Title: Mountain Paths
Author: Maeterlinck, Maurice
Language: English
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MOUNTAIN PATHS



THE WORKS OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK


ESSAYS

  THE TREASURE OF THE HUMBLE
  WISDOM AND DESTINY
  THE LIFE OF THE BEE
  THE BURIED TEMPLE
  THE DOUBLE GARDEN
  THE MEASURE OF THE HOURS
  ON EMERSON, AND OTHER ESSAYS
  OUR ETERNITY
  THE UNKNOWN GUEST
  THE WRACK OF THE STORM
  MOUNTAIN PATHS


PLAYS

  SISTER BEATRICE, AND ARDIANE AND BARBE BLEUE
  JOYZELLE, AND MONNA VANNA
  THE BLUE BIRD, A FAIRY PLAY
  MARY MAGDALENE
  PÉLLÉAS AND MÉLISANDE, AND OTHER PLAYS
  PRINCESS MALEINE
  THE INTRUDER, AND OTHER PLAYS
  AGLAVAINE AND SELYSETTE
  THE MIRACLE OF SAINT ANTHONY
  THE BETROTHAL; A SEQUEL TO THE BLUE BIRD POEMS


HOLIDAY EDITIONS

  OUR FRIEND THE DOG
  THE SWARM
  DEATH
  THOUGHTS FROM MAETERLINCK
  THE BLUE BIRD
  THE LIFE OF THE BEE
  NEWS OF SPRING AND OTHER NATURE STUDIES
  THE LIGHT BEYOND



  Mountain Paths

  BY
  MAURICE MAETERLINCK

  _Translated by_
  ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS

  [Illustration]


  NEW YORK
  DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
  1919



  COPYRIGHT, 1919
  BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.
  _All rights reserved_



CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                  PAGE

      I  THE POWER OF THE DEAD                3

     II  MESSAGES FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE      15

    III  BAD NEWS                            31

     IV  THE SOUL OF NATIONS                 41

      V  THE MOTHERS                         51

     VI  THREE UNKNOWN HEROES                59

    VII  WASTED BEAUTIES                     77

   VIII  THE INSECT WORLD                    87

     IX  EVIL-SPEAKING                      123

      X  OF GAMBLING                        133

     XI  THE RIDDLE OF PROGRESS             165

    XII  THE TWO LOBES                      179

   XIII  HOPE AND DESPAIR                   191

    XIV  MACROCOSM AND MICROCOSM            201

     XV  HEREDITY AND PREEXISTENCE          213

    XVI  THE GREAT REVELATION               229

   XVII  THE NECESSARY SILENCE              271

  XVIII  KARMA                              281



THE POWER OF THE DEAD



MOUNTAIN PATHS



I

THE POWER OF THE DEAD


1

In that curious little masterpiece _A Beleagured City_, Mrs. Oliphant
shows us the dead of a provincial town suddenly waxing indignant over
the conduct and the morals of those inhabiting the town which they
founded. They rise up in rebellion, invest the houses, the streets,
the market-places and, by the pressure of their innumerable multitude,
all-powerful though invisible, repulse the living, thrust them out
of doors and, setting a strict watch, permit them to return to their
roof-trees only after a treaty of peace and penitence has purified
their hearts, atoned for their offences and ensured a more worthy
future.

Undoubtedly a great truth underlies this fiction, which appears to us
far-fetched because we perceive only material and ephemeral realities.
The dead life and move in our midst far more really and effectually
than the most venturesome imagination could depict. It is very doubtful
whether they remain in their graves. It even seems increasingly certain
that they never allowed themselves to be confined there. Under the
tombstones where we believe them to lie imprisoned there are only a few
ashes, which are no longer theirs, which they have abandoned without
regret and which in all probability they no longer deign to remember.
All that was themselves continues to have its being in our midst. How
and under what aspect? After all these thousands, perhaps millions of
years, we do not yet know; and no religion has been able to tell us
with satisfying certainty, though all have striven to do so; but we
may, by means of certain tokens, hope to learn.


2

Without further considering a mighty but obscure truth, which it is
for the moment impossible to state precisely or to render palpable,
let us concern ourselves with one which cannot be disputed. As I have
said elsewhere, whatever our religious faith may be, there is at any
rate one place where our dead cannot perish, where they continue to
exist as really as when they were in the flesh and often more actively;
and this living abiding-place, this consecrated spot, which for those
whom we have lost becomes Heaven or Hell according as we draw nearer
to or travel farther from their thoughts and their desires, is within
ourselves.

And their thoughts and their desires are always higher than our own. It
is, therefore, by uplifting ourselves that we approach them. It is we
who must take the first steps, for they can no longer descend, whereas
it is always possible for us to rise; for the dead, whatever they may
have been in life, become better than the best of us. The least worthy
of them, in shedding the body, have shed its vices, its littlenesses,
its weaknesses, which soon pass from our memory as well; and the spirit
alone remains, which is pure in every man and able to desire only what
is good. There are no wicked dead, because there are no wicked souls.
This is why, as we purify ourselves, we restore life to those who were
no more and transform our memory, which they inhabit, into Heaven.


3

And what was always true of all the dead is far more true to-day, when
only the best are chosen for the tomb. In the region which we believe
to be under the earth, which we call the Kingdom of the Shades and
which in reality is the ethereal region and the Kingdom of Light, there
are at this moment disturbances no less profound than those which we
have experienced on the surface of the earth. The young dead have
invaded it from every side; and since the beginning of this world they
have never been so numerous, so full of energy and zeal. Whereas in
the customary sequence of the years the dwelling-place of those who
leave us receives only weary and exhausted lives, there is not one in
this incomparable host who, to borrow Pericles’ expression, “has not
departed from life at the height of glory.” Not one of them but has
gone up, not down, to his death clad in the greatest sacrifice that
man can make for an idea that cannot die. All that we have hitherto
believed, all that we have striven to attain beyond ourselves, all that
has lifted us to the level at which we stand, all that has overcome
the evil days and the evil instincts of human nature: all this could
have been no more than lies and illusions if such men as these, such
a mass of merit and of glory, were really annihilated, had for ever
disappeared, were for ever useless and voiceless, for ever without
influence in a world to which they have given life.


4

It is hardly possible that this could be so as regards the external
survival of the dead; but it is absolutely certain that it is not so
as regards their survival in ourselves. Here nothing is lost and no
one perishes. Our memories are to-day peopled by a multitude of heroes
struck down in the flower of their youth and very different from the
pale and languid cohort of the past, composed almost wholly of the sick
and the old, who had already ceased to exist before leaving the earth.
We must tell ourselves that now, in every one of our homes, both in our
cities and in the country-side, both in the palace and in the meanest
hovel, there lives and reigns a young dead man in the glory of his
strength. He fills the poorest, darkest dwelling with a splendour of
which it had never ventured to dream. His constant presence, imperious
and inevitable, diffuses and maintains a religion and ideas which it
had never known before, hallows everything around it, makes the eyes
look higher, prevents the spirit from descending, purifies the air
that is breathed and the speech that is held and the thoughts that are
mustered there and, little by little, ennobles and uplifts the whole
people on a scale of unexampled vastness.


5

Such dead as these have a power as profound, as fruitful as life and
less precarious. It is terrible that this experience should have been
made, for it is the most pitiless and the first in such enormous masses
that mankind has undergone; but, now that the ordeal is over, we shall
soon gather the most unexpected fruits. It will not be long before we
see the differences widen and the destinies diverge between the nations
which have acquired all these dead and all this glory and those which
were deprived of them; and we shall perceive with amazement that the
nations which have lost the most are those which have kept their riches
and their men. There are losses which are inestimable gains; and there
are gains whereby the future is lost. There are dead whom the living
cannot replace and the mere thought of whom accomplishes things which
our bodies cannot perform. There are dead whose energy surpasses death
and recovers life; and we are almost every one of us at this moment the
mandataries of a being greater, nobler, graver, wiser and more truly
living than ourselves. With all those who accompany him, he will be our
judge, if it be true that the dead weigh the soul of the living and
that our happiness depends on their verdict. He will be our guide and
our protector, for it is the first time, since history has revealed its
misfortunes to us, that man has felt so great a host of such mighty
dead soaring above his head and speaking within his heart.

We shall live henceforward under their laws, which will be more just
but not more severe nor more cheerless than ours; for it is a mistake
to suppose that the dead love nothing but gloom: they love only that
justice and that truth which are the eternal forms of happiness.

From the depths of this justice and this truth in which they are
all immersed, they will help us to destroy the great falsehoods of
existence; for war and death, if they sow innumerable miseries and
misfortunes, have at least the merit of destroying as many lives as
they occasion evils. And all the sacrifices which they have made for us
will have been in vain--and this is not possible--if they do not first
of all bring about the fall of the lies on which we live and which it
is not necessary to name, for each of us knows his own and is ashamed
of them and will be eager to make an end of them.

They will teach us, before all else, from the depths of our hearts
which are their living tombs, to love those who outlive them, since it
is in them alone that they wholly exist.



MESSAGES FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE



II

MESSAGES FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE


1

Sir Oliver Lodge is one of the most distinguished men of learning in
our day. He is also one of the oldest, most active and most prominent
members of that well-known Society for Psychical Research which,
founded in 1882, has ever since striven to study with irreproachable
scientific precision all the wonderful, inexplicable, occult and
supernatural phenomena which have always baffled and still elude
the comprehension of mankind. In addition to his purely scientific
works, of which, not being qualified to judge, I do not speak, he is
the author of some extremely remarkable books, such as _Man and the
Universe_, _The Ether of Space_ and _The Survival of Man_, in which
the loftiest and most daring metaphysical speculations are constantly
controlled by the most prudent, wise and steadfast common sense.

Sir Oliver Lodge, therefore, is at the same time a philosopher and a
practical, working scientist, accustomed to scientific methods which
do not readily allow him to go astray; he has, in a word, one of the
best-balanced brains that we could hope to meet; and he is convinced
that the dead do not die and that they are able to communicate with
us. He has tried to make us share his conviction in _The Survival of
Man_. I am not sure that he has quite succeeded. True, he gives us
a certain number of extraordinary facts, but they are facts which,
in the last resort, can be explained by the unconscious intervention
of intelligences other than those of the dead. He does not bring us
the irrefutable proof, such as we should consider, for instance,
the revelation of an incident, a detail, a piece of information so
absolutely unknown to any living creature that it could come only from
a spirit no longer of this world. We must admit, however, that such a
proof is, as he says, as difficult to conceive as to provide.


2

Sir Oliver’s youngest son, Raymond, was born in 1889, became an
engineer and enlisted for the duration of the war in September, 1914.
He was sent out to Flanders early in the spring of 1915; and, on the
14th of September of the same year, before Ypres, while the company
under his command was leaving the front-line trench, he was hit in the
left side by a splinter of a shell; and he died a few hours later.

He was, as a photograph shows us, one of those admirable young British
soldiers who are the perfect type of a robust, fresh, joyous humanity,
clean and bright, and whose death seems the more cruel and the more
incredible as it annihilates a greater aggregate of strength, hope and
beauty.

His father has dedicated to his memory a volume entitled, _Raymond, or
Life and Death_; and we are at first somewhat bewildered at seeing
that it is not, as one might expect, a book of lamentation, regrets and
tears, but the accurate, deliberately impassive and at times almost
cheerful report of a man of learning who thrusts aside his sorrow so
that he may see clearly before him, wrestles with the thought of death
and beholds the rising dawn of an immense and very strange hope.


3

I will not linger over the first part of the volume, which aims at
making us acquainted with Raymond Lodge. It contains some forty letters
written in the trenches, the testimony of his brother-officers’
devotion to him, details of his death and so on. The letters, I may
say in passing, are charmingly vivid and marked by a delicate and
delightful humour whose only object is to reassure those who are not
themselves in danger. I have not time to dwell upon them; and they are
not what most interests us here.

But the second part, which Sir Oliver Lodge calls _Supernormal
Portion_, passes from the life that exists on the surface of our earth
and introduces us into a very different world.

In the very first lines, the author reminds us that he has “made no
secret of his conviction, not merely that personality persists, but
that its continued existence is more entwined with the life of every
day than has been generally imagined; that there is no real breach
of continuity between the dead and the living; and that methods of
intercommunion across what has seemed to be a gulf can be set going in
response to the urgent demand of affection; that in fact, as Diotima
told Socrates (_Symposium_, 202 and 203), ‘Love bridges the Chasm.’”

Sir Oliver Lodge, then, is persuaded that his son, though dead, has
not ceased to exist and that he has not gone far from those who love
him. Raymond, in fact, seeks to communicate with his father as early
as eleven days after his death. We know that these communications or
so-called communications from beyond the grave--let us not prejudge
the issue for the moment--are made through the agency of a medium who
is or believes himself to be inspired or possessed by the deceased or
by a familiar spirit speaking in his name and repeating what the latter
reveals to him. The medium conveys his information either orally or by
automatic writing, or again, although this is very rare in the present
instance, by table-turning. But I will pass over these preliminaries,
which would carry us too far, and come straight to the communication
which is, I think, the most astonishing of all and perhaps the only
one that cannot be explained, or at least is exceedingly difficult to
explain, by the intervention of the living.

About the end of August, 1915, that is to say, not many days before
his death, Raymond, who, as we have seen, was near Ypres, had been
photographed with the officers of his battalion by a travelling
photographer. On the 27th of September following, in the course of a
sitting with the medium Peters, the spirit speaking by Peters’ mouth
said, suddenly:

“You have several portraits of this boy. Before he went away you had
a good portrait of him--two, no, three. Two where he is alone and one
where he is in a group of other men. He is particular that I should
tell you of this. In one you see his walking-stick.”

Now at that time the members of Sir Oliver Lodge’s family did not know
of the existence of this group. They attached no great importance,
however, to the revelations but in subsequent sittings, notably on the
3rd of December, before the photographs had arrived, before they were
seen, more detailed information was received. According to the spirit’s
statements, the photograph was of a dozen officers or more, taken
out of doors, in front of a sort of shelter (the medium kept drawing
vertical lines in the air). Some were sitting down and some were
standing up at the back. Raymond was sitting; somebody was leaning on
him. There were several photographs taken.

On the 7th of December, the photographs arrived at Mariemont, Sir
Oliver’s house near Edgbaston. There were three copies, all differing
slightly, of the same group of twenty-one officers, those in the back
row standing up, the others seated. The group was taken outside a sort
of temporary wooden structure, such as might be a hospital shed, with
six conspicuous nearly vertical lines on the roof. Raymond was one of
those sitting on the ground in front; his walking-stick, mentioned
in the first revelation, was lying across his feet. And a striking
piece of evidence is that his is the only instance where one man is
leaning or resting his hand on the shoulder of another, in two of the
photographs, or, in the third, his leg.

This manifestation is one of the most remarkable that have hitherto
been obtained, because it eliminates almost entirely any telepathic
interference, that is to say, any subconscious intercommunication
between the persons present at the sitting, all of whom were absolutely
unaware of the existence of the photographs. If we refuse to admit
the intervention of the deceased--which should, I agree, be admitted
only in the last resort--we must, in order to explain the revelation,
suppose that the subconsciousness of the medium or of one of those
present entered into communication, through the vast mazes and deserts
of space and amid millions of strange souls, with the subconsciousness
of one of the officers or of one of the people who had seen these
photographs whose existence there was no reason for suspecting. This is
possible; but it is so fortuitous, so prodigious that the survival and
intervention of the deceased would, in the circumstances, seem almost
less supernatural and more probable.


4

I will not enter into the details of the numerous sittings which
preceded or followed this one; nor will I even undertake to summarize
them. To share the emotion aroused, we must read the reports which
faithfully reproduce these strange dialogues between the living and
the dead. We receive the impression that the departed son comes daily
closer and closer to life and converses more and more easily, more and
more familiarly with all those who loved him before he was overtaken
by the shadows of the grave. He recalls to each of them a thousand
little forgotten incidents. He remains among his own kindred as though
he had never left them. He is always present and prepared to answer.
He mingles so completely in their whole life that no one any longer
thinks of mourning his loss. They question him about his present
state, ask him where he is, what he is, what he is doing. He needs no
pressing; he at once declares himself astonished at the incredible
reality of that new world. He is very happy there, reforming himself,
condensing himself, so to speak, and gradually finding himself again.
The existence of the intelligence and of the will, disencumbered of
the body, is freer, lighter, of greater range and diffusion, but
continues very like what it was in the flesh. The environment is no
longer physical but spiritual; and there is a translation to another
plane rather than the break, the complete overthrow, the extraordinary
transitions which we are pleased to imagine. After all, is it not
fairly plausible? And are we not wrong in believing that death changes
everything, from one day to the next, and that there is a sudden and
inconceivable abyss between the hour which precedes decease and that
which follows it? Is it in conformity with the habits of nature? Is
the life-force which we carry within ourselves and which doubtless
cannot be extinguished, is that force to so great a degree crippled and
cramped by our body that, when it leaves this body, it becomes, then
and there, entirely different and unrecognizable?

But I must set a limit to speculation and, lest I exceed the limits of
this essay, I must pass by two or three revelations less striking than
that of the photograph, but pretty strange notwithstanding. Obviously,
it is not the first time that such manifestations have occurred; but
these are really of a higher quality than those which crowd several
volumes of the _Proceedings_. Do they furnish the proof for which we
ask? I do not think so; but will any one ever be able to supply us
with that compelling proof? What can the discarnate spirit do when
trying to establish that it continues to exist? If it speak to us of
the most secret, the most private incidents of a common past, we reply
that it is we who are reviving those memories within ourselves. If it
aim at convincing us by its description of the world beyond the grave,
not all the most glorious and unexpected pictures of that world which
it might trace are worth anything as evidence, for they cannot be
controlled. If we seek a proof by asking it to foretell the future, it
confesses that it does not know the future much better than we do,
which is likely enough, seeing that any knowledge of this kind implies
a sort of omniscience and consequently omnipotence which can hardly be
acquired in a moment. All that remains to it, therefore, is such little
snatches of evidence and uncertain attempts at proof as we find here.
It is not enough, I admit; for psychometry, that is to say, a similar
manifestation of clairvoyance between one living subconsciousness
and another, gives almost equally astonishing results. But here as
there these results show at least that we have around us wandering
intelligences, already enfranchised from the narrow and burdensome
laws of space and matter, that sometimes know things which we do not
know or no longer know. Do they emanate from ourselves, are they only
manifestations of faculties as yet unknown, or are they external,
objective and independent of ourselves? Are they merely alive in the
sense in which we speak of our bodies, or do they belong to bodies
which have ceased to exist? That is what we cannot yet decide; but it
must be acknowledged that, once we admit their existence, which at this
date is hardly contestable, it becomes much less difficult to agree
that they belong to the dead.

This at least may be said: if experiments such as these do not
demonstrate positively that the dead are able directly, manifestly
and almost materially to mingle with our existence and to remain in
touch with us, they prove that they continue to live in us much more
ardently, profoundly, personally and passionately than had hitherto
been believed; and that in itself is more than we dared hope.



BAD NEWS



III

BAD NEWS


1

For more than four years, evil tidings passed night and day over almost
half the world of men. Never since our earth came into being were they
known to spread in crowds so dense and busy and commanding. In the
happy days of peace, we would come upon the gloomy visitants here and
there, travelling over hill and dale, nearly always alone, sometimes in
couples, rarely in companies of three, timid and shy, seeking to pass
unnoticed and humbly undertaking the smallest messages of sorrow that
destiny confided to their charge. Now they go with heads erect; they
are almost arrogant; and swollen with their importance, they neglect
any misfortunes that are not deathly. They encumber the roads, cross
the seas and rivers, invade the streets, do not forget the by-ways and
climb the most rugged and stony tracks. There is not a hovel cowering
in the dingiest and most obscure suburb of a great city, not a cottage
hidden in the recesses of the poorest hamlet of the most inaccessible
mountain, which escapes their search and towards which one of them,
detached from the sinister band, does not hasten with its little
footstep, eager, pitiless and sure. Each has its goal whence nothing
can divert it. Through time and space, over rocks and walls they press
onward, swift and determined, blind and deaf to all that would retard
them, thinking only of fulfilling their duty, which is to announce as
soon as may be to the most sensitive and defenceless heart the greatest
sorrow that can fall upon it.


2

We watch them pass as emissaries of destiny. To us they seem as fatal
as the very misfortune of which they are but the heralds; and no one
dreams of barring the way before them. So soon as one of them arrives,
all unexpected, in our midst, we leave everything, we rush forward, we
gather round it. Almost a religious fear compasses it about; we whisper
reverently; and we should bow no lower in the presence of a messenger
of God. Not only would no one dare to contradict it, or advise it, or
beg it to be patient, to grant a few hours of respite, to hide in the
darkness or to arrive by a longer road; on the contrary, all compete in
offering it zealous if humble service. The most compassionate, the most
pitiful are the most assiduous and obsequious, as though there were no
duty more unmistakable, no act of charity more meritorious than to lead
the dark envoy by the shortest and the quickest way to the heart which
it is to strike.


3

Once again, we are here confounding that which belongs to destiny with
that which belongs to ourselves. The misfortune was perhaps not to be
avoided; but a great part of the sorrows that attend it remain in our
power. It is for us to be careful of them, to direct them, to subdue
them, disarm them, delay them, turn them aside and sometimes even to
stop them altogether.

In effect, we hardly yet know the psychology of sorrow, which is as
deep, as complex and as worthy of study as the passions to which
we devote so much of our time. In everyday life, it is true, great
sorrows, though not so rare as we could have wished, were nevertheless
too widely scattered for us to study them easily, step by step. To-day,
alas, they are the ground of all our thoughts; and we are learning
at last that, even as love or happiness or vanity, they have their
secrets, their habits, their illusions, their sophistries, their dark
corners, their baffling mazes and their unforeseen abysses; for man,
whether he love or rejoice or weep, remains ever constant to himself!

It is not true, as we too willingly agree, that, since unhappiness
must be known sooner or later, our only duty is to reveal it at the
earliest moment, for the sorrow that is yet green is very different
from the sorrow that is already fading. It is not true, as we admit
without question, that anything is better than ignorance or uncertainty
and that there is a sort of cowardice in not forthwith announcing the
bad news which we know to those whom it must prostrate in the dust. On
the contrary, cowardice lies in ridding ourselves of the bad news as
quickly as we may and in not bearing its whole burden, secretly and
alone, as long as we are able. When the bad news arrives, our first
duty is to set it apart, to prevent it from spreading, to master it as
we would a malefactor or a stalking pestilence, to close all means of
escape, to mount guard over it, so that it cannot break forth and do
harm. Our duty is not merely, as the best of us and the most prudent
seem to believe, to usher in the bad news with a thousand precautions,
with short and muffled, sidelong and measured steps, by the back-door,
into the dwelling which it is to devastate; rather is it our duty
definitely to forbid its entrance and to have the courage to chain it
in our own dwelling, which it will fill with unjust and insupportable
reproaches and upbraidings. Instead of making ourselves the easy echo
of its cries, we should think only of stifling its voice. Each hour
that we thus pass in restless and painful intimacy with the hateful
prisoner is an hour of suffering which we accept for ourselves and
which we spare the victim of fate. It is almost certain that the
malignant recluse will end by escaping our vigilance; but here the very
minutes have their value and there is no gain, however small, that we
are entitled to neglect. The hour-glass that measures the phases of
sorrow is much finer and truer than that which marks the stages of
pleasure. The time that passes between the death of one whom we love
and the moment when we hear of his death is as full of pain as it is
of days. Most to be feared of all is the first blow of misfortune;
it is then that the heart is smitten and torn with a wound that will
never heal. But this blow has not its shattering and sometimes mortal
force unless it strike its victim at once and, so to speak, fresh from
the event. Every hour that is interposed deadens the sting and lessens
its virulence. A death already some weeks old no longer wears the
same face as that which is made known on the very day when it occurs;
and, if a few months have covered it, it is no longer a death, it has
become a memory. The days that divide us from it have almost the same
value whether they pass before we hear of it or afterwards. They remove
beforehand from the eyes and heart the blinding horror of the loss;
they step forward and draw it out of the clutch of madness into a past
like that which softens regret. They weave a sort of retrospective
memory which stretches into the past and grants straightway all that
true memory would have given little by little, hour by hour, during
the long months that part the first despair from the sorrow which grows
wise and reconciled and ready to hope anew.



THE SOUL OF NATIONS



IV

THE SOUL OF NATIONS


1

In the admirable and touching pages in which Octave Mirbeau bequeaths
his last thoughts to us, the great friend whose loss is mourned by
all who in this world hunger and thirst after justice expresses
his surprise at finding how in the supreme moments of its life the
collective soul of the French nation differs from the soul of each of
the individuals of which it is composed.

