The Man of Forty Crowns: I have heard much talk of population. Were we to take it into our heads to beget double the number of children we now do; were our country doubly peopled, so that we had forty millions of inhabitants instead of twenty, what would happen?
The Geometrician: Each would have, instead of forty, but twenty crowns to live upon; or the land would have to produce the double of what it now does; or there would be the double of the nation’s industry, or of gain from foreign countries; or one half of the nation sent to America; or the one half of the nation should eat the other.—The Man of Forty Crowns.
[Nature’s Way]
Nature cares very little for individuals. There are other insects which do not live above one day, but of which the species is perpetual. Nature resembles those great princes who reckon as nothing the loss of four hundred thousand men, so they but accomplish their august designs.— The Man of Forty Crowns.
[Prayer]
When the man of forty crowns saw himself the father of a son, he began to think himself a man of some weight in the state; he hoped to furnish, at least, ten subjects to the king, who should all prove useful. He made the best baskets in the world, and his wife was an excellent sempstress. She was born in the neighborhood of a rich abbey of a hundred thousand livres a year. Her husband asked me, one day, why those gentlemen, who were so few in number, had swallowed so many of the forty crown lots? “Are they more useful to their country than I am?”—“No, dear neighbor.”—“Do they, like me, contribute at least to the population of it?”—“No, not to appearance, at least.”—“Do they cultivate the land? Do they defend the state when it is attacked?”—“No, they pray to God for us.”—“Well, then, I will pray to God for them, and let us go snacks.”—The Man of Forty Crowns.
[Doubt and Speculation]
The Man of Forty Crowns: I have sometimes a great mind to laugh at all I have been told.
The Geometrician: And a very good mind it is. I advise you to doubt of everything, except that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right ones, and that triangles which have the same bases and height are equal to one another; or like propositions, as, for example, that two and two make four.
The Man of Forty Crowns: Yes; I hold it very wise to doubt; but I am curious since I have made my fortune and have leisure. I could wish, when my will moves my arm or my leg, to discover the spring, for surely there is one, by which my will moves them. I wonder sometimes why I can lift or lower my eyes, yet cannot move my ears. I think—and I wish I could know a little how—I mean,—there, to have my thought palpable to me, to touch it, as it were. That would surely be very curious. I want to find out whether I think from myself, or whether it is God that gives me my ideas; whether my soul came into my body at six weeks, or at one day old; how it lodged itself in my brain; whether I think much when in a profound sleep, or in a lethargy. I torture my brains to know how one body impels another. My sensations are no less a wonder to me; I find something divine in them, and especially in pleasure. I have striven sometimes to imagine a new sense, but could never arrive at it. Geometricians know all these things; kindly be so good as to teach me.