Let us, nevertheless, try to pick out a few clues; and let us state, in
the first place, that our conception of the universe has been greatly
and most effectively modified and, above all, that it is tending to
become modified more and more rapidly. Without our accounting for it,
each of the numerous discoveries of science--whether affecting history,
anthropology, geography, geology, medicine, physics, chemistry,
astronomy or the rest--changes our accustomed atmosphere and adds some
essential thing to an image which we do not yet distinguish, but which
we see looming above us, occupying the whole horizon, and which we feel,
by a presentiment, to be enormous. Its features are straggling, like
those illuminations which we see at evening fêtes. A frontal, colonnade,
cupola and portico, all incoherent, appear abruptly in the sky. We do
not know what they mean, to what they belong. They hang absurdly in the
motionless ether; they are inconsistent dreams in the still firmament.
But, suddenly, a little line of light meanders across the blue, and, in
the twinkling of an eye, connects the cupola with the columns, the
portico with the frontal, the steps with the ground; and the unexpected
edifice, as though flinging aside a mask of darkness, stands affirmed
and explicit in the night.
It is this little line of light, this deciding undulation, this flash of
general and complementary fire that is still lacking in the night of our
intelligence. But we feel that it exists, that it is there, outlined in
shadow in the darkness, and that a mere nothing, a spark issuing from we
know not what science will be enough to light it and to give an
infallible and exact sense to our immense presentiments and to all the
scattered notions that seem to stray through unfathomable space.