SOURCE: “The Ideas of Cyrano de Bergerac,” in French Free-Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire, The Athlone Press, 1960, pp. 48-66.

[In the excerpt which follows, Spink examines the philosophical underpinnings of Cyrano's works.]

Savinien de Cyrano, known as Cyrano de Bergerac, was one of the most daring speculative thinkers of his generation. It used to be thought that he was born at Bergerac in the South of France, but he was born in Paris in 1619, Bergerac being, in this case, not the town in the South of France, but a small family property near Paris. He was educated in Paris, possibly at the Collège de Beauvais. If so, he is not likely to have come in contact with many new ideas there, seeing that Grangier (a doughty champion of the University's rights but notorious as a narrow pedant) was at the head of it. The ferocity with which Cyrano berated him in his satirical comedy Le Pedant joué (1645) excludes any possibility of influence from that direction. Gassendi was teaching astronomy at the Royal College from 1645 to 1655 and it is possible, to say the least of it, that Cyrano was introduced to Gassendi by his friend and Gassendi's pupil Chapelle, although, as in the case of Molière and Dehénault, there is nothing to support the story that he joined Chapelle at private lessons.¹ In his imaginary travel story, the Empires de la lune, one of the philosophers whom his traveller in inter-stellar space meets on the moon says that he used to associate with La Mothe le Vayer and Gassendi. Cyrano also knew and admired Marolles, the translator of Lucretius, and Rohault, a Cartesian physicist, but reading was his chief source of information. His friend and first editor Lebret says he knew all the systems of the ancient philosophers and he was certainly acquainted with the new cosmology. He was also thoroughly acquainted with the Italians Cardano and Campanella. Italian naturalism was but dimly reflected in the poems of Théophile, and Vanini's two badly printed books had no more than one edition and cannot have reached a wide public. The Anti-bigot was not published and can only have been known to a wide public thanks to Mersenne's refutation, but the original works of the Italian philosophers were still available. Cardano was not forgotten in seventeenth-century France and his reputation was still high. As late as 1663 a complete edition of his works was published in French, with a life of Cardano by Naudé by way of introduction. Naudé, who had already devoted a study to Cardano in his Apologie des grands personnages, looked upon the Italian philosopher as a man of genius, albeit somewhat mad, and explained away his wilder fantasies as the temporary aberrations of an over-active brain. He took Cardano's part against J.-C. Scaliger, who had called him a ‘jingling fortune-teller’. So did Bayle, and Vossius (whom Bayle quotes in this context), though Bayle agreed with Naudé that Cardano was unbalanced; according to Bayle, Cardano's fault was not incredulity but an excess of superstitious belief in astrology, magic, necromancy and all the pseudo-sciences of the Renaissance. But readers of Cardano's works could find therein a coherent picture of the world. The world for Cardano was an immense animate being, whose soul, the Anima mundi, was the seat of intelligence and motion, while space was a mode of its existence. It is possible to make an abstract distinction between the extended universe and its soul, just as one can make an abstract distinction between the matter of a particular object, which is part of universal matter, and the form of a particular object, which is part of the universal soul, but it should not be thought that there are two substances, the world and its soul; there is only one world and the distinctions we make do not affect reality. We can distinguish between the universal intelligence and the universal soul, provided that we remember that such a distinction is an abstract one. In so far as an individual soul participates in the universal intelligence it is immortal; man's soul does so participate in so far as it comprehends the truth. But the doctrine of immortality is not necessary as a sanction for morality; the notion of justice is sufficient by itself; virtue is not dependent on the supposed rewards and punishments meted out in a future life. As far as the material world is concerned, Cardano continued to see it as it had been seen in the middle ages; he knew nothing of the new cosmology; for him the sky moved by itself and determined the motions of terrestrial things; the stars guided the course of history. The sun was the source of light and life and by its action produced living things from the earth in rich and varied profusion. Nature was wonderful, beneficent and worthy of man's adoration.

The Calabrian monk Tommaso Campanella forms a solid link between Cyrano and Italian naturalism. When Cyrano's traveller explores the surface of the sun, the philosopher who undertakes to explain the nature of this abode of light and life is none other than Campanella. Campanella was a focus for ideas coming from many different points of the intellectual horizon, and his books were widely disseminated: they were in all the bookshops in London in the middle of the century according to the translator of one of his political tracts.² He learnt much from Telesio, one of the greatest thinkers of the Italian renaissance, but he added to Telesio's sensationalism and materialism, the Stoic doctrine of the soul of the world, occultism and suggestions of oriental philosophy and finally Copernican cosmology. The placing of the sun in the centre of the world gave it an added importance for a philosopher who was used to considering the sky and the stars as the source of light, life, feeling, motion and all those superior influences which act upon the heavy, damp, dark principles whose seat is the earth. The sun became the great source of animation in a nature every part of which had soul, every part of which was sensitive. It is little wonder therefore that this man, who combined with philosophical speculations which brought him near to the stake in 1595³ an active political idealism which landed him in the prisons of Naples for twenty-five years from 1599 to 1624, should have entitled a utopian treatise written in a Neapolitan prison in 1602 Civitas solis. This book envisages a state organized in a strictly hierarchical fashion in concentric circles round a temple dedicated to the sun, but the sun is not actually worshipped for itself; it is worshipped as the ‘image, the face, the living statue’ of God.⁴ The Solarians are therefore Deists, rather than sun-worshippers or even pantheists, but they are said to originate from India and to have drawn their religious ideas from the Brahmans, doubtless because Campanella was acquainted with the pantheism and universal animism of the Hindus and had studied some such account as that of Strabo who expressly describes them as being dedicated to the sun.