He had devoted the best part of his work to examining, dissecting,
presenting in a blinding and sometimes unbearable light and
stigmatizing with unequalled eloquence and bitterness the weaknesses
and selfishness, the folly and meannesses, the vanity and sordid
money-sense, the lack of conscience, honesty, charity, dignity, the
shameful stains on the life of his fellow-countrymen. And behold,
in the hour of insistent duty, there arises suddenly, as in a fairy
scene, out of the quagmire which he had so long stirred with rough and
generous disgust, the purest, noblest, most patient, fraternal and
whole-hearted spirit of heroism and sacrifice that the world has ever
known, not only in the most glorious days of its history, but even in
the time of its most romantic legends, which were but glorious dreams
which it never hoped to realize.

I could say as much of another nation, which I know well, since it
lives in the land where I was born. The Belgians, in the guise in which
we saw them daily, appeared to give us no promise of a noble soul.
They seemed to us narrow and limited, a little commonplace, honest
in a mean, inglorious way, without ideals or generous aspirations,
wholly absorbed by their petty material welfare, their petty local
wrangles. Yet, when the same hour of duty sounded for them, more
menacing and formidable than those of the other nations, because it
preceded all of them in a terrible mystery; while there was everything
to gain and nothing to lose, save honour, if they proved faithless to
a plighted word; at the first call of their conscience aroused as by a
thunderbolt, without hesitating or glancing at what they had to meet or
undergo, with an unanimous and irresistible impulse, they astonished
mankind by a decision such as no other people had ever taken and saved
the world, well knowing that themselves could not be saved. And this
assuredly is the noblest sacrifice that the heroes and martyrs who have
hitherto appeared to be the professed exponents of sublime courage are
able to achieve upon this earth of ours.

On the other hand, to those of us who had had occasion to mix with
Germans, who had lived in Germany and believed that they knew German
manners and letters, it seemed beyond doubt that the Bavarians,
Saxons, Hanoverians and Rhinelanders, notwithstanding some defects of
education rather than character which grated upon us a little, also
possessed certain qualities, notably a genial kindness, a gravity, a
laboriousness, a steadiness, an uncomplaining temper, a simplicity
in their domestic life, a sense of duty and a habit of taking life
conscientiously, which we had never known or had succeeded in losing.
So, despite the warnings of history, we were struck dumb with amazement
and at first refused to believe the early tales of atrocities which
were not incidental, as in every war, but deliberate, premeditated,
systematic and perpetrated with a light heart by an entire people
setting itself of sober purpose and with a sort of perverse pride
outside the pale of humanity, transforming itself of a sudden into a
pack of devils more formidable and destructive than all those which
Hell had hitherto belched forth into our world.


2

We knew already and Dr. Gustave Le Bon had demonstrated to us in a
curious way that the soul of a crowd does not resemble the soul
of any of its component members. According to the leaders and the
circumstances that control it, the collective soul is sometimes
loftier, juster, more generous and most often more impulsive, more
credulous, more cruel, more barbarous and blind. But a crowd has only
a provisional, momentary soul, which does not survive the short-lived
and nearly always violent event that calls it into being; and its
contingent and transitory psychology is hardly able to tell us how the
profound, lasting and, so to speak, immortal soul of a nation takes
shape.


3

It is quite natural that a nation should not know itself at all and
that its acts should plunge it into a state of bewilderment from which
it does not recover until history has explained them to a greater or
lesser degree. None of the men who make up a nation knows himself;
still less does any of them know his fellows. Not one of us really
knows who or what he is; not one of us can say what he will do in
unexpected circumstances which are a trifle more serious than those
which form the customary tissue of life. We spend our existence in
questioning and exploring ourselves; our acts are as much a revelation
to ourselves as to others; and, the nearer we draw to our end, the
farther stretches the vista of that which still remains for us to
discover. We own but the smallest part of ourselves; the rest, which is
almost the whole, does not belong to us at all, but merges in the past
and the future and in other mysteries more unknown than the future or
the past.

What is true of each one of us is very much more true of a great nation
composed of millions of men. That represents a future and a past
stretching incomparably farther than those of a single human life. We
admit and constantly repeat that a nation is guided by its dead. It is
certain that the dead continue to live in it a far more active life
than is generally believed and that they control it unknown to itself,
even as, at the other end of the ages, the men of the future, that
is to say, all those who are not yet born, all those whom it carries
within itself as it does its dead, play no less important a part in a
nation’s decisions. But in its very present, at the moment when it is
living and putting forth its activity on this earth, in addition to
the power of those who no longer are and those who are not yet, there
is outside the nation, outside the aggregate of bodies and brains that
make it up, a host of forces and faculties which have not found or have
not wished to take their place, or which do not abide in the nation
consistently, and which nevertheless belong to it as essentially and
direct it as effectively as those which are comprised within it. What
our body contains when we believe ourselves circumscribed is little in
comparison with what it does not contain; and it is in what the body
does not contain that the highest and most powerful part of our being
seems to dwell. We must not forget that it grows stronger each day
that we neither die nor come into being, in a word, that we are not
wholly incarnate, and that, on the other hand, our flesh comprises
much more than ourselves. It is this that constitutes all the floating
forces which make up the real soul of a people, forces very much deeper
and more numerous than those which seem fixed in the body and the
spirit. They do not show themselves in the petty incidents of daily
life, which concern only the mean and narrow covering in which a nation
goes sheltered; but they unite, join forces and reveal their passionate
ardour at the grave and tragic hours when everlasting destiny is at
stake. They then lay down decisions which history inscribes on her
records, decisions whose grandeur, generosity and heroism astonish even
those who have taken them more or less unknown to themselves and often
in spite of themselves, decisions which are manifested in their own
eyes as an unexpected, magnificent and incomprehensible revelation of
themselves.



THE MOTHERS



V

THE MOTHERS


1

It was they who bore the main burden of suffering in this war.

In our streets and open spaces and all along the roads, in our
churches, in our towns and villages, in every house, we come into
contact with mothers who have lost their son or are living in an
anguish more cruel than the certainty of death.

Let us try to understand their loss. They know what it means, but they
do not tell the men.

Their son is taken from them at the fairest moment of his life, when
their own is in its decline. When a child dies in infancy, it is as
though his soul had hardly gone, as though it were lingering near the
mother who brought it into the world, awaiting the time when it may
return in a new form. The death which visits the cradle is not the
same as that which spreads terror over the earth; but a son who dies
at the age of twenty does not come back again and leaves not a gleam
of hope behind him. He carries away with him all the future that his
mother had remaining to her, all that she gave to him and all his
promise: the pangs, anguish and smiles of birth and childhood, the joys
of youth, the reward and the harvest of maturity, the comfort and the
peace of old age.

He carries away with him something much more than himself: it is not
his life only that comes to an end, it is numberless days that finish
suddenly, a whole generation that becomes extinct, a long series of
faces, of little fondling hands, of play and laughter, all of which
fall at one blow on the battle-field, bidding farewell to the sunshine
and reentering the earth which they will not have known. All this the
eyes of our mothers perceive without understanding; and this is why, at
certain times, the weight and sadness of their glance are more than any
of us can bear.


2

And yet they do not weep as the mothers wept in former wars. All their
sons disappear one by one; and we do not hear them complain or moan
as in days gone by, when great sufferings, great massacres and great
catastrophes were surrounded by the clamours and lamentations of the
mothers.

They do not gather in the public places, they do not utter
recriminations, they rail at no one, they do not rebel. They swallow
their sobs and stifle their tears, as though obeying a command which
they have passed from one to the other, unknown to the men.

We do not know what it is that sustains them and gives them the
strength to endure the remnant of their lives. Some of them have other
children; and we can understand that they transfer to these the love
and the future which death has shattered. Many of them have never lost
or are striving to recover their faith in the eternal promises; and
here again we can understand that they do not despair, for the mothers
of the martyrs did not despair either. But thousands of others, whose
home is for ever deserted and whose sky is peopled by none but pale
phantoms, retain the same hope as those who keep on hoping. What gives
them this courage which astonishes whenever we behold it?

When the best, the most compassionate, the wisest among us meet one of
these mothers who has just stealthily wiped her eyes, so that the sight
of her unhappiness may not offend others who are happier, when we seek
for words which, uttered amid the glaring directness of the most awful
sorrow that can strike a human heart, shall not sound like odious or
ridiculous lies, we can hardly find anything to say to her. We speak
to her of the justice and the beauty of the cause for which her hero
fell, of the immense and necessary sacrifice, of the remembrance and
gratitude of mankind, of the irreality of life, which is measured not
by the length of days but by the lofty height of duty and glory. We
add perhaps that the dead do not die, that there are no dead, that
those who are no more live nearer to our souls than when they were in
the flesh and that all that we loved in them lingers in our hearts so
long as it is visited by our memory and revived by our love.

But, even while we speak, we feel the emptiness of what we say. We
are conscious that all this is true only for those whom death has
not hurled into the abyss where words are nothing more than childish
babble; that the most ardent memory cannot take the place of a dear
reality which we touch with our hands or lips; and that the most
exalted thought is as nothing compared with the daily going out and
coming in, the familiar presence at meals, the morning and evening
kiss, the fond embrace at the departure and the intoxicating delight
at the return. The mothers know and feel this better than we do; and
that is why they do not answer our attempts at consolation and why
they listen to them in silence, finding within themselves other
reasons for living and hoping than those which we, vainly searching the
whole horizon of human certainty and thought, try to bring them from
the outside. They resume the burden of their days without telling us
whence they derive their strength or teaching us the secret of their
self-sacrifice, their resignation and their heroism.



THREE UNKNOWN HEROES



VI

THREE UNKNOWN HEROES


1

The Belgian government published last year a _Reply to the German White
Book of 10 May 1915_.

This reply gives peremptory and categorical denials to all the
allegations in the White Book on the subject of _francs-tireurs_, of
attacks by civilians and of the Belgian women’s cruelty to the German
prisoners and wounded. It contains a body of authentic and overwhelming
evidence upon the massacres at Andenne, Dinant, Louvain and Aerschot
which enables history here and now to pronounce its verdict with even
greater certainty than the most scrupulous jury of a criminal court.

Among the most frightful incidents reported in these accounts by
eye-witnesses, I would linger to-day upon only two of those which
marked the sack of Aerschot; not that they are more odious or cruel
than the others--on the contrary, beside the unprovoked murders and
wholesale executions at Andenne, Dinant and Louvain, which are of
unsurpassable horror, they seem almost kindly--but I select them for
the very reason that they display more clearly than in its most violent
excesses what we may call the normal mentality of the German army and
the abominable things which it did when it believed itself to be acting
with justice, moderation and humanity. I select them above all because
they show us the admirable and touching state of mind, as displayed
amidst a terrible ordeal, of a little Belgian city, the most innocent
of all the victims of this war, and offer for our contemplation
instances of simple and heroic self-sacrifice which have escaped notice
and which it is well to bring to light, for they are as beautiful as
the most splendid examples in the fairest pages of Plutarch.


2

Aerschot is a humble and happy little town in Flemish Brabant, one of
those modest unknown clusters of habitations which, like Dinant, for
ever to be regretted and buried in the past, nobody used to visit,
because they contained no buildings of note, but which retained and
represented all the more, in the depths of their silence and their
placid isolation, Flemish life in its most special, intimate, intense,
traditional, suave and peaceable aspect. In these half-rustic little
cities we find hardly any industries, at most a malt-kiln or two,
a corn-mill, an oil-works, a chicory-factory. Their life is almost
agricultural; and the well-to-do inhabitants live on the produce or
the rents of their fields, their meadows and their woods. The houses
in the church-square are substantial-looking, more or less cubical in
shape and painted virgin white; their carriage-gates are adorned with
glittering brasses. All through the week the square is almost deserted
and wakens into life only on market-days and on Sunday mornings, at
the hour of high mass. In a word, it is a picture of tranquillity,
of placid waiting for meals and repose, of drowsy, easy existence
and perhaps of happiness, if happiness consists in being happy in
a half-slumber free of remote ambitions, exaggerated passions or
over-eager dreams.

It was here, in this peaceful sojourn of immemorial restfulness, which
not even the war had hitherto disturbed below the surface, that, on
the 19th of August, 1914, at nine o’clock in the morning, after the
retreat of the last Belgian soldiers, the square was suddenly invaded
by a dense and endless stream of German troops. The burgomaster’s
son, a lad of fifteen, hurried to close the Venetian shutters of his
father’s house and was wounded in the leg by one of the bullets which
the victors fired at random through the windows.

At ten o’clock, the German officer in command sent for the burgomaster,
M. Tielemans, to appear at the Town-hall. He was received with
insults, hustled and abused for a _Schweinhund_, or pig-dog, a species
of animal which appears to be indigenous to Germany.

Next, Colonel Stenger, commanding the 8th infantry brigade, and his
two aides-de-camp took up their quarters in the burgomaster’s house in
the church-square and, I may add in passing, forthwith broke open all
the drawers in their rooms, after which they went to the balcony and
watched the march-past of their troops.

At four o’clock in the afternoon, obsessed by the delusion of
_francs-tireurs_, some soldiers, seized with panic, began to fire
shots in the streets. The colonel, standing on the balcony, was hit by
a German bullet and fell. One of the aides-de-camp rushed downstairs
shouting:

“The colonel is dead! I want the burgomaster!”

M. Tielemans felt that his time was come:

“This is a serious matter for me,” he said to his wife.

She squeezed his hand and urged him to keep courage. The burgomaster
was arrested and ill-treated by the soldiers. In vain his wife remarked
to the captain that her husband and son could not have fired, since
they possessed no weapons.

“That makes no difference,” replied the bully in uniform; “he’s
responsible. Also,” he added, “I want your son.”

This son was the boy of fifteen who had been wounded in the leg. As
he had a difficulty in walking, because of his wound, he was brutally
jostled before his mother’s eyes and escorted with kicks to the
Town-hall, there to join his father.

Meanwhile this same captain, persisting in his contention that his
men had been fired upon, compelled Madame Tielemans to go through
the house with him, from cellar to attic. He was obliged to observe
that all the rooms were empty and all the windows closed. Throughout
this inspection, he threatened the poor woman with his revolver. Her
daughter placed herself between her mother and their sinister visitor,
who did not understand. When they returned to the hall downstairs, the
mother asked him:

“What is to become of us?”

Coldly, he replied:

“You will be shot; so will your daughter and your servants.”

The pillage and the methodical setting on fire of the town now began.
All the houses on the right-hand side of the square were in flames.
From time to time, the soldiers apostrophized the women, shouting:

“You’re going to be shot, you’re going to be shot!”

       *       *       *       *       *

“At that moment,” says Madame Tielemans, in her sworn deposition,
“the soldiers were leaving our house, their arms filled with bottles
of wine. They opened the windows and removed all the contents of our
rooms. I turned away so as not to behold the pillage. By the lurid
light of the burning houses, my eyes fell upon my husband, my son and
my brother-in-law, accompanied by some other gentlemen who were being
led to execution. Never shall I forget the sight nor the look on the
face of my husband seeking his house for the last time and asking
himself what had befallen his wife and daughter, while I, lest I should
sap his courage, could not call out, ‘I am here!’”

       *       *       *       *       *

The hours passed. The women were driven out of the town and led like a
herd of cattle, along a road strewn with corpses, to a distant meadow,
where they were penned until morning. The men were arrested and their
hands tied behind their backs with copper wire so cruelly tightened as
to draw blood. They were gathered into groups and made to lie down so
that their heads touched the ground and they were unable to make any
movement. The night was spent in this way, with the town burning and
the pillage and orgy continuing.

Between five and six in the morning, the military authorities decided
that the executions should begin and that one of the largest groups
of prisoners, composed of about a hundred civilians, should be present
at the death of the burgomaster, his son and his brother. An officer
informed the burgomaster that his hour had come. On hearing these
words, a citizen of Aerschot, Claes van Nuffel by name, went up to the
officer, begged him to spare the chief magistrate’s life and offered
to die in his stead. He added that he was the burgomaster’s political
adversary, but that he considered that, at this moment, M. Tielemans
was essential to the town.

“No,” replied the officer, harshly, “we must have the burgomaster.”

M. Tielemans stood up, thanked M. van Nuffel and said that he would
die with an easy mind, as he had spent his existence doing all the
good in his power, and that he would not beg for mercy. He entreated,
however, that the lives of his fellow-citizens and of his son, a boy of
fifteen and his mother’s last consolation, might be spared. The officer
grinned and made no reply. The burgomaster’s brother next asked for
mercy, not for himself but for his brother and his nephew. His request
fell on deaf ears. The lad then got up and took his place between his
father and his uncle. Six soldiers took aim at ten yards’ distance; the
officer lowered his sword; and, as the widow of the heroic burgomaster
says, “the best man in this world had ceased to exist.”


3

I will now quote from the evidence of M. Gustave Nys, an eye-witness of
the horrible drama which nearly numbered him among its victims:

  “The other civilians were thereupon placed in rows of three. The
  third in each row was to leave it and fall out behind the dead
  bodies, in order to be shot. All the civilians had their hands tied
  behind their backs. My brother and I stood next to each other: I was
  number two; my brother Omer, twenty years of age, was number three.
  I asked the officer, ‘May I change places with my brother? It makes
  no difference to you who falls under your bullets; but it does to my
  mother, who is a widow, for my brother has finished his studies and
  is more useful to her than I am.’ Once again he refused to listen
  to my prayer. ‘Fall out, number three!’ My brother and I embraced;
  and he joined the others. There were thirty of them, drawn up in
  line. Then a horrible scene took place: the German soldiers, walking
  slowly along the row, killed three at each discharge of their rifles,
  waiting between the volleys for the officer’s word of command.”


4

Incidents such as these would pass unperceived if one did not take the
trouble to seek them out and to collect them piously amid the huge
mass of tragedies which for more than four years upset and ravaged
the unhappy country tortured by its invaders. Had they occurred in
the history of Greece or Rome, they would have found a place among
the great deeds that honour our earth and deserve to live for ever
in the memory of man. It is our duty to make them known for a moment
and to engrave in our recollection the names of those who were their
heroes. Thus set down, simply and plainly, as befits historic truth,
in depositions sworn under oath before a nameless registrar who has
stripped them of any literary or sentimental embellishment, they give
at first but a very faint idea of the intensity of the tragedy and
the value of the sacrifice. There is here no question of a glorious
death faced amid the excitement of the fighting, on a vast field of
battle. Nor are we considering an indefinite or overhanging menace, or
an uncertain, remote and perhaps avoidable danger. We have to do with
an obscure, solitary, horrible and imminent death in a ditch; and the
six rifle-barrels are there, aimed almost point-blank, ready, upon a
sign of the officer who accepts your offer, to change you, in a second,
into a heap of bleeding flesh and to send you to the unknown, terrible
region which man dreads all the more when he is still full of strength
and life. There is not a moment’s interval nor a gleam of hope between
question and answer, between existence with all its joys and death
with all its horrors. There is no encouragement, no word or gesture
of stimulation or support, no reward; in an instant, all is given in
exchange for nothing; it is sheer self-sacrifice standing naked and so
pure that we are surprised that not even Germans were conquered by its
beauty.

There was but one manner in which they could have extricated themselves
without dishonour and that was to pardon the two victims; or else,
supposing the thing which was not, which never is the case, that a
death was absolutely necessary, there was a second solution, which was
to accept the offer and to kill the martyr whom they ought to have
worshipped on their knees. In this way they would only have acted as
the worst of savages. But they discovered a third, which doubtless,
before them, the Carthaginians alone would have invented and adopted.
For that matter, they exceeded the fiercest savagery and equalled the
abominable Punic morality in another case which brings to mind that of
Regulus and which will be the third instance of heroism that I intend
to recall.


5

A few days after the events which I have narrated, on the 23rd of
August, 1914, Dinant became the scene of wholesale massacres which
involved exactly six hundred and six victims, including eleven children
under five years old, twenty-eight of ages between ten and fifteen and
seventy-one women.

Nothing can give an idea of the horror and infamy of these massacres,
which form one of the most disgraceful and terrible pages in the long
and monstrous history of Teuton shame. But it is not my purpose to
speak of this for the moment. There would be too much to tell. I wish
to-day only to separate from the mass an episode in which the hero
of Dinant-la-Wallone is worthy of a place beside his two brethren of
Aerschot in Flanders.

Just outside Dinant, near the famous Roche à Bayard, the legendary
glory of the fair and smiling little township, the Germans occupied the
right bank of the Meuse and were beginning to build a bridge of boats.
The French, hidden in the bushes and the windings of the left bank,
were firing on the engineers. Their fire was not very well-sustained;
and the Germans, without the least justification, drew the conclusion
that it was due to _francs-tireurs_, who, for that matter, throughout
this Belgian campaign, never existed except in their imagination. At
that moment, eighty hostages, taken from among the inhabitants of
Dinant, were collected and kept in sight at the foot of the rock. The
German officer sent one of them, M. Bourdon, a clerk attached to the
law-courts, to the left bank, to inform the enemy that, if the firing
continued, all the hostages would be instantly shot. M. Bourdon
crossed the Meuse, fulfilled his mission and pluckily returned to
reconstitute himself a prisoner. He assured the officer that he had
convinced himself that there were no _francs-tireurs_ and that only
French soldiers of the regular army were taking part in the defence of
the other bank. A few more bullets fell; and the officer caused the
eighty hostages to be shot, beginning, that he might be punished as he
deserved for his heroic faithfulness to his pledged word, with the poor
clerk, his wife, his daughter and his two sons, one of whom was a mere
child of fifteen.



WASTED BEAUTIES



VII

WASTED BEAUTIES


1

Under the grey skies and the disheartening rains of this autumnal July,
I think of the light which I have left behind me. I have left it down
there, on the now empty shores of the Mediterranean, and I ask myself
in vain why I parted from it. Yet I was one of the last to tear myself
away. All the others leave in the early days of April, recalled by
legendary memories of the deceitful spring-tides of the north, nor do
they realize that they are losing a great happiness.

It is good, it is wise to escape, amid the blue of sea and sky, the
icy months of our winters, dismal as punishment; but, although in the
south these months are warmer and above all more luminous than ours,
they do not quite make up to us for the darkness and the frost of our
native climes. The brightest and warmest hours, in spite of all,
retain an after-taste of cloud and snow; they are beautiful, but timid;
swiftly and fearfully they hasten towards the night. Now man, who is
born of the sun, like all things, has need of his hereditary portion of
primitive heat and all-pervading light. He has within him numberless
deep-seated cells which retain the memory of the resplendent days of
the prime and become unhappy when they cannot reap their harvest of
rays. Man can live in the gloom, but at long last he loses the smile
and the confidence that are so essential. Because of our twilit summers
it becomes indispensable to restore the balance between darkness and
light and sometimes to drive away, by superb excesses of sunshine, the
cold and the dark that invade our very souls.


2

It reigns at a few hours’ distance from us, the incomparable steady sun
which we no longer see. Those who leave before mid-June do not know
what happens when they are gone. Lo and behold, the real actors in this
wonderful fairyland spring up on every side as though they had been
awaiting the departure of intruding and mocking witnesses. During the
winter, in the presence of the official visitors, they have played but
a tempered prologue, a little colourless, a little slow, a little timid
and restrained. But now of a sudden the great lyrical acts blaze forth
upon the intoxicated earth.

The heavens open their vistas to the uttermost limits of the blue, to
the supreme heights where the glory and rapture of God are outspread;
and all the flowers rend the gardens, the rocks and the heaths, to
uplift themselves and leap towards the gulf of gladness which draws
them into space. The camomiles have gone mad; for six weeks they
hold outstretched, to invisible lovers, their great round clusters
like shields of glowing snow. The scarlet, tumultuous mantle of the
Bougainvilleas blinds the houses whose dazzled windows blink amid
the flames. The yellow roses cover the hills with a saffron-coloured
cloak; the pink roses, of the lovely, innocent pink of maiden blushes,
flood the valleys, as though the divine well-springs of the dawn, which
elaborate the ideal flesh of women and angels, had overflowed the
earth. Others climb the trees, scale pillars, columns, house-fronts,
porches, leap up and fall, rise again and multiply, jostle one
another, lie one on top of the other, forming so many bunches of
effervescing delight, so many silent swarms of impassioned petals.
And the innumerable, diverse and imperious scents that flow through
this ocean of mirth, like rivers which do not mingle, rivers whose
source we recognize at every breath! Here is the cold, green torrent
of the rose-geranium, the trickle of clove-carnations, the bright,
limpid stream of lavender, the resinous eddy of the pine-barren and
the wide, still, luscious lake, of an all but dizzy sweetness, of the
orange-blossom, which drowns the country-side in the vast, unmeasured
fragrance of the azure heavens, recognized at last.


