“If I did not know that you were a philosopher,” replied Micromegas, “I should be afraid of distressing you, when I tell you, that our life is seven hundred times longer than yours.--But what is even that? and, when we come to the last moment, to have lived a _single day_, and to have lived a _whole eternity_, amount to the very same thing. I have been in countries where they live a thousand times longer than with us; and I have always found them murmuring, just as we do ourselves.--But you have seventy-two senses, and they must have told you something about your globe. How many properties has matter with you?”--“If you mean _essential_ properties,” said the Saturnian, “without which our globe could not subsist, we count three hundred, extensive, impenetrable, mobile, gravitation, divisibility, and so forth.”--“That small number,” replied the gigantic traveller, “may be sufficient for the views which the Creator must have had with respect to your narrow habitation. Your globe is little; its inhabitants are so too. You have few senses; your matter has few qualities. In all this, Providence has suited you most happily to each other.” “The academician was more and more astonished with every thing which the traveller told him. At length, after communicating to each other a little of what they knew, and a great deal of what they knew _not_, and reasoning, as well and as ill, as philosophers usually do, they resolved to set out together, on a little tour of the universe.”[33] That, with the one thousand senses of the Sirian, or even the seventy-two senses of the inhabitant of Saturn, our notions of matter would be very different from what they are at present, cannot be doubted; since we should assign to it qualities, corresponding with all the varieties of our six dozen or one thousand classes of sensations. But, even with all these sensations, it is evident, that we should still know as little of _matter_, independent of the phenomena which it exhibits in relation to us, as we know, at this moment. Our definition of it would comprehend more phenomena; but it would still be a definition of its phenomena only. We might perhaps be able to fill up the Saturnian catalogue of three hundred essential properties, but these would be still only the relations of matter to our own perception. A change in the mere susceptibility of our organs of sense, or of our sentient mind, would be relatively to us, like a change in the whole system of things, communicating, as it were, new properties to every object around us. A single sense additional, in man, might thus be to external nature, like the creation of the sun, when he first burst upon it in splendour, “like the god of the new world,” and pouring every where his own effulgency, seemed to shed on it the very beauties which he only revealed.