compass? Is there a thing in this world that can be separated from the
inconceivable? Since there is no means of eliminating that inconceivable,
it is reasonable and salutary to make the best of it and therefore to
imagine it as stupendously vast as we are able. The gravest reproach
that can be brought against the positive religions and notably against
Christianity is that they have too often, if not in theory, at least in
practice, encouraged such a narrowing of the mystery of the universe. By
broadening it, we broaden the space wherein our mind will move. It is for
us what we make it: let us then form it of all that we can reach on the
horizon of ourselves. As for the mystery itself, we shall, of-course,
never reach it; but we have a much greater chance of approaching it by
facing it and going whither it draws us than by turning our backs upon it
and returning to that place where we well know that it no longer is. Not
by diminishing our thoughts shall we diminish the distance that separates
us from the ultimate truths; but by enlarging them as much as possible we
are sure of deceiving ourselves as little as possible. And the loftier
our idea of the infinite, the more buoyant and the purer becomes the
spiritual atmosphere wherein we live and the wider and deeper the horizon
against which our thoughts and feelings stand out, the horizon which is
all their life and which they inspire.
“Perpetually to construct ideas requiring the utmost stretch of our
faculties,” wrote Herbert Spencer, “and perpetually to find that such
ideas must be abandoned as futile imaginations, may realize to us more
fully than any other course the greatness of that which we vainly strive
to grasp.... By continually seeking to know and being continually thrown
back with a deepened conviction of the impossibility of knowing, we may
keep alive the consciousness that it is alike our highest wisdom and
our highest duty to regard that through which all things exist as the
Unknowable.”
8
Whatever the ultimate truth may be, whether we admit the abstract,
absolute and perfect infinity—the changeless, immovable infinity which
has attained perfection and which knows everything, to which our reason
tends—or whether we prefer that offered to us by the evidence, undeniable
here below, of our senses—the infinity which seeks itself, which is still
evolving and not yet established—it behoves us above all to foresee in it
our fate, which, for that matter, must, in either case, end by absorption
in that very infinity.
VI
OUR FATE IN THOSE INFINITIES
1
The first infinity, the ideal infinity, corresponds most nearly with
the requirements of our reason, which does not justify us in giving
it the preference. It is impossible for us to foresee what we shall
become in it, because it seems to exclude any becoming. It therefore but
remains for us to address ourselves to the second, to that which we see
and imagine in time and space. Furthermore, it is possible that it may
precede the other. However absolute our conception of the universe, we
have seen that we can always admit that what has not taken place in the
eternity before us will happen in the eternity after us and that there
is nothing save an untold number of chances to prevent the universe from
acquiring in the end that perfect consciousness which will establish it
at its zenith.
2
Behold us, then, in the infinity of those worlds, the stellar infinity,
the infinity of the heavens, which assuredly veils other things from our
eyes, but which cannot be a total illusion. It seems to us to be peopled
only with objects—planets, suns, stars, nebulæ, atoms, imponderous
fluids—which move, unite and separate, repel and attract one another,
which shrink and expand, are for ever shifting and never arrive, which
measure space in that which has no confines and number the hours in that
which has no term. In a word, we are in an infinity that seems to have
almost the same character and the same habits as that power in the midst
of which we breathe and which, upon our earth, we call nature or life.
What will be our fate in that infinity? We are asking ourselves no idle
question, even if we should unite with it after losing all consciousness,
all notion of the ego, even if we should exist there as no more than a
little nameless substance—soul or matter, we cannot tell—suspended in the
equally nameless abyss that replaces time and space. It is not an idle
question, for it concerns the history of the worlds or of the universe;
and this history, far more than that of our petty existence, is our own
great history, in which perhaps something of ourselves or something
incomparably better and vaster will end by meeting us again some day.