3

I do not believe that the world contains anything more beautiful
than those gardens and valleys of the Provençal coast during the six
or seven weeks when departing spring still mingles its verdure with
the first warmth of advancing summer. But what gives this wonderful
exultation of nature a melancholy which we do not find in any other
spot is the inhuman and almost painful solitude in which it is
revealed. Here, amid this desert, this silence, this emptiness, from
the vine-arbours to the terraces and from the terraces to the porches
of a thousand abandoned villas, reigns a rivalry of beauty which
reaches a poignant agony of intensity, exhausting every energy, form
and colour. There is here a sort of magic password, as though all the
powers of grace and splendour that nature holds concealed had united
to give at the same moment, to a spectator unknown to men, one great,
decisive proof of the blessings and the glories of the earth. There is
here a sort of unparalleled expectation, awful and unendurable, which
over the hedges, the gates and the walls watches for the coming of a
mighty god; an ecstatic silence which demands a supernatural presence;
a wild, exasperated impatience pouring from every side over the roads
where nothing now passes save the mute and diaphanous procession of the
hours.


4

Alas, how many beauties are wasted in this world! Here is enough to
feed our eyes till death! Here is the wherewithal to gather memories
which would support our souls even to the tomb! Here is that which
would provide thousands of hearts with the supreme sustenance of life!

In the main, when we come to think of it, all that is best in us, all
that is pure, happy and limpid in our intelligence and our feelings,
has its origin in a few beautiful spectacles. If we had never seen
beautiful things, we should possess only poor and ugly images
wherewith to clothe our ideas and emotions, which would perish of cold
and wretchedness like those of the blind. The great highway which
climbs from the plains of existence to the radiant heights of human
consciousness would be so gloomy, so bare and so deserted that our
thoughts would very soon lack the strength and courage to tread it; and
where our thoughts no longer pass it is not long before the briars and
the cruel horrors of the forest return. A beautiful spectacle which we
might have seen, which was ours, which seemed to call us and from which
we fled can never be replaced. Nothing more can grow in the spot where
it awaited us. It leaves in our soul a great barren area, in which we
shall find naught but thorns on the day when we most need roses. Our
thoughts and our actions derive their energy and their shape from the
things which our eyes have beheld. Between the heroic deed, the duty
accomplished, the sacrifice generously accepted and the beautiful
landscape which we have seen in the past there is very often a closer
and more vital connection than that which our memory has retained. The
more we see of beautiful things the better fitted we become to perform
good actions. If our inner life is to thrive, we need a magnificent
store of wonderful spoils.



THE INSECT WORLD



VIII

THE INSECT WORLD


1

Henri Fabre, as all the world now knows, is the author of half a
score of well-filled volumes in which, under the title of _Souvenirs
entomologiques_,[1] he set down the results of fifty years of
observation, study and experiment on the insects that seem to us the
best-known and the most familiar: different species of wasps and wild
bees, a few gnats, flies, beetles and caterpillars; in a word, all
those vague, unconscious, rudimentary and almost nameless little lives
which surround us on every side and which we contemplate with eyes that
are amused, but already thinking of other things, when we open our
window to welcome the first hours of spring, or when we go into the
gardens or the fields to bask in the blue summer days.


2

We take up at random one of these great volumes and naturally expect to
find first of all the very learned and rather dry lists of names, the
very fastidious and exceedingly quaint specifications of those huge,
dusty graveyards of which all the entomological treatises that we have
read so far seem almost wholly to consist. We therefore open the book
without zest and without unreasonable expectations; and forthwith,
from between the open leaves, there rises and unfolds itself, without
hesitation, without interruption and almost without remission to the
end of the four thousand pages, the most extraordinary of tragic fairy
plays that it is possible for the human imagination, not to create or
to conceive, but to admit and to acclimatize within itself.

Indeed, there is no question here of the human imagination. The insect
does not belong to our world. The other animals, the plants even,
notwithstanding their dumb life and the great secrets which they
cherish, do not seem wholly foreign to us. In spite of all, we feel
a certain earthly brotherhood in them. They often surprise and amaze
our intelligence, but do not utterly upset it. There is something, on
the other hand, about the insect that does not seem to belong to the
habits, the ethics, the psychology of our globe. One would be inclined
to say that the insect comes from another planet, more monstrous,
more energetic, more insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our
own. One would think that it was born of some comet that had lost its
course and died demented in space. In vain does it seize upon life with
an authority, a fecundity unequalled here below: we cannot accustom
ourselves to the idea that it is a thought of that nature of whom we
fondly believe ourselves to be the privileged children and probably
the ideal to which all the earth’s efforts tend. Only the infinitely
small disconcerts us still more greatly; but what really is the
infinitely small, other than an insect which our eyes do not see? There
is, no doubt, in this astonishment and lack of understanding a certain
instinctive and profound uneasiness inspired by those existences
incomparably better-armed, better-equipped than our own, by those
creature made up of a sort of compressed energy and activity in which
we suspect our most mysterious adversaries, our ultimate rivals and,
perhaps, our successors.


3

But it is time, under the conduct of an admirable guide, to penetrate
behind the scenes of our fairy play and to study at close quarters the
actors and supernumeraries, loathsome or magnificent, as the case may
be, grotesque or sinister, heroic or appalling, gifted or stupid and
almost always improbable and unintelligible.

And here, to begin with, taking the first that comes, is one of those
individuals, frequent in the South, where we can see it prowling
around the abundant manna which the mule scatters heedlessly along
the white roads and the stony paths: I mean the Sacred Scarab of
the Egyptians, or, more simply, the Dung-beetle, the brother of our
northern Geotrupes, a big Coleopteron all clad in black, whose mission
in this world is to shape the more savoury parts of his find into an
enormous ball which he must next roll to the underground dining-room
where the incredible digestive adventure is to take its course. But
destiny, jealous of all undiluted bliss, before admitting him to that
abode of sheer delight, imposes upon the grave and probably sententious
beetle tribulations without number, which are nearly always complicated
by the arrival of an untoward parasite.

Hardly has he begun, by dint of great efforts of his forehead and his
bandy legs, to roll the toothsome sphere backwards, when an indelicate
colleague, who has been awaiting the completion of the work, appears
and hypocritically offers his services. The other well knows that, in
this case, help and services, besides being quite unnecessary, will
soon mean partition and dispossession; and he accepts the enforced
collaboration without enthusiasm. But, so that their respective
rights may be clearly marked, the lawful owner invariably retains his
original place, that is to say, he pushes the ball with his forehead,
whereas the compulsory guest pulls it towards him on the other side.
And thus it jogs along between the two gossips, amid interminable
vicissitudes, flurried falls, ludicrous tumbles, till it reaches the
place chosen to receive the treasure and to become the banqueting-hall.
On arriving, the owner sets about digging out the refectory, while
the sponger pretends to go innocently to sleep on the top of the
bolus. The excavation becomes visibly wider and deeper; and soon the
first Dung-beetle dives bodily into it. This is the moment for which
the cunning auxiliary was waiting. He nimbly scrambles down from the
blissful eminence and, pushing it with all the energy that a bad
conscience gives, strives to gain the offing. But the other, who is
rather distrustful, interrupts his laborious digging, looks over the
edge, sees the sacrilegious rape and leaps out of the hole. Caught in
the act, the shameless and dishonest partner makes untold efforts to
play upon the other’s credulity, turns round and round the inestimable
orb and, embracing it and propping himself against it, with mock heroic
exertions, pretends to be frantically supporting it on a non-existent
slope. The two expostulate with each other in silence, gesticulate
wildly with their mandibles and tarsi and then, with one accord, bring
back the ball to the burrow.

It is pronounced sufficiently spacious and comfortable. They introduce
the treasure, they close the entrance to the corridor; and now in the
propitious darkness and the warm damp, where the magnificent stercoral
globe alone holds sway, the two reconciled messmates sit down face
to face. Then, far from the light and the cares of day and in the
great silence of the subterranean shade, solemnly commences the most
fabulous banquet whereof abdominal imagination ever evoked the absolute
beatitudes.

For two whole months, they remain cloistered; and, with their paunches
gradually hollowing out the inexhaustible sphere, definite archetypes
and sovereign symbols of the pleasures of the table and the delights of
the belly, they eat without stopping, without interrupting themselves
for a second, day or night. And, while they gorge, steadily, with a
movement perceptible and constant as that of a clock, at the rate of
three millimetres a minute, an endless, unbroken ribbon unwinds and
stretches itself behind them, fixing the memory and recording the
hours, days and weeks of the prodigious feast.


4

After the Dung-beetle, that dolt of the company, let us greet, also
in the order of the Coleoptera, the model household of _Minotaurus
typhaeus_, who is pretty well-known and extremely gentle, in spite of
his dreadful name. The female digs a huge burrow which is often more
than a yard and a half deep and which consists of spiral staircases,
landings, passages and numerous chambers. The male loads the rubbish
on the three-pronged fork that surmounts his head and carries it to
the entrance of the conjugal dwelling. Next, he goes into the fields
in quest of the harmless droppings left by the sheep, takes them down
to the first story of the crypt and reduces them to flour with his
trident, while the mother, right at the bottom, collects the flour and
kneads it into huge cylindrical loaves, which will presently be food
for the little ones. For three whole months, until the provisions are
deemed sufficient, the unfortunate husband, without taking nourishment
of any kind, exhausts himself in this gigantic work. At last, his task
accomplished, feeling his end at hand, so as not to encumber the house
with his wretched remains, he spends his last strength in leaving
the burrow, drags himself laboriously along and, lonely and resigned,
knowing that he is henceforth good for nothing, goes and dies far away
among the stones.

Here, on another side, are some rather strange caterpillars, the
Processionaries, which are not rare; as it happens, a single string
of them, five or six yards long, has just climbed down from my
umbrella-pines and is at this moment unfolding itself in the walks
of my garden, carpeting the ground traversed with transparent
silk, according to the custom of the race. To say nothing of the
meteorological apparatus of unparalleled delicacy which they carry
on their backs, these caterpillars, as everybody knows, have this
remarkable quality, that they travel only in a troop, one after the
other, like Breughel’s blind men or those of the parable, each of them
obstinately, indissolubly following its leader; so much so that, our
author having one morning disposed the file on the edge of a large
stone vase, thus closing the circuit, for seven whole days, during
an atrocious week, amid cold, hunger and unspeakable weariness, the
unhappy troop on its tragic round, without rest, respite or mercy,
pursued the pitiless circle until death overtook it.


5

But I see that our heroes are infinitely too numerous and that we
must not linger over our descriptions. We may at most, in enumerating
the more important and familiar, bestow on each of them a hurried
epithet, in the manner of old Homer. Shall I mention, for instance, the
Leucospis, a parasite of the Mason-bee, who, to slay his brothers and
sisters in their cradle, arms himself with a horn helmet and a barbed
breastplate, which he doffs immediately after the extermination, the
safeguard of a hideous right of primogeniture? Shall I tell of the
marvellous anatomical knowledge of the Tachytes, of the Cerceris, of
the Ammophila, of the Languedocian Sphex and many other wasps, who,
according as they wish to paralyse or to kill their prey or their
adversary, know exactly, without ever blundering, which nerve-centres
to strike with their sting or their mandibles? Shall I speak of the art
of the Eumenes, who transforms her stronghold into a complete museum
adorned with shells and with grains of translucent quartz; of the
magnificent metamorphosis of the Grey Locust; of the musical instrument
owned by the Cricket, whose bow numbers one hundred and fifty
triangular prisms that set in motion simultaneously the four dulcimers
of the wing-case? Shall I sing the fairy-like birth of the nymph of the
Onthophagus, a transparent monster, with a bull’s snout, that seems
carved out of a block of crystal? Would you behold the Flesh-fly, the
common Blue-bottle, daughter of the maggot, as she issues from the
earth? Listen to our author:

  “She disjoints her head into two movable halves, which, each
  distended with its great red eye, by turns separate and reunite. In
  the intervening space, a large, glassy hernia rises and disappears,
  disappears and rises. When the two halves move asunder, with one
  eye forced back to the right and the other to the left, it is as
  though the insect were splitting its brain-pan in order to expel the
  contents. Then the hernia rises, blunt at the end and swollen into
  a great knob. Next, the forehead closes and the hernia retreats,
  leaving visible only a kind of shapeless muzzle. In short, a frontal
  pouch, with deep pulsations, momentarily renewed, becomes the
  instrument of deliverance, the pestle wherewith the newly-hatched
  Dipteron bruises the sand and causes it to crumble. Gradually, the
  legs push the rubbish back and the insect advances so much towards
  the surface.”


6

And monster after monster passes, such as the imagination of Bosch or
Callot never conceived! The larva of the Rosechafer, which, though it
has legs under its belly, always travels on its back; the Blue-winged
Locust, unluckier still than the Flesh-fly and possessing nothing
wherewith to perforate the soil, to escape from the tomb and reach
the light but a cervical bladder, a viscous blister; and the Empusa,
who, with her curved abdomen, her great projecting eyes, her legs with
knee-pieces armed with cleavers, her halberd, her abnormally tall
mitre, would certainly be the most devilish goblin that ever walked the
earth, if, beside her, the Praying Mantis were not so frightful that
her mere aspect deprives her victims of their power of movement when
she assumes, in front of them, what the entomologists have termed “the
spectral attitude.”


7

One cannot mention, even casually, the numberless industries, nearly
all of absorbing interest, exercised among the rocks, under the ground,
in the walls, on the branches, the grass, the flowers, the fruits and
down to the very bodies of the subjects studied; for we sometimes find
a treble superposition of parasites, as in the Oil-beetles; and we see
the maggot itself, the sinister guest at the last feast of all, feed
some thirty brigands with its substance.

Among the Hymenoptera, which represent the most intellectual class in
the world which we are studying, the building-talents of our wonderful
Hive-bee are certainly equalled, in other orders of architecture,
by those of more than one wild and solitary bee and notably by the
Megachile, or Leaf-cutter, a little insect which is nothing to look
at and which, to house its eggs, manufactures honey-pots formed of a
multitude of disks and ellipses cut with mathematical precision from
the leaves of certain trees. For lack of space, I am unable, to my
great regret, to quote the beautiful and pellucid pages which Fabre,
with his usual conscientiousness, devotes to the exhaustive study of
this admirable work; nevertheless, since the occasion offers, let us
listen to his own words, though it be but for a moment and in regard to
a single detail:

  “With the oval pieces, it becomes another matter. What model has the
  Megachile when cutting her neat ellipses out of the delicate material
  for her wallets, the robinia-leaves? What ideal pattern guides her
  scissors? What system of measurement tells her the dimension? One
  would like to picture the insect as a living pair of compasses,
  capable of tracing an elliptic curve by a certain natural inflexion
  of its body, even as our arm traces a circle by swinging from the
  shoulder. A blind mechanism, the mere outcome of its organization,
  would alone be responsible for its geometry. This explanation would
  tempt me if the large oval pieces were not accompanied by much
  smaller ones, also oval, which are used to fill the empty spaces. A
  pair of compasses which changes its radius of its own accord and
  alters the curve according to the plan before it appears to me an
  instrument somewhat difficult to believe in. There must be something
  better than that. The circular pieces of the lid suggest it to us.

  “If, by the mere flexion inherent in her structure, the Leaf-cutter
  succeeds in cutting out ovals, how does she manage to cut out rounds?
  Can we admit the presence of other wheels in the machinery for the
  new pattern, so different in shape and size? However, the real point
  of the difficulty does not lie there. Those rounds, for the most
  part, fit the mouth of the jar with almost exact precision. When the
  cell is finished, the bee flies hundreds of yards away to make the
  lid. She arrives at the leaf from which the disk is to be cut. What
  picture, what recollection has she of the pot to be covered? Why,
  none at all: she has never seen it; she does her work underground, in
  utter darkness! At the utmost, she can have the indications of touch:
  not actual indications, of course, for the pot is not there, but
  past indications, useless in a work of precision. And yet the disk to
  be cut out must have a fixed diameter: if it were too large, it would
  not go in; if too small, it would close badly, it would slip down on
  the honey and suffocate the egg. How shall it be given its correct
  dimensions without a pattern? The bee does not hesitate for a moment.
  She cuts out her disk with the same celerity which she would display
  in detaching any shapeless lobe that might do for a stopper; and
  that disk, without further measurement, is of the right size to fit
  the pot. Let whoso will explain this geometry, which in my opinion
  is inexplicable, even when we allow for memory begotten of touch and
  sight.”

Let us add that the author calculated that, to form the cells of a
kindred Megachile, the Silky Megachile, exactly 1,064 of these ellipses
and disks would be required; and they must all be collected and shaped
in the course of an existence that lasts a few weeks.


8

Who would imagine that the Pentatoma, on the other hand, the poor and
evil-smelling Wood-bug, has invented a really extraordinary apparatus
wherewith to leave the egg? And first let us state that this egg is
a marvellous little box of snowy whiteness, which our author thus
describes:

  “The microscope discovers a surface engraved with dents similar to
  those of a thimble and arranged with exquisite symmetry. At the
  top and bottom of the cylinder is a wide belt of a dead black; on
  the sides, a large white zone with four big, black spots evenly
  distributed. The lid, surrounded by snowy cilia and encircled with
  white at the edge, swells into a black cap with a white knot in the
  centre. Altogether, a striking burial urn, with the sudden contrast
  between the coal-black and the fleecy white. The Etruscans would have
  found a magnificent model here for their funeral pottery.”

The little bug, whose forehead is too soft, covers her head, to raise
the lid of the box, with a mitre formed of three triangular rods, which
is always at the bottom of the egg at the moment of delivery. Her limbs
being sheathed like those of a mummy, she has nothing wherewith to put
her rods in motion except the pulsations produced by the rhythmic flow
of blood in her skull and acting after the manner of a piston. The
rivets of the lid gradually give way; and, as soon as the insect is
free, it lays aside its mechanical helmet.

Another species of bug, _Reduvius personatus_, who lives mostly in
lumber-rooms, where she lies hidden in the dust, has invented a still
more astonishing system of hatching. Here, the lid of the egg is not
riveted, as in the case of the Pentatomae, but simply glued. At the
moment of liberation, the lid rises and we see:

  “... a spherical vesicle emerge from the shell and gradually expand,
  like a soap-bubble blown through a straw. Driven farther and farther
  back by the extension of this bladder, the lid falls.

  “Then the bomb bursts; in other words, the blister, swollen beyond
  its capacity of resistance, rips at the top. This envelope, which is
  an extremely tenuous membrane, generally remains clinging to the edge
  of the orifice, where it forms a high, white rim. At other times,
  the explosion loosens it and flings it outside the shell. In those
  conditions, it is a dainty cup, half spherical, with torn edges,
  lengthened out below into a delicate, winding stalk.”

Now, how is this miraculous explosion produced? Fabre assumes that:

  “Very slowly, as the tiny creature takes shape and grows, this
  bladder-shaped reservoir receives the products of the work of
  respiration performed under the cover of the outer membrane. Instead
  of being expelled through the egg-shell, the carbonic acid, the
  incessant result of the vital oxidization, is accumulated in this
  sort of gasometer, inflates and distends it and presses upon the lid.
  When the insect is ripe for hatching, a superadded activity in the
  respiration completes the inflation, which perhaps has been preparing
  since the first evolution of the germ. At last, yielding to the
  increasing pressure of the gaseous bladder, the lid becomes unsealed.
  The chick in its shell has its air-chamber; the young Reduvius has
  its bomb of carbonic acid: it frees itself in the act of breathing.”


9

One would never weary of dipping eagerly into these inexhaustible
treasures. We imagine, for instance, that, from seeing cobwebs so
frequently displayed in all manner of places, we possess adequate
notions of the genius and methods of our familiar spiders. Far from
it: the realities of scientific observation call for an entire volume
crammed with revelations of which we had no conception. I will simply
name, at random, the symmetrical arches of the Clotho Spider’s nest,
the astonishing funicular flight of the young of our Garden Spider, the
diving-bell of the Water Spider, the live telephone-wire which connects
the web with the leg of the Cross Spider hidden in her parlour and
informs her whether the vibration of her toils is due to the capture of
a prey or a caprice of the wind.

It is impossible, therefore, short of having unlimited space at one’s
disposal, to do more than touch, as it were with the tip of the
phrases, upon the miracles of maternal instinct, which, moreover, are
confounded with those of the higher manufactures and form the bright
centre of the insect’s psychology. One would, in the same way, require
several chapters to convey a summary idea of the nuptial rites which
constitute the quaintest and most fabulous episodes of these new
Arabian Nights.

The male of the Spanish Fly, for instance, begins by frenziedly
beating his spouse with his abdomen and his feet, after which, with
his arms crossed and quivering, he remains long in ecstasy. The
newly-wedded Osmiae clap their mandibles terribly, as though it were a
matter rather of devouring each other; on the other hand, the largest
of our moths, the Great Peacock, who is the size of a bat, when drunk
with love finds his mouth so completely atrophied that it becomes no
more than a vague shadow. But nothing equals the marriage of the Green
Grasshopper, of which I cannot speak here, for it is doubtful whether
even Latin possesses the words needed to describe it seemingly.

All said, the marriage-customs are dreadful and, contrary to that
which happens in every other world, here it is the female of the pair
that stands for strength and intelligence and also for the cruelty
and tyranny which appear to be their inevitable outcome. Almost every
wedding ends in the violent and immediate death of the husband. Often,
the bride begins by eating a certain number of suitors. The prototype
of these fantastic unions could be supplied by the Languedocian
Scorpions, who, as we know, carry lobster-claws and a long tail
supplied with a sting, the prick of which is extremely dangerous. They
have a prelude to the festival in the shape of a sentimental stroll,
claw in claw; then, motionless, with fingers still gripped, they
contemplate each other blissfully, interminably; day and night pass
over their ecstasy, while they remain face to face, petrified with
admiration. Next, the foreheads come together and touch; the mouths--if
we can give the name of mouth to the monstrous orifice that opens
between the claws--are joined in a sort of kiss; after which the union
is accomplished, the male is transfixed with a mortal sting and the
terrible spouse crunches and gobbles him up with gusto.

But the Mantis, the ecstatic insect with the arms always raised in an
attitude of supreme invocation, the horrible _Mantis religiosa_ or
Praying Mantis, does better still: she eats her husbands (for the
insatiable creature sometimes consumes seven or eight in succession)
while they strain her passionately to their heart. Her inconceivable
kisses devour, not in a metaphorical, but in an appallingly real
fashion, the ill-fated choice of her soul stomach. She begins with
the head, goes down to the thorax, nor stops till she comes to the
hind-legs, which she deems too tough. She then pushes away the
unfortunate remains, while a new lover, who was quietly awaiting the
end of the monstrous banquet, heroically steps forward to undergo the
same fate.


10

Henri Fabre is indeed the revealer of this new world, for, strange
as the admission may seem at a time when we think that we know all
that surrounds us, most of those insects minutely described in the
vocabularies, learnedly classified and barbarously christened, had
hardly ever been observed in real life or thoroughly investigated in
all the phases of their brief and evasive appearances. He has devoted
to surprising their little secrets, which are the reverse of our
greatest mysteries, fifty years of a solitary existence, misunderstood,
poor, often very near to penury, but lit up every day by the joy
which a truth brings, which is the greatest of all human joys. Petty
truths, I shall be told, those presented by the habits of a spider or a
grasshopper. There are no petty truths to-day; there is but one truth,
whose looking-glass, to our uncertain eyes, seems broken, though its
every fragment, whether reflecting the evolution of a planet or the
flight of a bee, contains the supreme law.

And these truths thus discovered had the good fortune to be grasped
by a mind which knew how to understand what they themselves can but
ambiguously express, to interpret what they are obliged to conceal and,
at the same time, to appreciate the shimmering beauty, almost invisible
to the majority of mankind, that shines for a moment around all that
exists, especially around that which still remains very close to nature
and has hardly left its primeval sanctuary.

To make of these long annals the generous and delightful work of
literature that they are and not the monotonous and arid record of
finical descriptions and trivial acts that they might have been,
various and so to speak conflicting gifts were needed. To the patience,
the precision, the scientific minuteness, the protean and practical
ingenuity, the energy of a Darwin in the face of the unknown, to the
faculty of expressing what has to be expressed with order, clearness
and certainty, the venerable anchorite of Sérignan adds many of those
qualities which are not to be acquired, certain of those innate good
poetic virtues which cause his sure and supple prose, though a trifle
provincial, a trifle antiquated, a trifle primitive, to take its place
among the excellent prose of the day, prose of the kind that has its
own atmosphere, in which we breathe gratefully and tranquilly and
which we find only in masterpieces.

