OUR FATE IN THOSE INFINITIES
1
The first infinity, the ideal infinity, corresponds most nearly with the
requirements of our reason, which is not a reason for giving it the
preference. It is impossible for us to foresee what we shall become in
it, because it seems to exclude any becoming. It therefore but remains
for us to address ourselves to the second, to that which we see and
imagine in time and space. Furthermore, it is possible that it may
precede the other. However absolute our conception of the universe, we
have seen that we can always admit that what has not taken place in the
eternity before us will happen in the eternity after us and that there
is nothing save an untold number of chances to prevent the universe from
acquiring in the end that perfect consciousness which will establish it
at its zenith.
2
Behold us, then, in the infinity of those worlds, the stellar infinity,
the infinity of the heavens, which assuredly veils other things from our
eyes, but which cannot be a total illusion. It seems to us to be peopled
only with objects—planets, suns, stars, nebulæ, atoms, imponderous
fluids—which move, unite and separate, repel and attract one another,
which shrink and expand, are for ever shifting and never arrive, which
measure space in that which has no confines and number the hours in that
which has no term. In a word, we are in an infinity that seems to have
almost the same character and the same habits as that power in the midst
of which we breathe and which, upon our earth, we call nature or life.
What will be our fate in that infinity? We are asking ourselves no idle
question, even if we should unite with it after losing all
consciousness, all notion of the ego, even if we should exist there as
no more than a little nameless substance—soul or matter, we cannot
tell—suspended in the equally nameless abyss that replaces time and
space. It is not an idle question, for it concerns the history of the
worlds or of the universe; and this history, far more than that of our
petty existence, is our own great history, in which perhaps something of
ourselves or something incomparably better and vaster will end by
meeting us again some day.
3
Shall we be unhappy there? It is hardly reassuring when we consider the
ways of nature and remember that we form part of a universe that has not
yet gathered its wisdom. We have seen, it is true, that good and bad
fortune exist only in so far as regards our body and that, when we have
lost the organ of suffering, we shall not meet any of the earthly
sorrows again. But our anxiety does not end here; and will not our mind,
lingering upon our erstwhile sorrows, drifting derelict from world to
world, unknown to itself in an unknowable that seeks itself hopelessly,
will not our mind know here the frightful torture of which we have
already spoken and which is doubtless the last that imagination can
touch with its wing? Finally, if there were nothing left of our body and
our mind, there would still remain the matter and the spirit (or, at
least, the obviously single force to which we give that double name)
which composed them and whose fate must be no more indifferent to us
than our own fate; for, let us repeat, from our death onwards, the
adventure of the universe becomes our own adventure. Let us not,
therefore, say to ourselves:
“What can it matter? We shall not be there.”
We shall be there always, because everything will be there.
4
And will this everything wherein we shall be included, in a world ever
seeking itself, continue a prey to new and perpetual and perhaps painful
experiences? Since the part that we were was unhappy, why should the
part that we shall be enjoy a better fortune? Who can assure us that
yonder unending combinations and endeavours will not be more sorrowful,
more stupid and more baneful than those which we are leaving; and how
shall we explain that these have come about after so many millions of
others which ought to have opened the eyes of the genius of infinity? It
is idle to persuade ourselves, as Hindu wisdom would, that our sorrows
are but illusions and appearances: it is none the less true that they
make us very really unhappy. Has the universe elsewhere a more complete
consciousness, a more just and serene understanding than on this earth
and in the worlds which we discern? And, if it be true that it has
somewhere attained that better understanding, why does the mind that
presides over the destinies of our earth not profit by it? Is no
communication possible between worlds which must have been born of the
same idea and which lie in its depths? What would be the mystery of that
isolation? Are we to believe that the earth marks the farthest stage and
the most successful experiment? What, then, can the mind of the universe
have done and against what darkness must it have struggled, to have come
only to this? But, on the other hand, that darkness and those barriers
which can have come only from itself, since they could have arisen no
elsewhere, have they the power to stay its progress? Who then could have
set those insoluble problems to infinity and from what more remote and
profound region than itself could they have issued? Some one, after all,
must know the answer to them; and, as behind infinity there can be none
that is not infinity itself, it is impossible to imagine a malignant
will in a will that leaves no point around it which is not wholly
covered. Or are the experiments begun in the stars continued
mechanically, by virtue of the force acquired, without regard to their
uselessness and their pitiful consequences, according to the custom of
nature, who knows nothing of our parsimony and squanders the suns in
space as she does the seed on earth, knowing that nothing can be lost?
Or, again, is the whole question of our peace and happiness, like that
of the fate of the worlds, reduced to knowing whether or not the
infinity of endeavours and combinations be equal to that of eternity?
Or, lastly, to come to what is most likely, is it we who deceive
ourselves, who know nothing, who see nothing and who consider imperfect
that which is perhaps faultless, we, who are but an infinitesimal
fragment of the intelligence which we judge by the aid of the little
shreds of understanding which it has vouchsafed to lend us?
