within our sphere, what, after all, is this evil which Karma punishes?
If we go to the very root of the matter, evil always arises from a lack
of intelligence, from an erroneous and incomplete judgment, obscured
or restricted by our egoism, which allows us to perceive only the
proximate or immediate advantages of an action harmful to ourselves
or others, while concealing the remote but inevitable consequences
which such an action always ends by begetting. The whole science of
ethics, after all, is based only upon intelligence; and what we call
heart, sentiments, character is in fact nothing but accumulated and
crystallized intelligence, inherited or acquired, which has become
more or less unconscious and is transformed into habits or instincts.
The evil which we do we do only because of a mistaken egoism, which
sees the limits of its being too near at hand. As soon as intelligence
raises the point of view of this egoism, the limits extend, widen and
end by disappearing. The terrible and insatiable ego loses its centre
of attraction and avidity and knows itself, finds itself and loves
itself in all things. Let us not believe blindly in the intelligence of
the wicked who succeed, or in the happiness of the criminal. We ought
rather to see the converse, that is to say, the often hideous reality
of the success; moreover, this intelligence, in the shape of skill,
cunning or disloyalty, is a specialized intelligence, confined within
a narrow circuit and, like a constricted jet of water, very effective
when directed at a single point; but it is not a true and general,
spacious and generous intelligence. Wherever the latter reveals
itself, we necessarily find honesty, justice, forbearance, love and
kindness, because there is a lofty and full horizon and because there
is an instinctive or conscious knowledge of human proportions, of the
eternity of existence and the brevity of life, of man’s position in the
universe, of the mysteries that compass him about and the secret bonds
that unite him to all things that we see as well as to all things that
we do not see upon earth and in the heavens.
11
Is Karma, then, supposed to punish lack of intelligence? And, in the
first place, why not? It is the only real evil upon this earth; and,
if all men were superlatively intelligent, none would be unhappy.
But where would the justice of it be? We possess the intelligence
which nature has bestowed upon us; it is she, not we, that should
be held responsible. Let us understand one another. Karma does not
inflict punishment, properly speaking; it simply places us, after
our successive existences and slumbers, on the plane on which our
intelligence left us, surrounded by our actions and our thoughts. It
keeps a check and a record. It takes us such as we have made ourselves
and gives us the opportunity to make ourselves anew, to acquire what
we lack and to raise ourselves to the level of the highest. We are
bound to raise ourselves, but the slowness or rapidity of our ascent
depends only upon ourselves. When all is said, the apparent injustice
which grants more intelligence to some than to others is but a question
of date, a law of growth, of evolution, which is the fundamental law
of all the lives that we know, from the infusoria to the stars. We
could at most complain of coming later than the rest; but the rest,
in their turn, might with more reason complain of being called too
soon, of being unable to profit at once by all that has been acquired
since their birth. To avoid recrimination, therefore, we should all
have been on the same plane from the outset; we should all have been
born at the same time. But then the world would have been complete,
perfect, immutable, immobile, from the first moment of its existence
and ours. This would perhaps have been preferable; but it is not so
and it is, no doubt, impossible that it should be so; in any case, no
system of metaphysics, no religion, not even the first, the greatest,
the loftiest, the mother of all the rest, ever thought of rejecting the
indisputable and indubitable law of endless movement, of the eternal
Becoming; and it must be admitted that everything appears to justify
it. It is probable that there would be nothing if it were otherwise and
that there can only be something on condition that it becomes better
or worse, that it rises or falls, that it constitutes itself in order
to deconstitute and reconstitute itself and that movement is more
essential than being or substance. It is so because it is so. There is
nothing to be done, nothing to be said; we can but state the fact. We
are in a world in which matter would perish and disappear sooner than
movement, or rather in which matter, time, space, duration, existence
and movement are but one and the same thing.
12
But we also live in a world in which our reason encounters only the
impossible, the insoluble and the incomprehensible. The supreme
interpretations do no more than shift the riddle, to permit us to
obtain glimpses from a higher standpoint of the boundless immensity in
which we are striving. Therefore, apart from the puerile explanations
which, after successive changes of form, all the religions have
drawn from the original religion, three hypotheses and no more offer
themselves for our choice: on the one hand, nothingness, inertia and
absolute death, which are inconceivable; on the other hand, chance and
its eternal renewals, which are without change, hope, object or end, or
which, if they led to anything, would lead either to an inconceivable
annihilation or to the third hypothesis, according to which the best
becomes infinite, even to total absorption in the imperfectible, the
immutable, the immovable, which, as I have said elsewhere,[4] must have
occurred already in the eternity that precedes us, since there is no
reason why that which could not take place in this eternity should take
place in the eternity to come, which is no more infinite, is no more
extensive and offers no more chances than the past eternity and which
is not of a different nature.
The mother religion itself, the only one which is still acceptable,
which takes account of everything and which has foreseen everything,
does not escape this last dilemma by extending to thousands of
millions of years the duration of a year of Brahma, that is to
say, the period of evolution, of expiration, of externalization and
activity, and to an equal number of thousands of millions of years
the duration of a night of this god, that is to say, the period of
involution, of inspiration, of internalization, of slumber or inertia,
during which all is reabsorbed into the divinity or the sole absolute.
It does not escape it either by next multiplying these days and nights
by a hundred years which form one life and this life by a hundred
lives which lead to figures that defy expression, after which another
universe begins.
Here, too, there would be either an eternal recommencement without hope
or object, or, if there be progression, final perfection and immobility
which ought already to be attained. Let each draw from all this such
conclusions as he please or can, or bow once more, in silence, before
the Unknowable.
THE END
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The English translation of Fabre’s works, by Alexander Teixeira de
Mattos, is issued in America by the publishers of the present volume.
[2] In the volume, published in 1904, entitled _The Double Garden_.--A.
T. de M.
[3] The first essay in _The Buried Temple_.--A. T. de M.
[4] In _Our Eternity_.--A. T. de M.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.