n the three sciences of which I
speak, and why will he be beneath common sense when there is question of
this half moon? Because in the first cases he has seen with his eyes,
he has perfected his intelligence; and in the second, he has seen with
other people's eyes, he has closed his own, he has perverted the common
sense which is in him.

How has this strange mental alienation been able to operate? How can the
ideas which move with so regular and so firm a step in the brain on a
great number of subjects limp so wretchedly on another a thousand times
more palpable and easy to comprehend? This man always has inside him the
same principles of intelligence; he must have some organ vitiated then,
just as it happens sometimes that the finest _gourmet_ may have a
depraved taste as regards a particular kind of food.

How is the organ of this Arab, who sees half the moon in Mohammed's
sleeve, vitiated? It is through fear. He has been told that if he did
not believe in this sleeve, his soul, immediately after his death, when
passing over the pointed bridge, would fall for ever into the abyss. He
has been told even worse things: If ever you have doubts about this
sleeve, one dervish will treat you as impious; another will prove to you
that you are an insensate fool who, having all possible motives for
believing, have not wished to subordinate your superb reason to the
evidence; a third will report you to the little divan of a little
province, and you will be legally impaled.

All this terrifies the good Arab, his wife, his sister, all his little
family into a state of panic. They have good sense about everything
else, but on this article their imagination is wounded, as was the
imagination of Pascal, who continually saw a precipice beside his
armchair. But does our Arab believe in fact in Mohammed's sleeve? No. He
makes efforts to believe; he says it is impossible, but that it is true;
he believes what he does not believe. On the subject of this sleeve he
forms in his head a chaos of ideas which he is afraid to disentangle;
and this veritably is not to have common sense.

_CONCATENATION OF EVENTS_

The present is delivered, it is said, of the future. Events are linked
to each other by an invincible fatality: it is Destiny which, in Homer,
is above even Jupiter. This master of gods and men declares roundly that
he cannot stop his son Sarpedon dying in his appointed time. Sarpedon
was born at the moment when he had to