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constituted in such a way that it transmits to the brain, in the form of color, the various ways that bodies absorb and break down, in accordance with their chemical composition, the light rays that strike them.
    The various proportions of this absorption and breaking down make up the shades of color.
    Thus this organ imposes on the mind its way of seeing, or rather its arbitrary way of noting dimensions and perceiving the relationships of light with matter.
    Let us examine the sense of hearing.
    Even more than with the eye, we are the playthings and dupes of this fanciful organ.
    Two bodies colliding produce a certain shock in the atmosphere. This movement makes a certain tiny piece of skin vibrate in our ear, which changes immediately into a sound something that is in fact nothing but a vibration.
    Nature is silent. But the eardrum possesses the miraculous property of transmitting to us all the quiverings of invisible waves in space in the form of meaning, meaning that changes depending on the number of vibrations.
    This metamorphosis, which is performed by the auditory nerve over the short trajectory from the ear to the brain, has allowed us to create a strange art—music—the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.
    What shall we say of the senses of taste and smell? Would we recognize smells and the quality of various foods without the peculiar properties of the nose and the palate?
    Humanity, however, could exist without the ear, without taste and smell—that is, without any notion of sound, taste, or smell.
    Thus, if we had a few organs less, we would be unaware of admirable and unusual things, but if we had a few organs more, we would discover around us an infinity of other things we would never have suspected while we lacked the means to observe them.
    So we deceive ourselves when we pass judgments on the Known. We are surrounded by an unexplored unknown.
    Everything is uncertain, and can be perceived in different ways.
    Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.
    Let us formulate this certainty by using the old dictum: “Truth this side of the Pyrénées, error beyond.”
    And let us say: Truth inside the sense organ, error outside.
    Two and two no longer have to make four outside of our atmosphere.
    Truth on Earth, error further away. So I conclude that the mysteries we have glimpsed—like electricity, hypnotic sleep, transmission of will, suggestion, all the magnetic phenomena—remain hidden from us, because nature has not provided us with the organ, or organs, necessary to understand them.
    After I had convinced myself that everything my senses reveal to me exists only for me as I perceive it, and would be completely different for someone else differently organized, after having concluded that a differently made humanity would have about the world, about life, about everything, ideas that are absolutely opposite to our own, since the consensus of beliefs results only from the similarity of human organs, and differences of opinion come only from slight differences in the functioning of our nerve endings, I made an effortat superhuman thought in order to get some inkling of the impenetrable universe that surrounds me.
    Have I gone mad?
    I told myself: “I am surrounded by unknown things.” I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me—afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?
    And this confused terror of the supernatural, which has haunted mankind since the birth of the world, is legitimate, since the supernatural is nothing other than what remains veiled to us!
    Then I understood