Lastly, there was needed--and this was not the least requirement of
the work--a mind ever ready to cope with the riddles which, among
those little objects, rise up at every step as enormous as those which
fill the skies and perhaps more numerous, more imperious and more
strange, as though nature had here given a freer scope to her last
wishes and an easier outlet to her secret thoughts. Fabre shrinks from
none of those boundless problems which are persistently put to us by
all the inhabitants of that tiny world where mysteries are heaped up
in a denser and more bewildering fashion than in any other. He thus
meets and faces, turn by turn, the redoubtable questions of instinct
and intelligence, of the origin of species, of the harmony or the
accidents of the universe, of the life lavished upon the abysses of
death, without counting the no less vast, but so to speak more human
problems which, among infinite others, are inscribed within the
range, if not within the grasp, of our intelligence: parthenogenesis;
the prodigious geometry of the wasps and bees; the logarithmic spiral
of the snail; the antennary sense; the miraculous force which, in
absolute isolation, without the possible introduction of anything from
the outside, increases the volume of the Minotaurus’ egg tenfold,
where it lies, and, during seven to nine months, nourishes with an
invisible and spiritual food, not the lethargy, but the active life of
the scorpion and of the young of the Lycosa and the Clotho Spider. He
does not attempt to explain them by one of those generally-acceptable
theories, such as that of evolution, which merely shifts the ground
of the difficulty and which, I may say in passing, emerges from these
volumes in a somewhat sorry plight, after being sharply confronted with
incontestable facts.


11

Waiting for chance or a god to enlighten us, he is able, in the
presence of the unknown, to preserve that great religious and
attentive silence which is dominant in the best minds of the day. There
are those who say:

“Now that you have reaped a plentiful harvest of details, you should
follow up analysis with synthesis and generalize the origin of instinct
in an all-embracing view.”

To these he replies, with the humble and magnificent loyalty that
illumines all his work:

  “Because I have stirred a few grains of sand on the shore, am I in a
  position to know the depths of the ocean?

  “Life has unfathomable secrets. Human knowledge will be erased from
  the archives of the world before we possess the last word that a Gnat
  has to say to us....

  “Success is for the loud talkers, the self-convinced dogmatists;
  everything is admitted on condition that it be noisily proclaimed.
  Let us throw off this sham and recognize that, in reality, we
  know nothing about anything, if things were probed to the bottom.
  Scientifically, Nature is a riddle without a definite solution to
  satisfy man’s curiosity. Hypothesis follows on hypothesis; the
  theoretical rubbish-heap accumulates; and truth ever eludes us. To
  know how not to know might well be the last word of wisdom.”

Evidently, this is hoping too little. In the frightful pit, in the
bottomless funnel wherein whirl all those contradictory facts which
are resolved in obscurity, we know just as much as our cave-dwelling
ancestors; but at least we know that we do not know. We survey the
dark faces of all the riddles, we try to estimate their number, to
classify their varying degrees of dimness, to obtain an idea of their
position and their extent. That already is something, pending the
day of the first gleams of light. In any case, it means doing in the
presence of the mysteries all that the most upright intelligence can do
to-day; and that is what the author of this incomparable Iliad does,
with more confidence than he professes. He gazes at them attentively.
He wears out his life in surprising their most minute secrets. He
prepares for them, in his thoughts and in ours, the field necessary for
their evolutions. He increases the consciousness of his ignorance in
proportion to their importance and learns to understand more and more
that they are incomprehensible.



EVIL-SPEAKING



IX

EVIL-SPEAKING


1

“See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” say the three sacred
monkeys carved over the gate of the Buddhist temple of Iyeyasu at Nikko.

We all of us speak ill of one another:

  “No one,” Pascal remarks, “speaks of us in our presence as he does in
  our absence. The union that exists among men is based solely on this
  mutual deceit; and few friendships would survive if each knew what
  his friend says when he is not there, though he be speaking of him in
  all sincerity and without passion.

  “I lay it down as a fact that, if all men knew what they say of one
  another, there would not be four friends in this world.”

If you do away with evil-speaking, you do away with three-fourths of
our conversation; and an unbearable silence will hover over every
gathering. Evil-speaking or calumny--for it is extremely difficult to
separate the two sisters; and in reality any evil-speaking is likely to
be calumnious, inasmuch as we know others even less well than we know
ourselves--evil-speaking, which feeds all that creates disunion between
men and poisons their intercourse, is nevertheless the chief motive
that brings them together and enables them to enjoy the pleasures of
society.

But the ravages which it wreaks all around us are too well-known and
have too often been described to make it necessary for us to portray
them once again. Let us here consider only the harm which it does to
him who indulges in it. It accustoms him to see only the petty sides
of men and things; little by little it conceals from him the bold
outlines, the great unities, the heights and depths containing the only
truths that count and endure.

In reality, the evil which we find in others, the evil which we speak
of them, exists within ourselves: from ourselves we derive it; upon
ourselves it recoils. We perceive clearly only those defects which are
ours, or which we are on the point of acquiring. Within ourselves is
kindled the evil flame whose reflection we perceive on others. Each of
us diligently searches out, among those who surround him, the vice or
the defect that reveals to the clear-sighted the vice or the defect
to which he himself is thrall. There is no more ingenuous or intimate
confession, even as there is no better examination of conscience, than
to ask one’s self:

“What is the fault which I most willingly impute to my neighbour?”

You may be sure that this is the fault which you are most inclined to
commit and that you most readily see what is happening in the shallows
to which you yourself are descending. He who speaks ill of others is,
in short, merely his own traducer; and evil-speaking is, in essence,
but the story of our own falls, transposed or anticipated.


2

We surround ourselves with all the evil that we attribute to the
victims of our gossip. It takes form at our own expense; it lives
and feeds upon the best of our substance; it accumulates all about
us, peopling and encumbering our atmosphere with phantoms, at first
grotesque, inconsistent, docile, timid and ephemeral, which gradually
become persistent, add to their strength and stature, speak with louder
voice and develop into very real and imperious entities which ere long
will issue orders and assume the direction of most of our thoughts and
actions. We are less and less masters in our own houses; we feel our
character slowly sapped of its strength; and we find ourselves sooner
or later enclosed within a sort of enchanted circle which it is all but
impossible to break, a circle in which we no longer know whether we are
defaming our brethren because we are growing as bad as they, or whether
we are growing bad because we defame them.


3

We should accustom ourselves to judge all men as we judge the heroes
of this war. It is certain that, if any one had the pitiful courage to
undertake their belittlement, he would find, in any gathering of these
men, almost as many vices, pettinesses or blemishes as in any human
gathering chosen at random in any town or village. He would tell you
that it contained hopeless drunkards, unscrupulous libertines, uncouth,
narrow and greedy peasants, mean and rapacious shopkeepers, callous,
lewd and cheating artisans, sordid, envious clerks and, among young men
of better birth, idle, presumptuous, selfish and arrogant wastrels.
He would add that many of them did their duty only because there was
no way of avoiding it; that they went forward, despite themselves,
to brave a death which they hoped to escape, because they well knew
that they could not escape the death which would threaten them if they
refused to face the first. He might say all this and many other things
which would appear more or less true; but there is something far more
true, which is the great and magnificent truth that enfolds and uplifts
all the rest: it is the thing which they really did; it is the fact
that they willingly offered themselves to death in order to accomplish
what they regarded as a duty. It cannot be denied: if all those who
had vices and imperfections and the desire to shun danger had refused
to accept the sacrifice, no force in the world could have compelled
them to it; for they would represent a force at least equal to that
which would have sought to impel them. We must therefore believe that
these imperfections, these vices, these ignoble desires were very
superficial and in any case incomparably less powerful and less deeply
rooted than the great flood of feeling which carried all before it.
And this is why, when we think of those dead or mutilated heroes, the
petty thoughts which I have described do not even enter our minds. And
it is right that this should be so. In the heroic whole they count
for no more than rain-drops in the ocean. All has been swept away,
all has been made equal by sacrifice, suffering and death, in the one
untarnished beauty.

But let us not forget that it is almost the same with all men; and
that these heroes were not of a different nature from the neighbour
whom we are incessantly villifying. Death has purified and consecrated
them; but we are all of us daily in the presence of the sacrifice, the
suffering and, above all, the death which will purify and consecrate
us in our turn. We are almost all subject to the same ordeals which,
because they are less frequent and less glorious, appeal no less to the
same profound virtues; and, if so many men, chosen at hazard from among
us, have proved themselves worthy of our admiration, it is because,
after all, we are doubtless better than we seem; for, while those
others mingled in our life, even they did not appear to be much better
than ourselves.



OF GAMBLING



X

OF GAMBLING


1

_Paulo minora._ This essay, I need hardly say, consists of notes made
before the war and put in order now, at a time when victory allows our
thoughts to stray for a moment from the great tragedy in which the
destinies of mankind have been at stake. For the rest, the subject,
however frivolous it may at first sight appear, sometimes touches or
seems to touch problems which it is not unfitting to examine, were
it only to realize that they are perhaps illusive. Moreover it is
unfortunately probable that, when peace is restored, our allies will
visit in too numerous and confiding crowds the dubious havens of
delight which we are about to enter. I have no pretension to serve them
as a guide nor to teach them how to fight against the whims of fortune;
but a handful of them may find in these lines, if not useful hints or
profitable advice, at least some few reflections or observations which
will pave the way for their own experiments or render them easier.


2

Let us then pay a last visit to one of those green tables which spread
their length in the somewhat disreputable place of which I have written
elsewhere[2] as the “Temple of Chance.” To-day I would rather call
it the Factory of Chance, for it is here that, for more than half a
century, without respite or repose, on weekdays, Sundays and holidays
alike, daily from ten o’clock in the morning till twelve o’clock at
night, with croupiers unintermittently relieving one another, men have
obstinately manufactured Chance and doggedly consulted the formless and
featureless god that shrouds good luck and ill within his shadow.

We do not yet know what he is nor what he wants; we are not even sure
that he exists; but surely it would be astonishing if no result of any
kind, no clue to the tantalizing puzzle, had emerged from this endless
effort, the most gigantic, the most costly, the most methodical that
has ever been made on the brink of this gloomy abyss, if nothing had
been born of all this furious work, however trivial, however unhealthy
and useless it may appear.

In any case, at these tables, as at all places where passions become
intensified, we are able to make interesting observations and, among
other things, to behold at first hand, violently foreshortened and
harshly illuminated, certain aspects of man’s lifelong struggle with
the unknown. The drama, which as a rule is long drawn out, projecting
itself into space and time and breaking up amid circumstances that
escape our eyes, is here knit together, gathered into a ball, held,
so to speak, in the hollow of the hand. But, for all its speed, its
abruptness of movement and its extreme compression, it remains as
complex and mysterious as those which go on indefinitely. Until the
ivory ball that rolls and hops around the wheel falls into its red or
black compartment, the unknown veiling its choice or its destiny is as
impenetrable as that which hides from us the choice or the destiny of
the stars. The movements of the planets can be calculated almost to a
second; but no mathematical operation can measure or predict the course
of the little white ball.

Your most skilful players, indeed, have given up trying. Not one of
them any longer seriously relies on intuition, presentiment, second
sight, telepathy, psychic forces or the calculation of probabilities
in the attempt to foresee or determine the fall of a destiny no larger
than a hazel-nut. All the scientific part of human knowledge has
failed; and all the occult and magical side of that same knowledge has
been equally unsuccessful. The mathematicians, the prophets, the seers,
the sorcerers, the sensitives, the mediums, the psychometrists, the
spiritualists who call upon the dead for assistance, all alike are
blind, confounded and impotent before the wheel and before Destiny’s
thirty-seven compartments. Here Chance reigns supreme; and hitherto,
though it all happens before our eyes, though it is repeated to satiety
and may be held, let me say once more, in the hollow of our hand, no
one has yet been able to determine a single one of its laws.


3

Yet such laws seem to exist; and thousands of players have ruined
themselves in following their forms or their elusive and deceptive
traces. Let us take a bundle of those records or _permanences_,
published at Monte Carlo, which give day by day the list of
all the numbers that have come up at one of the roulette or
_trente-et-quarante_ tables. As everybody knows, these numbers are
arranged in long parallel columns, the black on the left and the red
on the right. When we look at one of these sheets, containing as a
rule ten columns of sixty-five numbers each--dead and harmless cyphers
now, though once so dangerous, once destructive of so many hopes and
perhaps inspiring more than one disaster--we observe a tendency towards
a fairly perceptible equilibrium between the red and the black. Most
often the two chances balance each other, singly or in little groups,
a black, a red, two blacks, three reds, three blacks, two reds and so
on. When we come upon a series of five, six, seven, eight, sometimes
eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve consecutive blacks, we are almost
certain of finding not far away a compensating series of five, six,
seven, eight or ten reds. There is a very real rhythm, a sort of
breathing or a cadenced movement to and fro of the mysterious creature
which we call Chance. This rhythm or balance is moreover confirmed by
the final statistics of the day, from which we learn that, in a total
of six hundred and so many spins of the ball, the difference between
the black and the red very seldom exceeds twenty or thirty; and this
difference is even smaller in the total for the week, that is to say,
in a total of nearly five thousand spins, when it is usually reduced to
a few units.


4

The monster has other strange habits. We see, for instance, that it is
not uncommon for a number to come up twice in succession; and it is
undeniable that, in each day’s play, two or three numbers are obviously
favoured, so much so that we may hurl out a challenge to logic and
declare that the more frequently a number occurs the more chances it
has of reappearing. This seems to conflict with the law of equilibrium
which we have remarked; but it must be observed that this equilibrium
will be recovered later, that by the end of the week the difference
will no longer be very great and that they will almost disappear when
the month is over. The equilibrium is more slowly restored because we
must multiply the number of series by eighteen and a half to reach the
proportions of the even chances.

Players note yet another law which, for that matter, is but a corollary
of the former habit, but which has something curiously human about it:
the chances which lag behind show a greater eagerness to regain their
lost ground at the moment that follows more or less closely upon a
halt, as though they had recovered their breath after a brief rest on
the landing of a staircase.

Let us add at once that it is wise to distrust these fluctuating habits
and these gropings after laws. For instance, red has been known to beat
black by seventy per cent. in the course of a day’s play. Black, on
the other hand, as people still remember at Monte Carlo, one day came
up twenty-nine times in succession and the second dozen twenty-eight
times without a break. Chance has not our nerves; it is not, like us,
impatient to make good its losses or to carry off its gains. It takes
its time, awaits its hour and does not trouble to keep step with our
ways of life.


5

Players as a rule attribute these habits or caprices to a trick of the
croupier’s hand. This is hardly tenable. After all, we know how the
thing is done. The ball drops into its compartment and the croupier
announces, for instance:

“13, black, _impair_ and manque.”

The losses are raked in, the winnings are paid out, the players renew
their stakes, there is sometimes a brief dispute, somebody asks for
change and so on. These operations vary a good deal in length; and
all this time the wheel carrying the ball is making hundreds of
revolutions. The croupier stops it at last, takes the ball, reverses
the wheel and sends the ball spinning in the opposite direction. It is
impossible under these conditions for his particular trick of the hand
to exercise any influence whatever. Besides, we can easily see from
the chart of the _permanences_ that the change of croupier does not
perceptibly affect the rhythm of the even chances. It is not the man
who controls the rhythm but the rhythm that controls the man.


6

These gropings after laws in what would seem a negation of all or any
law; these strivings on the part of Chance to quit its own domain
and to organize its chaos; this god who denies himself and seeks to
destroy himself by his own hand; these incomprehensible stammerings,
these awkward efforts to achieve utterance and assume consciousness are
rather curious, we must admit. For the rest, it is these efforts, these
hankerings after equilibrium, this embryonic rhythm that constitute
the gamblers’ good and bad luck. If Chance were simply Chance as we
conceive it on first principles, one would stake any sum anyhow and
at any moment. I am well aware that, according to the most learned
theorists on roulette, each _coup_ is independent of all the others
and begins as if nothing had happened before, as if nothing were to
happen afterwards, as if the table were fresh from the shop, the wheel
from the factory and the croupier from the hands of God. In theory
this is quite accurate; but we have just seen that in practice it does
not seem to be so. For that matter, it seems impossible to explain the
reason. Players are satisfied to observe the fact, while yielding to
a dangerous but very human tendency to exaggerate the scope and the
certainty of their observations.

They are too ready to see laws where there is only a mass of
coincidences as fleeting as clouds. It is of course necessary that
the reds and blacks, emerging successively from nowhere, should find
a place somewhere and form certain groups; and, if it is rather
surprising that at the end of the month their numbers are nearly equal,
it would be no less surprising if one of the colours were to prevail
largely over the other. It is perfectly true that, at first sight, the
reds and blacks seem to balance on the _permanence_ sheets; but it is
also true that, when we examine more closely, a series of five or six
reds, for instance, interrupted by one or two blacks, not infrequently
begins a fresh run; and ill-luck may well have it that, at this moment,
the player, in his search for equilibrium, will start punting on the
black and in a few _coups_ behold the disappearance of all the winnings
slowly and laboriously wrested from Chance, which is niggardly when one
is winning and extremely generous--to the bank--when one is losing. For
that matter, he will suffer the same disappointment if he bets on the
variation, in other words, against the equilibrium, and will too often
discover that these laws, when he puts his trust in them, are writ in
water, whereas they seem to be graven in bronze so soon as they betray
him.


7

In order to profit by these laws, which are perhaps fallacious and in
any case untrustworthy, and to secure himself against their treachery,
he has contrived a host of ingenious systems which sometimes enable him
to win but most often merely retard his ruin.

But, before speaking of these systems, let us begin by saying that
we shall concern ourselves here only with the even chances, red or
black, _pair_ or _impair_, _passe_ or _manque_. These are sufficiently
complicated in themselves and set us problems that would be enough
to exhaust all the shrewdness of a human life. As for any other than
the even chances, _en plein_, _à cheval_, _transversales_, _carrés_,
_douzaines_ and so forth, these, both in theory and in practice, escape
all control, calculation or explanation.

Whatever system he adopt, the gambler is always tossing heads or tails
against the bank. He has a chance and the bank has a chance; but zero
gives the bank odds against him; and, though zero is apparently a very
mild tax, since at _rouge-et-noir_ in thirty-six chances the bank has
only half a chance more than the player, it is bound to be ruinous in
the end. To escape the abruptness of a decision which, if he placed
all that he possessed on the red or the black, would end the game at a
single stroke, the player divides his stake, so as to be able to defy a
large number of chances, hoping that, thanks to a skilfully graduated
progression, he will end by lighting on a favourable series in which
the gains will exceed the losses. This is the underlying principle of
all the systems, which are never anything but more or less ingenious,
prudent and complicated martingales. There are not, there never will be
any others, in the absence of a miracle which has not yet occurred, of
an intuition which foresees what the ball will decide, or of an unknown
force which will oblige it to act as a player wishes.


8

I have no intention of reviewing all these systems, which are
innumerable and of unequal value: the _paroli_ pure and simple, that
artless, violent, doubled stake which leads straight to disaster;
the D’Alembert and all its variants; the descending progressions; the
differential methods; the _montant belge_; the _parolis intermittents_;
the snowball; the _photographie_; the staking of equal amounts on
certain groups of figures, which is a Chinese puzzle demanding days
of patient observation before it is attacked; and many others which I
forget, from the most clear-cut to the most mysterious, which are sold
at a high price, to credulous beginners, in sealed envelopes containing
what is everybody’s secret and with all or nearly all of which I
have become acquainted thanks to the kindness of an erudite player.
A detailed account of those most frequently used will be found in
D’Albigny’s treatise _Les Martingales modernes_, in Gaston Vessillier’s
_Théorie des systèmes géométriques_, in Hulmann’s _Traité des jeux
dits de hasard_, in Théo d’Alost’s _Théorie scientifique nouvelle des
jeux de la roulette, trente-et-quarante, etc._, and, above all, in the
_Revue de Monte Carlo_, which has given a system in every issue since
the day of its foundation some fifteen years ago.

Whether mystic or transparent, all these methods present more or less
the same dangers, being all founded on the quicksands of equilibrium
and temporary disturbance. If they are very cautious, the loss is
trifling, but the gain is still smaller; if they are bold, the gain is
great, but the loss is two or three times greater. The best of them,
in order to continue the defence of a moderate stake and of what has
already been sacrificed, involve the risking on the cloth, at a given
moment, of all the previous winnings, which are soon followed by the
sums held in reserve. This is the inevitable revenge of the bank, at
which you thought that you were nibbling with impunity, but which
suddenly opens wide its jaws, like a blind and drowsy crocodile, and
swallows profits and capital at a single gulp.


9

The players hearten themselves by maintaining that they have an
incontestable advantage over the bank. They begin to play, they “punt”
when they like and as they like and they withdraw when they please,
whereas the bank is compelled to play without stopping, to accept every
stake and to meet every _coup_ up to the limit of the maximum, which,
as we know, is six thousand francs on the even chances. This advantage
is a real one if the player, after winning a big sum, goes away and
does not come back again. But the lucky gambler, even more infallibly
than the one who has no luck, will return to the enchanted table and
in so doing loses the only elective weapon that he had against his
enemy. To choose your time for punting is but an illusory privilege,
because everything, at any moment, is equally shifting and uncertain;
and you never know beforehand when the precarious and deceptive law of
equilibrium will reassert itself. After a long sequence of blacks, you
wager on a fine series of reds, a certain run, you would say; but no
sooner have you staked your money than the series gives up the ghost
and remorseless black resumes its devastating course; or else you do
the opposite: you bet on black and it is red that settles down for a
run. At whatever moment you start punting, you are always fighting
red against black, that is to say, one to one. Once more, the only
real advantage is that you can go away when you like; but where is the
gambler, whether losing or winning, who is able to go away and not come
back?


10

After mature examination, all these systems merely carve the brutal
and crushing mass of luck into small pieces. They act as a defensive
padding against the blows of Chance, making them less grave. They
prolong the player’s life or his agony. They enable the owner of a
modest purse to stake as often as the multimillionaire, who would
confine himself to betting double or quits indefinitely, if he were
not stopped by the fatal barrier of the maximum. But all mathematical
operations, all combinations of figures flutter and struggle like
blind captives between bronze walls. They merely dash themselves
in vain against these walls, whether black or red: both remain
invulnerable and impregnable; and from their imprisoning embrace there
is no escape.


11

Does this mean that there is no such thing as a defensible method
and that the most skilful calculations have not revealed a means of
defeating Chance? In theory, I cannot bring myself to believe that
baseless calculations will ever do what they have not done up to the
present. It is none the less true that, in practice, we come upon
some which struggle with fair success against ill-luck. For instance,
a friend of mine, a British officer, has a system which he has been
using for a long time and which yields astonishing results. It is, of
course, a progression, the whole of whose virtue lies in an ingenious
and very simple key that seems to act as a sort of talisman. I have
not found this method in any of either the recognized or the catchpenny
treatises. It has its dangers, like the others; it has its difficult
moments, when, to save your anticipated profits and your earlier
losses, you have to risk a rather large amount. But, if you prudently
stop playing during runs which are too obstinately hostile, if you
allow the storm to pass as it spreads over a large number of chances,
you end by obtaining the necessary compensation. At any rate, it has
never seriously failed my friend so far.


12

Nevertheless it must not be supposed that we have only to use this
system blindly and automatically. As with other systems, a certain
science, a certain experience, a certain deftness are indispensable.
Though science and experience are evasive qualities here, fugitive and
at the mercy of Chance, they are by no means illusory. The careful and
experienced player understands how to approach and nurse his luck, or
at least how not to thwart it. He guesses the beginning and the end
of a favourable series. He foresees alternations and intermittences;
and, when he does not succeed in grasping their rhythm, he prefers
to abstain from playing, rather than encounter them inopportunely.
He makes more than one mistake, but makes far fewer than those who,
faithful to the very scientific theory of the absolute independence of
each _coup_, back either colour at any moment. He does not surrender
to the fixed rigidity of logic, he does not throw the gauntlet down to
fate, he does not defy the animosity of fortune. He is never obstinate.
He does not struggle on, sullenly, to his last coin, against an
iniquitous run, in order to gain the bitter satisfaction of learning
the utmost depths of his ill-luck and the injustice of fate. He has
no self-conceit, no prejudices, no inflexible opinions. He is docile,
plastic and accommodating. Devoid of all false shame, he cheerfully
abandons his pretensions and pays court to fortune. He retraces his
steps and retracts at fitting times. He stops, starts afresh, yields,
tacks about, allows himself to be borne upon the tide and comes safely
to harbour, while the arrogant, overbold and headstrong pilot founders
in deep water.

Beyond all else, he studies the character and temper of the table at
which he takes his seat, for each table has its psychology, its habits,
its history, which vary from day to day and yet by the end of the year
form a homogeneous whole wherein all temporary errors, all anomalies
and injustices are compensated. The question is to know on what page
of this history he should prepare to play his part. He will not learn
this at once. It is of little use for him to peep at the notes and
_permanences_ of the players who have come before him. What he wants is
the immediate contact, the very breath of the hidden god. But the god
is already thrilling into life, taking shape and countenance, giving
a whispered hint of his intentions, speaking words of approval or
condemnation; and the tragic struggle begins between the player, so
infinitely small, and Chance, so enormous and omnipotent.


