system blindly and automatically. As with other systems, a certain
science, a certain experience, a certain deftness are indispensable.
Though science and experience are evasive qualities here, fugitive and
at the mercy of Chance, they are by no means illusory. The careful and
experienced player understands how to approach and nurse his luck, or
at least how not to thwart it. He guesses the beginning and the end
of a favourable series. He foresees alternations and intermittences;
and, when he does not succeed in grasping their rhythm, he prefers
to abstain from playing, rather than encounter them inopportunely.
He makes more than one mistake, but makes far fewer than those who,
faithful to the very scientific theory of the absolute independence of
each _coup_, back either colour at any moment. He does not surrender
to the fixed rigidity of logic, he does not throw the gauntlet down to
fate, he does not defy the animosity of fortune. He is never obstinate.
He does not struggle on, sullenly, to his last coin, against an
iniquitous run, in order to gain the bitter satisfaction of learning
the utmost depths of his ill-luck and the injustice of fate. He has
no self-conceit, no prejudices, no inflexible opinions. He is docile,
plastic and accommodating. Devoid of all false shame, he cheerfully
abandons his pretensions and pays court to fortune. He retraces his
steps and retracts at fitting times. He stops, starts afresh, yields,
tacks about, allows himself to be borne upon the tide and comes safely
to harbour, while the arrogant, overbold and headstrong pilot founders
in deep water.
Beyond all else, he studies the character and temper of the table at
which he takes his seat, for each table has its psychology, its habits,
its history, which vary from day to day and yet by the end of the year
form a homogeneous whole wherein all temporary errors, all anomalies
and injustices are compensated. The question is to know on what page
of this history he should prepare to play his part. He will not learn
this at once. It is of little use for him to peep at the notes and
_permanences_ of the players who have come before him. What he wants is
the immediate contact, the very breath of the hidden god. But the god
is already thrilling into life, taking shape and countenance, giving
a whispered hint of his intentions, speaking words of approval or
condemnation; and the tragic struggle begins between the player, so
infinitely small, and Chance, so enormous and omnipotent.
13
Now that the battle is joined, now that the player has done what he
could to summon and welcome luck, there is nothing left for him to do
but wait; for luck, when all is said, will remain the supreme power
that pronounces the final verdict, the formidable and inevitable
unknown factor in every combination. The best of systems cannot
overcome an abnormal and pitiless run of bad luck which makes you stake
incessantly on the losing colour. A run like this, without favourable
intermittences, is extremely rare but always possible. It corresponds,
for that matter, with the extraordinary strokes of good luck, which
seem more frequent only because they attract more attention. From time
to time we see a man, or rather let me say a woman--for it is nearly
always female players who have these inspirations--walk up to the
table and with a high hand and not the least hesitation gamble _en
plein_ or _en cheval_, on a _transversale_ or _carré_, and win time
after time, as though she saw beforehand where the ball would fall.
These moments of intuition are always very brief; and, if the player
insists or grows stubborn, she will soon lose whatever she has won.
It is none the less true that, when we observe this very obvious and
striking phenomenon, we wonder whether there is not something more in
it than mere coincidence. When all is said, can luck be anything other
than a passing and dazzling intuition of what will flash into actuality
before everybody’s eyes a second later? Is not the compartment which
does not yet contain the little ball, but which in an instant will snap
it up and hold it, is not this compartment already, somewhere, a thing
of the present and even of the past? But these are questions which
would lead us too far afield in space and time.
14
Be this as it may, to return to the system of which we were speaking,
even if I were at liberty to divulge its secret I should not do so.
I am not a very austere moralist and I look upon gambling as one of
those profoundly human evils which we shall never be able to uproot
and which, for all our efforts, will always reappear in a new form.
Still, the least that we can do is not to encourage it. The gambler, I
mean the inveterate, almost professional gambler, is not interesting.
To begin with, he is an idler and nearly always a part of the world’s
flotsam, with no justification for his existence. If he be rich, he
is making the most foolish, the most dismal use of his money that can
be imagined. If he be poor, he is even less easily to be forgiven: he
should know better than to sacrifice his days and too often the welfare
and the peace of mind of those dependent on him to a will-o’-the-wisp.