Campanella was in Paris from 1634 until his death in 1639 and it may be reasonable to believe that Cyrano, who was educated in Paris and was fifteen years old when Campanella arrived and nineteen when he joined the Guards, may have come in contact with the illustrious Italian at some time during the years 1634-8. Be that as it may, the direct reference to Campanella towards the end of the Empires du Soleil is an explicit acknowledgment of a debt. Cyrano was acquainted with Campanella's work, both the Civitas solis and the De sensu rerum, by the time he came to write his imaginary journeys to the moon and the sun, about 1648.

The early part of Cyrano's career was given to soldiering, not to philosophizing. At the age of nineteen he took service with the Guards, in a company composed almost entirely of Gascon gentlemen, and became renowned for duelling. The Menagiana of 1695 says that he killed more than ten men for making fun of his nose, which as his portrait shows was very long, but the Menagiana is not a very reliable witness. His friend and first editor Lebret merely says: ‘les Gascons, qui composaient presque seuls cette compagnie, le considéraient comme le démon de la bravoure, et lui comptaient autant de combats que de jours qu'il y était entré’. The thirty years war was in progress and Cyrano fought and was wounded at Mouzon in Champagne in 1639 and again at Arras in 1640. He must have left the army soon afterwards seeing that we find him in Paris in 1643 in the company of the facetious poet Dassoucy and Gassendi's pupil, Chapelle. He had a room at the Collège de Lisieux, but it is not known what sort of post, if any, he held in the college. He lived simply, according to Lebret, drank little, ate soberly and was extremely chaste. Lebret tells the story of how, on one occasion, Cyrano was set upon by a band of armed men near the Porte de Nesle and how he killed two, wounded seven and put the rest to flight. But Lebret does not vouch for this story and it has left no other echo in contemporary records. Meanwhile Cyrano had become a playwright. His Le Pédant joué, a comedy of the schools and colleges, was played by the Illustre théâtre in 1645. Molière may well have prepared it for the stage; at any rate he claimed a scene from it (‘Qu'allait-il donc faire dans cette galère?’) as his own property, when later he made use of it in his own Fourberies de Scapin. Cyrano's one tragedy, La Mort d'Agrippine, played in 1654, gave him the reputation of being an atheist, or confirmed the reputation he already had, because of certain ideas expressed in the play. There seems to have been some hesitation on the part of the spectators as to which passages contained these ideas and on one occasion certain members of the audience, eager to be scandalized, but not knowing which were the scandalous lines, missed them in the second act,⁵ but cried, ‘Ah! le scélérat! Ah! l'athée!’ when Séjanus, in the fourth act, pointing out Tiberius as the man to be struck down, spoke the words, ‘Frappons, voilà l'hostie.’

Lebret says that Socrates and Pyrrho shared his approval with Democritus. In his satire Contre le Pédant, he declared that he believed in God, and in his letter Contre le carême he claimed to be a good Catholic, but the argument he used in Contre le Pédant to prove the existence of God was precisely the same as the one used by Séjanus in La Mort d'Agrippine to prove the non-existence of the gods. If a kind God did not exist, you would have ceased to exist long ago, says Cyrano to the pedant, and, if the gods existed they would have destroyed me long ago, says Séjanus. In his epistle Contre un jésuite assassin et médisant, he declared that he believed in providence and asked the question, how can chance explain the order of the universe and inert matter produce human reason? in such a way as to suggest that he disagreed with Lucretius, but he took the opposite view in the Empires de la lune. In spite of these vagaries, there is evidence in these shorter works, and particularly in his letters on sorcery, of an eminently sane and courageous mind. He believed in neither black magic nor in possession by devils. A witch according to him was a sufferer from sexual disorders of the mind who might be given a beating but not burnt alive. As for the cross used for exorcising demons, his opinion was merely that a cross is ‘length considered in relation to breadth’. His thinking was plain, straightforward, radical, modern: in none of his writings did he adopt an historical approach to the problem in hand or show any respect for tradition, established belief, accepted values. He was the first French writer to adopt the device of the ‘philosophical novel’ which permits of a total disregard for current standards of judgment and a fresh and ingenuous, or supposedly ingenuous attitude towards contemporary manners, customs, institutions and controversies. It also enables the author to pass off serious thinking as harmless fantasy. As an adept of the technique of the philosophical novel Cyrano is a forerunner of Montesquieu, Swift and Voltaire.

