It is this insatiable need which, on those points where human justice
remained dumb and declared itself powerless, appealed in former days to
the judgment of God. To-day, when the idea which we have conceived of
the divinity has changed its form and nature, the same instinct
persists, so deep, so general, that it is perhaps but the
half-transparent veil of an approaching truth. If we no longer look to
God to approve or condemn that which men are unable to judge, we now
confide that mission to the unconscious, incognizable and, so to speak,
future part of ourselves. The duel invokes no longer the judgment of
God, but that of our future, our luck or our destiny, composed of all
that is indefinite within us. It is called upon, in the name of our good
or evil possibilities, to declare whether, from the point of view of
inexplicable life, we are wrong or right.
There we have the indelibly human thing that is disengaged from amid all
the absurdities and puerilities of our present encounters. However
unreasonable it may appear, this sort of supreme interrogation, this
question put in the night which is no longer illumined by intelligible
justice, can hardly be waived so long as we have not found a less
equivocal manner of weighing the rights and wrongs, the essential hopes
and inequalities of two destinies that wish to confront each other.