He was reduced to the condition of an insect creeping on a "tas de boue," which Voltaire so vividly illustrated in Micromegas.

But man is resourceful; [words in Greek].

Displaced, along with his home, from the centre of things, he discovers a new means of restoring his self-importance; he interprets his humiliation as a deliverance.

Finding himself in an insignificant island floating in the immensity of space, he decides that he is at last master of his own destinies; he can fling away the old equipment of final causes, original sin, and the rest; he can construct his own chart and, bound by no cosmic scheme, he need take the universe into account only in so far as he judges it to be to his own profit.

Or, if he is a philosopher, he may say that, after all, the universe for him is built out of his own sensations, and that by virtue of this relativity "anthropo-centrism" is restored in a new and more effective form.
Built out of his own sensations: for the philosophy of Locke was now triumphant in France.