The Etats et Empires de la lune was written by 1649, in which year it was commented upon in a poem by Royer de Prades to whom Cyrano had communicated it in manuscript form. It was not published however until 1657, two years after Cyrano's death, when it was published by Cyrano's friend Lebret. Lebret chose as a title Histoire comique ou Etats et Empires de la lune, but Prades refers to it as L'Autre monde so it is possible that such was its original title. The idea of a journey to the moon may have been suggested by an English work entitled The Man in the Moon, or a discourse of a voyage thither by D. Gonsales, by Francis Godwin, bishop of Llandaff and Hereford. This English work was translated into French in 1648 and Cyrano must have been acquainted with it because his traveller to the moon finds a Spaniard there and this Spaniard has, like Godwin's D. Gonzales, used birds to make the trip. Cyrano seems also to have used a manuscript copy of Pierre Borel's Discours nouveau prouvant la pluralité des mondes before it was published at Geneva in 1657. Borel claimed in his preface that a copy of his book, which was completed by 1648, had been stolen and that his ideas had been used by another author. There is a copy of Borel's book at the Arsenal library in Paris which bears on the title page the words ‘Fait à Castres en haut Languedoc en 1647.’⁶ This is, on the face of it, evidence to show that the work existed early enough for Cyrano to have made use of it. Borel, who was a physician to the king, set out to prove in his discourse, by means of a heterogeneous collection of arguments, including the existence of birds of paradise and many quotations from Copernicus, Cardano, Tycho-Brahe, Galileo, and Kepler, that the earth is an animate being, possessed of reason and a soul,⁷ and that it is not in the centre of the world but in the third heaven. He believed the stars to be inhabited. He argued that the moon must be inhabited seeing that, like the earth, it has mountains and rivers. Pythagoras called the earth a moon … ‘some Stoics believed that there were people not only on the moon but also in the body of the sun, and Campanella says that these bright and shining mansions may have their inhabitants who are possibly more learned than we and better informed of the things we cannot comprehend’.⁸ At the end of his book Borel maintains that it would be possible to invent a machine to fly to the moon and promises an ars volandi in a proposed book of natural magic which, however, he does not seem to have written.

Cyrano relates, at the beginning of the Etats et Empires de la lune, how, during a conversation with some friends one moonlight night he maintained, in spite of their incredulous jests, that the moon was an inhabited world like our own. Perhaps even now, he cried, they are laughing in the moon at someone who thinks our own globe to be a world. But in vain did he quote Pythagoras, Democritus, Epicurus, Copernicus and Kepler, his friends only laughed the louder. On returning home, he found a volume of Cardano mysteriously open at the page where the author describes his meeting with two men from the moon. Forthwith he began to plan a voyage of discovery thither.

His first attempt, made with the aid of bottles of dew strapped around his body, ended in Canada, where he discussed his plans with the governor. ‘The sun’, said Cyrano, ‘is in the centre of the world, like the pips in the centre of an apple. In the pips is concentrated the life and heat of the fruit, and similarly the sun gives life, light, heat and energy to the world.’ ‘I agree with Copernicus,’ replies the governor, ‘that the sun is in the centre of the world and I agree that the earth turns; one of my priests explains this motion by saying it is due to the efforts of the damned down in hell; they try to climb up the inside to get away from the fire and make the earth go round like a tread-mill. But if, as you suggest, the stars are inhabited, then the world must be infinite, because the inhabitants of each star will see other stars beyond their own and so on indefinitely.’ ‘Why should not the world be infinite?’ replied Cyrano. ‘For one thing complete nothingness is unthinkable; for another, if the world is finite, God is finite, because where nothing existed God would not exist.’

This last remark can only have one meaning, namely that God is to the World what the intelligence is to the body; space and intelligence are two aspects of the same infinite Being. Cyrano does not, however, develop his argument in this sense and henceforward keeps within the realm of physics, and does not venture into metaphysics.

At the second attempt, propelled by rockets firing in succession, Cyrano's traveller reaches the moon and there falls into the Garden of Eden, but is not killed by his fall because he falls on the tree of life and one of its fruits is forced down his throat. The inhabitants of the moon are four-footed creatures and they refuse to admit that he has a soul because he is a biped. Luckily he is discovered by Socrates's daemon who converses with him in Greek. Socrates's daemon has had many adventures since the death of his original charge. He has appeared to Cardano, Cornelius Agrippa, John Tritheme, Faustus, Nostradamus, the knights of the Rosy Cross, La Mothe le Vayer, La Brosse, Tristan l'Hermite and Gassendi, as well as to Campanella, whose De sensu rerum he has inspired. He taught Campanella, at that time a prisoner of the Inquisition, how to guess his enemies' secret thoughts by imitating their physical attitudes and gestures: seeing that the thoughts in our minds correspond to the physical states of our bodies it is possible to reproduce the ones by adopting the others. Socrates's daemon, who is really an inhabitant of the sun, sent to the moon as one might be sent to a colony, is very wise because he possesses many sense organs a Tellurian, or even a Selenian, is not possessed of. Because he has many more sense organs he has many more impressions and more knowledge than others not so gifted; he knows for instance by purely sensitive intuition the nature of the magnet's attractive power. The Selenians also differ from earth-bound man. They use an intoned speech, like music, feed only on the odours of viands and (a fantastic detail but doubtless near to Cyrano's heart) a lunar poet is allowed to pay his bills in sonnets and quatrains.

