Meanwhile, this space--the abode of our ignorance--which, after the
disappearance of the religious ideas, had appeared frightfully empty,
is gradually becoming peopled with vague, but enormous figures. Each
time that one of these new forms uprises, the boundless extent in which
it comes to move increases in proportions that are boundless in their
turn; for the limits of boundlessness evolve in our imagination without
ceasing. Assuredly, the gods who conceived certain positive religions
were sometimes very great. The Jewish and Christian God, for instance,
declared Himself incommensurable, containing all things, and His first
attributes were eternity and infinity. But the infinite is an abstract
and tenebrous notion which assumes life and is explained only by the
displacing of frontiers which we thrust back further and further into
the finite. It constitutes a formless extent of which we can acquire a
consciousness only with the aid of a few phenomena that start up on
points more or less distant from the centre of our imagination. It is
efficacious only through the multiplicity of the, so to speak, tangible
and positive faces of the unknown which it reveals to us in its depths.
It does not become comprehensible and perceptible to us until it shows
animation and movement and kindles on the several horizons of space
questions more and more distant, more and more foreign to all our
uncertainties. For our life to take part in its life, the infinite must
question us incessantly and incessantly place us in the presence of the
infinity of our ignorance, which is the only visible garment beneath
which it allows us to conjecture the infinity of its existence.
Now the most incommensurable gods hardly put questions similar to those
which are endlessly put to us by that which their adorers call the void,
which is, in reality, nature. They were content to reign in a dead
space, without events and without images, consequently without points
of reference for our imagination, and having only an immutable and
immobile influence over our thoughts and feelings. Thus, our sense of
the finite, which is the source of all higher activity, became atrophied
within us. Our intelligence, in order to live on the confines of itself,
where it accomplishes its loftiest mission, our thought, in order to
fill the whole space of our brain, needs to be continually excited by
fresh recallings of the unknown. So soon as it ceases to be daily
summoned to the extremity of its own strength by some new fact--and
there are hardly any new facts in the reign of the gods--it falls
asleep, contracts, gives way and sinks into decay. One thing alone is
capable of dilating equally, in all their parts, all the lobes of our
head, and that is the active idea which we conceive of the riddle in the
midst of which we have our being. Is there danger of error in declaring
that never was the activity of this idea comparable with that of
to-day? Never before, neither at the time when the Hindoo, Jewish or
Christian theology flourished, nor in the days when Greek or German
metaphysics were engaging all the forces of human genius, was our
conception of the universe enlivened, enriched and broadened by proofs
so unexpected, so laden with mystery, so energetic, so real. Until now,
it was fed on indirect nourishment, so to speak, or rather it fed
illusively on itself. It inflated itself with its own breath, sprinkled
itself with its own waters, and very little came to it from without.
To-day, the universe itself is beginning to penetrate into the
conception which we form of it. The diet of our thought is changed. That
which it takes comes from outside itself and adds to its substance. It
borrows instead of lending. It no longer sheds around itself the
reflection of its own greatness, but absorbs the greatness around it.
Until now, we had been prosing, with the aid of our infirm logic or our
idle imagination, on the subject of the riddle; to-day, issuing from our
too inward abode, we are trying to enter into relations with the riddle
itself. It questions us, and we stammer as best we may. We put questions
to it, and, in reply, it unmasks, at moments, a luminous and boundless
perspective in the immense circle of darkness amid which we move. We
were, it might be said, like blind men who should imagine the outer
world from inside a shut room. Now, we are those same blind men whom an
ever-silent guide leads by turns into the forest, across the plain, on
the mountain and beside the sea. Their eyes have not yet opened; but
their shaking and eager hands are able to feel the trees, to rumple the
spikes of corn, to gather a flower or a fruit, to marvel at the ridge
of a rock or to mingle with the cool waves, while their ears learn to
distinguish, without needing to understand, the thousand real songs of
the sun and the shade, the wind and the rain, the leaves and the waters.