If Providence has created the stars and the planets, man has called the cannonball into existence.
Interpretation
Man's creations, like cannonballs, are a testament to human ingenuity, while the stars and planets signify the larger forces of nature.
This quote by Jules Verne highlights the contrast between the natural universe, created by Providence, and the artificial objects crafted by humanity. It suggests that while the cosmos is a product of divine creation, human beings have utilized their intellect and creativity to design technology and weaponry, illustrating both our potential and our flaws.
In practice
In a speech about technological advancement, one might say, 'If Providence has created the stars and the planets, man has called the cannonball into existence' to illustrate human innovation.
Travel enables us to enrich our lives with new experiences, to enjoy and to be educated, to learn respect for foreign cultures, to establish friendships, and above all to contribute to international cooperation and peace throughout the world.
It is always a vulgar and often an unhealthy pastime, and it is a vice which does not go alone; the man who gambles will find himself capable of any evil.
Nothing can astound an American. It has often been asserted that the word 'impossible' is not a French one. People have evidently been deceived by the dictionary. In America, all is easy, all is simple; and as for mechanical difficulties, they are overcome before they arise.
However strong, however imposing a ship may appear, it is not 'disgraced' because it flies before the tempest. A commander ought always to remember that a man's life is worth more than the mere satisfaction of his own pride. In any case, to be obstinate is blameable, and to be wilful is dangerous.
The Yankees, the first mechanicians in the world, are engineers - just as the Italians are musicians and the Germans metaphysicians - by right of birth. Nothing is more natural, therefore, than to perceive them applying their audacious ingenuity to the science of gunnery.
Nothing is more dreadful than private duels in America. The two adversaries attack each other like wild beasts. Then it is that they might well covet those wonderful properties of the Indians of the prairies - their quick intelligence, their ingenious cunning, their scent of the enemy.
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
The image of the scientist who puts the pursuit of truth before anything else has been shattered and replaced by a man on the make or a quasi-religious enthusiast who wants to prove his case at any cost. Science is becoming the tool of campaigning warfare, in which truth is the first casualty.
Something can be real - actually existing, not merely illusory - and yet not be fundamental. Scientists used to think that heat, for example, was a fluidlike substance called 'caloric' that flowed from hot objects to colder ones.
All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.
...there is simply nothing so important to a people and its government as how many of them there are, whether their number is growing or declining, how they are distributed as between different ages, sexes, and different social classes and racial and ethnic groups, and again, which way these numbers are moving.
Once you can reproduce a phenomenon, you are well on the way to understanding it.
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