diaphanous body which casts them off; they return the way they came and they find spread out upon the mirror the little bodies that move in equal superficies from our own and carry them back to our eyes. Our imagination, which is hotter than the other faculties of the soul, attracts the most subtle of them, with which it makes a reduced portrait.

"The operation of hearing is no more difficult to understand. To be more succinct, let us consider it only in harmony. Suppose then a lute touched by the hands of a master of the art. You will ask me how it happens that I perceive a thing I do not see, so far from me? Do sponges go out of my ears to suck up this music and bring it to me? Or does this lute player beget in my head another little player with another little lute, who has been ordered to sing me the same airs? No. This miracle is caused by the vibrating chord striking the little bodies which compose the air and so driving them into my brain and gently piercing it with these little corporeal nothings. When the string is stretched, the sound is high, because it drives the atoms more vigorously; and the organ so penetrated gives the fantasy sufficient of them to make its picture. If there is not enough, our memory does not complete its image and we are forced to repeat the same sound to it, so that for example it may take from the materials given it by the strains of a saraband enough to complete the portrait of that saraband. But this operation is almost nothing. The wonderful thing is that by this means we are moved sometimes to joy, sometimes to rage, sometimes to pity, sometimes to reflection, sometimes to pain. This happens, I imagine, when the movement received by these little bodies meets within us other little bodies moving in the same way or, on account of their shape, capable of the same motion. The new-comers excite their hosts to move with them and so, when a violent tune meets the fire of our blood (which is disposed to the same movement) it incites this fire to thrust its way out. This is what we call the ardour of courage. If a sound is gentler and has only strength enough to raise a slighter, more wavering flame (because the matter is more volatile), it moves along the nerves, membranes and channels of our flesh and excites the tickling we call joy. The ebullition of the other passions happens in the same way according to whether the little bodies are thrown against us more or less violently, whether they receive movement by meeting other vibrations, and according to what they find to move within us.

"The demonstration of touch is not more difficult. There is a perpetual emission of little bodies from all palpable matter; the more we touch it the more they are evaporated, because we squeeze them out of the object we handle like water from a sponge when we compress it. Hard bodies report to the organ their solidity; supple bodies, their softness; the rough, their harshness; the burning, their heat; the frozen, their cold. And as a proof of this, observe that hands hardened by labour are not so sensitive in discerning by the touch, and this is because of the thickness of the callus, which is neither porous nor animated and therefore transmits with great difficulty these fumes of matter. Some will desire to know where the organ of touch resides. For my part, I think it extends over all the superficies of our mass, since it happens through the agency of our nerves; and our skin is merely an imperceptible and continuous texture of nerves. I imagine, however, that the nearer to the head the limb with which we touch, the sooner we perceive. You may make the experiment as follows: if we close our eyes and touch something with the hand we discover what it is immediately, but if on the contrary we touch it with the foot we are some time in finding out what it is. The reason for this is that our nerves, whose matter is no more compact than that of our skin (which is everywhere pitted with little holes), lose many of these little atoms on the way through the small channels of their texture before the atoms reach the brain, the end of their journey.

"It remains for me to prove that smell and taste are caused also by the agency of these same little bodies. Tell me, then, when I taste a fruit, is it not through the moisture of my mouth melting it? Admit then that since there are different salts in a pear, which by being dissolved are split up into little bodies differing in shape from those making the taste of a plum, they must pierce our palate in a different way; just as the gash made by a pike piercing me is unlike that which I endure from a pistol-bullet, and as a pistol-bullet causes me a pain different from that of a steel arrow-head.

"I have nothing to say about smell, since even your philosophers admit that it takes place through a continual emission of little bodies cast off from their mass which strike our noses as they pass.

"On this principle I will now explain to you the creation, the harmony and the influence of the celestial globes with the immutable variety of meteors."

He was about to continue when our old host entered and turned our philosopher's thoughts toward departure. He brought with him crystals filled with glow-worms to lighten the room, but these little fire-insects lose much of their light when they are not freshly gathered and as these were ten days old they hardly shone at all. My demon did not wait for the company to be inconvenienced by this; he went up to his room and returned immediately with two fire balls, so brilliant that we were all surprised he did not burn his fingers.

