Christ. With Buddha, life is only the gate of death; with Christ, death
is the gate of life. In reality, it is the same thing and everything
ends by the absorption into the divine, for the doctrine of Christ is
nothing more than a mutilated branch of the great trunk of the mother
religion.
Here we have the solution offered to us by the most wonderful mind,
the greatest sage that humanity has ever known; by one who knew things
which we no longer know and which, it may be, we shall never recover.
It is the foundation of the religion of five hundred millions of men.
There is nothing nearer to the ultimate truth.
4
Let us observe, however, that the problem of immortality or
annihilation ought not to be set in these terms, since the word
annihilation cannot be employed, save in a metaphorical sense, to
denote a life which we no longer comprehend, seeing that Nihil or
nothingness is the one thing whose existence is utterly impossible and
whose non-existence is absolutely certain.
As for immortality, here again there is ambiguity, for, as
annihilation cannot exist, immortality is inevitable; and the only
question that remains to be solved is whether this immortality will
or will not be accompanied by some sort of continuance of our present
consciousness.
But, while it is probable that the problem of immortality, more or
less accompanied by consciousness, will long remain in suspense,
the answer to the problem of the “nervous headache,” or rather of
congenital hemiphlegia, is doubtless easier to find. In any case,
it occupies a domain which our direct investigations are able to
explore. It is, after all, an historical and geographical question.
It seems that there are in fact in the human brain an eastern lobe
and a western lobe, which have never acted at the same time. The one
produces, here, reason, science and consciousness; the other secretes,
yonder, intuition, religion and subconsciousness. One reflects only
the infinite and the unknowable; the other is interested only in
what it is able to delimit, in what it may hope to understand. They
represent, employing a perhaps imaginary image, the conflict between
the material and the moral ideal of humanity. They have more than
once endeavoured to penetrate each other, to mingle and to work in
concert; but the western lobe, at least over the most active part of
the world, has hitherto paralysed and almost annihilated the efforts of
the other. We are indebted to it for extraordinary progress in all the
material sciences, but also for such catastrophes as those which we are
undergoing to-day, catastrophes which, if we are not careful, will not
be the last nor the worst. The time would seem to have come to awaken
the paralysed lobe; but we have neglected it so greatly that we no
longer quite know what it is capable of doing.
HOPE AND DESPAIR
XIII
HOPE AND DESPAIR
1
The same soldier, who has become my war-time “god-child,” writes to me
again:
“I experience an ineffable delight in remaining the average man and
in professing emptiness. I felt a great peace descend within me on
the day when I resigned myself to the common lot, in other words,
to ignorance and death. I have found life by renouncing it and, now
that I am no longer anything, I feel rich indeed. Do not tempt me in
the direction of that subtle spiritual vanity which constitutes one
of the most formidable obstacles to the final liberation from self.
Proud I certainly was and I am still only too much so; but we cannot
extract virtues otherwise than from our vices. More ardently than
when I embraced the phantom of individual superiority, I stretch
my arms towards homogeneous equality, towards the fullness of
vacancy....”
2
He is right; but he is thinking, here, with the eastern lobe of his
brain, the Asiatic lobe; and the philosophy of this lobe counsels only
inaction and renunciation, the “enchantment of the disenchanted,” as
Renan used to say, or rather the satisfaction of despair. Certainly all
we that see, all that we feel and all that we know pledges us to this
despair, which our meditations--above all, those of this same Asiatic
lobe--may, for that matter, render very spacious and as beautiful,
almost as habitable, as hope. But what do we know, as compared with
what we do not know? We are ignorant of all that goes before and of all
that comes after us, in a word, of the whole universe. Our despair,
which appears at first the last word and the last effort of wisdom, is
therefore based upon what we know, which is nothing, whereas the hope
of those whom we believe to be less wise can be based upon what we do
not know, which is everything.
Moreover, if we would be quite just, there is more than one reason for
hoping which we will not recall here; let us confess therefore that in
this nothing which we know there exists naught but despair and that
hope can lie only in that everything which we do not know. But, instead
of listening only to our eastern lobe, which counsels us to accept
this inactive ignorance and to bury our lives therein, is it not more
reasonable at the same time to set our western lobe to work, the lobe
which seeks to discover that everything? It is possible that here too,
when all is said, it will find despair; but it is unlikely, for we
cannot imagine a world which would be merely an act of despair. Now,
if the world is not an act of despair, nothing that exists in it has
reason to despair. In any case and in the meanwhile, this search will
doubtless permit us to hope as long as the world exists.