At the lunar court Cyrano's traveller is put in the same cage as a Spaniard who has been carried to the moon by a flight of birds. This Spaniard complains that the doctors of the University of Paris think that no one besides themselves knows anything at all; he propounds a theory whereby the four elements can be reduced to one and the differences between things explained by the varying amounts of matter and void in them. There is the same matter in everything, though we should doubtless need another Prometheus to be able to separate matter from the things it composes. There is the same matter in a tree as in a man; everything is in everything; nature is one.

Our traveller soon learns to speak the lunar language and would have been taken for a man, albeit a deformed one, if the doctors of the country had not scorned the idea that God should givé a two-footed beast the privilege of manhood and an immortal soul. He is at last freed from his cage on condition that he recants after the manner of Galileo, and admits that the earth is the moon and the moon the earth.

On the moon the old respect the young and a son has no filial duties towards his father. Some of the philosophers of the moon eat only vegetables and the flesh of animals which have died a natural death, because in all things there is life and feeling and they would think it a crime to wound even a cabbage. Why should Nature prefer bloodthirsty creatures to this inoffensive plant? There is no right of birth in nature; all God's children are equal; therefore, if man has an immortal soul to his share, surely vegetative life must also have its bounty, and why should that bounty not be an intuitive knowledge of all nature, a share in the universal consciousness? Is not the possession of sense organs a limiting factor in the exercise of sensation? Does not the absence of such organs imply an immediate union with all nature?

The universe is an immense animate being (says a lunar philosopher) and we ourselves are universes for the minute animals that live in us, and these in their turn are universes for animals more minute. We are entirely composed of living beings; we are societies of microbes.

The conversation is interrupted because the whole town is being moved on wheels in order to obtain a change of air. When it is resumed, the subject is the eternity of the world and there is no doubt that Cyrano rejects the doctrine of creation in favour of Epicurus's eternal atoms. The roundest and most mobile of the atoms are those of fire, the formative or constructive principle in the universe. Fire forms and organizes the things we see around us, but fire is not a sort of providence. Cyrano takes up a resolutely anti-teleological position. The existence of any particular object is not to be marvelled at. Given a certain arrangement of the atoms, some object or other had to be formed and there is no need to marvel that it should be this rather than that, an oak-tree rather than an ash-tree. A different arrangement and different motion would have produced a sensitive plant, an oyster, a worm, a fly, a frog, a sparrow, a monkey, a man. It is no miracle that a pair of deuces comes up in dicing; so why should it be a miracle that a certain species, such as man, appears in nature? There is no problem to be solved, when one considers an infinite number of atoms in eternal motion.

All the senses, touch, sight, hearing, taste and smell are produced by emanation of particles from bodies. The lunar philosopher knows his Lucretius, but quietly neglects (as did all the physicists of the seventeenth century) the ‘idols’ or material images which, according to Lucretius, detach themselves from objects like a fine skin and come floating through the air to our organs of sense. On the other hand he applies his theory of the radiation of particles to astrology, and explains by this means the influence of the stars, whereas Lucretius had refused to admit any influence of these tranquil, imperturbable gods upon the affairs of men. But Lucretius's world is a world mechanically ordered, whereas Cyrano, like Campanella, and the Italian philosophers generally, pictured the world as suffused throughout with sensation and every object as sensitive to the radiations vibrating through it. Light and heat are radiations of smooth round particles like a fine dust. On the sun the dust is light and heat, and can be gathered up into flasks; indeed Socrates's daemon has brought several such flasks to the moon and produces them in order to replace the usual source of artificial light on the moon, namely glow-worms in glass bowls.

Only criminals are buried when they die. Other Selenians are cremated so that their souls, composed of fire, may be given added strength in the burning and thus enabled to rise to some planet nearer the sun, the divine centre of light and life. Sometimes however, when a Selenian takes leave of life, his friends drink his blood and eat his flesh, after which they pass the night with a girl of sixteen or seventeen years of age in the hope that the spirit of their friend will live again in the offspring they engender. Even Cyrano's long nose plays its part in the strange lunar customs. On the moon a long nose is a sign of intelligence and all those whose noses are not of the requisite length are castrated so that they cannot reproduce their unworthy kind. Chastity is a grave offence and a phallic symbol worn at the waist is a mark of nobility, to be preferred to the sword, because it is nobler to create life than it is to destroy it. No one believes in miracles on the moon; no one believes in doctors. The imagination is, by nature, capable of healing the body and doctors destroy this natural property by means of their drugs. When our traveller hears of this he attempts to see in it a proof of the soul's rationality and immortality, but the lunar philosopher will have none of such arguments. The soul without the body would be without sense and therefore without understanding; if it were not so, the soul of a blind man would not need eyes in order to see. But the traveller will hear no more of this impious talk and, being homesick for the earth, he asks for and is given a passport by the lunar authorities and is transported back to earth by Socrates's daemon. At least that is how the story ends in Lebret's edition. But the manuscript gives another version according to which the lunar philosopher gets as far as denying God before a black and hairy devil snatches up both philosopher and traveller and away up the chimney with them and towards hell. Fortunately our traveller just has time to say Jesu Maria and so finds himself lying in the heather near Mount Vesuvius.⁹