"These incombustible torches", said he, "will serve us better than your clusters of worms. They are sun-rays which I have purged of their heat; otherwise the corrosive qualities of its fire would have dazzled and hurt your sight. I have extracted the light and shut it in these transparent balls I am holding. This should not be a matter of great surprise to you; I was born in the Sun and so it is no more difficult for me to condense the rays which are the dust of that world than for you to collect the dust or atoms which are the pulverised earth of this world."

When we had finished praising this child of the Sun, it was late, and the young host sent his father home with the two philosophers, with a dozen balls of glow-worms hanging from his four legs. The rest of us, that is to say, the young host, my Instructor and I, went to bed by order of the Physionome. This time he put me in a room of violets and lilies and had me tickled in the usual way to send me to sleep. The next morning about nine o'clock my demon came in and told me he had just returned from the palace, whence he had been sent for by [Image], one of the Queen's waiting-women. She had inquired after me and said she still persisted in keeping her word, which is to say that she would gladly follow me if I would take her with me to the other World.

"I was greatly edified", he continued, "when I found that the principal motive for her journey was directed towards making herself a Christian. I have promised to help her design with all my ability and for this purpose to invent a machine capable of holding three or four persons, in which you can rise up together. From to-day onwards I shall apply myself seriously to the execution of this project. To amuse you during my absence here is a book which I brought from my native land. It is called _A Voyage to the Sun_. I am also giving you another, which I rate more highly, the _Great Works of the Philosophers_, composed by one of the greatest Wits of the Sun. He proves in it that all things are true and shows the way to unite physically the truths of each contradiction; for example, that white is black and black is white, that you can be and not be at the same time, that there can be a mountain without a valley, that nothing is something and that all things which exist do not exist. But notice that he proves these unheard-of paradoxes without any sophistry or captious reasoning. When you are tired of reading you can take a walk or converse with your companion, our young host. His mind has many charms; but what displeases me in him is his impiety. If he scandalizes you or shakes your faith by his reasoning do not fail to come at once and tell them to me; I will resolve the difficulties for you. Another would tell you to leave his company directly he began to philosophize on these matters, but he is extremely vain and I am certain he would take your flight for a defeat and would imagine your belief to be contrary to reason if you refused to listen to his reasons. Remember to live free."

With this phrase he left me, for in that country it is the method of leave-taking; and, in the same way, "Good day," or "Your servant, sir", is expressed by the compliment: "Sage, love me, since I love you."

He had scarcely left me when I began to examine attentively my books. The boxes, that is to say their covers, seemed to me admirable for their richness; one was carved from a single diamond incomparably more brilliant than ours, the second appeared to be a monstrous pearl cleft in two. My demon had translated these books into the language of that world; but as I have not yet spoken of their printing, I will explain the construction of these two volumes.

At the opening of the box I found something in metal almost similar to our clocks, filled with an infinite number of little springs and imperceptible machines. It is a book indeed, but a miraculous book without pages or letters; in fine, it is a book to learn from which eyes are useless, only ears are needed. When someone wishes to read he winds up the machine with a large number of all sorts of keys; then he turns the pointer towards the chapter he wishes to hear, and immediately, as if from a man's mouth or a musical instrument, this machine gives out all the distinct and different sounds which serve as the expression of speech between the noble Moon-dwellers.[48]

[Footnote 48: The likeness to a gramophone is obvious.]

When I had reflected on this miraculous invention in book-making I was no longer surprised that the young men of that country possessed more knowledge at sixteen or eighteen than grey-beards in our World. Since they know how to read as soon as they speak, they are never without reading. Indoors, out of doors, in town, travelling, on foot, or on horseback, they can have in their pocket or hanging from their saddle-bows as many as thirty of these books, and they have only to wind up a spring to hear a chapter, or several chapters, if they are in the mood to hear a whole book. In this way you have continually about you all great men, living or dead, and you hear them viva voce.

This present occupied me for more than an hour, and then hanging them upon myself like earrings I went out to walk in the town. I had not passed out of the street which ran opposite our house when towards the other end I met a large number of mournful people. Four of them carried on their shoulders a sort of coffin wrapped in black. I asked a bystander what was the meaning of this procession so similar to a funeral in my own country. He replied that the wicked [Image], whose name was expressed among the people by a blow on the right knee, had been convicted of envy and ingratitude: yesterday he had died and the Parliament had condemned him more than twenty years ago to die a natural death in his bed and to be buried after his death. I began to laugh at this reply and he asked me: "Why?"

