第60章

Guess if you can how it is all done.THE PHILOSOPHER: Certainly, since your great everything does not know mathematics, and since all your laws are most profoundly geometrical, there must be an eternal geometer who directs you, a supreme intelligence who presides over your operations.NATURE: You are right; I am water, earth, fire, atmosphere, metal, mineral, stone, vegetable, animal.I feel indeed that there is in me an intelligence; you have an intelligence, you do not see it.I do not see mine either; I feel this invisible power; -I cannot know it: why should you, who are but a small part of me, want to know what I do not know? THE PHILOSOPHER: We are curious.I want to know how being so crude in your mountains, in your deserts, in your seas, you appear nevertheless so industrious in your animals, in your vegetables? NATURE: My poor child, do you want me to tell you the truth? It is that I have been given a name which-does not suit me; my name is "Nature", and I am all art.THE PHILOSOPHER: That word upsets all my ideas.What! Nature is only art? NATURE: Yes, without any doubt.Do you not know that there is an infinite art in those seas and those mountains that you find so crude? Do you not know that all those waters gravitate towards the centre of the earth, and mount only by immutable laws; that those mountains which crown the earth are the immense reservoirs of the eternal snows which produce unceasingly those fountains, lakes and rivers without which my animal species and my vegetable species would perish? And as for what are called my animal kingdom, my vegetable kingdom and my mineral kingdom, you see here only three; learn that I have millions of kingdoms.But if you consider only the formation of an insect, of an ear of corn, of gold, of copper, everything will appear as marvels of art.THE PHILOSOPHER: It is true.The more I think about it, the more I see that you are only the art of I know not what most potent and industrious great being, who hides himself and who makes you appear.All reasoners since Thales, and probably long before him, have played at blind man's buff with you; they have said: " I have you! " and they had nothing.We all resemble Ixion;he thought he was kissing Juno, and all that he possessed was a cloud.NATURE: Since I am all that is, how can a being such as you, so small a part of myself, seize me? Be content, atoms my children, with seeing a few atoms that Surround you, with drinking a few drops of my milk, with vegetating for a few moments on my breast, and with dying without having known your mother and your nurse.THE PHILOSOPHER: My dear mother, tell me something of why you exist, of why there is anything.NATURE: I will answer you as I have answered for so many centuries all those who have interrogated me about first principles: I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THEM.THE PHILOSOPHER : Would not non-existence be better than this multitude of existences made in order to be continually dissolved, this crowd of animals born and reproduced in order to devour others and to be devoured, this crowd of sentient beings formed for so many painful sensations, that other crowd of intelligences which so rarely hear reason? What is the good of all that, Nature? NATURE: Oh! go and ask Him who made me.Philosophical Dictionary: Necessary NECESSARYOSMIN: Do you not say that everything is necessary? SELIM : If everything were not necessary, it would follow that God had made useless things.OSMIN: That is to say that it was necessary to the divine nature to make all that it has made? SELIM : I think so, or at least I suspect it; there are people who think otherwise;I do not understand them; maybe they are right.I am afraid of disputes on this subject.OSMIN : It is also of another necessary that I want to talk to you.SELIM : What! of what is necessary to an honest man that he may live? of the misfortune to which one is reduced when one lacks the necessary? OSMIN : No; for what is necessary to one is not always necessary to the other: