Look at all the villages of our Europe, so polished, so enlightened, so full of immense libraries, and which now seem to groan under the enormous mass of books. In each village two men at most, on an average, can read and write. Society loses nothing in consequence. All works are performed—building, planting, sowing, reap ing—as they were in the remotest times. The laborer has not even leisure to regret that he has not been taught to consume some hours of the day in reading. This proves that mankind had no need of historical monuments to cultivate the arts really necessary to life.
It is astonishing, not that so many tribes of people are without annals, but that three or four nations have preserved them for five thousand years or thereabouts, through so many violent revolutions which the earth has undergone. Not a line remains of the ancient Egyptian, Chaldaean, or Persian annals, nor of those of the Latins and Etruscans. The only annals that can boast of a little antiquity are the Indian, the Chinese, and the Hebrew.
We cannot give the name of annals to vague and rude fragments of history without date, order, or connection. They are riddles proposed by antiquity to posterity, who understand nothing at all of them. We venture to affirm that Sanchoniathon, who is said to have lived before the time of Moses, composed annals. He probably limited his researches to cosmogony, as Hesiod afterwards did in Greece. We advance this latter opinion only as a doubt; for we write only to be informed, and not to teach.
But what deserves the greatest attention is that Sanchoniathon quotes the books of the Egyptian Thoth, who, he tells us, lived eight hundred years before him Now Sanchoniathon probably wrote in the age in which we place Joseph’s adventure in Egypt. We commonly place the epoch of the promotion of the Jew Joseph to the prime-ministry of Egypt at the year of the creation 2300.
If, then, the books of Thoth were written eight hundred years before, they were written in the year 1500 of the creation. Therefore, their date was a hundred and fifty-six years before the deluge. They must, then, have been engraved on stone, and preserved in the universal inundation. Another difficulty is that Sanchoniathon does not speak of the deluge, and that no Egyptian writer has ever been quoted who does speak of it. But these difficulties vanish before the Book of Genesis, inspired by the Holy Ghost.
We have no intention here to plunge into the chaos which eighty writers have sought to clear up, by inventing different chronologies; we always keep to the Old Testament. We only ask whether in the time of Thoth they wrote in hieroglyphics, or in alphabetical characters? whether stone and brick had yet been laid aside for vellum, or any other material? whether Thoth wrote annals, or only a cosmogony? whether there were some pyramids already built in the time of Thoth? whether Lower Egypt was already inhabited? whether canals had been constructed to receive the waters of the Nile? whether the Chaldaeans had already taught the arts of the Egyptians, and whether the Chaldaeans had received them from the Brahmins? There are persons who have resolved all these questions; which once occasioned a man of sense and wit to say of a grave doctor, “That man must be very ignorant, for he answers every question that is asked him.”
ANTIQUITY
Have you ever, in some village, watched Pierre Aoudri and his wife Peronelle thrusting themselves ahead of their neighbors in a procession? “Our grandfathers,” they say, “were bell-ringers before those who jostle us today owned even a pig-sty.”
The vanity of Pierre, his wife and his neighbors, has nothing to go on; but their tempers rise. The quarrel is important; honor is in question. Proofs are necessary. A scholar who sings in the choir, discovers an old rusty iron pot, marked with an “A,” first letter of the name of the potter who made the pot. Pierre Aoudri persuades himself that it was his ancestors’ helmet. In this way was Caesar descended from a hero and from the goddess Venus. Such is the history of nations; such is, very nearly, our knowledge of antiquity.
The scholars of Armenia demonstrate that the terrestrial paradise was in their land. Some profound Swedes demonstrate that it was near Lake Vener which is visibly a remnant of it. Some Spaniards demonstrate also that it was in Castille; while the Japanese, the Chinese, the Indians, the Africans, the Americans are so unfortunate as not to know even that there was formerly a terrestrial paradise at the source of the Phison, the Gehon, the Tigris and the Euphrates, or, if you prefer it, at the source of the Guadalquivir, the Guadiana, the Douro and the Ebro; for from Phison one easily makes Phaetis, and from Phaetis one makes the Baetis which is the Guadalquivir. The Gehon is obviously the Guadiana, which begins with a “G.” The Ebro, which is in Catalonia, is incontestably the Euphrates, of which the initial letter is “E.”
But a Scotsman appears who demonstrates in his turn that the garden of Eden was at Edinburgh, which has retained its name; and it is to be believed that in a few centuries this opinion will make a fortune.
The whole globe was burned once upon a time, says a man versed in ancient and modem history; for I have read in a newspaper that some absolutely black charcoal has been found in Germany at a depth of a hundred feet, between mountains covered with wood. And one may even suspect that there were charcoal burners in this place.
Phaeton’s adventure makes it clear that everything has boiled right down to the bottom of the sea. The sulphur of Mount Vesuvius proves invincibly that the banks of the Rhine, Danube, Ganges, Nile and the great Yellow River are merely sulphur, nitre and Guiac oil, which only await the moment of explosion to reduce the earth to the ashes that it has already been. The sand on which we walk is evident proof that the earth has been vitrified, and that our globe is really only a glass ball, just as are our ideas.