3
One of the most dangerous temptations that assail him who scrutinizes
nature and who sees, as he advances in his enquiries, that her
mysteries become more and more numerous, reaching forth unendingly
in every direction, is the temptation to grow discouraged by the
impossible task and to abandon it. He drops his weapons. On the last
slope of life particularly, he is too much inclined to resign himself,
to go no farther forward, to make no further effort, to fall into a
humour of saying, “What is the good?” and to drop asleep and learn
nothing more, since he has learnt that he will never know anything.
He is already sensible of this wish to surrender at discretion when he
considers the humblest, the lowliest of the sciences. What will it be
when he attempts to embrace them all? The mind goes astray, becomes
dizzy, asks to close its eyes. It must not close them. That would be
the basest treachery that man could commit. We have no other thing to
do in this life of ours than to seek to know where we are. We find no
other reason for our existence; we have no other duty. Not to know
is merely vexatious; no longer to seek to know is the supreme, the
irremediable misfortune, the unpardonable desertion.
4
Yet, without renouncing, it is not well that we should feed ourselves
upon too petty illusions. We should always keep before our eyes certain
verities which put us in our place. There is no doubt that we shall
never know everything; and so long as we do not know everything we
shall be just as though we knew nothing. It is extremely possible, as
the Rig-Veda suggests, that God Himself, or the first cause, does not
know everything. It is equally possible that the universe has not yet,
in any of its parts, become conscious of itself; that it knows not
whence it came nor whither it is going, what it was nor what it will
be, what it has accomplished nor what it is seeking to accomplish;
and, on the other hand, it is probable that, if it has not yet learnt
these things, it will never learn them, seeing that, as I have already
said, there is no reason why it should be able, in the infinity of time
which will come after us, to do what it has not been able to do in the
infinity of time which went before.
5
If there be a consciousness of the universe, a God, He knows all that
He should know, or He will never know it. And, if He knows it, why has
He done what He has done, which cannot lead to anything, seeing that He
might already have led us where we ought to go? Why did He not prefer
nothingness, or at least that which we call nothingness, the only form
of lasting happiness, immovable, incontestable and comprehensible?
We could understand, if need were, an immobile, immutable, eternal
universe, a finished universe; but we cannot understand a universe
in movement, or one, at least, of which all the parts that we see are
incessantly in movement, evolving through space and time, a universe
hurling itself at a dizzy rate of speed towards an end which it will
never attain, since it has not yet attained it.
We may say, to console ourselves, that all despair comes only from the
limited nature of our purview; but it is fair to add that our purview
limits all hope in the same way.
MACROCOSM AND MICROCOSM
XIV
MACROCOSM AND MICROCOSM
1
The biologists tell us that the human embryo repeats, very rapidly
during the early months of its development and more slowly during the
later months, all the forms of life which preceded man upon this earth.
The round speck which is the germ becomes a hollow sphere, a sort
of sac with a double wall, which is known as the gastrula and whose
orifice of invagination, when it closes, receives the name of the
blastopore. This is protozoic life, the as yet gelatinous beginning of
animal life, and is followed, after transformations that would take too
long to enumerate, by polypoid life.
Next, on either side of the head, appear the branchial arches,
corresponding with the gills of the fish. At the end of the first
month, the limbs are still no more than mere buds; on the other hand,
the embryo is provided with a tail, which, folded against the body,
nearly touches the forehead. It now has the appearance of a tadpole
and lives a life which is wholly aquatic, bathed in the amniotic fluid
which represents for it the water in which the embryos of fish and
frogs move about freely.
It now becomes a matter of forming a resolution and knowing what to do
with it. The embryo is almost in the situation occupied by life at the
origin of the species; and nature, as though to humiliate man or to
humiliate herself by remembering her mistakes and hesitations, returns
to her gropings, her asymmetrics, her repentances, her unsuccessful
experiments. Tentative forms, such as the dorsal cord, are reabsorbed;
the primitive kidneys disappear, to make room for the final kidneys,
which are enormous, filling the greater portion of the peritoneal
cavity. Enormous too is the liver, which invades almost the whole of
the visceral cavity; enormous the head, almost as large as the rest
of the body; and in this enormous head the primitive ocular vesicles
are formed, themselves enormous, as is the umbilical vesicle. This is
the incoherent and monstrous period corresponding with the period of
madness and gigantism when nature, as yet inexperienced, was blindly
sketching uncertain creatures, formidable, unbalanced and anomalous,
birds, crocodiles, elephants and fish in one, as though she had not
as yet decided what to do, not yet completed her classifications,
disentangled her laws, or acquired the sense of proportion, of balance,
or of conditions essential to the maintenance of the life which she was
creating.