Underlying the gambler we find too often a sluggard, an incompetent,
a boneless egoist, greedy of vulgar and unmerited pleasures, a
dissatisfied and inefficient individual. Gambling is the stay-at-home,
imaginary, squalid, mechanical, anæmic and unlovely adventure of those
who have never been able to encounter or create the real, necessary
and salutary adventures of life. It is the feverish and unhealthy
activity of the wastrel. It is the purposeless and desperate effort of
the debilitated, who no longer possess or never possessed the courage
and patience to make the honest, persevering effort, the unspasmodic,
unapplauded effort which every human life demands.
There is also a great deal of puerile vanity about the gambler. Taken
for all in all, he is a child still seeking his place in the universe.
He has not yet realized his position. He thinks himself peerless in the
face of destiny. In his self-infatuation he expects the unknown or the
unknowable to do for him what it does not do for any one whomsoever.
And he expects this for no reason, simply because he is himself and
because others have not that privilege. He must tempt fate incessantly,
hurriedly, anxiously, in I know not what idle and pretentious hope of
learning to know himself from without. Whatever fortune’s decision
may be, he will find cause for preening himself. If he have no luck,
he will feel flattered because he is specially persecuted by fortune;
if he be lucky, he will think all the more highly of himself because
of the exceptional gifts which she bestows upon him. For the rest, he
does not need to believe that he deserves these gifts; on the contrary,
the less right he has to them, the prouder he will be of them; and the
unjust and manifestly undeserved chance which makes them his will form
the best part of the vainglorious satisfaction which he will contrive
to extract from them.
15
It would be extremely surprising, I said when I began, if this
indefatigable and exhaustive enquiry into Chance, pursued for over
fifty years, had failed to yield some sort of result. I am wondering,
at the end of this investigation, what that result is. At the cost of
an insane waste of money, time, physical, nervous and moral energy and
spiritual forces perhaps more precious still, it has taught us that
Chance is in short Chance, that is to say, an aggregate of effects
whereof we do not know the causes. But we knew as much as this before;
and our new discovery is a little derisory. We have seen the shadowy
appearance of certain laws or habits from which a few players appear
to derive advantage, though this advantage is always precarious. But
these apparent laws, which tend obscurely and uncertainly to instil a
little order into Chance, are, like Chance itself, but inconsistent
and ephemeral summaries of results from unknown causes. Upon the whole
we have learnt nothing, unless perhaps it be that we were wrong to
attach greater importance to those manifestations of destiny than
they possess. If we look at them more closely, we find that there is
nothing more behind all these catastrophes and all these mysteries of
luck than the catastrophe and the mysteries which we put there. We link
our fate to the fate of a little ball which is not responsible for it;
and, because we entrust it for a moment with our fortune, we fondly
imagine that mysterious moral powers are bent on directing and ending
its course at the right or wrong moment. It knows nothing of all this;
and, though the lives of thousands of men depended on its fall to the
right or the left of the point at which it stops, it would not care. It
has laws of its own, which it must obey and which are so complex that
we do not even try to explain them. It is just a little ball, honestly
seeking the little red or black hole in which to go to sleep and having
nothing very much to tell us of the secrets of a luck or destiny which
exist only within ourselves.
THE RIDDLE OF PROGRESS
XI
THE RIDDLE OF PROGRESS
1
This war, which is one such as had never yet been waged upon this
earth of ours, leads us to consider the great problem of the future of
mankind.
Dare we hope that humanity will one day renounce these monstrous
follies and that they will become altogether impossible? To this
question, if we wish to meet it at its source, I see but one reply,
which I have already given elsewhere and which I will here recapitulate
and complete, namely, that we are engulfed in a universe which has no
more limit in time than it has in space, which had no beginning, as it
will have no end, and which has behind it as many myriads of myriads of
years as it discovers ahead of it. Yesterday’s eternity and to-morrow’s
are precisely identical. All that the universe is going to do it must
have already done, for it has had as many opportunities of doing so as
it will ever have. All the things that it has not done are things which
it will never be able to do, because nothing will be added, in space
or time, to what it has already possessed in space or time. It has
necessarily made in the past all the efforts and all the experiments
which it will make in the future; and all that has gone before, having
been subject to the same chances, is perforce the same as all that is
to follow.