But if fire has changed our globe, water has produced still more remarkable revolutions. For you can clearly perceive that the sea, the tides of which mount as high as eight feet in our climate, has produced mountains of a height of sixteen to seventeen thousand feet. This is so true that some learned men who have never been in Switzerland have found a big ship with all its rigging petrified on Mount St. Gothard; or perhaps it was at the bottom of a precipice, or somewhere else. But it is quite certain that it was there. So men were originally fish: quod erat demonstrandum.
To descend to a less antique antiquity, let us speak of the times when most of the barbarous nations left their own countries, to seek others which were hardly better. It is true, if there be anything true in ancient history, that there were some Gaulish brigands who went to pillage Rome in the time of Camillus. Other Gaulish brigands had passed, it is said, through Illyria on their way toward Thrace, to hire out their services as murderers to other murderers. They exchanged their blood for bread, and later established themselves in Galatia. But who were these Gauls? were they Berichons and Angevins? They were without a doubt Gauls whom the Romans called Cisalpines, and whom we call Transalpines, famished mountaineers, neighbors of the Alps and the Apennines. The Gauls of the Seine and the Marne did not then know that Rome existed, and could not have thought of passing Mount Cenis, as Hannibal did later, in order to steal the wardrobes of Roman senators whose belongings at that time consisted only of a robe of poor gray material ornamented with an ox-blood band; two little knobs of ivory, or rather dog’s bone, on the arms of a wooden chair; and a piece of rancid bacon in their kitchens.
The Gauls, dying of hunger, and finding nothing to eat in Rome, went off to seek their fortunes under more distant skies, as did the Romans later, when they ravaged so many countries one after the other; as did the peoples of the North when they destroyed the Roman Empire.
And what else is there to tell us even a little of these migrations? Only a few lines that the Romans wrote at hazard; for the Celts, the Velches and the Cauls—those men who are supposed to have been so eloquent—at that time knew neither how to read nor write; neither they nor their bards.
But to infer from such scanty evidence that the Gauls or Celts—afterward conquered by a few of Caesar’s legions, and then by a horde of Bourguignons, and finally by a horde of Sicamores, under one Clodovic—had previously subjugated the whole
world, and given their names and laws to Asia, seems to me a bit too much. The thing is not mathematically impossible, and if it be demonstrated, I will give way. It would be very uncivil to refuse to the Velches what one grants to the Tartars.
ARTS
(That the Recent Birth of the Arts does not Prove the Recent Formation of the Globe.)
All philosophers have thought matter eternal; but the arts appear to be new. Even the art of making bread is of recent origin. The first Romans ate pap; and those conquerors of so many nations had neither windmills nor watermills. This truth seems, at first sight, to con tradict the doctrine of the antiquity of the globe as it now is, or to indicate that our earth has suffered terrible revolutions. Irruptions of barbarians can hardly annihilate arts which have become necessary. Suppose that an army of Negroes were to come upon us, like locusts, from the mountains of southern Africa, through Monomotapa, Monoemugi, etc., traversing Abyssinia, Nubia, Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, and all Europe, ravaging and overturning everything in its way; there would still be a few bakers, tailors, shoemakers, and carpenters left; the necessary arts would revive; luxury alone would be annihilated. This was what happened at the fall of the Roman Empire; even the art of writing became very rare; nearly all those arts which contributed to render life agreeable were for a long time extinct. Now, we are inventing new ones every day.
From all this, no well-grounded inference can be drawn against the antiquity of the globe. For, supposing that a flood of barbarians had entirely swept away the arts of writing and making bread; supposing even that we had had bread, or pens, ink, and paper, only for ten years—the country which could exist for ten years without eating bread or writing down its thoughts could exist for an age, or a hundred thousand ages, without these resources.
It is quite clear that man and the other animals can very well subsist without bakers, without romance-writers, and without divines, as witness America, and as witness also three-fourths of our own continent. The recent birth of the arts among us does not prove the recent formation of the globe, as was pretended by Epicurus, one of our predecessors in speculation, who supposed that the eternal atoms in their declination one day formed our earth by pure chance. Pomponatius used to say: “Se il mondo non e eterno, per tutti santi e molto vecchio”— “If this world be not eternal, by all the saints, it is very old.”
ASS
(The Ass of Verona.)
One must speak the truth, and not deceive one’s readers. I am not positive that the Ass of Verona still exists in all his splendor, because I have not seen him, but the travelers who saw him forty or fifty years ago agree in saying that his relics were enclosed in the body of an artificial ass made for the purpose, which was in the keeping of forty monks of Our Lady of the Organs at Verona, and was carried in procession twice a year. This was one of the most ancient relics of the town. According to the tradition, this ass, having carried our Lord in his entry into Jerusalem, did not choose to abide any longer in that city, but trotted over the sea—which for that purpose became as hard as his hoof—by way of Cyprus, Rhodes, Candia, Malta, and Sicily. Thence he went to sojourn at Aquilea; and at last he settled at Verona, where he lived a long while.