2
This, roughly speaking, is the recapitulation which occurs before
our eyes, but of which, no doubt, many incidents escape us or do not
sufficiently attract our attention, for it is possible that they
reproduce types with which we are not acquainted and which have not
even left geological traces, seeing that the number of species which
have disappeared is infinitely greater than that of the species which
we know.
Dr. Hélan Jaworski may therefore very justly assert that the embryonic
period corresponds with the geological period. And, even as, in the
great terrestrial evolution, we observe the gradual disappearance of
the armour-plated fishes, the monstrous reptiles and the gigantic
mammals, so, in the minor embryonic evolution, we see the primitive
kidney, the dorsal cord and the umbilical vesicle dissolve, while the
liver diminishes and the disproportion between the head and the rest of
the body is lessened. In a word, nature is learning wisdom, recognizing
her errors, profiting by her experience, doing her best to repair her
blunders and acquiring a sense of equilibrium, economy and form.
Dr. Jaworski finds other analogies between the geological period
corresponding with man’s appearance upon earth and the birth of the
child, analogies which are ingenious, but rather more hazardous. Birth
is in fact preceded by a miniature deluge, caused by the tearing of
the foetal envelopes, which allow the amniotic fluid to escape. Then
the child, at the moment of entering into life, suddenly experiences a
sort of glacial period; it passes, in fact, from an environment with
a temperature of over 98° to the outer air, which is barely 60° or
65°. The sense of cold is so terrible that it wrests a first cry of
suffering from the new-born child.
3
What is the meaning of this strange recapitulation?
Dr. Jaworski thinks that, if the brief process of embryonic evolution
which prepares the way for the birth of man repeats the great process
of terrestrial evolution, this latter, on its side, might well be but
a vast embryonic period that is preparing for a birth which we cannot
as yet imagine. I do not know whether he will succeed in maintaining
this stupendous theory. If he does, he will really have made us, as he
promises to do, “take a step towards the essence of things.” Meanwhile,
thanks to his preparatory studies, he will always have made us take
another and a very useful step towards a truth which this time is
incontestable, which, though less unexpected, has never been elucidated
with so much patience and which is no less big with consequences.
4
Dr. Jaworski, then, undertakes to demonstrate that the human body
unites in itself, in a plainly recognizable form, all the living
creatures which now exist upon earth and which have existed since
the origin of life. In other words, each creature sums up in itself
all those which have preceded it; and man, the last-comer, contains
within himself the whole biological tree, so much so that, if we could
distribute his body, if we could segregate each of his organs and keep
it alive in isolation, we should be able to reconstitute all existing
forms, to repeople the earth with all the species which it has borne,
from the primitive protoplasm to the synthesis, the final achievement,
which is man.
We might perhaps go farther than Dr. Jaworski and declare, with the
occultists of the east, that we likewise contain within us, in the germ
or in a rough-hewn state, all the creatures and all the forms that will
come after us. But here we should be leaving the domain of science
proper to lose ourselves in a speculation which by its very nature is
incapable of verification.
5
So it is not merely in a figurative sense, such as that foreshadowed by
the current idiom, where it speaks of the vascular tree, the branches
of nerves, or the ovarian cluster; it is not merely by analogy, but in
a literal and strictly scientific sense that our heart, fundamentally,
is nothing but a medusa and our kidneys sponges, that our intestines
represent the polyps and our skeleton the polypites, that our
reproductive organs are worms or molluscs, that the vertebral column
and the spinal marrow take the place of the Echinodermata, while the
Brachiopoda and the Ctenophora would be derived from our eye and the
reptiles found in our digestive apparatus, the birds in our respiratory
organs and so on.
I repeat, there is no question here of metaphors or of more or less
approximate, elastic and plausible correspondences but of rigorously
and meticulously established proofs.
I cannot, of course, set before you the details of Dr. Jaworski’s
exegesis. It would not permit of the slightest solution of continuity
and, in the three volumes published so far, it leads us to conclusions
which are very difficult to contest. People used to assert, without
attaching too much faith to what they said or scrutinizing it too
closely, that man is a microcosm. It seems to be clearly proved to-day
that this is not merely literally defensible, but scientifically
accurate. We are a prehistoric colony, immense and innumerous, a living
agglomeration of all that lives, has lived and probably will live upon
earth. We are not only the sons or brothers of the worms, the reptiles,
the fish, the frogs, the birds, the mammals and no matter what monsters
have defiled or affrighted the surface of the globe: we bear them
within us; our organs are no other than themselves; we nourish all
their types; they are only awaiting an opportunity to escape from us,
to reappear, to reconstitute themselves, to develop and to plunge us
once again into terror. In this respect, quite as much as in respect
of the secret thoughts, the vices and the phantoms with which we are
filled, we might repeat the words which Emerson’s old man used to speak
to his children, when they were frightened by a strange face in the
dark passage:
“Children, you will never see anything worse than yourselves!”