"You surprise me", I replied, "by telling me that a long life, a peaceful death and a pompous burial which in our World are signs of benediction, serve in this as an exemplary punishment."

"What! You consider burial a mark of benediction?" retorted this man. "On your honour now, can you conceive anything more terrible than a corpse moving under swarms of worms, at the mercy of toads which gnaw its cheeks; in fine, the plague dressed in a man's body. Good God! The mere thought that even when dead my face should be wrapped in a cloth and I should have five feet of earth on my mouth makes it difficult for me to breathe! That wretch you see carried there, in addition to the infamy of being cast into a pit, was condemned to have his funeral accompanied by a hundred and fifty of his friends, and as a punishment to them for having loved a man who was envious and ungrateful they were bidden to appear at his burial with mournful faces. Had it not been for the mercy of the judges who imputed his crimes in part to his lack of intelligence, his friends would have been commanded to weep. Except for criminals every one here is burned. And this is a very decent and a very reasonable custom, for we think that fire separates the pure from the impure. Moreover, its heat draws to it by sympathy that natural heat which composed the soul and gives it the power to rise continually until it reaches some star, the earth of people more immaterial than we and more intellectual, because their temperament must correspond to and participate in the purity of the globe they inhabit. This radical flame, being rectified still more by the subtlety of that world's elements, finally composes one of the citizens of that burning country.

"However, this is not our best method of burial. When one of our philosophers comes to an age where he feels his mind grow weak and the ice of years impede the movements of his soul, he gathers his friends together for a sumptuous banquet. Then he puts before them the motives which have made him resolve to take leave of Nature, the small hope he has of being able to add anything to his good actions: they either grant him the favour, that is they order him to die, or they severely command him to live. When the majority have placed the disposition of his life in his hands, he announces the day and place to his dearest friends. They purge themselves and fast for twenty-four hours. When they come to the sage's house, they sacrifice to the Sun and enter the room where the hero awaits them lying upon a ceremonial bed. Each one in turn flies to embrace him. When it comes to his best friend, the friend kisses him tenderly, leans upon his stomach, joins mouth to mouth, and with his right hand, which he keeps free, bathes a dagger in his heart. The Lover does not remove his lips from those of his Beloved until he feels he is dead. He then withdraws the steel from his breast, places his mouth on the wound, and drinks his blood and continues to suck until he can swallow no more. Another succeeds him immediately and they carry the first to a bed; when the second is satiated he is taken away to a bed and gives place to a third. Finally, when they are all satiated, after about four or five hours, they bring to each a girl of about sixteen or seventeen. During the next three or four days they enjoy the pleasures of love and they are fed exclusively on the dead man's flesh, which they eat raw, so that if anything is born from these embraces they may be almost sure it is their friend who lives again."

I did not give this man the opportunity of discoursing further, for I left him there and continued my walk. Although I cut it short, the time I spent on the peculiarities of the sights and in visiting certain districts of the town made me arrive more than two hours after dinner was ready. They asked me why I came so late.

"It is not my fault", I replied to the cook, who was complaining of it, "several times in the street I asked what time it was, but they only answered by opening the mouth, clenching the teeth and writhing the face askew."

"What!" cried everybody, "you did not know they were telling you the time that way?"

"Faith", I replied, "they might show their great noses to the Sun all they would before I should have learnt it."

"'Tis a convenience", said they, "which permits them to dispense with a watch. With their teeth they make so exact a dial that when they wish to tell someone the time they simply open their lips and the shadow of their nose falling upon them marks the hour as if upon a dial. Now, in order that you may know why every one in this land has a large nose, learn that as soon as a woman is delivered the midwife carries the child to the Prior of the Seminary. And, at the end of a year his nose is measured before the assembly of experts by the Syndic, and if by this measure it is found too short, the child is reputed a Snub-nose and handed over to the priests, who castrate him. You will perhaps ask the reason of this barbarity and how it happens that we, among whom virginity is a crime, establish continence by force? Learn then that we act in this way from thirty centuries of observation showing that a large nose is a sign over our door that says, 'Here lodges a witty, prudent, courteous, affable, generous and liberal man', and that a small nose is the sign-post of the opposite vices. That is why we make eunuchs of our snub-nosed children, for the Republic prefers to have no children from them than children like them."