In the Etats et Empires de la lune are already several hints to the effect that there is a still more interesting place to be visited, so we are not surprised to find Cyrano pen in hand again by 1650 composing the Etats et Empires du Soleil,¹⁰ which takes up the story precisely where the early work leaves off. Having reached France, the author relates how, while staying with a friend near Toulouse, he is taken for a sorcerer by some peasants, incited against him by their parish priest. When they find him riding along one day with a copy of Descartes's Principia among his baggage, they take this book for a book of magic because of all the circles and other diagrams it contains; they think Cyrano has come to bewitch the crops. He is imprisoned in a high tower and there makes a machine with a huge crystal bowl on the top of it. The action of the sun, creating a continual vacuum in this bowl, causes the air to rush in and fill up the void and push the machine upward. So off goes the traveller towards the sun. He does not experience hunger during his journey and this fact intrigues him. He knows perfectly well that the sun's heat is sufficient to nourish the soul within him provided it has some ‘radical moisture’ to attach itself to, as the flame of a lamp adheres to oil. But where is the humide radical coming from? Then he remembers that both heat and the humide radical are the same thing in substance, both being composed of mobile atoms. Furthermore, when one nears the sun there is sufficient heat for one to be able to dispense with the humide radical, whose function on earth is to hold the heat and prevent it from being rapidly dissipated. And so he journeys on for four months without food, past the moon and Venus and Mercury. As he journeys, he imagines that when matter was created, all the particles sorted themselves out by a sort of sympathy, like tending to like, and then all the planets so formed went spinning round the sun, pushed along by the sun's heat. Perhaps the sun spots will one day break away from the sun and form new planets. Perhaps the earth was once a sun; at all events it still retains enough heat to cause the moon to turn around it.

At last the traveller alights on a little planet near the sun, ‘one of those which the mathematicians call maculae’, and there he meets a man whose language he understands at once, because every word in it corresponds exactly to the essence of the thing it refers to. This man is a scientist; he prefers an inductive to a deductive method of reasoning, proceeding always from effects to causes and never from causes to effects. His natural history is better informed than that of Lucretius, but is conceived in exactly the same spirit. The planet he lives on was cast off by the sun and thereafter so sweated out vapours that rain fell for forty days and formed the seas. The ground was covered with a thick coat of fertile mud, in which, by the action of the sun, a series of coctions took place. It needed three coctions to produce a man, one for the liver, one for the heart and one for the brain. Two coctions were sufficient to produce a beast and one to produce a plant. At this point in his explanation, he points to a protuberance which is forming in the palpitating mud in front of him: the ground is about to bring forth a man¹¹ and he goes forward to act as midwife, while our traveller regains his flying machine. Up he goes towards the bright orb of the sun, his body now drawn to it by a natural attraction and impelled onwards by a natural desire. His body becomes transparent, except for the red of the life-blood within him, and his machine likewise. At length, nature, speaking within him by the voice of instinct, and without any recourse to reason, tells him to leap from his machine. He does so, breaking the crystal bowl as he goes, and the machine falls away behind him, becoming opaque again as it falls. He now feels perfectly happy, because joy is a flame within him and burns the more brightly as it approaches the luminous source from whence it flows. He falls at length on the surface of the sun.

Now the author's imagination is put to a hard test in which it weakens sadly. The novel begins to read at this point like a mediaeval allegory. We see the traveller awakening under a golden tree of which the fruits are diamonds, rubies and other precious stones and discover that the tree is a whole colony of minute beings who have taken on the form of a tree in order to cool the ardour of a nightingale who now sings disconsolately on the topmost branch: the unfortunate bird had fallen in love with the king of the colony at a time when he had assumed the form of a nightingale. As the traveller watches, the tree again changes its shape; after disintegrating into a myriad tiny creatures who perform a dance like that of motes in the sunbeams, it reassembles as a man!