3
Shall we be unhappy there? It is hardly reassuring when we consider the
ways of nature and remember that we form part of a universe that has
not yet gathered its wisdom. We have seen, it is true, that good and
bad fortune exist only in so far as regards our body and that, when we
have lost the organ of suffering, we shall not meet any of the earthly
sorrows again. But our anxiety does not end here; and will not our mind,
lingering upon our erstwhile sorrows, drifting derelict from world to
world, unknown to itself in an unknowable that seeks itself hopelessly,
will not our mind know here the frightful torture of which we have
already spoken and which is doubtless the last that imagination can touch
with its wing? Finally, if there were nothing left of our body and our
mind, there would still remain the matter and the spirit (or, at least,
the obviously single force to which we give that double name) which
composed them and whose fate must be no more indifferent to us than our
own fate; for, let us repeat, from our death onwards, the adventure of
the universe becomes our own adventure. Let us not, therefore, say to
ourselves:
“What can it matter? We shall not be there.”
We shall be there always, because everything will be there.
4
And will this everything wherein we shall be included, in a world ever
seeking itself, continue a prey to new and perpetual and perhaps painful
experiences? Since the part that we were was unhappy, why should the part
that we shall be enjoy a better fortune? Who can assure us that yonder
the unending combinations and endeavours will not be more sorrowful,
more stupid and more baneful than those which we are leaving; and how
shall we explain that these have come about after so many millions of
others which ought to have opened the eyes of the genius of infinity?
It is idle to persuade ourselves, as Hindu wisdom would, that our
sorrows are but illusions and appearances: it is none the less true that
they make us very really unhappy. Has the universe elsewhere a more
complete consciousness, a more just and serene understanding than on
this earth and in the worlds which we discern? And, if it be true that
it has somewhere attained that better understanding, why does the mind
that presides over the destinies of our earth not profit by it? Is no
communication possible between worlds which must have been born of the
same idea and which lie in its depths? What would be the mystery of that
isolation? Are we to believe that the earth marks the farthest stage and
the most successful experiment? What, then, can the mind of the universe
have done and against what darkness must it have struggled, to have come
only to this? But, on the other hand, that darkness and those barriers
which can have come only from itself, since they could have arisen no
elsewhere, have they the power to stay its progress? Who then could have
set those insoluble problems to infinity and from what more remote and
profound region than itself could they have issued? Some one, after all,
must know the answer; and, as behind infinity there can be none that is
not infinity itself, it is impossible to imagine a malignant will in a
will that leaves no point around it which is not wholly covered. Or are
the experiments begun in the stars continued mechanically, by virtue of
the force acquired, without regard to their uselessness and their pitiful
consequences, according to the custom of nature, who knows nothing of
our parsimony and squanders the suns in space as she does the seed on
earth, knowing that nothing can be lost? Or, again, is the whole question
of our peace and happiness, like that of the fate of the worlds, reduced
to knowing whether or not the infinity of endeavours and combinations be
equal to that of eternity? Or, lastly, to come to what is most likely, is
it we who deceive ourselves, who know nothing, who see nothing and who
consider imperfect that which is perhaps faultless, we who are but an
infinitesimal fragment of the intelligence which we judge by the aid of
the little shreds of understanding which it has vouchsafed to lend us?
5
How could we reply, how could our thoughts and glances penetrate the
infinite and the invisible, we who do not understand nor even see the
thing by which we see and which is the source of all our thoughts? In
fact, as has been very justly observed, man does not see light itself.
He sees only matter, or rather the small part of the great worlds which
he knows by the name of matter, touched by light. He does not perceive
the immense rays that cross the heavens save at the moment when they are
stopped by an object akin to those with which his eye is familiar upon
this earth: were it otherwise, the whole space filled with innumerable
suns and boundless forces, instead of being an abyss of absolute
darkness, absorbing and extinguishing shafts of light that shoot across
it from every side, would be but a monstrous and unbearable ocean of
flashes.
And, if we do not see the light, at least we think we know a few of its
rays or its reflections; but we are absolutely ignorant of that which is
unquestionably the essential law of the universe, namely, gravitation.