2
It is probable, therefore, that there was once an infinity of worlds
similar to our own, even as it is likely that there is an infinity of
such similar worlds at present, the infinity of space being comparable
with that of time. These coincidences, however difficult for us to
picture, must inevitably occur and recur in the immeasurable and the
innumerous in which we are immersed, that is, unless the infinity of
possible combinations be less unlimited than those of time and space.
This is where our capacity of imagination halts, for it is easier for
us to conceive the infinities of space and time than the infinity of
combinations. To obtain some idea of the latter, we should have to
understand the substance and the nature, the laws and the forces, in a
word, the whole riddle of existence. None the less is it true that this
possible infinity of combinations is our only hope; without it there
would be nothing more to expect of a universe which obviously would
have tried and exhausted everything before our coming.
But, if this number of combinations is really infinite, it is open to
us to say that the earth is an experiment which had not yet been made
and an experiment which has failed, since suffering and evil have the
upper hand of happiness and goodness. If the experiment has failed,
we are its victims; but we are not forbidden to hope that our efforts
will in some way modify combinations which will be more fortunate in
other places or at another time. If the experiment has failed, it does
not follow that others have not succeeded and are not more fortunate,
at this very moment, in other worlds than ours. We may even suppose
that, in the infinity of these combinations and experiments, the most
successful tend to become fixed and crystallized and that, in view of
their infinite number, they will bring about successfully in the future
what they have not brought about successfully in the past. This is a
hazardous glimmer; but I doubt whether any others will be discovered to
keep us uplifted above despair.
3
Let us for a moment assume that the experiment of this world had not
miscarried as it has; that the mind of man, which, since the beginning,
has been struggling painfully against matter and winning but a few
brief, uncertain and precarious victories, were a million times more
powerful and better-armed. It would no doubt have triumphed over all
that weighs us down and keeps us where we are; it would have freed
itself from the apparently illusory fetters of space and time. It is
not unreasonable to admit that, among the myriads of worlds which
people the infinite, there are some in which these better conditions
are realized. Perhaps, after all, it would be impossible to imagine
anything that does not exist somewhere in reality, for we may very
rightly maintain that our imaginings can be nothing more than stray
reflections of things that already exist. Now, if we lived in one of
those worlds and if we could see, as we should perhaps be allowed
to see, all that is happening at this moment on the earth which we
now inhabit and on others which are perhaps even worse and more
unfortunate, it seems to us that we should know neither rest nor ease
until we had intervened and helped to make it better and wiser and more
habitable.
4
For that matter, no one can tell us that this is not so now and that
all our spiritual victories, all that seems, at certain moments, to
be leading us towards a future less hideous than the past, all the
mysterious currents of good that sometimes flow through our world, all
that awaits us after death, no one, I say, can tell us that all this is
not due to the intervention of one of those worlds. It is true that we
cannot perceive the act of intervention, that we are hardly sensible
of it; but it is also true that these creatures of a higher world,
being of necessity less encumbered with matter and more spiritual than
we, must necessarily remain invisible to us. In the infinity of the
firmament we discover myriads of worlds that are material worlds like
our own; and we are able to discover only these, because all that does
not more or less closely resemble our own world must needs escape us.
But the space lying between the stars, which to us appears void, is
infinitely wider than the space which they themselves occupy; and it
would be strange indeed if it were not filled with worlds which we
cannot perceive at all, or rather if it were not itself one vast world
which our eyes are incapable of taking in.
It is, moreover, thinkable that, if we do not see these other worlds,
they, not being material worlds, do not perceive matter and are
consequently as unaware of us as we are unaware of them; for we are
doubtless mistaken in believing that, because we are visible to one
another, we are necessarily visible to all other beings. On the
contrary, there is reason to presume that these spiritual beings pass
through us without suspecting our presence and that, as they are
conscious and sensible only of that which emanates from the spirit,
they do not suspect or discover our existence except in so far as we
approach the conditions in which they exist.
