"Many people are now ready to recognize that there are in the world
beings more real than man. We admit the life of entities greater than
our own bodies. Society is not merely an arithmetical total, or a
collective designation. We even credit the existence of groups
intermediate between the individual and the state. But these opinions
are put forth by abstract deduction or by experimentation of reason.
"People employ them to complete a system of things and with the
complacencies of analogy. If they do not follow a serious study of
social data, they are at least the most meritorious results of
observations; they justify the method, and uphold the laws of a science
which struggles manfully to be scientific.
"These fashions of knowing would seem both costly and tenuous. Man did
not wait for physiology to give him a notion of his body, in which lack
of patience he was intelligent, for physiology has given him but
analytic and exterior information concerning things he had long known
from within. He had been conscious of his organs long before he had
specified their modes of activity. As spirals of smoke from village
chimneys, the profound senses of each organ had mounted toward him; joy,
sorrow, all the emotions are deeds more fully of consciousness than are
the thoughts of man's reason. Reason makes a concept of man, but the
heart perceives the flesh of his body.
"In like manner we must know the groups that englobe us, not by
observation from without, but by an organic consciousness. And it is by
no means sure that the rhythms will make their nodes in us, if we be not
the centres of groups. We have but to become such. Dig deep enough in
our being, emptying it of individual reveries, dig enough little canals
so that the souls of the groups will flow of necessity into us.
"I have attempted nothing else in this book. Various groups have come
here into consciousness. They are still rudimentary, and their spirit is
but a perfume in the air. Beings with as little consistence as la Rue du
Havre, and la Place de la Bastile, ephemeral as the company of people in
an omnibus, or the audience at L'Opéra Comique, can not have complex
organism or thoughts greatly elaborate. People will think it superfluous
that I should unravel such shreds in place of re-carding once more the
enormous heap of the individual soul.
"Yet I think the groups are in the most agitated stage of their
evolution. Future groups will perhaps deserve less affection, and we
shall conceal the basis of things more effectively. Now the incomplete
and unstable contours have not yet learned to stifle any tendency (any
inclination). Every impact sets them floating. They do not coat the
infantile matter with a hard or impacting envelope. A superior plant has
realized but few of the possibilities swarming in fructificatory mould.
A mushroom leads one more directly to the essential life quality than do
the complexities of the oak tree.
"Thus the groups prepare more future than is strictly required. Thus we
have the considerable happiness of watching the commencement of reign,
the beginning of an organic series which will last as did others, for a
thousand ages, before the cooling of the earth. This is not a
progression, it is a creation, the first leap-out of a different series.
Groups will not continue the activities of animals, nor of men; they
will start things afresh according to their own need, and as the
consciousness of their substance increases they will refashion the image
of the world.
"The men who henceforth can draw the souls of groups to converge within
themselves, will give forth the coming dream, and will gather, to boot,
certain intuitions of human habit. Our ideas of the being will undergo a
correction; will hesitate rather more in finding a distinction between
the existent and non-existent. In passing successively from the Place de
l'Europe to the Place des Vosges, and then to a gang of navvies, one
perceives that there are numerous shades of difference between nothing
and something. Before resorting to groups one is sure of discerning a
being of a simple idea. One knows that a dog exists, that he has an
interior and independent unity; one knows that a table or a mountain
does not exist; nothing but our manner of speech cuts it off from the
universal non-existing. But streets demand all shades of verbal
expression (from the non-existing up to the autonomous creature).
"One ceases to believe that a definite limit is the indispensable means
of existence. Where does la Place de la Trinité begin? The streets
mingle their bodies. The squares isolate themselves with great
difficulty. The crowd at the theatre takes on no contour until it has
lived for some time, and with vigor. A being _(être)_ has a centre, or
centres in harmony, but a being is not compelled to have limits. He
exists a great deal in one place, rather less in others, and, further
on, a second being commences before the first has left off. Every being
has, somewhere in space, its maximum. Only ancestored individuals
possess affirmative contours, a skin which cuts them off from the
infinite.
"Space is no one's possession. No being has succeeded in appropriating
one scrap of space and saturating it with his own unique existence.
Everything over-crosses, coincides, and cohabits. Every point is a perch
for a thousand birds. Paris, the rue Montmartre, a crowd, a man, a
protoplasm are on the same spot of pavement. A thousand existences are
concentric. We see a little of some of them.
"How can we go on thinking that an individual is a solitary thing which
is born, grows, reproduces itself and dies? This is a superior and
inveterate manner of being an individual. But groups are not truly born.
Their life makes and unmakes itself like an unstable state of matter, a
condensation which does not endure. They show us that life, at its
origin, is a provisory attitude, a moment of exception, an intensity
between two relaxations, not continuity, nothing decisive. The first
entireties take life by a sort of slow success, and extinguish
themselves without catastrophe, the single elements do not perish
because the whole is disrupted.
"The crowd before the Baraque Foraine starts to live little by little,
as water in a kettle begins to sing and evaporate. The passages of the
Odeon do not live by night, each day they are real, a few hours. At the
start life seems the affair of a moment, then it becomes intermittent.
To be durable; to become a development and a destiny; to be defined and
finished off at each end by birth and death, it needs a deal of
accustomedness.
"The primitive forms are not coequal. There is a natural hierarchy among
groups. Streets have no set middle, no veritable limitations; they hold
a long vacillating sort of life which night flattens out almost to
nothingness. Cross-roads and squares take on contour, and gather up the
nodes of their rhythms. Other groups have a fashioned body, they endure
but a little space, but they have learned, almost, to die; they even
resurrect themselves as by a jerk or dry spasm, they begin the habit of
being, they strive toward it, and this puts them out of breath.
"I have not yet met a group fully divine. None has had a real
consciousness, none has addressed me, saying: I exist. The day when the
first group shall take its soul in its hands, as one lifts up a child in
order to look in its face, that day there will be a new god upon earth.
This is the god I await, with my labor of annunciation."
This excerpt from Romains gives the tone of his thought. In so far as he
writes in the present tense he carries conviction. He broaches truly a
"new," or at least contemporary "_pathétique_." He utters, in original
vein, phases of consciousness whereinto we are more or less drifting, in
measure of our proper sensibility.