13

Now that the battle is joined, now that the player has done what he
could to summon and welcome luck, there is nothing left for him to do
but wait; for luck, when all is said, will remain the supreme power
that pronounces the final verdict, the formidable and inevitable
unknown factor in every combination. The best of systems cannot
overcome an abnormal and pitiless run of bad luck which makes you stake
incessantly on the losing colour. A run like this, without favourable
intermittences, is extremely rare but always possible. It corresponds,
for that matter, with the extraordinary strokes of good luck, which
seem more frequent only because they attract more attention. From time
to time we see a man, or rather let me say a woman--for it is nearly
always female players who have these inspirations--walk up to the
table and with a high hand and not the least hesitation gamble _en
plein_ or _en cheval_, on a _transversale_ or _carré_, and win time
after time, as though she saw beforehand where the ball would fall.
These moments of intuition are always very brief; and, if the player
insists or grows stubborn, she will soon lose whatever she has won.
It is none the less true that, when we observe this very obvious and
striking phenomenon, we wonder whether there is not something more in
it than mere coincidence. When all is said, can luck be anything other
than a passing and dazzling intuition of what will flash into actuality
before everybody’s eyes a second later? Is not the compartment which
does not yet contain the little ball, but which in an instant will snap
it up and hold it, is not this compartment already, somewhere, a thing
of the present and even of the past? But these are questions which
would lead us too far afield in space and time.


14

Be this as it may, to return to the system of which we were speaking,
even if I were at liberty to divulge its secret I should not do so.
I am not a very austere moralist and I look upon gambling as one of
those profoundly human evils which we shall never be able to uproot
and which, for all our efforts, will always reappear in a new form.
Still, the least that we can do is not to encourage it. The gambler, I
mean the inveterate, almost professional gambler, is not interesting.
To begin with, he is an idler and nearly always a part of the world’s
flotsam, with no justification for his existence. If he be rich, he
is making the most foolish, the most dismal use of his money that can
be imagined. If he be poor, he is even less easily to be forgiven: he
should know better than to sacrifice his days and too often the welfare
and the peace of mind of those dependent on him to a will-o’-the-wisp.
Underlying the gambler we find too often a sluggard, an incompetent,
a boneless egoist, greedy of vulgar and unmerited pleasures, a
dissatisfied and inefficient individual. Gambling is the stay-at-home,
imaginary, squalid, mechanical, anæmic and unlovely adventure of those
who have never been able to encounter or create the real, necessary
and salutary adventures of life. It is the feverish and unhealthy
activity of the wastrel. It is the purposeless and desperate effort of
the debilitated, who no longer possess or never possessed the courage
and patience to make the honest, persevering effort, the unspasmodic,
unapplauded effort which every human life demands.

There is also a great deal of puerile vanity about the gambler. Taken
for all in all, he is a child still seeking his place in the universe.
He has not yet realized his position. He thinks himself peerless in the
face of destiny. In his self-infatuation he expects the unknown or the
unknowable to do for him what it does not do for any one whomsoever.
And he expects this for no reason, simply because he is himself and
because others have not that privilege. He must tempt fate incessantly,
hurriedly, anxiously, in I know not what idle and pretentious hope of
learning to know himself from without. Whatever fortune’s decision
may be, he will find cause for preening himself. If he have no luck,
he will feel flattered because he is specially persecuted by fortune;
if he be lucky, he will think all the more highly of himself because
of the exceptional gifts which she bestows upon him. For the rest, he
does not need to believe that he deserves these gifts; on the contrary,
the less right he has to them, the prouder he will be of them; and the
unjust and manifestly undeserved chance which makes them his will form
the best part of the vainglorious satisfaction which he will contrive
to extract from them.


15

It would be extremely surprising, I said when I began, if this
indefatigable and exhaustive enquiry into Chance, pursued for over
fifty years, had failed to yield some sort of result. I am wondering,
at the end of this investigation, what that result is. At the cost of
an insane waste of money, time, physical, nervous and moral energy and
spiritual forces perhaps more precious still, it has taught us that
Chance is in short Chance, that is to say, an aggregate of effects
whereof we do not know the causes. But we knew as much as this before;
and our new discovery is a little derisory. We have seen the shadowy
appearance of certain laws or habits from which a few players appear
to derive advantage, though this advantage is always precarious. But
these apparent laws, which tend obscurely and uncertainly to instil a
little order into Chance, are, like Chance itself, but inconsistent
and ephemeral summaries of results from unknown causes. Upon the whole
we have learnt nothing, unless perhaps it be that we were wrong to
attach greater importance to those manifestations of destiny than
they possess. If we look at them more closely, we find that there is
nothing more behind all these catastrophes and all these mysteries of
luck than the catastrophe and the mysteries which we put there. We link
our fate to the fate of a little ball which is not responsible for it;
and, because we entrust it for a moment with our fortune, we fondly
imagine that mysterious moral powers are bent on directing and ending
its course at the right or wrong moment. It knows nothing of all this;
and, though the lives of thousands of men depended on its fall to the
right or the left of the point at which it stops, it would not care. It
has laws of its own, which it must obey and which are so complex that
we do not even try to explain them. It is just a little ball, honestly
seeking the little red or black hole in which to go to sleep and having
nothing very much to tell us of the secrets of a luck or destiny which
exist only within ourselves.



THE RIDDLE OF PROGRESS



XI

THE RIDDLE OF PROGRESS


1

This war, which is one such as had never yet been waged upon this
earth of ours, leads us to consider the great problem of the future of
mankind.

Dare we hope that humanity will one day renounce these monstrous
follies and that they will become altogether impossible? To this
question, if we wish to meet it at its source, I see but one reply,
which I have already given elsewhere and which I will here recapitulate
and complete, namely, that we are engulfed in a universe which has no
more limit in time than it has in space, which had no beginning, as it
will have no end, and which has behind it as many myriads of myriads of
years as it discovers ahead of it. Yesterday’s eternity and to-morrow’s
are precisely identical. All that the universe is going to do it must
have already done, for it has had as many opportunities of doing so as
it will ever have. All the things that it has not done are things which
it will never be able to do, because nothing will be added, in space
or time, to what it has already possessed in space or time. It has
necessarily made in the past all the efforts and all the experiments
which it will make in the future; and all that has gone before, having
been subject to the same chances, is perforce the same as all that is
to follow.


2

It is probable, therefore, that there was once an infinity of worlds
similar to our own, even as it is likely that there is an infinity of
such similar worlds at present, the infinity of space being comparable
with that of time. These coincidences, however difficult for us to
picture, must inevitably occur and recur in the immeasurable and the
innumerous in which we are immersed, that is, unless the infinity of
possible combinations be less unlimited than those of time and space.

This is where our capacity of imagination halts, for it is easier for
us to conceive the infinities of space and time than the infinity of
combinations. To obtain some idea of the latter, we should have to
understand the substance and the nature, the laws and the forces, in a
word, the whole riddle of existence. None the less is it true that this
possible infinity of combinations is our only hope; without it there
would be nothing more to expect of a universe which obviously would
have tried and exhausted everything before our coming.

But, if this number of combinations is really infinite, it is open to
us to say that the earth is an experiment which had not yet been made
and an experiment which has failed, since suffering and evil have the
upper hand of happiness and goodness. If the experiment has failed,
we are its victims; but we are not forbidden to hope that our efforts
will in some way modify combinations which will be more fortunate in
other places or at another time. If the experiment has failed, it does
not follow that others have not succeeded and are not more fortunate,
at this very moment, in other worlds than ours. We may even suppose
that, in the infinity of these combinations and experiments, the most
successful tend to become fixed and crystallized and that, in view of
their infinite number, they will bring about successfully in the future
what they have not brought about successfully in the past. This is a
hazardous glimmer; but I doubt whether any others will be discovered to
keep us uplifted above despair.


3

Let us for a moment assume that the experiment of this world had not
miscarried as it has; that the mind of man, which, since the beginning,
has been struggling painfully against matter and winning but a few
brief, uncertain and precarious victories, were a million times more
powerful and better-armed. It would no doubt have triumphed over all
that weighs us down and keeps us where we are; it would have freed
itself from the apparently illusory fetters of space and time. It is
not unreasonable to admit that, among the myriads of worlds which
people the infinite, there are some in which these better conditions
are realized. Perhaps, after all, it would be impossible to imagine
anything that does not exist somewhere in reality, for we may very
rightly maintain that our imaginings can be nothing more than stray
reflections of things that already exist. Now, if we lived in one of
those worlds and if we could see, as we should perhaps be allowed
to see, all that is happening at this moment on the earth which we
now inhabit and on others which are perhaps even worse and more
unfortunate, it seems to us that we should know neither rest nor ease
until we had intervened and helped to make it better and wiser and more
habitable.


4

For that matter, no one can tell us that this is not so now and that
all our spiritual victories, all that seems, at certain moments, to
be leading us towards a future less hideous than the past, all the
mysterious currents of good that sometimes flow through our world, all
that awaits us after death, no one, I say, can tell us that all this is
not due to the intervention of one of those worlds. It is true that we
cannot perceive the act of intervention, that we are hardly sensible
of it; but it is also true that these creatures of a higher world,
being of necessity less encumbered with matter and more spiritual than
we, must necessarily remain invisible to us. In the infinity of the
firmament we discover myriads of worlds that are material worlds like
our own; and we are able to discover only these, because all that does
not more or less closely resemble our own world must needs escape us.
But the space lying between the stars, which to us appears void, is
infinitely wider than the space which they themselves occupy; and it
would be strange indeed if it were not filled with worlds which we
cannot perceive at all, or rather if it were not itself one vast world
which our eyes are incapable of taking in.

It is, moreover, thinkable that, if we do not see these other worlds,
they, not being material worlds, do not perceive matter and are
consequently as unaware of us as we are unaware of them; for we are
doubtless mistaken in believing that, because we are visible to one
another, we are necessarily visible to all other beings. On the
contrary, there is reason to presume that these spiritual beings pass
through us without suspecting our presence and that, as they are
conscious and sensible only of that which emanates from the spirit,
they do not suspect or discover our existence except in so far as we
approach the conditions in which they exist.


5

Consider the earth in its origin: at first, a shapeless nebula,
becoming gradually more and more condensed; next, a globe of fire, of
rocks in fusion, whirling for millions of years through space, with
no other object than that of forming into a mass and cooling: an
inconceivable incandescence, which none of our sources of heat can
enable us to picture; an essential, scientific, absolute barrenness
which may well have proclaimed itself irremediable and everlasting.
Who would have thought that from these torrents of matter in eruption,
which seemed to have destroyed for ever all life or the least germ of
life, there would emerge each and every form of life itself, from the
most enormous, the strongest, the most enduring, the most impetuous,
the most abundant, down to the slightest, the least visible, the most
precarious, the most ephemeral, the most exiguous? Who above all could
have dared foresee that they would give birth to what seems so utterly
alien to the liquefied or pasty rocks and metals that alone formed the
surface, the nucleus and the very entity of our globe, I mean our human
intelligence and consciousness?


6

Is it possible to imagine a more unexpected evolution and ending?
What could astonish us after so great an astonishment and what are
we not entitled to hope of a world which, after being what it was,
has produced what we see and what we are? Considering that it started
from a sort of negation of life, from integral barrenness and from
worse than nothing, in order to end in us, where will it not end after
starting from ourselves? If its birth and formation have elaborated
such prodigies, what prodigies may not its existence, its indefinite
prolongation and its dissolution hold in store for us? There are an
immeasurable distance and inconceivable transformations between the
one frightful material of the early days and the human thought of
this moment; and there will doubtless be a like distance and like
transformations as difficult to conceive between the thought of this
moment and that which will succeed it in the infinity of time.

It seems as if, in the beginning, our earth did not know what to do
with its material and with its force, which inter-devoured each other.
In the vast, flaming void in which it was being consumed, it had not
yet the shadow of an object or an idea; to-day, it has so many that
our scholars wear out their lives to no purpose in seeking them and
are overwhelmed by the number of its mysterious and inexhaustible
combinations.

At that time it disposed of but a single force, the most destructive
that we knew, fire. If everything was born of fire, which itself seemed
to be born only to destroy, what will not be born of that which seems
to be born only to produce, beget and multiply? If it was able to do so
much with the lava and the red-hot cinders which were the only elements
that it possessed, what will it not be able to do with all that it will
end by possessing?


7

It is well sometimes to tell ourselves that we are at least living in a
world which has not yet exhausted its future and which is much nearer
to its beginning than to its end. It was born only yesterday and has
but lately disentangled its original chaos. It is at the starting-point
of its hopes and its experiments. We believe that it is making for
death, whereas all its past, on the contrary, shows that it is much
more probably making for life. In any case, as its years pass by, the
quantity and still more the quality of the life which it engenders
and maintains tend to increase and to improve. It has given us only
the first-fruits of its miracles; and in all likelihood there is no
more connection between what it was and what it is than there will be
between what it is and what it will be. No doubt, when its greatest
marvels burst into being, we shall no longer possess the lives which
we possess to-day; but we shall still be there under another form, we
shall still be existing somewhere, on its surface or in its depths; and
it is not utterly improbable that one of its last prodigies will reach
us in our dust, awaken us and recall us to life, in order to impart to
us at last the share of happiness which we had not enjoyed and to teach
us that we were wrong not to interest ourselves, on the further side of
our graves, in the destiny of this earth of ours, of which we had never
ceased to be the immortal offspring.



THE TWO LOBES



XII

THE TWO LOBES


1

A soldier writes me the following letter from the front:

  “There are quagmires and skeletons in the forest. I have discovered
  and admired the ruined gods under the still living and wonderful
  vegetation: their spirit has evaporated. The odour of Christ has
  little charm for me; I prefer that of Buddha. What I adore in him
  is the fundamental contradiction that seeks to assure us of our
  immortality by proving our inevitable annihilation. He taught,
  in the same breath, the illusion of the Ego and its periodical
  reincarnation, an obvious absurdity which implies a knowledge of the
  profoundest truth, of the very nature of being, at the same time and
  alternately collective and individual. This discovery, which he did
  not formulate, should have led him elsewhere than to Nirvana, that
  paradise of unripe fruits....

  “Man is so fashioned as to perceive only one half of the universe;
  and the mind of ordinary texture sees barely a hemisphere of truth.
  Afflicted with a congenital ‘nervous headache,’ humanity thinks with
  only one half of its brain, with the eastern lobe or the western, the
  ancient or the modern; its mind nibbles its own tail; the antinomies
  pursue one another in an endless circle, which Kant believed that he
  had discovered, but which Buddha had striven to open. He possessed
  the complementary virtues; he was religious and rational; while he
  summed up within himself the mysticism of the east, his was the most
  scientific of the minds of antiquity, at a time when science did not
  exist but was merged in philosophy. The moderns who have sought to
  condense into a system the collective and hardly initiated effort
  of science have pitiably failed, for they have thought only as
  westerners, entangled in the contradiction of idealistic aspirations
  and materialistic arguments, whereas Buddha’s formula might still
  and almost without breaking down contain this gigantic effort and
  yet not hamper it. From the death of the prince-philosopher, down to
  the flights of contemporary science, true thought has not advanced
  one step; Arab or Christian spiritualism and its reagent, positivist
  or scientific materialism, are recoils in contrary directions, false
  monisms which, taking the extreme for the supreme, seek to fix the
  centre of gravity on the circumference of the wheel. The explorers of
  the Beyond must set out from the cross-roads of religious synthesis
  and scientific analysis and drag these rival sisters by the hand.

  “Truth shines at the centre of a circle of onlookers and we must pass
  through its flame to recognize a brother in the adversary opposite.
  We must reach the centre of space to discern the identity of its
  cardinal points: ‘_Totum et Nihil, Alter et Ego_.’ The longing to
  convert others must yield to the need of completing and balancing
  our own point of view. In the sacred forest, which pioneers have
  penetrated on all sides and in all ages, the more greatly daring must
  necessarily draw nearer one to the other. Even if they cannot meet,
  they can hear one another and give one another mutual encouragement.
  The most modest cry of discovery may be welcome in the solitude and
  silence in which the truth of the future is ripening....”


2

I thought it well to preserve this page. It sets forth, in a
remarkable, though perhaps too rapid summary, two or three of the
great problems which in reality are only one and to which, unless we
give up everything, we are bound to attempt the answer: the problems
of immortality or annihilation, of flux and reflux, of existence
alternatively collective and individual, of exteriorization and
interiorization, which make up the mighty cosmic rhythm whereof our
life and death are but infinitesimal pulsations.


3

But let us begin by observing that the fundamental contradiction
which seeks to assure us of our immortality by proving our inevitable
annihilation is not to be found in Buddha and that it is not true to
say that he teaches in the same breath the illusion of the Ego and
its periodical reincarnation. The doctrine of reincarnation is not
Buddha’s. He found it ready-made; it existed before him and was so
deeply rooted in his people that he does not even dream of disputing
it. From the exoteric point of view, he tries only to disarm it, to
deprive it of its sting, to render it harmless. He tries to reduce
life to the point where it can find nothing wherewith to reincarnate
itself. According to the exoteric doctrine, which is but a preparation
for esoteric truth, life is naught but suffering; and its only aim is
the redemption or the extinction of suffering. This extinction is
to be found in Nirvana, which is not annihilation but the absorption
of the individual into the universe. Ordinary death, by reason of
the perpetual reincarnation of the same individual, cannot suppress
suffering. We must therefore find a sort of superdeath, which makes
any reincarnation impossible; and this superdeath can be obtained
only by the man who has been striving to die all his life long and
who has deliberately cut off all the ties that bind him to existence:
all love, all hope, all desire, all possession. When, at the end of
this systematic and voluntary superdeath, the actual death arrives, it
will no longer find a living germ capable of achieving reincarnation.
This superdeath, thus obtained, will precede by many centuries or
millenaries purification, final redemption and the absorption into the
absolute One.

It has been said that this is exactly the reverse of the doctrine of
Christ. With Buddha, life is only the gate of death; with Christ, death
is the gate of life. In reality, it is the same thing and everything
ends by the absorption into the divine, for the doctrine of Christ is
nothing more than a mutilated branch of the great trunk of the mother
religion.

Here we have the solution offered to us by the most wonderful mind,
the greatest sage that humanity has ever known; by one who knew things
which we no longer know and which, it may be, we shall never recover.
It is the foundation of the religion of five hundred millions of men.
There is nothing nearer to the ultimate truth.


4

Let us observe, however, that the problem of immortality or
annihilation ought not to be set in these terms, since the word
annihilation cannot be employed, save in a metaphorical sense, to
denote a life which we no longer comprehend, seeing that Nihil or
nothingness is the one thing whose existence is utterly impossible and
whose non-existence is absolutely certain.

As for immortality, here again there is ambiguity, for, as
annihilation cannot exist, immortality is inevitable; and the only
question that remains to be solved is whether this immortality will
or will not be accompanied by some sort of continuance of our present
consciousness.

But, while it is probable that the problem of immortality, more or
less accompanied by consciousness, will long remain in suspense,
the answer to the problem of the “nervous headache,” or rather of
congenital hemiphlegia, is doubtless easier to find. In any case,
it occupies a domain which our direct investigations are able to
explore. It is, after all, an historical and geographical question.
It seems that there are in fact in the human brain an eastern lobe
and a western lobe, which have never acted at the same time. The one
produces, here, reason, science and consciousness; the other secretes,
yonder, intuition, religion and subconsciousness. One reflects only
the infinite and the unknowable; the other is interested only in
what it is able to delimit, in what it may hope to understand. They
represent, employing a perhaps imaginary image, the conflict between
the material and the moral ideal of humanity. They have more than
once endeavoured to penetrate each other, to mingle and to work in
concert; but the western lobe, at least over the most active part of
the world, has hitherto paralysed and almost annihilated the efforts of
the other. We are indebted to it for extraordinary progress in all the
material sciences, but also for such catastrophes as those which we are
undergoing to-day, catastrophes which, if we are not careful, will not
be the last nor the worst. The time would seem to have come to awaken
the paralysed lobe; but we have neglected it so greatly that we no
longer quite know what it is capable of doing.



HOPE AND DESPAIR



XIII

HOPE AND DESPAIR


1

The same soldier, who has become my war-time “god-child,” writes to me
again:

  “I experience an ineffable delight in remaining the average man and
  in professing emptiness. I felt a great peace descend within me on
  the day when I resigned myself to the common lot, in other words,
  to ignorance and death. I have found life by renouncing it and, now
  that I am no longer anything, I feel rich indeed. Do not tempt me in
  the direction of that subtle spiritual vanity which constitutes one
  of the most formidable obstacles to the final liberation from self.
  Proud I certainly was and I am still only too much so; but we cannot
  extract virtues otherwise than from our vices. More ardently than
  when I embraced the phantom of individual superiority, I stretch
  my arms towards homogeneous equality, towards the fullness of
  vacancy....”


2

He is right; but he is thinking, here, with the eastern lobe of his
brain, the Asiatic lobe; and the philosophy of this lobe counsels only
inaction and renunciation, the “enchantment of the disenchanted,” as
Renan used to say, or rather the satisfaction of despair. Certainly all
we that see, all that we feel and all that we know pledges us to this
despair, which our meditations--above all, those of this same Asiatic
lobe--may, for that matter, render very spacious and as beautiful,
almost as habitable, as hope. But what do we know, as compared with
what we do not know? We are ignorant of all that goes before and of all
that comes after us, in a word, of the whole universe. Our despair,
which appears at first the last word and the last effort of wisdom, is
therefore based upon what we know, which is nothing, whereas the hope
of those whom we believe to be less wise can be based upon what we do
not know, which is everything.

Moreover, if we would be quite just, there is more than one reason for
hoping which we will not recall here; let us confess therefore that in
this nothing which we know there exists naught but despair and that
hope can lie only in that everything which we do not know. But, instead
of listening only to our eastern lobe, which counsels us to accept
this inactive ignorance and to bury our lives therein, is it not more
reasonable at the same time to set our western lobe to work, the lobe
which seeks to discover that everything? It is possible that here too,
when all is said, it will find despair; but it is unlikely, for we
cannot imagine a world which would be merely an act of despair. Now,
if the world is not an act of despair, nothing that exists in it has
reason to despair. In any case and in the meanwhile, this search will
doubtless permit us to hope as long as the world exists.


3

One of the most dangerous temptations that assail him who scrutinizes
nature and who sees, as he advances in his enquiries, that her
mysteries become more and more numerous, reaching forth unendingly
in every direction, is the temptation to grow discouraged by the
impossible task and to abandon it. He drops his weapons. On the last
slope of life particularly, he is too much inclined to resign himself,
to go no farther forward, to make no further effort, to fall into a
humour of saying, “What is the good?” and to drop asleep and learn
nothing more, since he has learnt that he will never know anything.

He is already sensible of this wish to surrender at discretion when he
considers the humblest, the lowliest of the sciences. What will it be
when he attempts to embrace them all? The mind goes astray, becomes
dizzy, asks to close its eyes. It must not close them. That would be
the basest treachery that man could commit. We have no other thing to
do in this life of ours than to seek to know where we are. We find no
other reason for our existence; we have no other duty. Not to know
is merely vexatious; no longer to seek to know is the supreme, the
irremediable misfortune, the unpardonable desertion.


4

Yet, without renouncing, it is not well that we should feed ourselves
upon too petty illusions. We should always keep before our eyes certain
verities which put us in our place. There is no doubt that we shall
never know everything; and so long as we do not know everything we
shall be just as though we knew nothing. It is extremely possible, as
the Rig-Veda suggests, that God Himself, or the first cause, does not
know everything. It is equally possible that the universe has not yet,
in any of its parts, become conscious of itself; that it knows not
whence it came nor whither it is going, what it was nor what it will
be, what it has accomplished nor what it is seeking to accomplish;
and, on the other hand, it is probable that, if it has not yet learnt
these things, it will never learn them, seeing that, as I have already
said, there is no reason why it should be able, in the infinity of time
which will come after us, to do what it has not been able to do in the
infinity of time which went before.


5

If there be a consciousness of the universe, a God, He knows all that
He should know, or He will never know it. And, if He knows it, why has
He done what He has done, which cannot lead to anything, seeing that He
might already have led us where we ought to go? Why did He not prefer
nothingness, or at least that which we call nothingness, the only form
of lasting happiness, immovable, incontestable and comprehensible?

We could understand, if need were, an immobile, immutable, eternal
universe, a finished universe; but we cannot understand a universe
in movement, or one, at least, of which all the parts that we see are
incessantly in movement, evolving through space and time, a universe
hurling itself at a dizzy rate of speed towards an end which it will
never attain, since it has not yet attained it.