5
Consider the earth in its origin: at first, a shapeless nebula,
becoming gradually more and more condensed; next, a globe of fire, of
rocks in fusion, whirling for millions of years through space, with
no other object than that of forming into a mass and cooling: an
inconceivable incandescence, which none of our sources of heat can
enable us to picture; an essential, scientific, absolute barrenness
which may well have proclaimed itself irremediable and everlasting.
Who would have thought that from these torrents of matter in eruption,
which seemed to have destroyed for ever all life or the least germ of
life, there would emerge each and every form of life itself, from the
most enormous, the strongest, the most enduring, the most impetuous,
the most abundant, down to the slightest, the least visible, the most
precarious, the most ephemeral, the most exiguous? Who above all could
have dared foresee that they would give birth to what seems so utterly
alien to the liquefied or pasty rocks and metals that alone formed the
surface, the nucleus and the very entity of our globe, I mean our human
intelligence and consciousness?
6
Is it possible to imagine a more unexpected evolution and ending?
What could astonish us after so great an astonishment and what are
we not entitled to hope of a world which, after being what it was,
has produced what we see and what we are? Considering that it started
from a sort of negation of life, from integral barrenness and from
worse than nothing, in order to end in us, where will it not end after
starting from ourselves? If its birth and formation have elaborated
such prodigies, what prodigies may not its existence, its indefinite
prolongation and its dissolution hold in store for us? There are an
immeasurable distance and inconceivable transformations between the
one frightful material of the early days and the human thought of
this moment; and there will doubtless be a like distance and like
transformations as difficult to conceive between the thought of this
moment and that which will succeed it in the infinity of time.
It seems as if, in the beginning, our earth did not know what to do
with its material and with its force, which inter-devoured each other.
In the vast, flaming void in which it was being consumed, it had not
yet the shadow of an object or an idea; to-day, it has so many that
our scholars wear out their lives to no purpose in seeking them and
are overwhelmed by the number of its mysterious and inexhaustible
combinations.
At that time it disposed of but a single force, the most destructive
that we knew, fire. If everything was born of fire, which itself seemed
to be born only to destroy, what will not be born of that which seems
to be born only to produce, beget and multiply? If it was able to do so
much with the lava and the red-hot cinders which were the only elements
that it possessed, what will it not be able to do with all that it will
end by possessing?
7
It is well sometimes to tell ourselves that we are at least living in a
world which has not yet exhausted its future and which is much nearer
to its beginning than to its end. It was born only yesterday and has
but lately disentangled its original chaos. It is at the starting-point
of its hopes and its experiments. We believe that it is making for
death, whereas all its past, on the contrary, shows that it is much
more probably making for life. In any case, as its years pass by, the
quantity and still more the quality of the life which it engenders
and maintains tend to increase and to improve. It has given us only
the first-fruits of its miracles; and in all likelihood there is no
more connection between what it was and what it is than there will be
between what it is and what it will be. No doubt, when its greatest
marvels burst into being, we shall no longer possess the lives which
we possess to-day; but we shall still be there under another form, we
shall still be existing somewhere, on its surface or in its depths; and
it is not utterly improbable that one of its last prodigies will reach
us in our dust, awaken us and recall us to life, in order to impart to
us at last the share of happiness which we had not enjoyed and to teach
us that we were wrong not to interest ourselves, on the further side of
our graves, in the destiny of this earth of ours, of which we had never
ceased to be the immortal offspring.
THE TWO LOBES
XII
THE TWO LOBES
1
A soldier writes me the following letter from the front:
“There are quagmires and skeletons in the forest. I have discovered
and admired the ruined gods under the still living and wonderful
vegetation: their spirit has evaporated. The odour of Christ has
little charm for me; I prefer that of Buddha. What I adore in him
is the fundamental contradiction that seeks to assure us of our
immortality by proving our inevitable annihilation. He taught,
in the same breath, the illusion of the Ego and its periodical
reincarnation, an obvious absurdity which implies a knowledge of the
profoundest truth, of the very nature of being, at the same time and
alternately collective and individual. This discovery, which he did
not formulate, should have led him elsewhere than to Nirvana, that
paradise of unripe fruits....
