Anthony, with outstretched arms, supports himself upon the Devil's horns, and thus occupies all the space between them.
He remembers with disdain the ignorance of other days, the mediocrity of his dreams. And now those luminous globes he was wont to gaze upon from below, are close to him. He distinguishes the intercrossing of the lines of their orbits, the complexity of their courses. He beholds them coming from afar,—and, like stones suspended in a sling, describe their circles, form their hyperbolas.
He perceives, all within the field of his vision at once, the Southern Cross and the Great Bear, the Lynx and the Centaur, the nebula of Dorado, the six suns in the constellation of Orion, Jupiter with his four satellites, and the triple ring of the monstrous Saturn!—all the planets, all the stars that men will discover in the future. He fills his eyes with their light; he over-burthens his mind with calculation of their distances: then, bowing his head, he murmurs):
"What is the purpose of all that?"
The Devil. "There is no purpose. How could God have a purpose? What experience could have instructed him?—what reflection determined him?
Anthony: What is the purpose of all that? The Devil: There is no purpose.
"Before the beginning he could not have acted;—and now his action would be useless."
Anthony. "Yet he created the world, at one time, by his word only."