He was still talking when a man came in completely naked. I immediately sat down and put on my hat to do him honour, for in that country these are marks of the greatest respect one can show a man.

"The Kingdom", said he, "desires that you will advertise the magistrates before leaving for your country because a mathematician has just promised the council that if, when you reach your world, you will construct a certain machine which he will show you corresponding to another which he will have ready here, he will draw your world to him and join it to our globe."

As soon as he was gone I asked the young host: "I beg you will tell me what is meant by that bronze, shaped like our parts of shame, which hung from that man's belt? During the time that I lived at the court in a cage I saw quantities of them, but as I was almost always surrounded by the Queen's waiting-women I feared I should be lacking in respect to their sex and rank if I directed the conversation to so homely a matter in their presence."

He replied: "Here the females no more than the males would be so ungrateful as to blush at the sight of that which made them; the virgins are not ashamed to respect upon us, in memory of their mother Nature, the one thing which bears her name. Know then that the scarf with which this man is honoured and upon which hangs like a medal the shape of a virile member, is the symbol of a gentleman and the mark which distinguishes a noble from a commoner."

I protest this paradox seemed to me so extravagant that I could not keep from laughing.

"This seems to me a most extraordinary custom", said I to my young host, "since in our world to wear a sword is the mark of nobility."

He was not moved by this but exclaimed: "My little man, the nobles in your world are mad to parade an instrument which is the mark of a hangman, which is only forged for our destruction and is indeed the sworn enemy of everything that lives! And just as mad on the contrary to hide a member without which we should be in the category of things that are not, the Prometheus of every animal and the indefatigable repairer of Nature's weaknesses! Woe to the country where the marks of generation are ignominious and where those of destruction are honourable! You call that member, 'the parts of shame', as if there were anything more glorious than to give life and anything more infamous than to take it away."

During this discourse we continued to dine and as soon as we arose from our beds we went into the garden to take the air. The diversity and the beauty of the place delayed our conversation for some time. But since the noblest desire which then moved me was to convert to our religion a soul so uplifted above the vulgar mob, I exhorted him a thousand times not to smirch with matter the fair genius with which Heaven had endowed him, to draw out of the throng of animals a spirit capable of the Beatific Vision, in fine, to think seriously of uniting some day his immortality with pleasure rather than with pain.

"What!" replied he, with a peal of laughter, "you think your soul immortal to the exclusion of that of beasts? My dear friend, without exaggeration your pride is very insolent! And, I beseech you, whence do you deduce this immortality to the prejudice of the Beasts? Is it because we are gifted with reason and they not? To begin with, I deny that and whenever you please I will prove to you that they reason like ourselves. But even if it were true that reason has been granted us as a prerogative and that it was a privilege reserved to our species alone, does that mean that God must enrich man with immortality when He has already squandered reason upon him? I suppose I should give, in that case, a _pistole_ to a beggar because I gave him a _crown_ yesterday? You yourself see the falsity of the argument and that, on the contrary, if I am just, I ought to give a _crown_ to another rather than a _pistole_ to the first, since the other has had nothing from me. We must conclude from this, my dear friend, that God, who is a thousand times more just than we are, will not have given everything to some and nothing to others. To allege as an example the case of the eldest sons in your world, whose share engulfs almost all the property of the family, is simply a weakness of fathers, who are desirous of perpetuating their names and fear they may be lost or dissipated by poverty. But God is not capable of error, and has been careful not to commit one so great; then, since there is neither before nor after in God's eternity, with him the younger sons are no younger than the elder."

I do not dissimulate that this reason shook me.

"Permit me", said I, "to break off upon this matter, for I do not feel myself strong enough to reply to you. I shall go seek a solution of this difficulty from our mutual Instructor."

Without waiting for his reply I immediately went to the room of this able demon, and waiving any preliminaries I put before him the objections to the immortality of our souls which I had just heard, and this is what he replied:

"My son, this young hot-head is desirous of persuading you that it is unlikely man's soul should be immortal because God, who has called Himself the common Father of all beings, would be unjust if He had favoured one species and abandoned generally all the others to annihilation or misfortune. It is true these reasons glitter a little at a distance. Although I might ask him how he knows that what is just to us is also just to God, how he knows that God measures with our measuring-rod, how he knows that our laws and customs, instituted only to remedy our own disorders, serve also to cut out pieces from the omnipotence of God; I will pass over all these things together with all that has been so divinely answered on this point by the fathers of your Church and I will discover to you a mystery not yet revealed.