“Man is so fashioned as to perceive only one half of the universe;
and the mind of ordinary texture sees barely a hemisphere of truth.
Afflicted with a congenital ‘nervous headache,’ humanity thinks with
only one half of its brain, with the eastern lobe or the western, the
ancient or the modern; its mind nibbles its own tail; the antinomies
pursue one another in an endless circle, which Kant believed that he
had discovered, but which Buddha had striven to open. He possessed
the complementary virtues; he was religious and rational; while he
summed up within himself the mysticism of the east, his was the most
scientific of the minds of antiquity, at a time when science did not
exist but was merged in philosophy. The moderns who have sought to
condense into a system the collective and hardly initiated effort
of science have pitiably failed, for they have thought only as
westerners, entangled in the contradiction of idealistic aspirations
and materialistic arguments, whereas Buddha’s formula might still
and almost without breaking down contain this gigantic effort and
yet not hamper it. From the death of the prince-philosopher, down to
the flights of contemporary science, true thought has not advanced
one step; Arab or Christian spiritualism and its reagent, positivist
or scientific materialism, are recoils in contrary directions, false
monisms which, taking the extreme for the supreme, seek to fix the
centre of gravity on the circumference of the wheel. The explorers of
the Beyond must set out from the cross-roads of religious synthesis
and scientific analysis and drag these rival sisters by the hand.
“Truth shines at the centre of a circle of onlookers and we must pass
through its flame to recognize a brother in the adversary opposite.
We must reach the centre of space to discern the identity of its
cardinal points: ‘_Totum et Nihil, Alter et Ego_.’ The longing to
convert others must yield to the need of completing and balancing
our own point of view. In the sacred forest, which pioneers have
penetrated on all sides and in all ages, the more greatly daring must
necessarily draw nearer one to the other. Even if they cannot meet,
they can hear one another and give one another mutual encouragement.
The most modest cry of discovery may be welcome in the solitude and
silence in which the truth of the future is ripening....”
2
I thought it well to preserve this page. It sets forth, in a
remarkable, though perhaps too rapid summary, two or three of the
great problems which in reality are only one and to which, unless we
give up everything, we are bound to attempt the answer: the problems
of immortality or annihilation, of flux and reflux, of existence
alternatively collective and individual, of exteriorization and
interiorization, which make up the mighty cosmic rhythm whereof our
life and death are but infinitesimal pulsations.
3
But let us begin by observing that the fundamental contradiction
which seeks to assure us of our immortality by proving our inevitable
annihilation is not to be found in Buddha and that it is not true to
say that he teaches in the same breath the illusion of the Ego and
its periodical reincarnation. The doctrine of reincarnation is not
Buddha’s. He found it ready-made; it existed before him and was so
deeply rooted in his people that he does not even dream of disputing
it. From the exoteric point of view, he tries only to disarm it, to
deprive it of its sting, to render it harmless. He tries to reduce
life to the point where it can find nothing wherewith to reincarnate
itself. According to the exoteric doctrine, which is but a preparation
for esoteric truth, life is naught but suffering; and its only aim is
the redemption or the extinction of suffering. This extinction is
to be found in Nirvana, which is not annihilation but the absorption
of the individual into the universe. Ordinary death, by reason of
the perpetual reincarnation of the same individual, cannot suppress
suffering. We must therefore find a sort of superdeath, which makes
any reincarnation impossible; and this superdeath can be obtained
only by the man who has been striving to die all his life long and
who has deliberately cut off all the ties that bind him to existence:
all love, all hope, all desire, all possession. When, at the end of
this systematic and voluntary superdeath, the actual death arrives, it
will no longer find a living germ capable of achieving reincarnation.
This superdeath, thus obtained, will precede by many centuries or
millenaries purification, final redemption and the absorption into the
absolute One.