These metamorphoses have a philosophical significance. They are Cyrano's strained effort to express in narrative form the very abstract conception of ‘pure act’. The traveller is now at the centre of the universe and at the beginning of things. He cannot go beyond in search of causes and principles without supposing the existence of a world beyond. Whilst on earth he had two opposing principles to work with, gross and sluggish matter (a principle of intertia) and rapidly moving fire (a principle of activity), and could combine them more or less in the same way as the schoolmen combined matter and form, in order to explain the nature of things, but the earthly principle of inertia has now been left behind. The beings he meets with on the surface of the sun are all activity; they are what men call ‘spirits’, although they refuse to call themselves by this name. They are, like everything else in the universe, composed of atoms, each one of which is spontaneously active; that is why the tree disintegrates before assuming a different form; it is a colony of minute autonomous beings. But though the tree is made of minute creatures, it is not moulded into shape or constructed by any outside agent; it is self-constructing. Its metamorphoses are pure acts. Cyrano is not content with a purely abstract notion of ‘pure act’, nor is he content with a mechanistic materialism. He applies his corpuscular principle to all the dualisms current in his time (‘form’ and ‘matter’ in the schools, ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ in Descartes's Meditations, ‘heat’ and ‘cold’, ‘contraction’ and ‘expansion’, the notions used by the ‘chemists’ and the Italian philosophers) and aims at a thorough-going monism. The forms which the solar beings take on must not be separate from their matter, otherwise Cyrano is as far as ever from realizing the perfect unity of nature. Their form must be an arrangement of atoms and at the same time a spontaneous act, not imposed from without; its psychical and physical aspects must be identical; mobility and consciousness must be one and the same function; panpsychism must be reduced to dynamic atomism, otherwise the arrangement of the atoms will be the effect of an outside cause and the old dualism of intelligence and matter will reappear in all its obstinacy.

The passage makes strange reading, but it is not the fanciful product of an overheated imagination (a term which had a perfectly literal meaning for Cyrano); it is the sustained effort of a systematic thinker to clothe his most abstract conceptions in concrete language. A failure, certainly, as literature, but a tour de force of expression none the less.

The next episode repeats some of the effects of the Etats et Empires de la lune. The traveller is tried by a sort of ‘parliament of fowls’ and would certainly have been pecked to death as a representative of man's tyrannical breed, had he not been saved by the soul of his parrot, who frequently heard him declare on earth that the brutes have souls. He is escorted out of the land of birds into that of trees, which sense his presence amongst them and speak to each other in their murmurous language as he approaches. Trees have sense, just as beasts and men have sense. Sense exists at all stages in the scale of being, as the following episode is doubtless intended to illustrate. It is a struggle between the two opposing elements, heat and cold, the one represented by the salamander the other by the lemur. Heat being the active principle of Cyrano's universe in its simplest form, we have now reached the point at which Campanella can appear to add an explanatory comment. Campanella has retained his identity on the surface of the sun, whereas most human souls are merely united to the sun's heat and lose all individual personality. Campanella has been saved from such extinction by the fact that he had knowledge of the truth; the human soul is immortal in so far as it contains within itself true ideas, but other souls disintegrate into their component atoms and sooner or later these atoms radiate out once more from the sun and go to exercise in animate bodies on various planets the functions of sense and memory. Descartes's name is now mentioned and Campanella expresses great admiration for his rival's mental powers, but Cyrano adds a remark which is sufficient to show that he prefers Lucretius's atoms to Descartes's ‘extended substance’. Unfortunately the text left by Cyrano stops abruptly at the point when Descartes arrives. According to the last sentences of the Etats et Empires de la lune in Lebret's edition of 1657, the manuscript of the Etats et Empires du soleil and of a third part entitled Histoire de l'Etincelle (the soul) was stolen; it is therefore likely that the final section of it, including the whole of the Histoire de l'Etincelle, was lost or suppressed before the publication of the manuscript in 1662.

In 1662, in a volume entitled Nouvelles œuvres de Cyrano de Bergerac, appeared a fragment entitled Physique ou science des choses naturelles which at first sight gives the impression that Cyrano held at some time very different beliefs from those explicitly or implicitly contained in the Autre Monde. This fragment, which contains a detailed table of contents of a treatise of physics, together with a draft of the first chapters, follows Descartes, with the exception that Descartes's metaphysical introduction to physics is replaced by a sketch of an empiricist psychology, and might lead one to believe that Cyrano had come under the strong influence of Descartes. But the fragment bears such a close resemblance to Rohault's Traité de physique, published in 1671, that one is obliged to conclude that one or other of the writers of these two works merely followed the thought of the other and as Rohault's treatise consists of the lectures which he had been giving for some years, it is reasonable to assume that the real author of the system is Rohault. There is a resemblance between the ideas expressed in the opening sections and those expressed by Cyrano elsewhere, but not in the later sections. The opening sections are empiricist; they state the necessity of proceeding from effects to causes; they propose the use of an experimental method; the rest is purely Cartesian: matter is reduced to extension, the possibility of vacuum is denied, figure and motion are the only two properties of matter used in the explanation of natural phenomena. These theories are far from being in accord with Cyrano's thinking as expressed elsewhere, while the combination of an experimental method with Cartesian theories of matter and motion characterizes Rohault as a scientist. Cyrano may have come under the influence of Rohault at some time; Lebret says that the two men were friends. Cyrano's notes may be the outcome of their relationship. It is very unlikely that they are the fruit of independent inquiry or speculation on Cyrano's part and they did not have any marked effect on the rest of his work.

Apart from these notes there is no trace of Cartesianism in Cyrano's writings. That he knew the Principia is not in doubt: was it not this work of Descartes which led to his hero's being accused of sorcery? But such ideas expressed by Cyrano (elsewhere than in the Physique ou science des choses naturelles) which do not conflict with Cartesianism were commonplaces for the physicists of the time.

