"Je viens vous annoncer une grande nouvelle:
Nous l'avons, en dormant, madame, échappé belle.
Un monde près de nous a passé tout du long,
Est chu tout au travers de notre tourbillon;
Et s'il eût en chemin rencontré notre terre,
Elle eût été brisée en morceaux comme verre."
Molière.
This announcement of Trissontin's to Philaminte, who begins the parody on the fears caused by the appearance of comets, would not have been a parody four or five centuries ago. These tailed bodies, which suddenly come to light up the heavens, were for long regarded with terror, like so many warning signs of divine wrath. Men have always thought themselves much more important than they really are in the universal order; they have had the vanity to pretend that the whole creation was made for them, whilst in reality the whole creation does not suspect their existence. The Earth we inhabit is only one of the smallest worlds; and therefore it can scarcely be for it alone that all the wonders of the heavens, of which the immense majority remains hidden from it, were created. In this disposition of man to see in himself the centre and the end of everything, it was easy indeed to consider the steps of nature as unfolded in his favor; and if some unusual phenomenon presented itself, it was considered to be without doubt a warning from Heaven. If these illusions had had no other result than the amelioration of the more timorous of the community one would regret these ages of ignorance; but not only were these fancied warnings of no use, seeing that once the danger passed, man returned to his former state; but they also kept up among people imaginary terrors, and revived the fatal resolutions caused by the fear of the end of the world.