Toward the end of their course Cæsar presented himself one day in his
friend Alzugaray’s office.
“I think,” he said, “that I am getting my philosophy into shape.”
“My dear man!”
“Yes. I have tacked some new contours on to my Darwinian pragmatism.”
Alzugaray, in whom every treasure-trove of his friend’s always produced
great surprise, stood staring naïvely at him.
“Yes, I am building up my system,” Cæsar went on, “a system within
relative truth. It is clear.”
“Let’s hear what it is.”
“In regard to us,” said Cæsar, as if he were speaking of something
that had happened in the street a few minutes before, “our uncertain
instrument of knowledge makes two apparent states of nature seem real to
us; one, the static, in which things are perceived by us as motionless;
the other, the dynamic, wherein these same things are found in motion.
It is clear that in reality everything is in motion; but within the
relative truth of our ideas we are able to believe that there are some
things in repose and others in action. Isn’t that so?”
“Yes. That is, I think so,” replied Alzugaray, who was beginning to
wonder if the whole earth was trembling under his feet.
“Good!” Cæsar continued. “I am going to pass from nature to life: I
am going to assume that life has a purpose. Where can this purpose be
found? We don’t know. But what can be the machinery of this purpose?
Only movement, action. That is to say, struggle. This assertion once
made, I am going to take a hand in carrying it out. The things we call
spiritual also are dynamic. Who says anything whatsoever says matter and
force; who says force affirms attraction and repulsion; attraction and
repulsion are synonymous with movement, with struggle, with action. Now
I am inside of my system. It will consist of putting all the forces near
me into movement, into action, into struggle. What pleasure may there be
in this? First, the pleasure of doing, the pleasure, we might call
it, of efficiency; secondly, the pleasure of seeing, the pleasure of
observing.... What do you think of it?”
“Fine, man! The things you start are always good.” “Then there is the
moral point. I think I have settled that too.”
“That too?”
“Yes. Morals should be nothing more than the true, fitting, and natural
law of man. Man considered solely as a spiritual machine? No. Considered
as an animal that eats and drinks? Not that either. Man considered as a
complete whole. Isn’t that so?”
“I believe it is.”
“I proceed. In nature laws become more obscure, according as more
complicated objects of knowledge turn up. We all clearly see the law
of the triangle, and the law of oxygen or of carbon with the same
clearness. These laws appear to us as being without exception. But then
comes the mineral, and we begin to see variations; in this form it
exerts one attraction, in that form a different one. We ascend to
the vegetable and find a sort of surprise-package. The surprises are
centupled in the animal; and are raised to an unknown degree in man.
What is the law of man, as man? We do not know it, probably we shall
never know it. Right and justice may be truths, but they will always
be fractional truths. Traditional morality is a pragmatism, useful and
efficacious for social life, for well-ordered life; but at the bottom,
without reality. Summing all this up: first, life is a labyrinth
which has no Ariadne’s thread but one,--action; secondly, man is upheld
in his high qualities by force and struggle. Those are my conclusions.”
“Clever devil! I don’t know what to say to you.”
Alzugaray asserted that, without taking it upon him to say whether his
friend’s ideas were good or bad, they had no practical value; but
Cæsar insisted once and many times on the advantages he saw in his
metaphysics.