We are emerging (to speak only of the last three or four centuries of
our present civilization), we are emerging from the great religious
period. During this period, despite the hopes laid beyond the tomb,
human life stood out against a somewhat gloomy and threatening
background. This background allowed the thousand mobile and diversely
shaded curtains of art and metaphysics to intervene pretty freely
between the last men and its faded folds. Its existence was to some
extent forgotten. It no longer appeared in view save at the hour of the
great rifts. Nevertheless, it always existed in the immanent state,
giving a uniform colour to the atmosphere and the landscape and giving
to human life a diffuse meaning which proposed a sort of provisional
patience upon questions that were too pressing.
To-day, this background is disappearing in tatters. What is there in its
place to give a visible form, a new meaning to the horizon?
The fallacious axis upon which humanity believed itself to revolve has
suddenly snapped in two; and the huge platform which carries mankind,
after swaying for some time in our alarmed imaginations, has quietly
settled itself again to turning on the real pivot that had always
supported it. Nothing is changed except one of those unexplained phrases
with which we cover the things which we do not understand. Hitherto, the
pivot of the world seemed to us to be made up of spiritual forces;
to-day, we are convinced that it is composed of purely material
energies. We flatter ourselves that a great revolution has been
accomplished in the kingdom of truth. As a matter of fact, there has
been, in the republic of our ignorance, but a permutation of epithets, a
sort of verbal _coup d'État_, the words "mind" and "matter" being no
more than the interchangeable attributes of the same unknown.