If you are only two against a thousand in leading this beautiful, pure
life, rejoice that there are at least two of you and do not despair of
your course of action.
Is it not Renan who has uttered this profound saying: “The great things
in any race are usually accomplished by the minority”?
Do not rejoice because there are slaves. Let their example be a fearful
warning to you; let it fill you with an overmastering desire to free
them from servitude.
To the apostle Paul is ascribed that disquieting utterance of the
conquering soldier: “Oportet hæreses esse.”
Yes, undoubtedly, whoever wishes to fight needs an enemy.
The dazzling chance of such conquests is not, alas, the thing you will
be most likely to miss. But every conquest is vain that does not tend
toward peace.
One thinks with ecstasy of the joy of a universal communion, from
which no one would be left out, in which no one would be the victim.
Must there be heretics? Yes! To convince them, but not to vanquish
them, and still less to put them to the stake.
X
ON THE REIGN OF THE HEART
“The knowledge of external things does not make up for me, in times
of affliction, for my ignorance of the moral world; but my knowledge
of the moral world always consoles me for my ignorance of external
things.”--_Pascal_.
I
It has come, the time of affliction!
Whatever may be the outcome of this war, it marks a period of profound
despair for humanity. However great may be the pride of victory,
however generous such a victory may be, under whatever light the
distant consequences may be presented to us, we live, none the less, in
a blighted age, on an earth that will be devastated for long years, in
the midst of a society that is decimated, ruined, crushed by its wounds.
Among all our disillusionments, if there is one that remains especially
painful to us it is the sort of bankruptcy of which our whole
civilization is convicted.
Man had never been prouder than at the beginning of the twentieth
century of the discoveries he had realized in the domain of what
Pascal called “the external sciences.”
We must admit that there was some excuse for this intoxication, this
error. In its struggle with matter, humanity had experienced a success
that was so daring, so disconcerting, and above all so repeated that it
lost a just conception of its adversary and forgot that its principal
enemy was itself.
Events have recalled this to it in a flash. In the last year or two it
has expressed its discomfiture through millions of simple lips. It has
asked with anguish how “a century so advanced in civilization” could
give birth to this demoralizing catastrophe. Stupefied, it sees turning
against itself all those inventions which, it had been told, were made
for its happiness. For hardly one is absent. Even those that seemed
the highest in moral significance, even they, have contributed in some
degree to the disaster. Only the fear of creating an uncontrollable
situation has prevented certain of the belligerents from forming an
alliance with the very germs of epidemic diseases and thus debasing the
noblest of all the acquisitions of science.
A doubt has grown up in all hearts: what, after all, is this
civilization from which we draw such pride and which we claim the
right to impose upon the peoples of the other continents? What is this
thing that has suddenly revealed itself as so cruel, so dangerous, as
destitute of soul as its own machines?
Eyes have been opened, spirits have been illuminated: never did
barbarism, in all its brutality and destructiveness, attain results as
monstrous as those of which our industrial and scientific civilization
has proved itself capable. Is it indeed anything but a travesty on
barbarism?
What inclines one to believe this is that the peoples which have
dedicated to the gods of the factory and the laboratory the most
fervent and the most vainglorious worship have shown themselves in this
way by far the cruellest, the most fertile in inhumane and disgraceful
inventions.
M. Bergson has said, of the intelligence, that it is “characterized by
a natural incomprehension of life.” To this one might add: and by a
complete incomprehension of happiness, which is the very aim of life.
With its retinue of ingenious inventions and clever complications, the
intelligence plays the part of something irresponsible or criminal in
the great disorder of the world. It seems not only incapable of giving
happiness to men, but actually adapted to bewilder them, corrupt them,
set them quarreling. It knows how to provoke conflicts; it is unable
either to exorcise them or to resolve them.
Scientific and industrial civilization based upon the intelligence is
condemned. For long years it has monopolized and distracted all human
energies. Its reign has ended in an immense defeat.