5
How could we reply, how could our thoughts and glances penetrate the
infinite and the invisible, we who do not understand nor even see the
thing by which we see and which is the source of all our thoughts? In
fact, as has been very justly observed, man does not see light itself.
He sees only matter, or rather the small part of the great worlds which
he knows by the name of matter, touched by light. He does not perceive
the immense rays that cross the heavens save at the moment when they are
stopped by an object akin to those with which his eye is familiar upon
this earth: were it otherwise, the whole space filled with innumerable
suns and boundless forces, instead of being an abyss of absolute
darkness, absorbing and extinguishing pencils of light that shoot across
it from every side, would be but a monstrous and unbearable ocean of
flashes. And, if we do not see the light, at least we think we know a
few of its rays or its reflexions; but we are absolutely ignorant of
that which is unquestionably the essential law of the universe, namely,
gravitation. What is that force, the most powerful of all and the least
visible, imperceptible to our senses, without form, without colour,
without temperature, without substance, without savour and without
voice, but so awful that it suspends and moves in space all the worlds
which we see and all those which we shall never know? More rapid, more
subtle, more incorporeal than thought, it wields such sway over
everything that exists, from the infinitely great to the infinitely
small, that there is not a grain of sand upon our earth nor a drop of
blood in our veins but are penetrated, wrought upon and quickened by it
until they act at every moment upon the farthest planet of the last
solar system that we struggle to imagine beyond the bounds of our
imagination.
Shakspeare’s famous lines,
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,”
have long since become utterly inadequate. There are no longer more
things than our philosophy can dream of or imagine: there is none but
things which it cannot dream of, there is nothing but the unimaginable;
and, if we do not even see the light, which is the one thing that we
believed we saw, it may be said that there is nothing all around us but
the invisible.
We move in the illusion of seeing and knowing that which is strictly
indispensable to our little lives. As for all the rest, which is
well-nigh everything, our organs not only debar us from reaching, seeing
or feeling it, but even restrain us from suspecting what it is, just as
they would prevent us from understanding it, if an intelligence of a
different order were to bethink itself of revealing or explaining it to
us. The number and volume of those mysteries is as boundless as the
universe itself. If mankind were one day to draw near to those which
to-day it deems the greatest and the most inaccessible, such as the
origin and the aim of life, it would at once behold rising up behind
them, like eternal mountains, others quite as great and quite as
unfathomable; and so on, without end. In relation to that which it would
have to know in order to hold the key to this world, it would always
find itself at the same point of central ignorance. It would be just the
same if we possessed an intelligence several million times greater and
more penetrating than ours. All that its miraculously increased power
could discover would encounter limits no less impassable than at
present. All is boundless in that which has no bounds. We shall be the
eternal prisoners of the universe. It is therefore impossible for us to
appreciate in any degree whatsoever, in the smallest conceivable
respect, the present state of the universe and to say, as long as we are
men, whether it follows a straight line or describes an immense circle,
whether it is growing wiser or madder, whether it is advancing towards
the eternity which has no end or retracing its steps towards that which
had no beginning. Our sole privilege within our tiny confines is to
struggle towards that which appears to us the best and to remain
heroically persuaded that no part of what we do within those confines
can ever be wholly lost.
6
But let not all these insoluble questions drive us towards fear. From
the point of view of our future beyond the grave, it is in no way
necessary that we should have an answer to everything. Whether the
universe have already found its consciousness, whether it find it one
day or seek it everlastingly, it could not exist for the purpose of
being unhappy and of suffering, neither in its entirety, nor in any one
of its parts; and it matters little if the latter be invisible or
incommensurable, considering that the smallest is as great as the
greatest in what has neither limit nor measure. To torture a point is
the same thing as to torture the worlds; and, if it torture the worlds,
it is its own substance that it tortures. Its very fate, wherein we have
our part, protects us; for we are simply morsels of infinity. It is
inseparable from us as we are inseparable from it. Its breath is our
breath, its aim is our aim and we bear within us all its mysteries. We
participate in it everywhere. There is naught in us that escapes it;
there is naught in it but belongs to us. It extends us, fills us,
traverses us on every side. In space and time and in that which, beyond
space and time, has as yet no name, we represent it and summarize it
completely, with all its properties and all its future; and, if its
immensity terrifies us, we are as terrifying as itself.
If, therefore, we had to suffer in it, our sufferings could be but
ephemeral; and nothing matters that is not eternal. It is possible,
although somewhat incomprehensible, that parts should err and go astray;
but it is impossible that sorrow should be one of its lasting and
necessary laws; for it would have brought that law to bear against
itself. In like manner, the universe is and must be its own law and its
sole master: if not, the law or the master whom it must obey would be
the universe alone; and the centre of a word which we pronounce without
being able to grasp its scope would be simply shifted. If it be unhappy,
that means that it wills its own unhappiness; if it will its
unhappiness, it is mad; and, if it appear to us mad, that means that our
reason works contrary to everything and to the only laws possible,
seeing that they are eternal, or, to speak more humbly, that it judges
what it wholly fails to understand.