We may say, to console ourselves, that all despair comes only from the
limited nature of our purview; but it is fair to add that our purview
limits all hope in the same way.



MACROCOSM AND MICROCOSM



XIV

MACROCOSM AND MICROCOSM


1

The biologists tell us that the human embryo repeats, very rapidly
during the early months of its development and more slowly during the
later months, all the forms of life which preceded man upon this earth.

The round speck which is the germ becomes a hollow sphere, a sort
of sac with a double wall, which is known as the gastrula and whose
orifice of invagination, when it closes, receives the name of the
blastopore. This is protozoic life, the as yet gelatinous beginning of
animal life, and is followed, after transformations that would take too
long to enumerate, by polypoid life.

Next, on either side of the head, appear the branchial arches,
corresponding with the gills of the fish. At the end of the first
month, the limbs are still no more than mere buds; on the other hand,
the embryo is provided with a tail, which, folded against the body,
nearly touches the forehead. It now has the appearance of a tadpole
and lives a life which is wholly aquatic, bathed in the amniotic fluid
which represents for it the water in which the embryos of fish and
frogs move about freely.

It now becomes a matter of forming a resolution and knowing what to do
with it. The embryo is almost in the situation occupied by life at the
origin of the species; and nature, as though to humiliate man or to
humiliate herself by remembering her mistakes and hesitations, returns
to her gropings, her asymmetrics, her repentances, her unsuccessful
experiments. Tentative forms, such as the dorsal cord, are reabsorbed;
the primitive kidneys disappear, to make room for the final kidneys,
which are enormous, filling the greater portion of the peritoneal
cavity. Enormous too is the liver, which invades almost the whole of
the visceral cavity; enormous the head, almost as large as the rest
of the body; and in this enormous head the primitive ocular vesicles
are formed, themselves enormous, as is the umbilical vesicle. This is
the incoherent and monstrous period corresponding with the period of
madness and gigantism when nature, as yet inexperienced, was blindly
sketching uncertain creatures, formidable, unbalanced and anomalous,
birds, crocodiles, elephants and fish in one, as though she had not
as yet decided what to do, not yet completed her classifications,
disentangled her laws, or acquired the sense of proportion, of balance,
or of conditions essential to the maintenance of the life which she was
creating.


2

This, roughly speaking, is the recapitulation which occurs before
our eyes, but of which, no doubt, many incidents escape us or do not
sufficiently attract our attention, for it is possible that they
reproduce types with which we are not acquainted and which have not
even left geological traces, seeing that the number of species which
have disappeared is infinitely greater than that of the species which
we know.

Dr. Hélan Jaworski may therefore very justly assert that the embryonic
period corresponds with the geological period. And, even as, in the
great terrestrial evolution, we observe the gradual disappearance of
the armour-plated fishes, the monstrous reptiles and the gigantic
mammals, so, in the minor embryonic evolution, we see the primitive
kidney, the dorsal cord and the umbilical vesicle dissolve, while the
liver diminishes and the disproportion between the head and the rest of
the body is lessened. In a word, nature is learning wisdom, recognizing
her errors, profiting by her experience, doing her best to repair her
blunders and acquiring a sense of equilibrium, economy and form.

Dr. Jaworski finds other analogies between the geological period
corresponding with man’s appearance upon earth and the birth of the
child, analogies which are ingenious, but rather more hazardous. Birth
is in fact preceded by a miniature deluge, caused by the tearing of
the foetal envelopes, which allow the amniotic fluid to escape. Then
the child, at the moment of entering into life, suddenly experiences a
sort of glacial period; it passes, in fact, from an environment with
a temperature of over 98° to the outer air, which is barely 60° or
65°. The sense of cold is so terrible that it wrests a first cry of
suffering from the new-born child.


3

What is the meaning of this strange recapitulation?

Dr. Jaworski thinks that, if the brief process of embryonic evolution
which prepares the way for the birth of man repeats the great process
of terrestrial evolution, this latter, on its side, might well be but
a vast embryonic period that is preparing for a birth which we cannot
as yet imagine. I do not know whether he will succeed in maintaining
this stupendous theory. If he does, he will really have made us, as he
promises to do, “take a step towards the essence of things.” Meanwhile,
thanks to his preparatory studies, he will always have made us take
another and a very useful step towards a truth which this time is
incontestable, which, though less unexpected, has never been elucidated
with so much patience and which is no less big with consequences.


4

Dr. Jaworski, then, undertakes to demonstrate that the human body
unites in itself, in a plainly recognizable form, all the living
creatures which now exist upon earth and which have existed since
the origin of life. In other words, each creature sums up in itself
all those which have preceded it; and man, the last-comer, contains
within himself the whole biological tree, so much so that, if we could
distribute his body, if we could segregate each of his organs and keep
it alive in isolation, we should be able to reconstitute all existing
forms, to repeople the earth with all the species which it has borne,
from the primitive protoplasm to the synthesis, the final achievement,
which is man.

We might perhaps go farther than Dr. Jaworski and declare, with the
occultists of the east, that we likewise contain within us, in the germ
or in a rough-hewn state, all the creatures and all the forms that will
come after us. But here we should be leaving the domain of science
proper to lose ourselves in a speculation which by its very nature is
incapable of verification.


5

So it is not merely in a figurative sense, such as that foreshadowed by
the current idiom, where it speaks of the vascular tree, the branches
of nerves, or the ovarian cluster; it is not merely by analogy, but in
a literal and strictly scientific sense that our heart, fundamentally,
is nothing but a medusa and our kidneys sponges, that our intestines
represent the polyps and our skeleton the polypites, that our
reproductive organs are worms or molluscs, that the vertebral column
and the spinal marrow take the place of the Echinodermata, while the
Brachiopoda and the Ctenophora would be derived from our eye and the
reptiles found in our digestive apparatus, the birds in our respiratory
organs and so on.

I repeat, there is no question here of metaphors or of more or less
approximate, elastic and plausible correspondences but of rigorously
and meticulously established proofs.

I cannot, of course, set before you the details of Dr. Jaworski’s
exegesis. It would not permit of the slightest solution of continuity
and, in the three volumes published so far, it leads us to conclusions
which are very difficult to contest. People used to assert, without
attaching too much faith to what they said or scrutinizing it too
closely, that man is a microcosm. It seems to be clearly proved to-day
that this is not merely literally defensible, but scientifically
accurate. We are a prehistoric colony, immense and innumerous, a living
agglomeration of all that lives, has lived and probably will live upon
earth. We are not only the sons or brothers of the worms, the reptiles,
the fish, the frogs, the birds, the mammals and no matter what monsters
have defiled or affrighted the surface of the globe: we bear them
within us; our organs are no other than themselves; we nourish all
their types; they are only awaiting an opportunity to escape from us,
to reappear, to reconstitute themselves, to develop and to plunge us
once again into terror. In this respect, quite as much as in respect
of the secret thoughts, the vices and the phantoms with which we are
filled, we might repeat the words which Emerson’s old man used to speak
to his children, when they were frightened by a strange face in the
dark passage:

“Children, you will never see anything worse than yourselves!”

If all the species were to disappear and only man remained, none
would be lost and all might be reborn of his body, as though they were
coming out of Noah’s ark, from the almost invisible protozoa down to
the formidable antediluvian colossi which could lick the roofs of our
houses.

It is therefore fairly probable that all these species take part in
our existence, in, our instincts, in all our feelings, in all our
thoughts; and here once more we are led back to the great religions of
India, which foresaw all the truths that we are gradually discovering
and which already, thousands of years ago, were telling us that man
is everything and that he must recognize his essence in every living
creature.



HEREDITY AND PREEXISTENCE



XV

HEREDITY AND PREEXISTENCE


1

The law of heredity which insists that the descendants shall suffer
by the faults and profit by the virtues of their ancestors comprises
truths that are no longer disputed. They shine forth, visible to the
eyes of all. The child of a drunkard will bear the burden of his
father’s vice all his life long, from the day of his birth to that of
his death, in body and in mind. One might say that by this irrefutable
example nature had intended ostentatiously to affirm and manifest
the implacable character of her law, as though to make us understand
that she takes no account whatever of our conceptions of justice and
injustice and that she acts on an unvarying principle in all the
obscure circumstances in which we cannot follow the inextricable
windings of her will. This example, if we had no other, would be enough
to brand that inhuman will with infamy. There is no law more repugnant
to our reason, to our sense of responsibility, nor one which does a
deeper injury to our trust in the universe and the unknown spirit
that rules it. Of all life’s injustices, this is the most glaring and
the least comprehensible. For most of the others we find excuses or
explanations; but, when we remember that a new-born child, a child
which did not ask to be born, is, from the moment of inhaling its first
breath of air, smitten with irremediable insolvency, with a ferocious,
irrevocable sentence and with evils which it will drag to the grave, it
seems to us that not one of the most hateful tyrants that history has
cursed would have dared to do what nature does quietly every day.

But do we really bear the burden of the errors of the dead? In the
first place, is it quite certain that the dead are really dead and no
longer dwell within us? It is a fact that we continue them, that we
are the durable part of what they were. We cannot deny that we are
still subject to their influence, that we reproduce their features and
their characters, that we represent them almost entirely, that they
continue to live and to act in us; it is therefore very natural that
they also should continue to bear the consequences of an action or a
way of living which their departure has not interrupted.

“But,” you may say, “I had no part in this action, this habit, this
vice for which I am paying to-day. I was not consulted; I had no
opportunity of uttering a protest, of checking my father, or my
grandfather, as he went to his ruin down the fatal precipice. I was not
born; I did not yet exist!”

How do you know? May there not be a fundamental mistake in the idea
of heredity as we conceive it? At one end of the beam of those scales
which we accuse of injustice hangs heredity, but the other is borne
down by something different, which we have never taken into account,
for it has not yet a name, something which is the antithesis of
heredity, which cleaves into the future instead of emerging from the
past and which we might call preexistence or prenatality.

Even as our dead still live in us, so we have already lived in them.
There is no reason to believe that the future, which is full of life,
is less active and less potent than the past, which is full of the
dead. Instead of descending, should we not rather ascend the course of
the years to discover the source of our actions?

We know not in what fashion those already dwell in us who shall be
born of us, down to the last generation; but that they do dwell in us
is certain. Whatever the number of our descendants, in the sequence of
the ages, whatever the transformations which the elements, climates,
countries and centuries may cause them to undergo, they will keep
intact, through all vicissitudes, the principle of life which they have
derived from us. They have not obtained it elsewhere or they could not
be what they are. They have really issued from us; and, if they have
issued from us, it is because they were in us from the first. What were
they doing within us, all these innumerable, accumulated lives? Is it
permissible to suppose that they were absolutely inactive? Then what
were their functions, what their power? What divided them from us? When
did we begin, where did they end? At what point did their thoughts and
their desires mingle with ours?

“How could they think and act in us,” you ask, “having as yet no brain?”

True; but they had ours. The dead too are without a brain; nevertheless
no one will deny that they continue to think and act in us. This brain
of which we are so proud is not the source but the condenser of thought
and will. Like the Leyden jar or the Ruhmkorff coil, it exists, it is
animated only so long as the electric fluid of life passes through it
or resides in it. It does not produce this fluid, it collects it;
what matters is not its convolutions, which may be compared with the
windings of an induction-coil, but the life that flows through it; and
what can this life be, if it be not the sum of all the existences which
are accumulated within us, which are not extinguished at our death,
which begin before our birth and which continue us, forwards, and
backwards, into the infinity of time?


2

Writers of essays and novels have at times endeavoured to represent
these diverse lives which we harbour within us; and each of us, if he
question himself sincerely and profoundly, will discover in himself
two or three clearly-defined types, which have nothing in common but
the body in which they reside, which rarely agree among themselves,
which are incessantly striving to gain the upper hand and which put up
with one another as best they can, in order to go through an existence
whose aggregate forms our ego. This ego will be good or bad, remarkable
or insignificant, more or less generous or selfish, calm or uneasy,
pacific or pugnacious, heroic or pusillanimous, hesitating or decided
and enterprising, brutal or refined, crafty or loyal, active or idle,
chaste or lascivious, modest or vainglorious, proud or obsequious,
unreliable or steadfast, according to the authority which the type
that captures the best positions of the heart or brain is able to
assume over the others. But, even in the life that appears the most
stable, the most homogeneous, the best-balanced, this authority will
never be final or undisputed. The dominant type will find itself for
ever disputed, attacked, thwarted, disturbed, circumvented, harassed,
tempted, deceived, betrayed and sometimes cunningly dethroned by one
of the rival or subordinate types which it failed to distrust or which
it did not watch narrowly enough. We behold unexpected coalitions,
fantastic compromises, regrettable defections, fierce competitions,
incessant intrigues and positive revolutions, especially at the
critical periods and at each moment of important happenings; and all
this prodigious inward tragedy does not cease for an instant until the
hour of death.


3

But, once again, why seek only in the past and among our ancestors for
the actors in this drama which is the essential drama of humanity? What
justification have we for supposing that the dead alone play all the
parts? Why should those from whom we have issued possess more influence
than those who will issue from us? The first are remote from our bodily
selves, they are separated from us by unfathomable mysteries and their
survival may perhaps be called in question; the others inhabit our
flesh and their existence is incontestable. We have just seen that the
argument deduced from the absence of any brain is not invincible.

“But,” you will perhaps go on to say, “how do you suppose that, when
they have not yet lived, they can possess habits, virtues and vices,
preferences and experience, in a word, all that constitutes a character
and cannot be acquired save by contact with life?”

But the same objection could be raised, in most cases, with regard
to our ancestors. Generally speaking, when we issued from them, they
were still young; they were not yet what they became and what we shall
become after them. They had not yet adopted the habits, the ways of
thinking or feeling, or cultivated the virtues or the vices which are
reproduced in us. The stubborn little mediocrity whom we all feel
within us, frugal, cautious and shabby in his dealings, was still
perhaps a prodigal, high-spirited and reckless youth; the rake was
still perhaps chaste, the thief had never stolen and the murderer may
have had a horror of bloodshed. All this is almost equally immaterial
and equally potential in both cases; the only present points at issue
are the amorphous tendencies and forces whereon the brain which we
receive from these and pass on to those bestows a form.

It is therefore very possible that the little mediocrity, the rake,
the thief or the murderer, far from being dead, are not yet born and
are taking as active a part as our ancestors in the agitations and
sometimes in the conduct of our existence. This is what the most
ancient and the most venerable religions of humanity always foresaw
or revealed, receiving it perhaps on the authority of an unknown and
loftier source; and of these religions Christianity, with its dogma
of original sin, is but an imperfect echo. Even to-day, more than six
hundred millions of human beings believe in the preexistence of the
soul, in successive lives and in reincarnation. In the eyes of these
religions, the little mediocrity who begot us several centuries ago
is the same who, a little less paltry, a little less narrow, improved
by his previous life and his passage through the mysteries of death,
is awaiting within us the moment of rebirth and who, while waiting,
shares our instincts, our feelings and our thoughts. He does not
wait in solitude; he is but one life in the host of lives which have
preceded us and which come back to live in us again; and all these past
and future lives form the sum total of our own.


4

We will not here discuss this doctrine of successive lives and of the
expiatory and purifying reincarnation, which is the noblest and, up
to now, the only acceptable explanation of nature’s injustices that
has been discovered. In the present state of our knowledge, it can be
only a magnificent theory or a statement impossible of proof. Let us
not forsake the indisputable ground on which heredity and preexistence
have their being. Heredity is an acquired fact, an experimental truth;
preexistence is a logical necessity. It is not indeed possible to
conceive that what will be born of us does not already exist within us
in fact, in principle, in the germ, in essence or in potentiality;
and, from the moment of its existence in a fashion probably more
spiritual than material, it is far less surprising that it should be
more or less responsible for thoughts and actions to which it could not
be wholly a stranger.

In any case, heredity, which is incontestable, and preexistence,
which is necessary, remind us yet once again that each of us is not a
single being, isolated, permanent, hermetically sealed, independent of
others and separated from all things in time and space, but a porous
vase dipping into the infinite; a sort of cross-roads, where all the
paths of the past, the present and the future meet; an inn beside the
eternal highways, where all the lives which make up our own foregather
for a few days’ sojourn. We believe ourselves dead when they leave the
inn; and we fancy that they too have perished. It is more likely that
this is not so at all. They are merely quitting the ruined hostel to
install themselves in a new and more habitable house. They carry with
them their debts and their obligations; they remove to their new abode
their instincts, their habits, their ideals, their passions also, their
merits and their faults, their acquisitions and their memories. The
house is different, but the guests are the same; and the old life will
resume its course in the new dwelling and will be perhaps a little
nobler, perhaps a little fairer, perhaps filled with a little brighter
light.



THE GREAT REVELATION



XVI

THE GREAT REVELATION


1

We despair of ever knowing the origin of the universe, its aim, its
laws, or its intentions; and we end by doubting whether there be any.
It were wiser very humbly to confess that we are not able to conceive
them. It is probable that, if the universe to-morrow were to yield us
the key of its riddle, we should be as incapable of understanding how
to use it as is a dog to whom we show the key of a clock. In revealing
its great secret to us, it would teach us hardly anything; or at least
the revelation would have but an insignificant influence upon our
life, our happiness, our ethics, our efforts, and our hopes. It would
soar at such heights that no one would perceive it; at most it would
disencumber the sky of our religious illusions, leaving only the
infinite void of the ether in their place.


2

For that matter, there is no saying but that we once possessed this
revelation. It is highly possible that the religions of nations which
have disappeared, such as the Lemurians, the Atlanteans and many
others, were aware of it and that we have discovered its remains in the
esoteric traditions that have come down to us. It must not indeed be
forgotten that there exists, side by side with the outward, scientific
history, a secret history of mankind which derives its substance
of legends, myths, hieroglyphics, strange monuments and mysterious
writings from the hidden meaning of the primitive books. One thing
is certain, that, though the imagination of those who interpret this
occult history is often venturesome, all that they declare is not to be
despised and deserves to be examined more seriously one day than has
hitherto been done.

The essence of this esoteric revelation is very well summed up by M.
Marc Saunier, a disciple of Fabre d’Olivet and Saint-Yves d’Alveydre,
in his book, _La Légende des symboles_.

  “The Initiates,” he says, “have always regarded each continent as
  a being subject to the same laws as man. For them, the minerals
  constitute its skeleton, the flora its flesh, the fauna its
  nerve-cells and the human races the grey matter of its brain. This
  continent itself is but an organ of the earth, wherein each man is
  treated as a thinking cell and whereof the thought is represented by
  the sum of human thoughts. The earth itself is but an organ of the
  solar system, which in turn is considered as an individual; and our
  solar system thus becomes merely an organ of another being of the
  infinite, whose heart would appear in the star Alpha in Aries. And
  lastly, by a final synthesis, we come to the Cosmos, which expresses
  the general sum of all things, in a being whose body is the world
  and whose thought is the universal intelligence, exalted by the
  religions to the rank of a deity.”

The basis of their doctrine is plainly evolutionistic. Each continent
has merely transformed, in its own time and according to its own ideal,
the seeds which came from the Hyperborean tracts; and man is but the
result of an animal evolution. For the rest, they borrow it in part
from the Hindus, thus anticipating by many thousands of years the
latest hypotheses of our modern science.


3

But, without loitering in these shifting sands, let us go direct to
clear and reliable sources. We possess, in the sacred and secret books
of India, of which we know only an infinitesimal part, a cosmogony
which no European conception has ever surpassed. It would not be
correct to say that it attained, at the first endeavour, the ultimate
limits beyond which the mind of man could not venture without
dissolving in the infinite, for it was the work of centuries of which
we do not know the tale; but it indisputably preceded all the others,
its birth was earlier than anything that we know and, at the beginning
of all things, it exceeded in grandeur all that we have learnt and all
that we can imagine.

It was the first, for instance, long before our historic periods, to
give us a dizzy yet concrete idea of the infinity of time. The Book of
Manu teaches us that twelve thousand years of mortals are but a day and
a night to the gods; their year, therefore, consisting of three hundred
and sixty days, numbers 4,320,000 years. A thousand years of the gods
make but one of Brahma’s days, that is to say, 4,320,000,000 human
years, representing the total life of our globe; and Brahma’s night is
of equal duration. Three hundred and sixty of these days and nights
make one of this god’s years; and a hundred of these years constitute
one of his lives, that is to say, the duration of the universe, which
is represented by the formidable figure of 311,090,000,000,000
years. After this he begins a new life. At present we have not yet
attained the noon of Brahma’s actual day nor half the life-time of our
terrestrial globe.

To complete this outline of the stupendous chronology of the Vedas,
I continue to profit by some notes received from my war-time godson,
who has a thorough knowledge of this unduly neglected science. For
the rest, it will be seen that chronology and cosmogony are here in
intimate connection:

  “The day of Brahma (4,320,000,000 years) is divided into fourteen
  lives of Manu, consisting alternately of seven Manvantaras and seven
  Pralayas. The word Manvantara signifies the interval between two
  Manus: one of these appears in the dawn and the other in the twilight
  of this period of terrestrial activity. The morning Manu gives the
  Manvantara its name and the evening Manu presides over the Pralaya,
  that is to say, the period of dissolution, or negative _status quo_,
  death, sleep, or inertia, as the case may be, which divides two waves
  of life.

  “Universal evolution is a chain without beginning or end, each
  link of which in turn appears and disappears in our field of
  consciousness. Brahma himself dies only to be reborn. But for the
  sovereign of the worlds, as for a random star or the least of
  organized creatures, there is death and dissolution only from the
  individual point of view. Darkness is the ransom to be paid for
  light, the evening balances the morning, age is the price of youth
  and death the reverse of life. In reality, however, all evolution is
  at the same time continuous and discontinuous; the Manvantaras and
  Pralayas are at once simultaneous and successive; each individual
  life is engendered by its elemental double and engenders its residual
  double. Every decline of life in a given place coincides with an
  increase of being in a corresponding place and proceeds by means of
  a rebirth in a fresh place. Fundamentally, there is no individual
  life. We are at once ourselves and another, ourselves and several
  others, ourselves and all others, ourselves and the Universe,
  ourselves and infinity.

  “The evolution of our terrestrial globe is an infinitesimal cycle of
  this universal evolution, corresponding merely with a day and a night
  of Brahma, and is divided into fourteen cycles, each consisting of
  a Manvantara and a Pralaya. The cycle of organic evolution upon our
  solidified globe represents only one of these subdivisions, that is
  to say, the radius of the organic sphere is only a fourteenth part
  of the radius of the mineral sphere. Mineral evolution is manifestly
  continuous from the formation of the globe to its dissolution. If,
  between the periods of geological activity, there exists a Pralaya
  of any kind, this latter, despite the etymology of the word, must
  be not a dissolution, which would be perfectly inconceivable from
  the logical and scientific point of view, but a period of inertia
  or abatement, of which the hypothesis is readily admissible
  and of which the glacial periods, occurring in the very course
  of the present Manvantara, afford us an example. In the earlier
  cycles of Manu, the earth passed in succession through the various
  stages of condensation which science regards as igneous and which
  correspond with the ethereal, gaseous and liquid evolution of the
  elements. During these long periods, the life of the present existed
  potentially in the soul of the earth and actually on other globes
  than ours.”


4

But we will proceed no further with this outline, which would become
so complicated as to be inextricable. Let us remember simply the
magnificent doctrine of the reincarnation, which is the most ancient
reply, the only decisive and, no doubt, the most plausible reply, to
all the problems of justice and injustice, the immortal torture of
mortals, and its corollary, the law of Karma, which, as my godson
so truly says, “is the most wonderful of ethical discoveries: it
represents abstract liberty and is enough to enfranchise the human
will from any superior or even infinite being. We are our own creators
and the sole captains of our fate; no other than ourselves rewards
or punishes us; there is no sin, but only consequences; there is no
morality, but only responsibilities. Now Buddha taught that, merely by
virtue of this sovran law, the individual must be reborn to reap what
he has sowed; and this certainty of rebirth was enough to neutralize
the horror of death.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Is all this nothing more than imagination, than the dreams of brains
more ardent than our own, the hallucinations of ascetics which amaze
the young and the immobility or the echo of immemorial traditions
bequeathed by other races, or by races anterior to man and more
spiritual? It is impossible to decide; but, whatever its origin, it is
certain that the monument whereof we have seen but a corner of the
pedestal is prodigious and that it has not a human aspect. All that we
can say is that our modern sciences, notably archæology, geology and
biology, confirm rather than invalidate either of these revelations.


5

But this is not the question for the moment. Let us suppose that one
of these revelations, for instance, that of the sacred books of India,
were true, incontestable and scientifically proved by our researches;
or that an interplanetary communication or a declaration of some
superhuman being no longer permitted us to doubt its authenticity: what
influence would such a revelation have upon our life? What would it
transform in our life, what novel element would it add to our morality
or our happiness? No doubt it would work but a very slight change. It
would pass too high above us; it would not descend to our level; it
would not touch us; we should lose ourselves in its immensity; and upon
the whole, knowing everything, we should be neither happier nor wiser
than when we knew nothing.