Cyrano is much nearer to Gassendi and he may well have discussed his ideas with Gassendi seeing that he was a friend of Gassendi's pupil Chapelle. He may also have followed Gassendi's lectures on astronomy at the Royal College. It is from such personal contact that the influence of Gassendi must have come seeing that Gassendi's Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenis Laertii were not published until 1649 and the Syntagma philosophicum until 1658. A general encouragement to pursue his speculations in the direction of dynamic atomism was probably the form Gassendi's influence took, rather than the precise teaching of particular theories. Cyrano brings modifications to the doctrine of Lucretius, it is true, which are made also by Gassendi in the Animadversiones, particularly as regards the theory of vision, but they were so expected at the time that even Marolles, who was no physicist, makes them in the notes to his translation of the De rerum natura published in 1650. It would have been strange indeed had Cyrano taken over from Lucretius the material images or ‘idols’ which come through the air from the things of the outside world to the organs of sense. He could have found these ‘intentional species’ rejected by others than by Gassendi. He was a voracious reader and one of his complaints according to Lebret was that book after book repeated the same ideas. Conversation with Gassendi, whose erudition embraced all that Cyrano took from Lucretius and the Italians (and how much else besides!), may well have orientated his speculations. The bold integration of panpsychism with atomism which Cyrano carries through with such vigour, had been cautiously explored by the master, beside whose work that of Cyrano is a mere rapid sketch. But, whereas the Provost of Digne never forgot that he was a cleric and was constantly pre-occupied with the claims of Christian doctrine, Cyrano followed the lead of the Italians and Lucretius in so totally a non-Christian spirit that his independence of Gassendi is also evident.

Cyrano was as non-pagan as he was non-Christian. There is no trace of religious feeling in his work at all. He does not replace Christianity by the religion of nature. As far as he is concerned therefore, a little satirical essay published by Zacharie de Lisieux, in Gyges Gallus (1658), misses its mark. Zacharie de Lisieux imagined an assembly of men engaged in the worship of a statue all covered with breasts like the Roman goddess of fertility, or, more exactly, the suckling of young, Ruminia. The argument implied by this allegory is that the putting of intelligence into nature (as against making it transcendent) comes to the same thing as the worshipping of nature. But Cyrano shows no inclination to worship nature or any other being, real or imaginary. His physics are strictly atomistic, and his psychology strictly sensationalist. The one substance in Cyrano's cosmos is the atoms and, however fine and ‘subtle’ they may be on the sun and in the rays of light and heat, they have one fundamental property which may be called either motion or sensation. Intelligence is sensation and all nature participates in it; the less it is limited by particular sense organs or stereotyped by reason and the ordinary forms of language, the more nearly does it correspond to the nature of things: sensitive intuition, far from being the lowest form of understanding is the purest and the most authentic. Although Cyrano does not say so explicitly, one can infer from what he does say that pure intelligence and the simple motion of the atoms are one and the same thing. The total motion and the total intelligence of the universe are one and the same thing. There is no falsehood in his world, no evil. He is no more a dualist in morals than he is in physics or psychology. There is no negation in his world. Everything can be conceived and can exist; nothing is impossible.¹² If the word miracle is not used in the ‘other world’, it is not because some things are impossible, but because, all things being possible, nothing is miraculous. The danger of such an attitude would have been a belief in magic such as Cardano had entertained, but Cyrano's thinking was too close to that of Lucretius for the danger to be grave. That he considered black magic to be an illusion of a disordered mind is shown by his letters on witchcraft. If he believed in magic, it was natural magic, the magic of science. He speculates, it is true, on the power of divination and attributes such a gift to Campanella, but his speculations are scientific in spirit. He begins from observation. He has observed that twins not only have the same physical characteristics but also the same mental characteristics and think and act in harmony even when they are at a distance from each other. Applying to these observed facts, or what he took for observed facts, his speculative principle which identifies the physical with the psychical, he argues that in two persons who are physically identical the same mental states must occur. If therefore by imitation one can bring one's physical state into harmony with that of another person, one may well be able to reproduce in one's own mind the thoughts and feelings of that person. By imitating their attitudes and gestures Campanella discovered the most secret thoughts of the inquisitors. When Cyrano goes further, on the very last page of the Etats et Empires du Soleil, and attributes to Campanella a real second sight, the modern reader is justified in raising his eyebrows. Campanella knows immediately when Descartes arrives on the sun (Descartes died in 1650), although he is three leagues or more away. He knows by intuition; he sees Descartes arrive in a ‘dream’. On this issue scientific rationalism was to take a very different attitude from that of Cyrano, but even here there is no suggestion of a conquest of nature by the easy way which was the magicians' aim; there is no mention of magic formulae, incantations or rites. Campanella's insight can be rationally explained by Cyrano's physical principles: his imagination is so receptive that it registers purely physical impulses received from three leagues away. Doubtless a severe lesson in geometry from the newly arrived Descartes would have helped to bridle such speculation, just as a stern lesson in mechanics would have convinced Cyrano at the outset that his machine could never have reached the moon, but prophetic dreams were not unheard of occurrences in Cyrano's time and did not Pierre Borel promise an ars volandi which would make a flight to the moon feasible? It would be idle to suggest that Cyrano submits his thinking to rigorous scientific discipline; on the contrary he allows speculation unfettered play, but his speculation is far from aimless; it is coherent and purposeful.