7
Everything, therefore, must end, or perhaps already be, if not in a
state of happiness, at least in a state exempt from all suffering, all
anxiety, all lasting unhappiness; and what, after all, is our happiness
upon this earth, if it be not the absence of sorrow, anxiety and
unhappiness?
But it is childish to talk of happiness and unhappiness where infinity
is in question. The idea which we entertain of happiness and unhappiness
is something so special, so human, so fragile that it does not exceed
our stature and falls to dust as soon as we take it out of its little
sphere. It proceeds entirely from a few contingencies of our nerves,
which are made to appreciate very slight happenings, but which could as
easily have felt everything the opposite way and taken pleasure in that
which is now pain.
I do not know if my readers remember the striking passage in which Sir
William Crookes shows how well-nigh all that we consider as essential
laws of nature would be falsified in the eyes of a microscopic man,
while forces of which we are almost wholly ignorant, such as
surface-tension, capillarity, the Brownian movements, would
preponderate. Walking on a cabbage-leaf, for instance, after the dew had
fallen, and seeing it studded with huge crystal globes, he would infer
that water was a solid body which assumes spherical form and rises in
the air. At no great distance, he might come to a pond, when he would
observe that this same matter, instead of rising upwards, now seems to
slope downwards in a vast curve from the brink. If he managed, with the
aid of his friends, to throw into the water one of those enormous steel
bars which we call needles, he would see that it made a sort of concave
trough on the surface and floated tranquilly. From these experiments and
a thousand others which he might make, he would naturally deduce
theories diametrically opposed to those upon which our entire existence
is based. It would be the same if the changes were made in the direction
of time, to take an hypothesis imagined by the philosopher William
James:
“Suppose we were able, within the length of a second, to note distinctly
ten thousand events instead of barely ten, as now; if our life were then
destined to hold the same number of impressions it might be a thousand
times as short. We should live less than a month, and personally know
nothing of the change of seasons. If born in winter, we should believe
in summer as we now believe in the heats of the carboniferous era. The
motions of organic beings would be so slow to our senses as to be
inferred, not seen. The sun would stand still in the sky, the moon be
almost free from change and so on. But now reverse the hypothesis, and
suppose a being to get only one thousandth part of the sensations that
we get in a given time, and consequently to live a thousand times as
long. Winters and summers will be to him like quarters of an hour.
Mushrooms and the swifter growing plants will shoot into being so
rapidly as to appear instantaneous creations; annual shrubs will rise
and fall from the earth like restlessly boiling water-springs; the
motions of animals will be as invisible as are to us the movements of
bullets and cannon-balls; the sun will scour through the sky like a
meteor, leaving a fiery trail behind him, &c. That such imaginary cases
(barring the super-human longevity) may be realized somewhere in the
animal kingdom, it would be rash to deny.”
8
We believe that we see nothing hanging over us but catastrophes, deaths,
torments and disasters; we shiver at the mere thought of the great
interplanetary spaces, with their intense cold and their awful and
gloomy solitudes; and we imagine that the worlds that revolve through
space are as unhappy as ourselves because they freeze, or disaggregate,
or clash together, or are consumed in unutterable flames. We infer from
this that the genius of the universe is an abominable tyrant, seized
with a monstrous madness, delighting only in the torture of itself and
all that it contains. To millions of stars, each many thousand times
larger than our sun, to nebulæ whose nature and dimensions no figure, no
word in our language is able to express, we attribute our momentary
sensibility, the little ephemeral play of our nerves; and we are
convinced that life there must be impossible or appalling, because we
should feel too hot or too cold. It were much wiser to say to ourselves
that it would need but a trifle, a few papillæ more or less to our skin,
the slightest modification of our eyes and ears, to turn the temperature
of space, its silence and its darkness into a delicious spring-time, an
incomparable music, a divine light.
“Nothing is too wonderful to be true,” said Faraday.
It were much more reasonable to persuade ourselves that the catastrophes
our imagination sees there are life itself, the joy and one or other of
those immense festivals of mind and matter in which death, thrusting
aside at last our two enemies, time and space, will soon permit us to
take part. Each world dissolving, extinguished, crumbling, burnt or
colliding with another world and pulverized means the commencement of a
magnificent experiment, the dawn of a marvellous hope and perhaps an
unexpected happiness drawn direct from the inexhaustible unknown. What
though they freeze or flame, collect or disperse, pursue or flee one
another: mind and matter, no longer united by the same pitiful hazard
that joined them in us, must rejoice at all that happens; for all is but
birth and rebirth, a departure into an unknown filled with wonderful
promises and maybe an anticipation of some ineffable event.