And we are just at the moment when a thousand new reasons for having
confidence in the destinies of our kind are being born around us. For
hundreds and hundreds of centuries we have occupied this earth; and the
greatest dangers seem past. They were so threatening that we have
escaped them only by a chance that cannot occur more than once in a
thousand times in the history of the worlds. The earth, still too young,
was poising its continents, its islands and its seas before fixing them.
The central fire, the first master of the planet, was at every moment
bursting from its granite prison; and the globe, hesitating in space,
wandered among greedy and hostile stars ignorant of their laws. Our
undetermined faculties floated blindly in our bodies, like the nebulæ in
the ether; a mere nothing could have destroyed our human future at the
groping hours when our brain was forming itself, when the network of our
nerves was branching out. To-day, the instability of the seas and the
uprisings of the central fire are infinitely less to be feared; in any
case, it is unlikely that they will bring about any more universal
catastrophes. As for the third peril, collision with a stray star, we
may be permitted to believe that we shall be granted the few centuries
of respite necessary for us to learn how to ward it off. When we see
what we have done and what we are on the point of doing, it is not
absurd to hope that one day we shall lay hold of that essential secret
of the worlds which, for the time being and to soothe our ignorance
(even as we soothe a child and lull it to sleep by repeating to it
meaningless and monotonous words), we have called the law of
gravitation. There is nothing mad in supposing that the secret of this
sovereign force lies hidden within us, or around us, within reach of our
hand. It is perhaps tractable and docile, even as light and electricity;
it is perhaps wholly spiritual and depends upon a very simple cause
which the displacing of an object may reveal to us. The discovery of an
unexpected property of matter, analogous to that which has just
disclosed to us the disconcerting qualities of radium, may lead us
straight to the very sources of the energy and the life of the stars;
and from that moment man's lot would be changed and the earth,
definitively saved, would become eternal. It would, at our pleasure,
draw closer to or further from the centres of heat and light, it would
flee from worn-out suns and go in search of unsuspected fluids, forces
and lives in the orbit of virgin and inexhaustible worlds.