Cyrano's mentality was sane and vigorous; it had a vulgar strength and pugnacity. He openly derided the professors of the University of Paris, a corporation to be feared in the intellectual world. He could imagine the putting of a town on wheels so as to obtain a change of air. He could imagine the settlement of international disputes by arbitration. He was sometimes coarse but never obscene. Confident in himself, he was capable of good-natured satire which could strike deeper than earnest indignation. Confident with the self-confidence of an amateur and a cavalier, but also of natural genius, he could drive straight to the heart of the matter, albeit rough-shod over the susceptibilities of the learned.

He died at the early age of thirty-five. Was he in danger from the ecclesiastical authorities? Did the Jesuits steal the manuscript of the Histoire de l'Etincelle? The bibliophile Lacroix suggested as much in his edition of 1858, but there is no documentary evidence to support the suggestion, so it would be idle to discuss it. Cyrano may well have been considered too eccentric to be dangerous. All the same Lebret thought it prudent to omit a number of long paragraphs from his edition of the Etats et Empires de la lune. Cyrano was not quickly forgotten, though his name aroused little controversy. His book was parodied by the Italian players in 1684, in an Arlequin, Empereur de la lune. It was frequently reprinted until the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1748 Benoît de Maillet dedicated his Telliamed, a book of geological essays, to Cyrano, and this was a fitting honour to pay to the author of so lively an imaginative theory of the moon.

Notes

1. This story was told by Molière's first biographer, Grimarest, in 1705. It was severely shaken by G. Michaut in La Jeunesse de Molière (1923). …

2. Advice to the Spanish monarchy, London, 1659, p. 8.

3. See L. Blanchet, Campanella, Paris, Alcan, 1920.

4. Cf. De Sensu rerum (Frankfurt, 1623, p. 370): ‘Mundus ergo totus est sensus, vita, anima, corpus, statua Dei altissimi ad ipsius gloriam, in potestate, sapientia et amore.’ (Epilogue.)

5. The lines they missed in the second act were the following:

                                                                                             Ces enfants de l'effroi,
   Ces beaux riens qu'on adore, et sans savoir pourquoi,
   Ces altérés du sang de bêtes qu'on assomme,
   Ces dieux que l'homme a faits, et qui n'ont point fait l'homme,
   Des plus fermes états ce fantastique soutien,
   Va, va, Térentius, qui les craint ne craint rien.

   Cf. V, vi:

   J'ai beau plonger mon âme et mes regards funèbres
   Dans ce vaste néant et ces longues ténèbres,
   J'y recontre partout un état sans douleur,
   Qui n'élève à mon front ni trouble ni terreur;
   Car, puisque l'on ne reste, après ce grand passage,
   Que le songe léger d'une légère image,
   Et que le coup fatal ne fait ni mal ni bien;
   Vivant, parce qu'on est, mort, parce qu'on n'est rien,
   Pourquoi perdre à regret la lumière reçue,
   Qu'on ne peut regretter, après qu'elle est perdue?
   Pensez-vous m'étonner par ce faible moyen,
   Par l'horreur du tableau d'un être qui n'est rien?

   These lines are spoken by Séjanus and cannot of course be looked upon as a direct expression of Cyrano's opinions, although the author of the Theophrastus redivivus, writing in 1659, assumed that they could be so interpreted.

6. Arsenal 2858, ff. 316-35.

7. This is not for lack of knowledge of Descartes; in 1656 he published a life of Descartes (Vitae Renati Cartesii, summi philosophi, compendium, Paris).

8. Text from the English translation entitled A New Treatise proving a multiplicity of worlds. That the Planets are Regions Inhabited, and the Earth a Star, and that it is out of the Centre of the World in the third Heaven, and turns round before the Sun which is fixed … London, 1658.

9. F. Lachèvre, Œuvres libertines de Cyrano de Bergerac, Paris, 1921, i, p. 98 and 98 n.

10. Published in 1662. Cyrano himself (or Lebret his editor) refers to it as l'Histoire de la république du soleil at the end of the edition of the Etats et Empires de la lune published by Lebret in 1657.

11. Cf. Lucretius, De rerum natura, v, 806-15.

12. In the Grand Œuvre des Philosophes, which Socrates's daemon leaves behind, the author ‘proves that all things are true, and explains the means of uniting physically the truths of each contradiction, as, for instance, that white is black and that black is white, that one can be and not be at the same time, that there can be a mountain without a valley, that non-being is being, that all things which are are not. But notice that he proves all these strange paradoxes without any fanciful or sophistic reasons.’ (Œuvres libertines, ed. Lachèvre, Paris, 1921, i, p. 83.)