Kabanata Kabanata 198 · MINES AND MINERS

Human societies all have what is called in theatrical parlance, _a

third lower floor_. The social soil is everywhere undermined, sometimes

for good, sometimes for evil. These works are superposed one upon the

other. There are superior mines and inferior mines. There is a top and

a bottom in this obscure sub-soil, which sometimes gives way beneath

civilization, and which our indifference and heedlessness trample under

foot. The Encyclopedia, in the last century, was a mine that was almost

open to the sky. The shades, those sombre hatchers of primitive

Christianity, only awaited an opportunity to bring about an explosion

under the Cæsars and to inundate the human race with light. For in the

sacred shadows there lies latent light. Volcanoes are full of a shadow

that is capable of flashing forth. Every form begins by being night.

The catacombs, in which the first mass was said, were not alone the

cellar of Rome, they were the vaults of the world.

Beneath the social construction, that complicated marvel of a

structure, there are excavations of all sorts. There is the religious

mine, the philosophical mine, the economic mine, the revolutionary

mine. Such and such a pick-axe with the idea, such a pick with ciphers.

Such another with wrath. People hail and answer each other from one

catacomb to another. Utopias travel about underground, in the pipes.

There they branch out in every direction. They sometimes meet, and

fraternize there. Jean-Jacques lends his pick to Diogenes, who lends

him his lantern. Sometimes they enter into combat there. Calvin seizes

Socinius by the hair. But nothing arrests nor interrupts the tension of

all these energies toward the goal, and the vast, simultaneous

activity, which goes and comes, mounts, descends, and mounts again in

these obscurities, and which immense unknown swarming slowly transforms

the top and the bottom and the inside and the outside. Society hardly

even suspects this digging which leaves its surface intact and changes

its bowels. There are as many different subterranean stages as there

are varying works, as there are extractions. What emerges from these

deep excavations? The future.

The deeper one goes, the more mysterious are the toilers. The work is

good, up to a degree which the social philosophies are able to

recognize; beyond that degree it is doubtful and mixed; lower down, it

becomes terrible. At a certain depth, the excavations are no longer

penetrable by the spirit of civilization, the limit breathable by man

has been passed; a beginning of monsters is possible.

The descending scale is a strange one; and each one of the rungs of

this ladder corresponds to a stage where philosophy can find foothold,

and where one encounters one of these workmen, sometimes divine,

sometimes misshapen. Below John Huss, there is Luther; below Luther,

there is Descartes; below Descartes, there is Voltaire; below Voltaire,

there is Condorcet; below Condorcet, there is Robespierre; below

Robespierre, there is Marat; below Marat there is Babeuf. And so it

goes on. Lower down, confusedly, at the limit which separates the

indistinct from the invisible, one perceives other gloomy men, who

perhaps do not exist as yet. The men of yesterday are spectres; those

of to-morrow are forms. The eye of the spirit distinguishes them but

obscurely. The embryonic work of the future is one of the visions of

philosophy.

A world in limbo, in the state of fœtus, what an unheard-of spectre!

Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier, are there also, in lateral galleries.

Surely, although a divine and invisible chain unknown to themselves,

binds together all these subterranean pioneers who, almost always,

think themselves isolated, and who are not so, their works vary

greatly, and the light of some contrasts with the blaze of others. The

first are paradisiacal, the last are tragic. Nevertheless, whatever may

be the contrast, all these toilers, from the highest to the most

nocturnal, from the wisest to the most foolish, possess one likeness,

and this is it: disinterestedness. Marat forgets himself like Jesus.

They throw themselves on one side, they omit themselves, they think not

of themselves. They have a glance, and that glance seeks the absolute.

The first has the whole heavens in his eyes; the last, enigmatical

though he may be, has still, beneath his eyelids, the pale beam of the

infinite. Venerate the man, whoever he may be, who has this sign—the

starry eye.

The shadowy eye is the other sign.

With it, evil commences. Reflect and tremble in the presence of any one

who has no glance at all. The social order has its black miners.

There is a point where depth is tantamount to burial, and where light

becomes extinct.

Below all these mines which we have just mentioned, below all these

galleries, below this whole immense, subterranean, venous system of

progress and utopia, much further on in the earth, much lower than

Marat, lower than Babeuf, lower, much lower, and without any connection

with the upper levels, there lies the last mine. A formidable spot.

This is what we have designated as the _le troisième dessous_. It is

the grave of shadows. It is the cellar of the blind. _Inferi_.

This communicates with the abyss.