This digression, too long for our restlessness, but too succinct in
view of the facts it involves, raises several criticisms.
One might, in the first place, object that evolution is a thing which
species undergo and which they cannot influence themselves. If that is
true, humanity finds itself forced into an adventure against which it
is puerile and presumptuous to contend.
This attitude implies a submissive fatalism that denies both our sense
of experience and our thirst for perfection. We are apt to construe
our lessons in such a way as to draw instruction from them. We have
shown this in many moments of crisis, and we feel a certain repugnance
to thinking that we cannot turn to our own profit the most majestic
lesson that has ever been given to men.
Certain minds, on the other hand, have concluded that humanity is
altogether too old, too highly evolved a species to be capable of ever
again renouncing what is fundamental in its inveterate intellectual
traditions, its scientific acquisitions and the customs that have
sprung from them.
If this conception of the world did not appear as if stamped with
lassitude and scepticism, it would seem to leave us in the presence
of a desperate alternative: either the acceptance of a life without
restraint, given over to every sort of folly, exposed to every sort
of lapse into crime, or the solitary search for an oblivion that only
waits for death.
But will the peoples who have struggled so fiercely for their material
interests remain disarmed in the face of the moral danger that
threatens the very morning of the race, will they undertake nothing
truly efficacious for the sake of posterity?
That is the anxiety that haunts generous souls today.
The political arrangements that will mark the end of this war will be
of no real interest if the minds that control the spiritual direction
of the peoples do not labor, from now on-and in the future, to modify
the meaning of the ideas of progress and civilization.
We cannot believe that humanity is so deeply sunk in its convictions
and its intellectual habits as to remain forever incapable of sudden
change and reform.
The human world has already passed through important crises; it has
already been forced several times to reshape the idea it had formed of
culture and civilization.
It has always been amid its ruins that it has meditated the conditions
of a new life. If it is true that ruins demand the revolution of
customs, let us admit that the heart of man has never been more
urgently entreated than today.
In any case, there is no question of giving up those customs that
form an integral part of our vital economy. It would be fantastic to
consider the regeneration of a society that was deprived, for example,
of the means of communication which have obtained for a century and
which we could scarcely abandon now without suicide. But it is fair to
consider how great and dangerous is the hold of the false needs which
the study of the “external sciences” creates in us and not to permit
our ideal activity to be blindly enslaved any longer by our material
ingenuity.
There exist in our nature ardent forces that one cannot condemn
without appeal and that will manifest themselves against all discipline.
The passion of the sciences must be deeply-rooted when we see men, in
love with love, peace, humanity, consecrating themselves, as if in
their own despite, under the cover of some abstract sophistry, to tasks
whose results may contribute seriously to the wretchedness and the
debasement of society.
If one might gather together all the faculties of the spirit for the
single cause of happiness!
At least, and from now on, let us cease to consider that the monstrous
development of industrial science represents civilization; otherwise
let us withdraw from this word its whole moral significance and seek
another for the needs of our ideal.
Let us cease humiliating moral culture, the only pledge we have of
peace and happiness, before the irresponsible and unruly genius that
haunts the laboratories. Scientific civilization, let us say, to
allow it to keep this name for a moment, has been for us so prodigal
in bitterness that we can no longer abandon it uncontrolled to its
devouring activity. We must make use of it as a servant and cease any
longer to adore it as a goddess.
V
We must revise all our definitions, all our values, our whole
vocabulary.
All fervent spirits should set themselves to this work, and their task
will be all the heavier the more widely extended they are assured their
influence will be.
We must strive to make our stunned humanity realize that happiness does
not consist in travelling at the rate of sixty miles an hour, rising
up into the air on a machine or talking under the ocean, but above all
else in being rich in beautiful thoughts, contented with its work,
honored with warm affections.
We must restore the cult of the arts which contribute to the
purification of the soul, which are consoling in times of affliction
and remain, by their nature, incapable of serving ignoble ends.
We must employ our strength to altering the meaning of the words
“riches,” “possessions,” “authority,” to showing that they are things
of the soul and that the material acceptance of these terms corresponds
to realities that are perfidious and ironical. We must at the same time
transform the ideas of benevolence and ambition, open a new career to
these virtues, create for them new ends and new satisfactions. Those
who consider such a program with irony or scepticism make a great
mistake. Its realization may seem illusory, but it will undoubtedly
become a necessity. The material goods at the disposal of humanity will
find themselves considerably reduced both by the destruction of which
they have been the object and by the long arrest of the production of
them.
Their rarity and their growing expensiveness will be the source of
grave and almost insoluble conflicts, which new effusions of blood will
only make more venomous.
Humanity can hurl against this terrible future a defiance full of
grandeur. It can, under the influence of its spiritual masters, seek
its happiness in a wise and passionate transformation of its desires.
Let us not urge it toward resignation but toward the conquest of the
true riches, those that assure it the moral possession of the world.