True, he who says ecstatically, “The world is governed by love,
goodness, generous passions,” surrenders himself to a childish error.
But he who cries, “The whole world is enslaved by egoism, violence and
base passions,” speaks foolishly.
As we look about us, we might perhaps imagine that from one or the
other of these two moral attitudes there is no escape. Must we believe
that the spirit of system has such an irresistible hold over everyone
who sets about the business of living?
The world! The world! It is much more beautiful and complex than that.
It always upsets our prearrangements, and that is why we cherish it so
dearly. But we also love to foresee things, and system seems to arrange
them so that we can.
What does it signify in a world that is capable of everything? Amid
the evil and the mediocre there will always shine forth consolingly
something noble, something wondrous. Is it not shameful to predict the
basest things so glibly only to close our eyes the more obstinately
before the beauty that is unknown and unforeseen?
I assure you, in spite of all, that two lines of music can turn a
multitude back and agitate the deepest springs of its behavior. If
the miracle does not result from harmonious sounds, it will be borne,
perhaps, of ten warm, rhythmical words, or the sight of a statue or the
evocation of an image.
The worship of immediate realities leads us to those easy victories
that intoxicate the coarse spirits. At times it results in irreparable
disasters, for it inclines us to misprize those secret and delicate
things that pave the way for the soul’s most daring flights and
ventures.
Some other time I shall tell the story of the general who, in order to
allay the grievances of his mutinous troops, offered them a cask of
wine and, thanks to this blunder, suffered a defeat.
People who reason in a wholesale fashion get along successfully from
day to day till the hour when a tiny error destroys their success
forever.