"My son, you know that a tree is made from earth, a pig from a tree and a man from a pig. May we not then believe, since all creatures in Nature tend to become more perfect, that they aspire to become men, whose essence is the result of the finest and best imagined mixture in the world and the sole link between the life of brutes and of angels? Only a pedant would deny that these metamorphoses occur. Do we not see that an apple-tree sucks up and digests the surrounding turf by means of the heat of its germ as if through its mouth; that a pig devours its fruit and thereby converts it into a part of itself; and that a man by eating this pig reheats this dead flesh, joins it to himself, and so causes this animal to live again in a more noble species? Thus the Great Pontiff upon whose head you see a tiara was a bunch of grass in my garden sixty years ago. Since God is the common Father of all His creatures and should love them all equally, is it not most credible that by a metempsychosis more reasonable than that of the Pythagoreans all sensible life, all vegetable life, in fine, all matter, will pass through man and then the great day of Judgment will come, to which the prophets direct the secrets of their philosophy?"

Fully satisfied I returned to the garden and began to repeat to my companion what our Master had taught me, when the Physionome arrived to take us to dinner and to the dormitory. I shall not particularize these, because I ate and went to bed as on the preceding day.

The next morning as soon as I was awake I went to arouse my antagonist. "'Tis as great a miracle", said I when I reached him, "to find a great wit like yours buried in sleep, as to see fire without movement."

He was annoyed by this clumsy compliment. "But", cried he in a passionate rage, "will you never free your mouth as well as your reason from these fabulous expressions of miracles? Such words disgrace the name of philosopher. Since the wise man sees nothing in the world which he does not understand or which he considers incapable of being understood, he ought to abominate all these expressions like miracles, prodigies, supernatural events, invented by the stupid to excuse the weaknesses of their minds."

I then felt conscientiously obliged to say something to disabuse him.

"Although you do not believe in miracles", I replied, "they do not cease to occur, and many of them. I have seen them with my own eyes. I have seen more than twenty sick people miraculously cured."

"You say", he interrupted, "that these people were cured miraculously, but you do not know that the power of the imagination is able to combat all maladies, because there is a certain natural balsam extended through our bodies containing all the qualities contrary to all those of every disease that attacks us. Our imagination is warmed by the pain and seeks in its place the specific remedy to oppose the venom, and so cures us. For this reason the ablest doctor in our world advises a patient rather to take an ignorant doctor whom he thinks very skilful than to take a very skilful doctor whom he thinks ignorant, because he believes that our imagination works for our health and when only slightly aided by remedies is capable of curing us, but that the most powerful remedies are too weak when not applied by the imagination! You are surprised that the first men in your world lived so many centuries without having any knowledge of medicine? Their constitution was strong and this universal balm had not been dissipated by the drugs with which your doctors undermine you. To become convalescent they had only to desire strongly and to imagine they were cured; immediately their clear, vigorous and taut imagination plunged into this vital oil, applied the active to the passive and almost in a twinkling they were as well as formerly. Even to-day these astonishing cures continue, but the populace attributes them to a miracle. For my part, I do not believe in a miracle at all and my reason is that it is more easy for all these talkers to be wrong than for the thing to happen. Let me ask them this: A man has a fever and he has been cured. It is clear that during his illness he wished very ardently to recover his health and so made vows; it necessarily followed, since he was ill, that he should die, that he should remain ill or that he should get better. If he had died they would have said God had rewarded him for his pains; they might have maliciously equivocated by saying that He had cured the sick man of all his ills according to his prayers. If his infirmity had persisted they would have said he lacked faith; but because he recovered it is a visible miracle! Is it not far more likely that his fantasy, excited by a violent desire for health, achieved this end? I admit that many of these gentlemen who make vows recover; but how many more do we see who have perished miserably with their vows?"

