Micromégas

Voltaire

4 ideas

1. Giants laugh at the animalcule's cosmic claim

   Micromégas, a 120,000-foot-tall Sirian, and a Saturnian dwarf of 6,000 feet use a diamond as a microscope to find a ship of philosophers returning from an Arctic expedition. They question the tiny humans about the soul, and a Thomist in a square cap declares that the stars, the planets and the giants themselves were all made solely for man. The visitors fall into uncontrollable 'Homeric laughter', and Micromégas leaves a book promising to reveal the purpose of things; when opened in Paris its pages are blank.

2. Every scale feels itself too small

   The Saturnian has 72 senses and lives 15,000 years, yet complains that this is too little. The Sirian has nearly 1,000 senses and lives far longer, and still feels hemmed in. Because each being measures itself against something larger rather than against those below it, dissatisfaction and a sense of brevity follow at every scale, so absolute size or capacity never produces contentment.

3. Measurement earns respect, metaphysics earns ridicule

   The microscopic humans surprise the giants by correctly measuring Micromégas's height with instruments, which shows that intelligence does not scale with body size. When the same philosophers explain the soul, the Aristotelian, Cartesian, Malebranchist and Leibnizian answers are confident and empty. The Lockean, who admits he does not know how he thinks and limits himself to what the senses establish, is the one the giants approve. Human dignity is located in modest empirical knowledge, not in systems that claim to know the unknowable.

4. Wars fought over a heel-sized mud heap

   The philosophers explain that 100,000 men in hats are killing 100,000 men in turbans over a patch of earth no bigger than the giant's heel. The rulers who ordered the fighting have never seen the land and stay home in their palaces. Seen from a large enough scale, territorial war becomes a disproportion between stakes and slaughter, and the moral fault lies with the rulers who order it and suffer none of its costs.

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