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enjoyed a hundred and fourscore years! Why, ’tis a life-time for a patriarch.
BRAHMIN.—My master, Fonfouca, lived till three hundred; it is the ordinary course of life among us Brahmins. I have a very great regard for Francis Xavier; but all his prayers would never have put nature out of her destined order: had he really been able to prolong the life of a gnat but for one single instant beyond what the general concatenation of causes and events allows of, this globe of ours had worn a quite different appearance from that in which you now behold it.
JESUIT.—You have a strange opinion of future contingents: why, you must be entirely ignorant that man is free, and that our free-will disposes of everything in this sublunary world at its mere fancy and pleasure. I can assure you the Jesuits alone have contributed not a little to some very considerable revolutions.
BRAHMIN.—I have no manner of question in regard to the learning and power of the reverend fathers, the Jesuits: they are a very valuable part of human society; yet I cannot by any means believe them the sovereign arbiters of human transactions: every single person, every single being, whether Jesuit or Brahmin, is one of the springs which act in the general movement of the universe; in which he is the slave, and not the master of destiny. Pray, to what do you think Genghis Khan owed the conquest of Asia? To the very moment in which his father one day happened to awake as he was in bed with his wife; to a word which a Tartar chanced to let fall some years before. I, for example, the very person you behold, am one of the chief causes of the deplorable death of Henry IV., for which, you may see, I am still much afflicted.
JESUIT.—Your reverence is pleased to be very merry upon the matter? You the cause of the death of Henry IV.!
BRAHMIN.—Alas! it is too true. This happened in the nine hundred and eighty-three thousandth year of the revolution of Saturn, which makes the fifteen hundred and fiftieth of your era. I was then young and giddy headed. I thought proper, upon a time, to take a walk, which I began with moving my left foot first, on the coast of Malabar, whence most evidently followed the death of Henry IV.
JESUIT.—How so, prithee? For, as to our society, who were accused with having had a large share in that affair, we had not the least knowledge of it.
BRAHMIN.—I’ll tell ye how fate thought proper to order the matter. By moving my left foot, as I told you, I unluckily tumbled my friend Eriban, the Persian merchant, into the water, and he was drowned. My friend, it seems, had a very handsome wife, that ran away with an Armenian merchant: this lady had a daughter, who married a Greek; the daughter of this Greek settled in France, and married the father of Ravaillac. Now, had not every tittle of this happened exactly as it did, you are very sensible the affairs of the houses of France and Austria would have turned out in a very different manner. The system of Europe would have been entirely changed. The wars between Turkey and the German Empire would have had quite another issue; which issue would have had an effect on Persia, as well as Persia on the East Indies; so you see it is plain to a demonstration, that the whole depended on my left foot, which was connected with all the other events of the universe, past, present, and to come.
JESUIT.—I must have this affair laid before some of our fathers, who are theologians.
BRAHMIN.—In the meantime, I will tell you, father, that the maid-servant of the grandfather of the founder of the Feuillants—for you must know I have dipped into your histories—was likewise one principal cause of the death of Henry IV., and of all the accidents which it produced.
JESUIT.—This servant-maid must then have been a domineering quean!
BRAHMIN.—Oh fie! no such thing. She was a mere idiot, by whom her master had a child. Madame de la Barrière, poor soul, died of grief at it. She who succeeded her was, as your chronicles tell, the grandmother of the blessed John de la Barrière, who founded the order of Feuillants. Ravaillac was a monk of this order. With them he sucked in a certain doctrine very fashionable in those days, as you well enough know. This doctrine taught him to believe that the most meritorious thing he could possibly do was to assassinate the best king in the whole world. What followed is known to everybody.
JESUIT.—In spite of your left foot, and the wench of the grandfather of the founder of the Feuillants, I shall ever be of opinion that the horrible action committed by Ravaillac was a future contingent, which might very well not have happened: for, after all, man is certainly a free agent.
BRAHMIN.—I do not know what you mean by a free agent. I can affix no certain idea to these words. To be free, is to do whatever we think proper, and not to will whatever we please. All I know of the matter is, that Ravaillac voluntarily committed the crime, of which he was destined by fate to be the instrument. This crime was no more than a link of the great chain of destiny.
JESUIT.—You may say what you will, but the affairs of this world are far from having any such dependence as you are pleased to think. What signifies, for example, this useless conversation of ours, here on the shores of the East Indies?
BRAHMIN.—What you and I say in conversation is doubtless sufficiently insignificant; but, for all that, were you not here, the machine of the universe would be extremely changed from what it is.
JESUIT.—There your Brahmin reverence is pleased to advance a huge paradox truly.
BRAHMIN.—Your Ignatian fathership may believe me or no, as you like it. But assuredly, we should never have had this conversation together, had you not come into the East Indies. You had never made this voyage, had not your St. Ignatius de Loyola been wounded at the siege of Pampeluna, or had not the king of Portugal persisted in discovering the passage round the Cape of Good Hope. Now, prithee, did not the king of Portugal, with the help of the compass, entirely change the face of this world of ours? But it was first of all necessary that a certain Neapolitan should make this discovery of the compass; now tell me, if you have the face, that everything is not wholly subservient to one constant and uniform tenor of action; which by indissoluble, but invisible, concatenation, unites all that lives, or acts, or dies, or suffers on the surface of our globe?
JESUIT.—What then would become of our future contingents?
BRAHMIN.—What care I what become of them? but yet the order established by the hand of an eternal and almighty God must certainly exist forever.
JESUIT.—Were one to listen to you, we ought not to pray to God at all.
BRAHMIN.—It is our duty to adore Him. But pray what mean ye by praying to God?
JESUIT.—What all the world means by it, to be sure: that He would grant our petitions, and favor us in all our wants.
BRAHMIN.—I understand you. You mean, that a gardener might obtain clear sunshine weather, at a time which God had ordained from all eternity to produce rains; and that a pilot should have an easterly wind, when a westerly wind ought to refresh the earth, as well as the seas? My good father, to pray as we ought is to submit one’s self wholly to Providence. So good evening to you. Destiny requires I should now visit my Brahminess.
JESUIT.—And my free-will urges me to give a lesson to a young scholar.
DIALOGUES BETWEEN LUCRETIUS AND POSIDONIUS
FIRST COLLOQUY.
POSIDONIUS.—Your poetry is sometimes admirable; but the philosophy of Epicurus is, in my opinion, very bad.
LUCRETIUS.—What! will you not allow that the atoms, of their own accord, disposed themselves in such a manner as to produce the universe?
POSIDONIUS.—We mathematicians can admit nothing but what is proved by incontestable principles.
LUCRETIUS.—My principles are so.
Ex nihilo nihil, in nihilum nil posse reverti. Tangere enim & tangi nisi corpus nulla potest res.
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