"But at least", I replied, "if what you say of this balsam is true, it is a proof that our soul is reasonable, since without making use of our reason and without leaning on the support of our will it knows of itself how to apply the active to the passive as if it were outside us. Well, if it is reasonable when it is separated from us we must necessarily conclude that it is spiritual; and if you admit it is spiritual I conclude that it is immortal, since death only happens to animals through those changes of form whereof matter alone is capable."

The young man then sat up in bed and making me sit down also, spoke in much these terms:

"I am not surprised that the souls of beasts (which are corporeal) should die, since they are probably only a harmony of the four qualities, the strength of the blood, a relationship of well-proportioned organs; but I am very surprised that our incorporeal, intellectual and immortal soul should be constrained to leave us for the same reasons that make an ox perish. Has the soul made an agreement with our body that, when the body receives a sword thrust in the heart, a leaden bullet in the brain, a musket shot through the trunk, it will abandon immediately its ruined house? But the soul often breaks this contract, for some die of a wound which others escape; and so every soul must make a separate bargain with its body. Truly this soul which, as they make us believe, is so clever, is very foolish to leave its lodging when it sees that by leaving this place it will find its apartment marked out for it in Hell. And if this soul were spiritual and reasonable by itself, as they say, if it were as capable of intelligence when separated from our body as it is when invested by the body, how is it that those born blind, with all the advantages of this intellectual soul, are not able to imagine what sight is? Why do the deaf not hear? Is it because they are not yet deprived of all their senses by death? What! I cannot then make use of my right hand because I have a left as well? To prove that the soul cannot act without senses although it is spiritual, they allege the case of a painter who cannot make a picture without brushes. Yes, but that is not to say that when a painter, who cannot work without brushes, has lost his colours, his pencils, and his canvases as well, he can then do better. On the contrary, the more obstacles are opposed to his work the more impossible it will be for him to paint. However, they maintain that this soul, which can only act imperfectly when it has lost one of its tools in the course of life, can work perfectly when it has lost them all after our death. If they repeat to us that the soul does not need these instruments, I shall repeat to them that they ought to whip the blind who pretend they cannot see."

"But", said I, "if our soul dies, as I see you wish to deduce, the resurrection you expect would be only a chimera, for God would have to recreate our souls and that would not be resurrection."

He interrupted me and shook his head.

"Hey! Faith!" cried he, "who has deluded you with that fairy-tale? What! You? What! I? What! My maid-servant be resurrected?"

"This is not an amusing tale", I replied, "it is an indubitable truth which I will prove to you."

"And I", said he, "will prove to you the contrary. To begin with, suppose that you ate a Mohammedan; you convert him consequently into your own substance! Is it not true that when you have digested this Mohammedan he is changed partly into flesh, partly into blood, partly into seed? You embrace your wife and with the seed drawn entirely from this Mohammedan's body you cast the mould of a pretty little Christian. I ask; will the Mohammedan have his body at the resurrection? If the earth yields it up to him, the little Christian will not have his body, since it is only a part of the Mohammedan's. If you tell me that the Christian will have his, God will have to take from the Mohammedan that which the little Christian only received from the Mohammedan's body. And so inevitably one or the other will be without a body! You will reply perhaps that God will reproduce from matter a body to furnish the one who is without a body? Yes, but another difficulty stops us. Suppose the damned Mohammedan is resurrected and God gives him a new body, because the Christian has stolen his old one, since the body alone does not make the man, any more than the soul alone, but the two joined together in one person, and since the soul and the body each departed from the man whole, if God then makes the Mohammedan another body, it is no longer the same individual. So God damns a man who is not the man who has merited Hell. One body has whored, it has criminally abused all the senses and, to punish this body, God casts into the fire another, which is virgin and pure, and has never lent its organs to the performance of the slightest crime. And what is even more ridiculous is that this body will have deserved both Hell and Paradise; for, in so far as it is Mohammedan, it must be damned, and in so far as it is Christian, it must be saved. Thus God cannot put it in Paradise without being unjust and rewarding with glory instead of with the damnation it deserved as Mohammedan; and He cannot cast it into Hell without being unjust and rewarding with eternal death instead of the blessedness it deserved as Christian. Then, if He wishes to be just, He must both save and damn this man eternally."

"I have nothing to reply", I answered, "to your sophistic arguments against the resurrection; God has said it and God cannot lie."

"Not so fast", he retorted, "you are still at 'God has said'; you must first prove there is a God, which for my