“Let him speak!” urged the studious corpuscle. “His views differ from mine, but I will be tolerant! I have arguments that will silence him soon. Now, then, my friend, if our reason for being is such as you describe, and you liken men to us, these many men you speak of must occupy a relation to their Earth similar to ours to this Man. Do they pounce upon and destroy every organism malignant to their creature?”
“I have no doubt of it!” cried the old corpuscle. “I believe that, existing with those that are workers, are others, similar to them but idle or weak, or, at any rate, of no value to the Earth. I do not say that these worthless ones are pounced upon and eaten, but I do believe that in some way those of no value are forced out of existence; perhaps, besides weak and idle individuals, there are whole tribes who are being exterminated, unable to survive in the struggle with the fit.”
“What industrious, unselfish beings these Men must be to do so much for their Earth!” sneered a doubter.
“Now, let him speak!” urged the tolerant philosopher. “I have arguments that will destroy his views, in a moment. Let there be freedom of speech, by all means!”
“Industrious and unselfish?” repeated the old corpuscle. “Are we? Industrious, yes; but unselfish, no! For our own existence we are working in this Man’s behalf. We are not philanthropists. For the necessities of life we perform our appointed functions, most of us never dreaming that we are laboring in the interests of the Man we inhabit. So it is, I believe, with them! I can’t quite imagine what their beneficent tasks are, but perhaps they till the soil, as we till the soil of this Man, keeping the Earth’s system in good order, doing everything in the belief that they are working only for themselves.”
“Pursue your analogy!” cried the rival philosopher. “If we populate a living creature, then the creature inhabited by Man must itself be a corpuscle floating in the system of something inconceivably vaster. We are leucocytes to Men; Men are to the Earth; then hordes of Earths are to a Universe? You speak of many Men. Are there hordes of Earths?”
“You have expressed a thought of my own! I believe that there are other creatures like the Earth. Perhaps they are faintly visible to the Earth. Perhaps they revolve and have orbits and course through a system just as we do.”
“There,” cried the old corpuscle’s opponent, “I’ve got you! Be tolerant to him, my friends; I’ll silence him in a moment. My friend, then these vast revolving creatures like the Earth are remote from one another? They float in nothingness, then? But you have called them corpuscles, or tiny parts of a whole. How can they be parts of a solid, when they are widely separated bodies floating in nothingness?”
“Take an object of any kind,” was the answer. “Of what is it composed? You call it a solid, but I have lingered long enough in this Man’s brain to catch glimmers of what he calls the atomic theory. This doctrine is, that all matter is composed of ultra-microscopic particles known as molecules. These molecules are not stationary; they revolve; they have orbits; in everything you think solid and dead, tiny specks of itself are floating and are never still. A myriad worlds like the Earth, are only molecules floating in ether, forming a solid, just as the molecules of any substance you are familiar with form a solid. Only comparatively are they far apart, as to a creature microscopic enough, the molecules of a bit of bone would seem far apart and not forming a solid, at all. To the molecules nearest to him he would give names, such as Neptune or Mars; like Men, he would call them planets; remoter molecules would be stars.”
“Wretched nonsense!” cried the other philosopher-corpuscle. For he had no argument left. “Subversive of all modern thought! You ought to be locked up for promulgating your wild views! I’ll be the first to hang you, if someone will bring a rope! You have it that all existence is a solid, then? That a myriad worlds like your fancied Earth are molecules to an ultimate creature? But there can, then, be no ultimate creature; he, in turn is but a microscopic part of— Beware of him and don’t listen to him, my friends!”