This does not mean that our tendency towards extremes is enough to guide
us to definite certainties. There are always two extremes between which
we have to choose; and it is often difficult to decide which is the
starting-point and which the final goal. In morals, for instance, we
have to choose between absolute egotism or altruism and in politics
between the best-organized government that it is possible to imagine,
directing and protecting the smallest acts of our life, or the absence
of all government. The two questions are still insoluble. Nevertheless,
we are free to believe that absolute altruism is more extreme and
nearer to our end than absolute egotism, in the same way as anarchy is
more extreme and nearer to the perfection of our kind than the most
minutely and irreproachably organized government, such as, for instance,
one might imagine to prevail at the last limits of integral socialism.
We are free to believe this, because absolute altruism and anarchy are
the extreme forms that demand the most perfect man. Now it is towards
perfect man that we must turn our gaze; for it is in that direction that
we must hope that mankind is moving. Experience still shows that we risk
less by keeping our eyes before us than by keeping them behind us, less
by looking too high than by not looking high enough. All that we have
obtained so far has been announced and, so to speak, called forth by
those who were accused of looking too high. It is wise, therefore, when
in doubt, to attach one's self to the extreme that implies the most
perfect, the most noble and the most generous form of mankind. Thus it
was that this reply could be given to one who asked whether it were well
to grant to men, in spite of their present imperfections, the most
complete possible liberty:
"Yes, it is the duty of all whose thoughts go before the inconscient
mass to destroy all that trammels the liberty of men, as if all men
deserved to be free, even though we know that they will not deserve to
be so until long after their deliverance. The harmonious use of liberty
is acquired only by a long misuse of its benefits. By proceeding at the
first to the most distant and highest ideal we have the greatest chance
of afterwards discovering the best."
And what is true of liberty is also true of the other rights of man.