If all the species were to disappear and only man remained, none
would be lost and all might be reborn of his body, as though they were
coming out of Noah’s ark, from the almost invisible protozoa down to
the formidable antediluvian colossi which could lick the roofs of our
houses.
It is therefore fairly probable that all these species take part in
our existence, in, our instincts, in all our feelings, in all our
thoughts; and here once more we are led back to the great religions of
India, which foresaw all the truths that we are gradually discovering
and which already, thousands of years ago, were telling us that man
is everything and that he must recognize his essence in every living
creature.
HEREDITY AND PREEXISTENCE
XV
HEREDITY AND PREEXISTENCE
1
The law of heredity which insists that the descendants shall suffer
by the faults and profit by the virtues of their ancestors comprises
truths that are no longer disputed. They shine forth, visible to the
eyes of all. The child of a drunkard will bear the burden of his
father’s vice all his life long, from the day of his birth to that of
his death, in body and in mind. One might say that by this irrefutable
example nature had intended ostentatiously to affirm and manifest
the implacable character of her law, as though to make us understand
that she takes no account whatever of our conceptions of justice and
injustice and that she acts on an unvarying principle in all the
obscure circumstances in which we cannot follow the inextricable
windings of her will. This example, if we had no other, would be enough
to brand that inhuman will with infamy. There is no law more repugnant
to our reason, to our sense of responsibility, nor one which does a
deeper injury to our trust in the universe and the unknown spirit
that rules it. Of all life’s injustices, this is the most glaring and
the least comprehensible. For most of the others we find excuses or
explanations; but, when we remember that a new-born child, a child
which did not ask to be born, is, from the moment of inhaling its first
breath of air, smitten with irremediable insolvency, with a ferocious,
irrevocable sentence and with evils which it will drag to the grave, it
seems to us that not one of the most hateful tyrants that history has
cursed would have dared to do what nature does quietly every day.
But do we really bear the burden of the errors of the dead? In the
first place, is it quite certain that the dead are really dead and no
longer dwell within us? It is a fact that we continue them, that we
are the durable part of what they were. We cannot deny that we are
still subject to their influence, that we reproduce their features and
their characters, that we represent them almost entirely, that they
continue to live and to act in us; it is therefore very natural that
they also should continue to bear the consequences of an action or a
way of living which their departure has not interrupted.
“But,” you may say, “I had no part in this action, this habit, this
vice for which I am paying to-day. I was not consulted; I had no
opportunity of uttering a protest, of checking my father, or my
grandfather, as he went to his ruin down the fatal precipice. I was not
born; I did not yet exist!”
How do you know? May there not be a fundamental mistake in the idea
of heredity as we conceive it? At one end of the beam of those scales
which we accuse of injustice hangs heredity, but the other is borne
down by something different, which we have never taken into account,
for it has not yet a name, something which is the antithesis of
heredity, which cleaves into the future instead of emerging from the
past and which we might call preexistence or prenatality.
Even as our dead still live in us, so we have already lived in them.
There is no reason to believe that the future, which is full of life,
is less active and less potent than the past, which is full of the
dead. Instead of descending, should we not rather ascend the course of
the years to discover the source of our actions?
We know not in what fashion those already dwell in us who shall be
born of us, down to the last generation; but that they do dwell in us
is certain. Whatever the number of our descendants, in the sequence of
the ages, whatever the transformations which the elements, climates,
countries and centuries may cause them to undergo, they will keep
intact, through all vicissitudes, the principle of life which they have
derived from us. They have not obtained it elsewhere or they could not
be what they are. They have really issued from us; and, if they have
issued from us, it is because they were in us from the first. What were
they doing within us, all these innumerable, accumulated lives? Is it
permissible to suppose that they were absolutely inactive? Then what
were their functions, what their power? What divided them from us? When
did we begin, where did they end? At what point did their thoughts and
their desires mingle with ours?
“How could they think and act in us,” you ask, “having as yet no brain?”
True; but they had ours. The dead too are without a brain; nevertheless
no one will deny that they continue to think and act in us. This brain
of which we are so proud is not the source but the condenser of thought
and will. Like the Leyden jar or the Ruhmkorff coil, it exists, it is
animated only so long as the electric fluid of life passes through it
or resides in it. It does not produce this fluid, it collects it;
what matters is not its convolutions, which may be compared with the
windings of an induction-coil, but the life that flows through it; and
what can this life be, if it be not the sum of all the existences which
are accumulated within us, which are not extinguished at our death,
which begin before our birth and which continue us, forwards, and
backwards, into the infinity of time?
2