It is toward the resources of the heart that our hope turns. Betrayed
by this clever intelligence, whose formidable works have at times the
very look of stupidity itself, we aspire to the reign of the heart; all
our desires turn toward a moral civilization, such as is alone capable
of exalting us, satisfying us, protecting us, assuring us the true
burgeoning of our race.
It is by juggling with words that people have been able to attach the
idea of true progress to the development of the mechanical, chemical
or biological sciences. True progress concerns nothing but the soul,
it remains independent of the expedients and the practices of science.
This latter is able to triumph even when the true progress, the ascent
of mankind toward happiness, is interrupted and thwarted in its
profoundest tendencies.
There are not lacking people to tell us that the war will mark with
precision the advent of a new world, that it has bought in the blood
and the flame the moral elevation necessary for a fruitful and final
peace. We cannot share this optimism of official eloquence. It is
not the performance of tasks of murder that opens to men the road
to justice and converts them to good customs. Humanity must grow
unaccustomed to crime, and it is not the armed intelligence that can
accomplish this miracle. The pacifying work of the war will remain
in peril if everything that is healthy and generous in humanity does
not labor to dethrone this scientific civilization which still abuses
society after having reduced it to helplessness.
I consider as negligible the objection of the stoics who say that these
miseries do not depend upon us and that we ought obstinately to seek
our happiness through them, isolate our happiness from the surrounding
degradation. No! These miseries do depend upon us. In spite of its
disdainful nobility, the stoic resignation has here too much the look
of egoism.
This moral civilization, when its hour comes, will revive Christianity
and propagate it; it will not leave the human race in the abandonment
of the desperate misery of today.