What is that force, the most powerful of all and the least visible,
imperceptible to our senses, without form, without colour, without
temperature, without substance, without savour and without voice, but
so awful that it suspends and moves in space all the worlds which we
see and all those which we shall never know? More rapid, more subtle,
more incorporeal than thought, it wields such sway over everything that
exists, from the infinitely great to the infinitely small, that there is
not a grain of sand upon our earth nor a drop of blood in our veins but
are penetrated, wrought upon and quickened by it until they act at every
moment upon the farthest planet of the last solar system that we struggle
to imagine beyond the bounds of our imagination.
Shakspeare’s famous lines,
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,”
have long since become utterly inadequate. There are no longer more
things than our philosophy can dream of or imagine: there is none but
things which it cannot dream of, there is nothing but the unimaginable;
and, if we do not even see the light, which is the one thing that we
believed we saw, it may be said that there is nothing all around us but
the invisible.
We move in the illusion of seeing and knowing that which is strictly
indispensable to our little lives. As for all the rest, which is
well-nigh everything, our organs not only debar us from reaching, seeing
or feeling it, but even restrain us from suspecting what it is, just
as they would prevent us from understanding it if an intelligence of
a different order were to bethink itself of revealing or explaining
it to us. The number and volume of those mysteries is as boundless as
the universe itself. If mankind were one day to draw near to those
which to-day it deems the greatest and the most inaccessible, such
as the origin and the aim of life, it would at once behold rising up
behind them, like eternal mountains, others quite as great and quite
as unfathomable; and so on, without end. In relation to that which it
would have to know in order to hold the key to the riddle of this world,
it would always find itself at the same point of central ignorance. It
would be just the same if we possessed an intelligence several million
times greater and more penetrating than ours. All that its miraculously
increased power could discover would encounter limits no less impassable
than at present. All is boundless in that which has no bounds. We shall
be the eternal prisoners of the universe. It is therefore impossible for
us to appreciate in any degree whatsoever, in the smallest conceivable
respect, the present state of the universe and to say, as long as we
are men, whether it follows a straight line or describes an immense
circle, whether it is growing wiser or madder, whether it is advancing
towards the eternity which has no end or retracing its steps towards that
which had no beginning. Our sole privilege within our tiny confines is
to struggle towards that which appears to us the best, and to remain
heroically persuaded that no part of what we do within those confines can
ever be wholly lost.
6
But let not all these insoluble questions drive us towards fear. From the
point of view of our future beyond the grave, it is in no way necessary
that we should have an answer to everything. Whether the universe have
already found its consciousness, whether it find it one day or seek it
everlastingly, it could not exist for the purpose of being unhappy and
of suffering, either in its entirety, or in any one of its parts; and it
matters little if the latter be invisible or incommensurable, considering
that the smallest is as great as the greatest in what has neither limit
nor measure. To torture a point is the same thing as to torture the
worlds; and, if it torture the worlds, it is its own substance that it
tortures. Its very fate, wherein we have our part, protects us; for we
are simply morsels of infinity. It is inseparable from us as we are
inseparable from it. Its breath is our breath, its aim is our aim and we
bear within us all its mysteries. We participate in it everywhere. There
is naught in us that escapes it; there is naught in it but belongs to
us. It extends us, fills us, traverses us on every side. In space and
time and in that which, beyond space and time, has as yet no name, we
represent it and summarize it completely, with all its properties and all
its future; and, if its immensity terrifies us, we are as terrifying as
itself.
If, therefore, we had to suffer in it, our sufferings could be but
ephemeral; and nothing matters that is not eternal. It is possible,
although somewhat incomprehensible, that parts should err and go
astray; but it is impossible that sorrow should be one of its lasting
and necessary laws; for it would have brought that law to bear against
itself. In like manner, the universe is and must be its own law and its
sole master: if not, the law or the master whom it must obey would be
the universe alone; and the centre of a word which we pronounce without
being able to grasp its scope would be simply shifted. If it be unhappy,
that means that it wills its own unhappiness; if it will its unhappiness,
it is mad; and, if it appear to us mad, that means that our reason works
contrary to everything and to the only laws possible, seeing that they
are eternal, or, to speak more humbly, that it judges what it wholly
fails to understand.
