Let us ask whether this pathos of the humble creature, in truth so arrogant, in the Spinozist sense of an ambition satisfied by dreams, does not find itself destituted for the sake of a new image of thought, foreign to all rhetoric of poverty and glory: childhood, finally placed back on its feet.

Mechanism, with its inability to propose a new norm of health, seemed to us to reinforce the chimera of the infans adultus. We might even, in this regard, invoke the figurative example of the elephant passing through the eye of a needle (judging that its impossibility is obvious to everyone, Spinoza uses it as a distinct image conforming to the understanding, conducive to illustrating the illustration that lists of chimeras or metamorphoses already constituted). What is clear is the opposition of the small and the large, and their mutual opposition. But what is stopping the imagination from mentally shrinking the elephant, as in Lewis Carroll, until it could pass through the eye of a needle? The fiction would be even easier insofar as it would not need to pass through a transformation: the elephant would conserve its figure, its proportions, in just the same way that Alice, warped by the idea of growing up, became enormous and then miniscule. Whence the gnomes that belong to the Jewish tradition. Whence too the Lilliputians and the Brobdingnagians, in Swift, next to whom Gulliver is sometimes a giant, sometimes a dwarf – and a dwarf even next to the queen's court dwarf, who uses him as a punching bag, and a nanunculus next to the little girl who takes care of him. ‘I reflected what a Mortification it must prove to me to appear as inconsiderable in this Nation, as one single Lilliputian would be among us.’ This sensitivity to the relativity of the small and the large, which is characteristic of the age – to the extent, of course, that one can consider Spinoza and Swift as contemporaries – clearly has nothing to do with the idea of growth, and one cannot think the becoming of the child in these terms; and this indeed is why Swift could draw through these oscillations a satire of his own society (Alice, in her naivety as a young girl, confuses becoming-adult with the excessive growth of a child).