Not to know what he has come upon this earth to do: that is man’s great
and everlasting torment. Now we must perforce admit that the actual
truth of the universe, if some day we learn it, will probably be very
similar to one or other of those revelations which, while appearing to
teach us everything, teach us nothing at all. It will at least possess
the same inhuman character. It will necessarily be as unlimited in both
space and time, as abysmal, as foreign to our senses and our brain.
The more tremendous, the more majestic the revelation, the greater
chance will it have of being true; but also, the more remote from us
it is, the less will it interest us. We can hardly hope to escape
from this discouraging dilemma: those revelations, explanations or
interpretations which are too petty will not satisfy us, because we
shall instinctively feel them to be insufficient; while those which are
too great will pass us by too far to affect us.


6

It nevertheless seems desirable that this revelation of the sacred
books of India should be authentic and that our knowledge, still so
slight, so unimportant, so timid and so incoherent, should gradually
confirm, as indeed it unwittingly does daily, certain points scattered
through the boundless immensity of this immemorial truth.

It would in any case, even if it did not succeed in affecting us
directly, possess the advantage of enlarging our horizon, which is
narrower than we suppose, until it embraces infinity; of studding
this infinity with magnificent landmarks; of animating it, peopling
it, filling it with wonderful faces, making it a living, perceptible,
almost comprehensible thing.

We all know that we dwell in infinity; but this infinity is, for us,
only a bare and barren word, a black and uninhabitable void, a formless
abstraction, a lifeless expression, to which our imagination can
give only a momentary vitality, at the cost of a tiring, solitary,
unskilful, unassisted, ungrateful and unfruitful effort. We hold
ourselves, in fact, pent in this terrestrial world of ours and in our
brief historic ages; and at the most we raise our eyes, from time to
time, towards the other planets of our solar system and project our
thoughts, which are discouraged from the beginning, as far as the
nebulous periods that preceded man’s advent on our globe. More and more
deliberately we are directing the whole activity of our intelligence
upon ourselves; and, by a regrettable optical illusion, the more it
restricts its field of action, the deeper we believe it to be probing.
Our thinkers and philosophers, fearing lest they should stray as their
predecessors did before them, no longer concern themselves with any
but the least disputable aspects, problems and secrets; but, if these
are the least disputable, they are also the least sublime; and man, in
his quality as a terrestrial animal, becomes the sole object of their
investigations. The scientists, on the other hand, are accumulating
minor data and observations whose weight is stifling them; yet they no
longer dare to thrust them aside or open them out, so as to ventilate
them by some general law, some salutary hypothesis, for those which
they have hitherto ventured to advance have been pitiably contradicted,
one after the other, and scouted by experience.

Nevertheless, they are right to act as they do and to continue their
investigations according to their narrow and restricted methods; but
we are entitled to observe that, the closer they believe that they
have drawn to a fugitive truth, the greater are their uncertainty and
confusion, the more precarious, imaginary and insufficient seem the
foundations upon which they based their confidence and the more fully
do they perceive the immense distance that still divides them from the
least of life’s secrets. As one of the most illustrious of them, Sir
William Grove, prophetically remarked:

  “The day is fast approaching when it will be confessed that the
  Forces we know are but the phenomenal manifestations of Realities we
  know nothing about, but which were known to the Ancients and by them
  worshipped.”


7

This, indeed, is what we are bound to think if we study slightly this
primitive revelation, this ancient wisdom and what has grown out of it.
Man once knew more than he now knows. He was ignorant perhaps of the
enormous mass of petty details which we have observed and classified
and which have enabled us to subdue certain forces which he never
thought of turning to account: but it is probable that he understood
better than we do their nature, their essence and their origin.

The higher civilization of humanity, which history traces back
tentatively to five or six thousand years before Christ, is perhaps far
more ancient; and, without admitting, as has been asserted, that the
Egyptians kept astronomical records through a period of six hundred and
thirty thousand years, we may consider it as established that their
observations embraced two precessional cycles, two sidereal years, or
fifty-one thousand, seven hundred and thirty-six solar years. Now they
themselves were not initiators but initiates, who derived all that they
knew from a more ancient source. It was the same with the Semites,
in the matter of their primitive books and their Kabbalah; and the
Greeks, among whom all those who really taught us something about the
origin and constitution of the world and its elements, about nature and
divinity, mind and matter, men such as Hesiod, Pythagoras, Anaxagoras,
Plato and the Neo-Platonists, were likewise initiates, that is to say,
they were men who, having travelled in Egypt or India, had drunk of the
same one and immemorial spring. Our prehistoric religions, Scandinavian
or Germanic and the Druidism of the Celts, those of China and Japan, of
Mexico and Peru, despite numerous deformations, were also derived from
the same source, even as our great western metaphysics, which preceded
our modern materialism, with its somewhat sordid outlook, and notably
the metaphysics of Leibnitz, Kant, Schelling, Fichte and Hegel have
approached it and, more or less unconsciously, slaked their thirst at
it.

It is therefore certain that through the Greeks, through the Bible,
through Christianity, which is its last echo, for the author of the
Apocalypse and St. Paul were initiates, we are all steeped in this
revelation; that there is not and never has been any other; that it
is the great human or superhuman revelation; and that consequently
it would be right and salutary to study it more attentively and more
profoundly than we have hitherto done.


8

Where does the source of this revelation lie? We place it in the
east because nearly everything that we know about it is found in
the sacred books of India. But it is almost certainly of western or
rather Hyperborean origin and dates back to those wonderful vanished
Atlanteans, whose last Protoscythian colonies flourished over eleven
thousand years ago and whose existence can no longer be denied.

Remember that famous passage in Plato:

  “One day, when Solon was conversing with the priests of Saïs on the
  history of the remote ages, one of them said:

  “‘O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children!... There is not
  an opinion, not a tradition of knowledge among you that is old....
  You know nothing of that noble race of heroes of whom you are a
  remnant.... Nine thousand years, as our annals record, have elapsed
  since what I am about to tell you.... The most famous of your actions
  was the overthrow of the island of Atlantis, which lay over against
  the Pillars of Hercules, was greater than Libya and Asia put together
  and was the passage to other islands and to a great ocean whereof
  the Mediterranean Sea was but a harbour; and within the Pillars the
  empire of Atlantis reached in Europe to Tyrrhenia and in Libya to
  Egypt. This mighty power was arrayed against Egypt and Greece and
  all the Mediterranean countries. Then your city did bravely and won
  renown throughout the earth. For, risking her own existence, she
  repelled the invader and gave liberty to all the nations within the
  Pillars. Soon after, earthquakes arose and floods; and your warlike
  race was swallowed up by the earth; and the island of Atlantis also
  disappeared in the sea.’”

This page in the _Timæus_ is the first glimpse that history properly
so-called affords of the immense chaos of the antediluvian period.
Modern researches and discoveries have confirmed it step by step. To
quote Roisel, who devoted a remarkable book to the Atlanteans, a work
less well-known than those of Scott Elliott and Rudolf Steiner, but one
that does not admit of the slightest doubt:

  “It is proved that, long before the historic ages, the Atlanticans
  had acquired a marvellous science whose elements mankind is hardly
  beginning to reconstitute and whose mighty relics are found in
  ancient Gaul, Egypt, Persia, India and the central portion of the
  American continent. More than ten thousand years before our era, they
  knew the precession of the equinoxes, the slow changes which many
  stars experience in their courses and the thousand secrets of nature.
  They had processes of which modern industry has not yet fathomed the
  mysteries.”


9

The outcome of these studies is that humanity never underwent a
disaster to be compared with the disappearance of Atlantis. It will
perhaps need thousands of years to repair that loss and to reascend
to the level of a civilization which had certainties of which we
laboriously glean the scattered remnants, regarding the origin and
movements of the universe, the energy of matter, the unknown forces
of this and other worlds, the life beyond the grave and a social
organization and political economy similar to those of the bees.
Nothing could better prove the uselessness of man’s effort than this
unparalleled loss, if we did not strive to hope in spite of all.

A nation of wonderful metallurgists, who had discovered the means of
tempering copper for which we are still seeking, a nation of fabulous
engineers, whose geometry, as Professor Smyth tells us, began where
Euclid’s ends, they lifted and transported to enormous distances, by
mysterious methods, rocks weighing fifteen hundred tons and strewed
the world with those fantastic moving stones known as “mad stones”
and “stones of truth,” stones weighing five hundred tons and so
ingeniously poised on one of their corners that a child can move them
with its finger, whereas the united impetus of two hundred men would
be incapable of overturning them, stones which, from the geological
point of view, never belong to the spot where they are found. A nation
of explorers who had traversed and colonized the whole surface of
the earth, a nation of scholars, mathematicians and astronomers,
they appear to have been above all things ruthless rationalists and
logicians, endowed with, so to speak, a metallic brain, the lateral
lobes of which were much more highly developed than ours. They applied
their incomparable faculties exclusively to the study of the exact
sciences; and the sole object of their energies was the conquest of
truth. But the study of the invisible and the infinite, under their
powerful scrutiny, itself becomes an exact science; and the main idea
of their cosmogony, by virtue of which everything issues from the ocean
of cosmic matter or from the boundless waves of the eternal ether, soon
to return and to reemerge, disfigured and overladen with numberless
myths by the imagination of their degenerate descendants or settlers:
this main idea forms the base of every religion. It is improbable that
man will ever discover one to equal it or replace it.


10

It is in the sacred books of India that we find the surest and most
plentiful traces of this cosmogony or of this revelation. Less than a
century ago, men were almost wholly unaware of the existence of these
sacred books. Their interpreters have taken two different paths. On
the one hand, scholars whom we may describe as official have supplied
translations of a certain number of texts, which might also be called
official, texts which they do not always understand and which their
readers understand even less. On the other hand, initiates, genuine
or pretended, with the assistance of adepts of an occult fraternity,
have suggested a new and more impressive interpretation of these same
texts or of others still more secret. They still, rightly or wrongly,
inspire a certain distrust. We are obliged to admit the authenticity
and the antiquity of certain traditions, of certain primitive and
essential writings, though it is impossible to assign an approximate
date to them, so completely are they merged in the mists of the
prehistoric ages. But they are almost incomprehensible without keys and
commentaries; and it is here that our doubts and hesitations begin. A
large number of those commentaries are likewise very ancient and in
their turn need keys; others appear to be more recent; lastly, others
seem to be contemporary; and it is often difficult to draw a dividing
line between that which may well exist in the original and that which
the interpreters believe to exist in the original or which they more or
less deliberately add to it. Now the most striking, the most impressive
and in any case the most lucid part of the doctrine is often contained
in the commentaries.

Next, as I have observed, comes the question of the keys, which
is intimately connected with the foregoing. These keys are more
or less workable and command more or less respect; sometimes they
seem fanciful or arbitrary; they are delivered only with curious
precautions, singly and grudgingly; and they are apt to unlock several
superimposed meanings. And all this is accompanied by fantastic
reticences, by so-called dangerous or terrible secrets, withheld at
the decisive moment, and by revelations which, it is contended, cannot
be communicated until many centuries have elapsed. Doors through which
we were about to pass are slammed in our faces just as we were at last
catching a glimpse of a long-promised horizon; and behind each of them
hides a supreme initiate, a still living master, the sacred guardian
of the ultimate mysteries, who knows all things, but can or will say
nothing.

Observe, moreover, that a host of more or less intelligent
_illuminati_, of elderly women and unbalanced spinsters, of
simple-minded people who accept, blindly and off-hand, that which
they do not understand, of discontented, unsuccessful, vain or crafty
persons who fish in troubled waters, in a word, all the usual suspect
mob that gathers round any more or less mysterious doctrine, science
or phenomenon, has discredited these first esoteric interpretations,
of which the very source is none too dear. Lastly, let us add that the
burning of the famous library of Alexandria, in which all the knowledge
of the east was amassed, the destruction in the sixteenth century,
under the Mogul Akbar, of thousands of Sanskrit volumes, the systematic
and merciless demolition, especially during the first few centuries
of the Church and in the Middle Ages, of all that referred or alluded
to this dreaded and embarrassing revelation, have deprived us of our
best means of control. The adepts, it is true, assert on the other hand
that the true texts, as well as the ancient commentaries which alone
enable them to be understood, still exist in the secret crypts and
subterranean libraries of Thibet or the Himalayas, libraries of books
more innumerable than any which we possess in the west, and that they
will reappear in a more enlightened age. It is possible, but in the
meanwhile they are of no help to us.


11

Be this as it may, what we have is enough to perplex us greatly;
and the control allowed by the fragments which have been saved from
historic antiquity absolutely removes all suspicion of more or less
recent fraud or deception in respect of the essentials. Moreover, any
fraud or deception of this nature seems hardly possible and would be
so ingenious that we should be obliged to marvel at it as a phenomenon
almost as remarkable as that whereof it would be seeking to give the
illusion; and we should have to admit that the mind of man has never
insinuated itself so far into the infinity of time and space, or
into the origin of things, and has never risen to such heights. Had
this revelation profited by all the attainments of our latter-day
science and thought, it could not have furnished us with theories
more satisfactory, more logical, more coherent, more plausible, more
synthetic, or worthier of the infinity which they strive to embrace
and often seem to attain, on the rhythm of the eternities, the ebb
and flow of the eternal Becoming, the never-ending cycle and the
periodic existences of the ego, the birth, movement and evolution of
the worlds, the divine breath and the intelligence that animate it, on
Maya, the eternal illusion of ignorance, the struggle for life, natural
selection, the gradual development and transformation of stars and
men, the functions and energies of the ether, immortal and infallible
justice, the intermolecular and fantastic activity of matter, on the
nature of the soul and the existence of the vast, nameless power that
governs the universe, in a word, on all the riddles that assail and all
the mysteries that overwhelm us.

But, let us hasten to repeat it, there could not seriously be any
question of fraud, because the texts or traditions that might be
regarded with suspicion are corroborated by other texts, such as the
sacred inscriptions of Egypt, which no one thinks of contesting. At
most we may come upon a few passages antedated by the imprudent
zeal of adepts or commentators, a few interpolations which merely
embroider the majestic lines. Taking it as a whole, we have to do with
a revelation which dates back infinitely farther than all that we
have called the prehistoric ages, wherefore it is legitimate that our
astonishment should be unbounded.


12

Very good, it will be said, this interpretation of the universe, this
anthropocosmogenesis is the loftiest, the most spacious, the most
wonderful, the most unassailable that has ever been conceived; it
teems in every part with human thought and imagination; but what is
it all based upon? When all is said, we have here only magnificent
hypotheses, boldly disguised as authoritative, dogmatic and peremptory
declarations, but every one incapable of verification. This is the
objection which I myself put forward, a little hastily, in one of the
early chapters of _Our Eternity_.

It is indeed undeniable that we shall not for some time to come, that
perhaps we shall never know the truth about the origin and the end of
the universe or any of the other problems which these declarations
profess to solve. But it is curious to note that science, despite
itself, is daily drawing nearer to one or other of these declarations
and that it is unable to set aside or to contradict any of them. There
is for example, a certain study of the genesis of the elements, by the
well-known chemist, Sir William Crookes, which unconsciously becomes
plainly occultist, while the discovery of the radioactivity of matter
reproduces precisely the theory of vortices of the initiate Anaxagoras.
It is the same, _mutatis mutandis_, with the function attributed to
the ether, the latest, indispensable postulate of our scientists. It
is the same with the supreme and essential functions of certain minute
glands of which modern medicine is only now beginning to rediscover
the importance and which probably hold hidden the primordial secrets
of life: the thyroid gland, which directs growth and intelligence;
the suprarenal gland, which governs the unconscious muscle that is the
heart; and the pineal gland, the most mysterious of all, which brings
us into relation with the unknown worlds. It is the same again with
astronomy, when the manifest insufficiency of our so-called cosmic
laws, notably that of gravitation, propounds a host of questions which
only the cosmogony of the east is able to answer. But this would
require a long enquiry, which I am not qualified to undertake.

For the rest, nothing obliges us to accept these declarations as
dogmas. There is no question here of a religion which imposes upon us
its blind faith, its _Credo quia absurdum_. We are quite entitled to
regard them as mere hypotheses, as immense, incomparable antediluvian
poems, of which the Mosaic Genesis is but a disfigured fragment.
But, even as hypotheses or poems, it must be admitted that they are
prodigious, that we have nothing better, nothing more probable to set
against them and that, in view of their incontestable antiquity, of
their prehistoric origin, they seem really superhuman.

Must we admit, as the occultists contend, that they come to us from
beings superior to man, from more spiritual entities, living under
unknown conditions, who occupied our earth or the neighbouring planets
before our coming; from a Lemuro-Atlantean civilization which, in
its megalithic monuments, has left indelible traces in the memory of
the peoples and on the face of our earth? It is quite possible; but
here again we are free to await the confirmations of Hindu, Egyptian,
Chaldean, Assyrian and Persian archæology, which on this point, as on
so many others, has not spoken its last word.


13

I am well aware that this revelation, as apparently all those which
may be made in the course of time, dates back to and ends in the
unknowable, the insoluble mystery of divinity, of being, or existence;
and it necessarily stops short before the barrier of this unknowable,
which is as impenetrable and impregnable as a cliff that is infinite in
every dimension and formed of a single block of black diamond. There is
nothing to be done; we can but halt; we cannot even seek to outflank
it, to approach it from the other side, for the other side, if we could
reach it, would necessarily be like the side in front of us, seeing
that the non-existence of everything would be just as inexplicable,
just as incomprehensible as its existence. It is true that, in the
secret recesses of the doctrine, the universe and all that it contains
is known as Maya, that is to say, the eternal illusion, so that the two
irreconcilable mysteries unite in a still greater mystery which man’s
intelligence can no longer approach.

Fundamentally, the primitive riddle, the primordial mystery not
being elucidated, all the rest illumines only the steps that lead
from comparative knowledge to absolute ignorance. It will probably
be the same with all the revelations that may address themselves to
man’s intelligence so long as he continues on this planet, for this
intelligence doubtless has limits which no effort can enlarge. But in
the meantime it is certain that these steps, which lead to nothing,
nevertheless, at the first onset and from the earliest days led him
to the highest point which his intelligence has attained or can hope
to attain. The most ancient explanation embraces straightway all the
attempts at explanation that have hitherto been offered. It harmonizes
the positivism of science with the most transcendental idealism; it
accepts matter and spirit; it reconciles the mechanical impulsion
of atoms and worlds with their intelligent guidance. It gives us
an unconditioned divinity, “a causeless cause of all the causes,”
worthy of the universe which is this divinity itself and of which all
the divinities that have succeeded it in all our religions are but
scattered, mutilated and unrecognizable members. It offers us, lastly,
in its law of Karma, by virtue of which each being undergoes in his
successive lives the consequences of his actions and gradually purifies
himself, the loftiest, justest and most unassailable, the most fertile,
consoling and hopeful moral principle that could ever be proposed to
man. Because of all this it appears worthy of investigation, respect
and admiration.


14

This respect and admiration, however, do not militate against our
liberty to choose or reject many things, or to reserve them while we
wait for further light. When we are told, for instance, that the Cosmos
is guided by an infinite series of hierarchies of sensient beings, each
having a mission to fulfil, which are the agents of the Karmic and
Cosmic laws; when it is added that each of these beings was a man in
an earlier Manvantara, or is preparing to become one in the present or
in a future Manvantara, that they are perfected men, or nascent men,
and that, in their higher and less material spheres, they do not differ
morally from terrestrial human beings save in that they do not possess
the sense of personality and of emotional nature; when, lastly, we are
assured that what we call unconscious Nature is in reality a complex of
forces manipulated by semi-intelligent beings (Elementals) directed by
the High Planetary Spirits (Dhyani-Shohans), whose total forms the Word
Manifest of the non-manifest Logos and constitutes at the same time
both the intelligence of the universe and its immutable law, we can do
homage to the ingenuity of these speculations, as to that of thousands
of others which perhaps embrace the truth more closely than our best
and most recent scientific hypotheses; we are free to take what we
please from them and to leave what we please. All this, I grant, is
by no means proved, is not verified, or cannot be verified, save in
certain details, whereas the great fundamental outlines will probably
always escape the control of our unequipped intelligence. But what we
must, I repeat, admire without reserve is the prodigious spiritual
edifice offered by the sum total of this revelation, the immense
intellectual effort which, since the dawn of humanity, has attempted
to unravel the unfathomable chaos of the origin, structure, progress,
direction and end of the universe and which appears to have succeeded
to this extent, that hitherto nothing has been found that equals it, or
is not inspired by it or, often unconsciously, returns to it.


15

I said in the first part of this essay that too lofty a revelation,
even were it incontestable, would have hardly any influence upon our
life, that it would change little in it, that it would occur too far
from us in the immensity of space and that it would not sink into our
hearts and minds. Was it thus with that of which we are now speaking,
which is the only truly superhuman and yet acceptable and almost
unassailable revelation that we have had? Yes and no, according to the
point of view which we take up. All that it contains of too great a
character, except its notion of eternity, has not really modified our
ideas, has not permeated into our habits. It has not even profoundly
affected the peoples who have handed it down to us and who, abandoning
any endeavour to understand it, have transformed it into a barbarous
and monstrous anthropomorphic polytheism. It is more or less the same
everywhere. All the religions, from the pagan religions of China and
Japan, Gaul and ancient Germany, Mexico and Peru, down to Christianity
with its variants and its offshoots, have issued from it; but all
have not been able to live and govern men, save by disfiguring and
mutilating it, by dwarfing it to the lowest stature of the souls of
their time, by altering it beyond recognition. It is therefore highly
probable that matters would be the same with any other and greater
revelation, if such were possible, even though this had all the signs
of a divine, direct, authentic, indubitable, irrefutable, irrecusable
revelation, in a word, with that which we are still awaiting without
daring to hope for it.



THE NECESSARY SILENCE



XVII

THE NECESSARY SILENCE


1

The practitioners of occult science in the east tell us of certain
dwellers in the solitudes of Thibet and the Himalayas, Initiates,
Masters, heirs to the wisdom of the “Sons of Light,” or the “Seven
Primordials,” who possess the seven keys which enable them to
understand the sacred prehistoric texts. They are said to be the silent
depositories of the secret of the intermolecular or interetheric
forces, by the aid of which the races of beings who preceded man upon
this earth used to transport to enormous distances monoliths of more
than five hundred tons’ weight, which have no relation to the stones
that surround them and whose arrangement and astronomical orientation
manifestly reveal the intervention of an intelligent and even a highly
scientific mind.

These monoliths are sometimes carved, as for instance the famous
colossal idols in the valley of Bamian, in Afghanistan, of which one is
173 feet high, or the five hundred and fifty monsters of Easter Island,
in Polynesia, which, we may observe in passing, remain one of the most
insoluble and perplexing riddles in the world. Hewn out of basalt,
reclining or standing erect upon their platforms, these sculptures,
one of which measures over 90 feet in height, are undoubtedly the most
ancient human effigies to be found upon our earth. Official science
ascribes to them an antediluvian origin, while esoteric tradition
regards them as portraits of the giants of the last Atlantean race,
which became degenerate and lapsed into witchcraft shortly before the
disappearance of the mysterious continent whereof Easter Island is
supposed to be merely one of the loftier summits to-day emerging from
the lonely Pacific.

I have before me as I write the photographs of some of these haunting
giants; and I do not believe that in our most oppressive nightmares
it would be possible to imagine faces more formidable, more impassive
and unfeeling, more eternally ferocious, more coldly supercilious,
more pitilessly disdainful and icily omnipotent. Are they Selenites or
Martians, with their tightly-closed, implacable mouths and those eyes
of theirs, hollow, like wells of malediction, or protuberant and framed
in an airman’s goggles? They are not in any way simian, as one might
have supposed, but rather represent demoniacal and abstract entities,
such as evil, doom and fatality. They seem not so much inhuman as
prehuman or posthuman; and they bear a horrible relation to certain
ancestral memories which slumber in the marrow of our bones, warning us
that such faces undoubtedly once existed.


2

But let us return to our great Initiates. They are, it appears, reputed
to be the guardians of the irresistible and incommensurable sidereal
force, the force which supports and directs the worlds and which is
capable, if it were misused, of destroying in a moment the whole human
species, all that lives upon the earth and this very earth itself;
but it is also capable, if it were wisely tamed, of ensuring man an
ultimate royalty, perhaps access to other heavenly bodies and, in any
case, a power so great that the Golden Age which existed of old, thanks
to the subjection of this force, might flourish once more upon our
planet.