7
Everything, therefore, must end, or perhaps already be, if not in a state
of happiness, at least in a state exempt from all suffering, all anxiety,
all lasting unhappiness; and what, after all, is our happiness upon this
earth, if it be not the absence of sorrow, anxiety and unhappiness?
But it is childish to talk of happiness and unhappiness where infinity is
in question. The idea which we entertain of happiness and unhappiness is
something so special, so human, so fragile that it does not exceed our
stature and falls to dust as soon as we take it out of its little sphere.
It proceeds entirely from a few contingencies of our nerves, which are
made to appreciate very slight happenings, but which could as easily have
felt everything the opposite way and taken pleasure in that which is now
pain.
I do not know if my readers remember the striking passage in which Sir
William Crookes shows how well-nigh all that we consider as essential
laws of nature would be falsified in the eyes of a microscopic man, while
forces of which we are almost wholly ignorant, such as surface-tension,
capillarity or the Brownian movements, would preponderate. Walking on
a cabbage-leaf, for instance, after the dew had fallen, and seeing it
studded with huge crystal globes, he would infer that water was a solid
body which assumes spherical form and rises in the air. At no great
distance, he might come to a pond, when he would observe that this
same matter, instead of rising upwards, now seems to slope downwards
in a vast curve from the brink. If he managed, with the aid of his
friends, to throw into the water one of those enormous steel bars which
we call needles, he would see that it made a sort of concave trough
on the surface and floated tranquilly. From these experiments and a
thousand others which he might make, he would naturally deduce theories
diametrically opposed to those upon which our entire existence is based.
It would be the same if the changes were made in the direction of time,
to take an hypothesis imagined by the philosopher William James:
“Suppose we were able, within the length of a second, to note distinctly
ten thousand events instead of barely ten, as now; if our life were then
destined to hold the same number of impressions it might be a thousand
times as short. We should live less than a month, and personally know
nothing of the change of seasons. If born in winter, we should believe
in summer as we now believe in the heats of the carboniferous era.
The motions of organic beings would be so slow to our senses as to be
inferred, not seen. The sun would stand still in the sky, the moon be
almost free from change and so on. But now reverse the hypothesis, and
suppose a being to get only one thousandth part of the sensations that we
get in a given time, and consequently to live a thousand times as long.
Winters and summers will be to him like quarters of an hour. Mushrooms
and the swifter growing plants will shoot into being so rapidly as to
appear instantaneous creations; annual shrubs will rise and fall from the
earth like restlessly boiling water-springs; the motions of animals will
be as invisible as are to us the movements of bullets and cannon-balls;
the sun will scour through the sky like a meteor, leaving a fiery trail
behind him, etc. That such imaginary cases (barring the superhuman
longevity) may be realized somewhere in the animal kingdom, it would be
rash to deny.”
8
We believe that we see nothing hanging over us but catastrophes, deaths,
torments and disasters; we shiver at the mere thought of the great
interplanetary spaces, with their intense cold and their awful and gloomy
solitudes; and we imagine that the worlds that revolve through space are
as unhappy as ourselves because they freeze, or disaggregate, or clash
together, or are consumed in unutterable flames. We infer from this
that the genius of the universe is an abominable tyrant, seized with a
monstrous madness, delighting only in the torture of itself and all that
it contains. To millions of stars, each many thousand times larger than
our sun, to nebulæ whose nature and dimensions no figure, no word in our
language is able to express, we attribute our momentary sensibility,
the little ephemeral play of our nerves; and we are convinced that life
there must be impossible or appalling, because we should feel too hot
or too cold. It were much wiser to say to ourselves that it would need
but a trifle, a few papillæ more or less to our skin, the slightest
modification of our eyes and ears, to turn the temperature of space, its
silence and its darkness into a delicious springtime, an incomparable
music, a divine light.
“Nothing is too wonderful to be true,” said Faraday.