This fable originated in the fact that most asses have a sort of black cross on their backs. There seems to have been an old ass in the neighborhood of Verona, on whose back the populace remarked a finer cross than his brethren could boast of; some good old woman was at hand to say that this was the ass on which Christ rode into Jerusalem; and the ass was honored with a magnificent funeral. The feast established at Verona passed into other countries, and was especially celebrated in France, where during the mass the ass’s praise was sung:
Orientis partibus
Adventabit asinus,
Pulcher et fortissimus.
There was a long procession, headed by a young woman with a child in her arms, mounted on an ass, representing the Virgin Mary going into Egypt. At the end of the mass the priest, instead of saying Ite missa est, brayed three times with all his might, and the people answered in chorus.
We have books on the feast of the ass, and the feast of fools; they furnish material toward a universal history of the human mind.
ASTROLOGY
Astrology may rest on better foundations than Magic. For if no one has ever seen either goblins, or lemures, or goddesses, or peris, or demons, or cacodemons, the predictions of astrologers have often been seen to succeed. If, of two astrologers consulted on the life of a child and on the weather, one says that the child will live to manhood, the other not; if one announces rain, and the other fine weather, it is clear that one of them will be a prophet.
The prime misfortune of the astrologers is that the sky has changed since the rules of the art were established. The sun, which at the equinox was in Aries in the time of the Argonauts, is today in Taurus; and the astrologers, to the great hurt of their art, today attribute to one house of the sun what belongs visibly to another. This, however, is not a conclusive argument against astrology. The masters of the art deceive themselves; but it is not demonstrated that the art cannot exist.
There is no absurdity in saying: Such and such a child is born in the waxing of the moon, during stormy weather, at the rising of such and such star; his constitution has been feeble, and his life unhappy and short, which is the ordinary lot of poor constitutions: whereas this child, on the contrary, was born when the moon was full, the sun strong, the weather calm, at the rising of such and such star; his constitution has been good, his life long and happy. If these observations had been repeated, if they had been found accurate, experience would have been able after some thousands of centuries to form an art which it would have been difficult to doubt. One would have thought, with some reason, that men are like trees and vegetables which must be planted and sown only in certain seasons. It would have been of no avail against the astrologers to say: My son was born at a fortunate time, and nevertheless died in his cradle. The astrologer would have replied: It often happens that trees planted in the proper season perish; I answered to you for the stars, but I did not answer for the malformation you communicated to your child. Astrology operates only when no cause opposes itself to the good the stars can do.
One would have succeeded no better in discrediting the astrologer by saying: Of two children who were born in the same minute, one has been king, the other has been only churchwarden of his parish. For the astrologer could very well have defended himself by pointing out that the peasant made his fortune when he became churchwarden, as the prince when he became king.
And if one alleged that a bandit hanged by Sixtus V was born at the same time as Sixtus V himself, who from a pig-herd became Pope, the astrologers would say there had been a mistake of a few seconds, and that it is impossible, according to the rules, for the same star to bestow the triple crown and the gallows. Only because a host of experiences belied predictions, did men at last perceive that the art is illusory; but, before being undeceived, they were long credulous.
One of the most famous mathematicians in Europe, named Stoffler, who flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and who worked for a long time on the calendar reform which was proposed at the Council of Constance, foretold a universal flood for the year 1524. This flood was supposed to arrive in the month of February, and nothing was more plausible; for Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars were then in conjunction in the sign of Pisces. All the peoples of Europe, Asia and Africa, who heard of the prediction, were dismayed. Everyone expected the flood, rainbows to the contrary. Several contemporary authors record that the inhabitants of the maritime provinces of Germany hastened to sell their lands dirt cheap to those who had the most money, and who were less credulous than they. Everyone provided himself with a boat to serve as an ark. A Toulouse doctor, named Auriol, had a great ark made for himself, his family, and his friends; the same precautions were taken throughout a large part of Italy. At last the month of February arrived, and not a drop of water fell. Never was there a drier month, an
d never were the astrologers more embarrassed. Nevertheless they were neither discouraged nor neglected, and almost all princes continued to consult them.
I have not the honor of being a prince; but the celebrated Count of Boulainvilliers, and an Italian named Colonna, who was highly thought of in Paris, both foretold that I should most certainly die at the age of thirty-two. I have been malicious enough to outwit them by nearly thirty years already, wherefore I humbly beg their pardon.
ATOMS
The only question now at issue is, whether the author of nature has formed primordial parts unsusceptible of division, or if all is continually dividing and changing into other elements. The first system seems to account for everything, and the second, hitherto at least, for nothing.
If the first elements of things were not indestructible, one element might at last swallow up all the rest, and change them into its own substance. Hence, perhaps, it was that Empedocles imagined that everything came from fire, and would be destroyed by fire.
This question of atoms involves another famous question; that of the infinite divisibility of matter. The word atom signifies without parts—not to be divided. You divide it in thought only, for if you were to divide it in reality it would no longer be an atom.
You may divide a grain of gold into eighteen million visible parts; a grain of copper dissolved in spirit of sal ammoniac has exhibited upwards of twenty-two thousand parts; but when you have arrived at the last element the atom escapes the microscope, and you can divide no further except in imagination.
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