All this is possible; and, for the moment, we need not go into the
matter. But that, possessing the secret of this force and of many
others, transmitted from Hierophant to Candidate, or, as they say
“from mouth to ear,” the experts in occult science do not divulge it
and place it at the service of humanity: this is the great reproach
brought against them; and for all those who are not aware that the
end of Initiation is not power and material happiness but wisdom,
development and the uplifting of the inner being it is the best proof
that they are cheats and impostors. It may be that, driven into a
corner, they are silent because they have nothing to tell us; but the
argument is not so unanswerable as those who avail themselves of it
are inclined to think. We shall perhaps see this before long. It is
indeed not impossible that one day some accident of knowledge will
place one or other of our scientists in a position analogous to that
of these Masters or Initiates. To him also the terrible question of
the necessary silence will then present itself. We have but lately
witnessed in this war the insensate and demoniacal use which man has
made of certain inventions. What will happen if other energies are
placed in his hands, energies far more formidable, which we seem to be
on the point of discovering and releasing?

Man is not ready to know more of such matters than he now knows. The
safety of the species is at stake. Humanity, which is hardly emerging
from its infancy, or has only just attained the dangerous period of
adolescence (it would be about sixteen or seventeen years of age,
according to Dr. Jaworski’s well-supported and striking historic
parallel), has already passed the limit of the inventions which it
is able to assimilate or endure without incurring the risk of death.
Almost all of them, from the subjection of steam and the still dubious
taming of electricity, have done it incomparably more harm than good.
Explosives, for example, which have helped it to build a few roads--a
work which the Romans, for that matter, did quite as well as we do--to
open up a few mines, to pierce a few tunnels, have cost it millions of
young lives.

Perhaps it is time, not to check the investigations of science, but
to control its discoveries and to reserve, as the occultists wisely
did, for a select circle of Initiates, rigorously tested and bound by
inviolable oaths, the secret of those too perilous energies around
which we are feeling our way and which are on the point of revealing
themselves and becoming public property. Our moral evolution is several
centuries behind our scientific evolution; and it is more than probable
that the latter, being too swift and too intensive, may disastrously
impede the former. It will profit no one to travel in three hours from
Paris to Pekin, from Pekin to New York and from New York to Calcutta,
if these repeated and miraculous journeys leave those who take them
in the same frame of mind on their arrival as on their departure.
We are more or less in the same position as Russia, whose heart and
spirit were not steadfast enough, not resolute enough, to bear what the
head had too quickly and too artificially stored up. Nothing is more
quickly disseminated or more readily assimilated than the results of
science; nothing, on the other hand, is more slow, more painful or more
precarious than moral evolution; and yet it is upon this alone, as we
are realizing more and more clearly, that man’s happiness and future
depend.



KARMA



XVIII

KARMA


1

Stripped of its innumerable and inextricable oriental complications,
which may possibly correspond with realities but which cannot be
verified, Karma, the infallible Law of Retribution, is, when all is
said, what we, speaking more vaguely and without believing in it
unduly, call Immanent Justice. Our Immanent Justice is a somewhat
idle shadow. True, it often manifests itself after monstrous actions,
great vices, sins or iniquities; but we rarely have the opportunity
of seeing it intervene in the thousand petty acts of injustice,
cruelty, weakness, dishonesty and baseness of ordinary life, though
the aggregate of these paltry but incessant misdeeds may weigh heavier
than the most notorious crime. In any case, its action being more
dispersed, more diffuse, slower and more often moral than material,
nearly always escapes our observation; and, as, on the other hand, it
appears to cease at the moment of death, it hardly ever has time to
demand its due and usually arrives too late at the bedside of a sick
or dying man, who has lost consciousness or no longer has the time to
expiate his offences.

Karma then, if you will, is Immanent Justice; only, it is no longer
an inconstant goddess, inconsistent, incoherent, impotent, erratic,
capricious, inexact, forgetful, timid, inattentive, sluggish, evasive,
intangible and bounded by the tomb, but a god, vast and inevitable as
Destiny, a god who fills up each outlet, each horizon, each crevice
of every existence and who is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent,
infallible, impassible and incorruptible. He is in us, as we are in
him. He is ourselves. He is more than we: he is what we are, while
he is still what we were and is already what we shall become. We
are small, evanescent and ephemeral; he is great, imperturbable,
immovable, eternal. Nothing escapes him of that which escapes us and
no doubt will escape us even beyond the tomb. Not an action, not a
wish, not a thought, not the shadow of an intention but is weighed more
strictly than it was weighed by the forty-two posthumous judges who
awaited the soul on that further shore of which we are told in one of
the most ancient texts in the world, the Egyptian _Book of the Dead_.
All is set down, dated, valued, verified, classified, entered as debit
or credit, as reward or expiation, in the immense and eternal index
of the astral records. There can be nothing that he does not know,
because he has taken part in all that he judges; and he judges us not
from the depth of our present ignorance, but from the height of all
that we shall learn much later. He is not only our intelligence and our
consciousness of to-day, which are hardly waking and no longer count
their errors; he is even now, for they already dwell within us, though
they be inactive, impotent, dumb and blind, our intelligence and our
consciousness to come, when they shall have attained, in the course of
the ages and of the innumerable developments, expiations and ascents,
the loftiest summits of Wisdom and Discernment.

At the hour of our death the account seems closed; but he is simply
asleep and will resume his hold of us again. He will slumber perhaps
for hundreds, nay, thousands of years in “Devachan,” that is to say, in
the state of unconsciousness which prepares us for a new incarnation;
but, when we awake, we shall find the assets and liabilities added up
beyond recall; and our Karma will merely continue the life which we
have laid aside. It will continue to be ourselves in that life and to
see the consequences of our faults and our deserts burst into flower
and afterwards to see other causes bear fruit in other effects, until
the consummation of the ages when every thought born upon this earth
ends by losing sight of it.


2

Karma, as we see, is, when all is said, the immortal entity which man
fashions by his deeds and thoughts and which follows him, or rather
envelops and absorbs him, through his successive lives and changes,
even as he incessantly changes, while preserving every previous
impress. Man’s thoughts, as this doctrine very truly says, build up his
character; his deeds make his environment. What man has thought, that
he has become; his qualities and natural gifts adhere to him as the
results of his ideas. He is, in all truth, created by himself. He is
in the fullest sense of the word responsible for all that he is. He is
contained in the net of all that he has done. He can neither undo nor
destroy the past; but, so long as the effects of the past are yet to
come, it is possible for him to alter them or to divert them by fresh
exertions. Nothing can affect him that he has not set in movement;
no evil can befall him that he has not deserved. In the infinite
evolution of the eternities he will never find himself in the presence
of any judge other than himself.


3

It is certain that the idea of this supreme judge, who is our
consciousness uninterrupted throughout the centuries and the
millenaries, who is each one of us grown more and more enlightened,
more and more incorruptible and infallible, leads to the highest,
sincerest and purest system of morals that it is possible to conceive
or to justify here below. The judge and the defendant are no longer
face to face; they are one within the other and form but one and the
same person. They can hide nothing from each other; and both have the
same urgent interest in discovering the least fault, the slightest
shadow and in purifying themselves as quickly and as completely as
possible, in order to put an end to the reincarnations and to live at
last in the One Being. The best, the saintliest are near doing so from
the moment when they quit this life; but, detached from all things,
they do not cease to act for the good of all men, for already they know
all things. They go farther than the mystic Christian who expects a
reward from without: they are their own reward. They go farther than
Marcus Aurelius, the great type of the man without illusions, who
continues to act without hoping that his action can profit others: they
know that nothing is useless, that nothing can be wasted; it is when
they no longer need anything whatever that they work with the greatest
ardour.

Contrary to what is too generally believed, this system of morals which
leads to absolute repose extols activity. Hear, in this connection,
the great teachings of the _Bhagavad-Gita_, the Lord’s Song, which
is perhaps, as its translators, not without good reason, think, the
most beautiful, that is to say, the most exalted book known up to the
present time:

  “Thy business is with the action only, never with its fruits; so let
  not the fruit of action be thy motive.... Perform action ... dwelling
  in union with the divine, renouncing attachments and balanced evenly
  in success and failure.... Pitiable are they who work for fruit....
  Man winneth not freedom from action by abstaining from activity, nor
  by mere renunciation doth he rise to perfection.... Perform thou
  right action, for action is superior to inaction; and, inactive, even
  the maintenance of thy body would not be possible. The world is bound
  by action, unless performed for the sake of sacrifice....

  “He who seeth inaction in action and action in inaction, he is wise
  among men, he is harmonious, even while performing all action. Whose
  works are all free from the moulding of desire, whose actions are
  burned up by the fire of wisdom, him the wise have called a sage.
  Having abandoned attachment to the fruit of action, always content,
  nowhere seeking refuge, he is not doing anything, although doing
  actions.... He should be known as a perpetual ascetic, who neither
  hateth nor desireth; free from the pairs of opposites ... he is
  easily set free from bondage....”

And remember that this, which forms part of the _Mahabharata_, the
greatest epic on earth, was written four or five thousand years ago.


4

Whatever we may think of the plausibility of the doctrine or
revelation, we cannot dispute that this morality and this justification
of justice are the most ancient and at the same time the most beautiful
and reassuring that the mind of man has imagined. But they are based
upon a postulate which we are perhaps too much inclined to refuse
blindly. It asks us in fact to admit that our existence does not end at
the hour of our death and that the spirit, or the vital spark, which
does not perish, seeks an asylum and reappears in other bodies. At
first the postulate seems monstrous and unacceptable; but on closer
examination its aspect becomes much less strange, less arbitrary
and less unreasonable. It is, to begin with, certain that, if all
things undergo transformation, nothing perishes or is annihilated in
a universe which knows no nothingness and in which nothingness alone
remains absolutely inconceivable. What we call nothingness could
therefore be only another mode of existence, of persistence and of
life; and, if we cannot admit that the body, which is only matter,
is annihilated in its substance, it is no less difficult to admit
that, if it were animated by a spirit--which it is hardly possible to
dispute--this spirit should disappear without leaving a trace of any
kind.

So the first point of the postulate and the most important is of
necessity granted. There remains the second point, that of the
successive reincarnations. Here, it is true, we have only hypotheses
and probabilities. It is necessary that this spirit, this soul, this
vital spark or principle, this idea, this immaterial substance--it
matters little what name we give it--must go or reside somewhere,
must do or become something. It may wander in the infinity of space
and time, dissolve, lose itself and disappear, or at least mingle
and become confused with what it encounters there, and finally
become absorbed in that boundless spiritual or vital energy which
appears to animate the universe. But, of all hypotheses, the least
probable is not that which tells us that, on leaving a body which has
become uninhabitable, instead of escaping and wandering through the
illimitable vast that fills it with terror, it looks about it for a
lodging resembling that which it has lately quitted. Obviously this
is only an hypothesis; but in our complete and terrible ignorance it
presents itself before any other. We have nothing to support it save
the most ancient tradition of humanity, a tradition perhaps prehuman
and in any case absolutely general; and experience tends to show that
at the base of these traditions and these instances of universal assent
there is nearly always a great truth and that they must be accorded
a greater importance and a greater value than have hitherto been
attributed to them.


5

As regards evidence, or rather premonitory suggestions of evidence, we
have scarcely anything beyond the experiments of Colonel de Rochas,
who, by means of hypnotic passes, succeeded in making a few exceptional
mediums retrace not only the whole course of their present lives,
back to their earliest childhood, but also that of a certain number
of previous existences. It cannot be denied that these extremely
serious experiments, which were very scientifically conducted, are most
bewildering; but the danger of unconscious suggestion or telepathy is
not and doubtless will never be sufficiently remote to allow them to
become really conclusive.

We find further, on pursuing the same train of ideas, certain cases of
reincarnation, like that of one of Dr. Samson’s little daughters, as
related in the _Annales des sciences psychiques_ for July, 1913. This
case, which is almost undisputed, is exceedingly curious; but, though
it is not unique, those which resemble it are too rare to allow us to
rely upon them.

There remains what are known as prenatal reminiscences. It happens
fairly often that a man who finds himself in an unfamiliar country, in
a city, a palace, a church, a house, or a garden, which he is visiting
for the first time, is conscious of a strange and very definite
impression that he “has seen it before.” It suddenly seems to him
that this landscape, these vaulted ceilings, these rooms and the very
furniture and pictures which he finds in them are quite well-known to
him and that he recollects every nook and corner and every detail.
Which of us but has, at least once in his life, vaguely experienced
some such impression? But the recollections are often so definite that
the person in whom they occur is able to act as a guide through the
house or park which he has never explored and to describe beforehand
what his party will find in this or that room or at the turn of this
or that avenue. Is it really a recollection of previous existences,
a telepathic phenomenon or an ancestral and hereditary memory? The
same question suggests itself touching certain innate aptitudes or
faculties, by virtue of which we see children of genius, musicians,
painters, mathematicians or simple artisans, who know from the outset,
without learning them, nearly all the secrets of their art or craft.
Who will venture to decide?

This is about all that we can cite in favour of the doctrine of
reincarnation. It is not enough to weigh down the scales. But all the
other suppositions, theories or religions, excepting spiritualism,
which for the rest is perfectly consistent with successive existences,
have less solid foundations and are even, to be truthful, devoid of
any. It would therefore be ungracious on their part to reproach the
supposition which we are considering with the instability of the
arguments whereon it is based.

Once again, how desirable it would be that all this were true! There
would be no more moral uncertainties, no more uneasiness in respect of
justice. And it is so beautiful, so complete, that it is perhaps real.
It is difficult indeed to admit that such a dream is untrue from first
to last, a dream which has been dreamed so long, since the beginning of
the world, by so many thousands of millions of men and which, despite
numerous and far-reaching distortions, has, when all is said, been the
one dream of humanity. It is not possible to prove that it is based
upon truth; but, unlike most of the religions derived from it, it is
not possible either to demonstrate that it is imaginary and fabricated
throughout; and, there being this doubt, why should not reason, which
it never offends, be allowed to accept it and at heart to hope and
act as though it were true, while waiting for science to confirm it
completely, or to invalidate it, or to give us another hypothesis which
it will perhaps never be able to elaborate?

What at first repels many of those who investigate it is the unduly
assured and arbitrary insistence upon a thousand petty details,
probably interpolated, as in all religions, by inferior minds, animated
by a narrow and maladroit zeal. But these details, viewed from a
certain elevation, do not in any way alter the great outlines, which
remain immeasurable, admirable and unspoiled.


6

For the rest, whether reincarnation be accepted or rejected, there is
surely such a thing as survival, since death and nothingness cannot be
conceived; and the whole matter is once more reduced to the problem
of continued identity. Even in reincarnation this identity, from our
present, limited point of view, would possess only a relative interest,
seeing that, all memory of previous existences being abolished, it
would necessarily evade us. Let us ask ourselves, moreover, whether
this question of personality without solution of continuity does
really possess the importance which we attach to it and whether this
importance is not a delusion, a temporary blindness of our egoism, of
our terrestrial intelligence. For the fact remains that we interrupt
it and lose it every night without disquieting ourselves. It is enough
for us to be certain that we shall recover it on awaking; and we are
reassured. But suppose that this were not the case and that one evening
we were warned that we should not recover it, that on the following
morning we should have forgotten all our past existence and should
begin a new life, without any memory to connect us with the old. Should
we feel the same terror, the same despair, as if we had been told
that we should never wake again and that we should be hurled into our
death? I do not believe it, I even think that we should accept our lot
fairly cheerfully. It would not greatly matter to us that we should
have to lose the memory of a past, consisting, like the past of all of
us, of more evil than good, provided that life continued. It would no
longer be our life, it would no longer have anything in common with
the life of the day before; nevertheless we should not believe that
we were losing it and we should retain a vague hope of recovering or
recognizing something of ourselves in the existence before us. We
should take pains to prepare for this existence, to insure it against
misfortune and distress, to make it, in advance, as pleasant and as
happy as possible. It might and ought to be so, not only if we believe
in reincarnation, because the case would be almost identical, but also
if we do not believe in it, since a survival of some sort is almost
certain and absolute annihilation is actually inconceivable.


7

Perhaps with a little courage and goodwill it would be possible for us,
even in this life, to look higher and farther, to shed for an instant
that narrow and dismal egoism which refers all things to self, to tell
ourselves that the intelligence or the good which our thoughts and
efforts diffuse in the spiritual spheres are not wholly lost, even
when it is not certain that the little nucleus of trivial habits and
commonplace recollections that we are possesses them exclusively. If
the good actions which we have performed, the noble or merely honest
intentions or thoughts which we have experienced attach themselves and
give value to a life in which we shall not recognize our own, this is
not a sufficient reason to regard them as useless or to deny them all
merit. It is well to remind ourselves at times that we are nothing
if we are not everything and to learn from now onwards to interest
ourselves in something that is not solely ourselves and already to
live the ampler, less personal, less egotistical life which presently,
without any doubt, whatever may be our creed, will be our eternal life,
the only life that matters and the only life for which it is wise to
prepare ourselves.


8

If we do not accept reincarnation, Karma none the less exists:
a mutilated Karma, it is true; a diminished Karma, devoid of
spaciousness, with an horizon limited by death, beginning its work and
doing its best in the brief spell of time which it has before it, but
less negligible, less impotent, less inactive and ineffective than
is supposed. Acting within its narrow sphere, it gives us a fairly
accurate albeit very incomplete idea of what it would accomplish in
the wider sphere which we deny it. But this would lead us back to the
highly debatable question of mundane justice. It is almost insoluble,
because its decisive operations, being inward and secret, escape
observation. Following many others, who, for the rest, have explained
it better than I, I have spoken of it elsewhere, particularly in
_Wisdom and Destiny_ and in _The Mystery of Justice_;[3] but, as Queen
Scheherazade might say, it would serve no useful purpose to repeat it.


9

Let us then return to Karma properly so-called, the ideal Karma. It
rewards goodness and punishes evil in the infinite sequence of our
lives. But first of all, some will ask, what is this goodness, what
is this evil, what is the best or the worst of our petty thoughts,
our petty intentions, our petty ephemeral actions, compared with
the boundless immensity of time and space? Is there not an absurd
disproportion between the hugeness of the reward or punishment and the
pettiness of the fault or merit? Why mix the worlds, the eternities
and the gods with things which, however monstrous or admirable at
first, are not slow, even within the trivial limits of our life,
to lose gradually all the importance which we ascribed to them, to
vanish, to fade into oblivion? That is true; but we must needs speak
of human things in terms of human beings and on the human scale. What
we call good or evil is that which works us good or evil, that which
benefits or harms ourselves or others; and, so long as we live upon
this earth and have not disappeared, we must needs attach to good
and evil an importance which in themselves they do not possess. The
noblest religions, the proudest metaphysical speculations, so soon as
they involve human morality, human evolution and the human future,
have always been obliged to reduce themselves to human proportions, to
become anthropomorphous. This is an invincible necessity, by virtue of
which, despite the horizons that tempt us on every hand, it behoves us
to limit our ideas and our outlook.


10

Let us then limit them and once more ask ourselves, this time remaining
within our sphere, what, after all, is this evil which Karma punishes?
If we go to the very root of the matter, evil always arises from a lack
of intelligence, from an erroneous and incomplete judgment, obscured
or restricted by our egoism, which allows us to perceive only the
proximate or immediate advantages of an action harmful to ourselves
or others, while concealing the remote but inevitable consequences
which such an action always ends by begetting. The whole science of
ethics, after all, is based only upon intelligence; and what we call
heart, sentiments, character is in fact nothing but accumulated and
crystallized intelligence, inherited or acquired, which has become
more or less unconscious and is transformed into habits or instincts.
The evil which we do we do only because of a mistaken egoism, which
sees the limits of its being too near at hand. As soon as intelligence
raises the point of view of this egoism, the limits extend, widen and
end by disappearing. The terrible and insatiable ego loses its centre
of attraction and avidity and knows itself, finds itself and loves
itself in all things. Let us not believe blindly in the intelligence of
the wicked who succeed, or in the happiness of the criminal. We ought
rather to see the converse, that is to say, the often hideous reality
of the success; moreover, this intelligence, in the shape of skill,
cunning or disloyalty, is a specialized intelligence, confined within
a narrow circuit and, like a constricted jet of water, very effective
when directed at a single point; but it is not a true and general,
spacious and generous intelligence. Wherever the latter reveals
itself, we necessarily find honesty, justice, forbearance, love and
kindness, because there is a lofty and full horizon and because there
is an instinctive or conscious knowledge of human proportions, of the
eternity of existence and the brevity of life, of man’s position in the
universe, of the mysteries that compass him about and the secret bonds
that unite him to all things that we see as well as to all things that
we do not see upon earth and in the heavens.


11

Is Karma, then, supposed to punish lack of intelligence? And, in the
first place, why not? It is the only real evil upon this earth; and,
if all men were superlatively intelligent, none would be unhappy.
But where would the justice of it be? We possess the intelligence
which nature has bestowed upon us; it is she, not we, that should
be held responsible. Let us understand one another. Karma does not
inflict punishment, properly speaking; it simply places us, after
our successive existences and slumbers, on the plane on which our
intelligence left us, surrounded by our actions and our thoughts. It
keeps a check and a record. It takes us such as we have made ourselves
and gives us the opportunity to make ourselves anew, to acquire what
we lack and to raise ourselves to the level of the highest. We are
bound to raise ourselves, but the slowness or rapidity of our ascent
depends only upon ourselves. When all is said, the apparent injustice
which grants more intelligence to some than to others is but a question
of date, a law of growth, of evolution, which is the fundamental law
of all the lives that we know, from the infusoria to the stars. We
could at most complain of coming later than the rest; but the rest,
in their turn, might with more reason complain of being called too
soon, of being unable to profit at once by all that has been acquired
since their birth. To avoid recrimination, therefore, we should all
have been on the same plane from the outset; we should all have been
born at the same time. But then the world would have been complete,
perfect, immutable, immobile, from the first moment of its existence
and ours. This would perhaps have been preferable; but it is not so
and it is, no doubt, impossible that it should be so; in any case, no
system of metaphysics, no religion, not even the first, the greatest,
the loftiest, the mother of all the rest, ever thought of rejecting the
indisputable and indubitable law of endless movement, of the eternal
Becoming; and it must be admitted that everything appears to justify
it. It is probable that there would be nothing if it were otherwise and
that there can only be something on condition that it becomes better
or worse, that it rises or falls, that it constitutes itself in order
to deconstitute and reconstitute itself and that movement is more
essential than being or substance. It is so because it is so. There is
nothing to be done, nothing to be said; we can but state the fact. We
are in a world in which matter would perish and disappear sooner than
movement, or rather in which matter, time, space, duration, existence
and movement are but one and the same thing.


12

But we also live in a world in which our reason encounters only the
impossible, the insoluble and the incomprehensible. The supreme
interpretations do no more than shift the riddle, to permit us to
obtain glimpses from a higher standpoint of the boundless immensity in
which we are striving. Therefore, apart from the puerile explanations
which, after successive changes of form, all the religions have
drawn from the original religion, three hypotheses and no more offer
themselves for our choice: on the one hand, nothingness, inertia and
absolute death, which are inconceivable; on the other hand, chance and
its eternal renewals, which are without change, hope, object or end, or
which, if they led to anything, would lead either to an inconceivable
annihilation or to the third hypothesis, according to which the best
becomes infinite, even to total absorption in the imperfectible, the
immutable, the immovable, which, as I have said elsewhere,[4] must have
occurred already in the eternity that precedes us, since there is no
reason why that which could not take place in this eternity should take
place in the eternity to come, which is no more infinite, is no more
extensive and offers no more chances than the past eternity and which
is not of a different nature.

The mother religion itself, the only one which is still acceptable,
which takes account of everything and which has foreseen everything,
does not escape this last dilemma by extending to thousands of
millions of years the duration of a year of Brahma, that is to
say, the period of evolution, of expiration, of externalization and
activity, and to an equal number of thousands of millions of years
the duration of a night of this god, that is to say, the period of
involution, of inspiration, of internalization, of slumber or inertia,
during which all is reabsorbed into the divinity or the sole absolute.
It does not escape it either by next multiplying these days and nights
by a hundred years which form one life and this life by a hundred
lives which lead to figures that defy expression, after which another
universe begins.

Here, too, there would be either an eternal recommencement without hope
or object, or, if there be progression, final perfection and immobility
which ought already to be attained. Let each draw from all this such
conclusions as he please or can, or bow once more, in silence, before
the Unknowable.


THE END



FOOTNOTES:

[1] The English translation of Fabre’s works, by Alexander Teixeira de
Mattos, is issued in America by the publishers of the present volume.

[2] In the volume, published in 1904, entitled _The Double Garden_.--A.
T. de M.

[3] The first essay in _The Buried Temple_.--A. T. de M.

[4] In _Our Eternity_.--A. T. de M.



TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.




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