It were much more reasonable to persuade ourselves that the catastrophes
which our imagination sees there are life itself, the joy and one or
other of those immense festivals of mind and matter in which death,
thrusting aside at last our two enemies, time and space, will soon permit
us to take part. Each world dissolving, extinguished, crumbling, burnt
or colliding with another world and pulverized means the commencement of
a magnificent experiment, the dawn of a marvellous hope and perhaps an
unexpected happiness drawn direct from the inexhaustible unknown. What
though they freeze or flame, collect or disperse, pursue or flee one
another: mind and matter, no longer united by the same pitiful hazard
that joined them in us, must rejoice at all that happens; for all is but
birth and rebirth, a departure into an unknown filled with wonderful
promises and maybe an anticipation of some ineffable event.
VII
CONCLUSIONS
1
In order to retain a livelier image of all this and a more exact memory,
let us give a last glance at the road which we have travelled. We have
put aside, for reasons which we have stated, the religious solutions and
total annihilation. Annihilation is physically impossible; the religious
solutions occupy a citadel without doors or windows into which human
reason does not penetrate. Next comes the theory of the survival of
our ego, released from its body, but retaining a full and unimpaired
consciousness of its identity. We have seen that this theory, strictly
defined, has very little likelihood and is not greatly to be desired,
although, with the surrender of the body, the source of all our ills,
it seems less to be feared than our actual existence. On the other
hand, as soon as we try to extend or to exalt it, so that it may appear
less barbarous or less crude, we come back to the theory of a cosmic
consciousness or of a modified consciousness, which, together with that
of survival without any sort of consciousness, closes the field to every
supposition and exhausts every forecast of the imagination.
Survival without any sort of consciousness would be tantamount for us to
annihilation pure and simple, and consequently would be no more dreadful
than the latter, that is to say, than a sleep with no dreams and with
no awakening. The theory is unquestionably more acceptable than that of
annihilation; but it prejudges very rashly the questions of a cosmic
consciousness and of a modified consciousness.
2
Before replying to these, we must choose our universe, for we have the
choice. It is a matter of knowing how we propose to look at infinity. Is
it the moveless, immovable infinity, from all eternity perfect and at
its zenith, and the purposeless universe that our reason will conceive
at the farthest point of our thoughts? Do we believe that, at our death,
the illusion of movement and progress which we see from the depths of
this life will suddenly fade away? If so, it is inevitable that, at our
last breath, we shall be absorbed in what, for lack of a better term, we
call the cosmic consciousness. Are we, on the other hand, persuaded that
death will reveal to us that the illusion lies not in our senses but in
our reason and that, in a world incontestably alive, despite the eternity
preceding our birth, all the experiments have not been made, that is
to say that movement and evolution continue and will never and nowhere
stop? In that case, we must at once accept the theory of a modified
or progressive consciousness. The two aspects, after all, are equally
unintelligible but defensible; and, although really irreconcilable, they
agree on one point, namely, that unending pain and unredeemed misery are
alike excluded from them both for ever.
3
The theory of a modified consciousness does not necessitate the loss
of the tiny consciousness acquired in our body; but it makes it almost
negligible, flings, drowns and dissolves it in infinity. It is of course
impossible to support this theory with satisfactory proofs; but it is
not easy to shatter it like the others. Were it permissible to speak
of likeness to truth in this connexion, when our only truth is that we
do not see the truth, it is the most likely of the interim theories
and gives a magnificent opening for the most plausible, varied and
alluring dreams. Will our ego, our soul, our spirit, or whatever we call
that which will survive us in order to continue us as we are, will it
find again, on leaving the body, the innumerable lives which it must
have lived since the thousands of years that had no beginning? Will
it continue to increase by assimilating all that it meets in infinity
during the thousands of years that will have no end? Will it linger for
a time around our earth, leading, in regions invisible to our eyes, an
ever higher and happier existence, as the theosophists and spiritualists
contend? Will it move towards other planetary systems, will it emigrate
to other worlds, whose existence is not even suspected by our senses?
Everything seems permissible in this great dream, save that which might
arrest its flight.