"Certainly," replied the man. "For example this stone is grey, has such and such a form, has three dimensions, is heavy and divisible."
"Well!" said the Sirian, "this thing that appears to you to be divisible, heavy, and grey, will you tell me what it is? You see some attributes, but behind those, are you familiar with that?
"No," said the other.
"—So you do not know what matter is."
So Micromegas, addressing another sage that he held on a thumb, asked what his soul was, and what it did.
"Nothing at all," said the Malebranchist philosopher[5]. "God does everything for me. I see everything in him, I do everything in him; it is he who does everything that I get mixed up in."
[5] See the opuscule entitled "All in God" in Miscellaneous (1796).
"It would be just as well not to exist," retorted the sage of Sirius. "And you, my friend," he said to a Leibnitzian who was there, "what is your soul?"
"It is," answered the Leibnitzian, "the hand of a clock that tells the time while my body rings out. Or, if you like, it is my soul that rings out while my body tells the time, or my soul is the mirror of the universe, and my body is the border of the mirror. All that is clear."
A small partisan of Locke was nearby, and when he was finally given the floor: "I do not know," said he, "how I think, but I know that I have only ever thought through my senses. That there are immaterial and intelligent substances I do not doubt, but that it is impossible for God to communicate thought to matter I doubt very much. I revere the eternal power. It is not my place to limit it. I affirm nothing, and content myself with believing that many more things are possible than one would think."