Kabanata Kabanata 256 · THE TWO DUTIES: TO WATCH AND TO HOPE

This being the case, is all social danger dispelled? Certainly not.

There is no Jacquerie; society may rest assured on that point; blood

will no longer rush to its head. But let society take heed to the

manner in which it breathes. Apoplexy is no longer to be feared, but

phthisis is there. Social phthisis is called misery.

One can perish from being undermined as well as from being struck by

lightning.

Let us not weary of repeating, and sympathetic souls must not forget

that this is the first of fraternal obligations, and selfish hearts

must understand that the first of political necessities consists in

thinking first of all of the disinherited and sorrowing throngs, in

solacing, airing, enlightening, loving them, in enlarging their horizon

to a magnificent extent, in lavishing upon them education in every

form, in offering them the example of labor, never the example of

idleness, in diminishing the individual burden by enlarging the notion

of the universal aim, in setting a limit to poverty without setting a

limit to wealth, in creating vast fields of public and popular

activity, in having, like Briareus, a hundred hands to extend in all

directions to the oppressed and the feeble, in employing the collective

power for that grand duty of opening workshops for all arms, schools

for all aptitudes, and laboratories for all degrees of intelligence, in

augmenting salaries, diminishing trouble, balancing what should be and

what is, that is to say, in proportioning enjoyment to effort and a

glut to need; in a word, in evolving from the social apparatus more

light and more comfort for the benefit of those who suffer and those

who are ignorant.

And, let us say it, all this is but the beginning. The true question is

this: labor cannot be a law without being a right.

We will not insist upon this point; this is not the proper place for

that.

If nature calls itself Providence, society should call itself

foresight.

Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material

improvement. To know is a sacrament, to think is the prime necessity,

truth is nourishment as well as grain. A reason which fasts from

science and wisdom grows thin. Let us enter equal complaint against

stomachs and minds which do not eat. If there is anything more

heart-breaking than a body perishing for lack of bread, it is a soul

which is dying from hunger for the light.

The whole of progress tends in the direction of solution. Some day we

shall be amazed. As the human race mounts upward, the deep layers

emerge naturally from the zone of distress. The obliteration of misery

will be accomplished by a simple elevation of level.

We should do wrong were we to doubt this blessed consummation.

The past is very strong, it is true, at the present moment. It

censures. This rejuvenation of a corpse is surprising. Behold, it is

walking and advancing. It seems a victor; this dead body is a

conqueror. He arrives with his legions, superstitions, with his sword,

despotism, with his banner, ignorance; a while ago, he won ten battles.

He advances, he threatens, he laughs, he is at our doors. Let us not

despair, on our side. Let us sell the field on which Hannibal is

encamped.

What have we to fear, we who believe?

No such thing as a back-flow of ideas exists any more than there exists

a return of a river on its course.

But let those who do not desire a future reflect on this matter. When

they say “no” to progress, it is not the future but themselves that

they are condemning. They are giving themselves a sad malady; they are

inoculating themselves with the past. There is but one way of rejecting

To-morrow, and that is to die.

Now, no death, that of the body as late as possible, that of the soul

never,—this is what we desire.

Yes, the enigma will utter its word, the sphinx will speak, the problem

will be solved.

Yes, the people, sketched out by the eighteenth century, will be

finished by the nineteenth. He who doubts this is an idiot! The future

blossoming, the near blossoming forth of universal well-being, is a

divinely fatal phenomenon.

Immense combined propulsions direct human affairs and conduct them

within a given time to a logical state, that is to say, to a state of

equilibrium; that is to say, to equity. A force composed of earth and

heaven results from humanity and governs it; this force is a worker of

miracles; marvellous issues are no more difficult to it than

extraordinary vicissitudes. Aided by science, which comes from one man,

and by the event, which comes from another, it is not greatly alarmed

by these contradictions in the attitude of problems, which seem

impossibilities to the vulgar herd. It is no less skilful at causing a

solution to spring forth from the reconciliation of ideas, than a

lesson from the reconciliation of facts, and we may expect anything

from that mysterious power of progress, which brought the Orient and

the Occident face to face one fine day, in the depths of a sepulchre,

and made the imaums converse with Bonaparte in the interior of the

Great Pyramid.

In the meantime, let there be no halt, no hesitation, no pause in the

grandiose onward march of minds. Social philosophy consists essentially

in science and peace. Its object is, and its result must be, to

dissolve wrath by the study of antagonisms. It examines, it

scrutinizes, it analyzes; then it puts together once more, it proceeds

by means of reduction, discarding all hatred.

More than once, a society has been seen to give way before the wind

which is let loose upon mankind; history is full of the shipwrecks of

nations and empires; manners, customs, laws, religions,—and some fine

day that unknown force, the hurricane, passes by and bears them all

away. The civilizations of India, of Chaldea, of Persia, of Syria, of

Egypt, have disappeared one after the other. Why? We know not. What are

the causes of these disasters? We do not know. Could these societies

have been saved? Was it their fault? Did they persist in the fatal vice

which destroyed them? What is the amount of suicide in these terrible

deaths of a nation and a race? Questions to which there exists no

reply. Darkness enwraps condemned civilizations. They sprung a leak,

then they sank. We have nothing more to say; and it is with a sort of

terror that we look on, at the bottom of that sea which is called the

past, behind those colossal waves, at the shipwreck of those immense

vessels, Babylon, Nineveh, Tarsus, Thebes, Rome, beneath the fearful

gusts which emerge from all the mouths of the shadows. But shadows are

there, and light is here. We are not acquainted with the maladies of

these ancient civilizations, we do not know the infirmities of our own.

Everywhere upon it we have the right of light, we contemplate its

beauties, we lay bare its defects. Where it is ill, we probe; and the

sickness once diagnosed, the study of the cause leads to the discovery

of the remedy. Our civilization, the work of twenty centuries, is its

law and its prodigy; it is worth the trouble of saving. It will be

saved. It is already much to have solaced it; its enlightenment is yet

another point. All the labors of modern social philosophies must

converge towards this point. The thinker of to-day has a great duty—to

auscultate civilization.

We repeat, that this auscultation brings encouragement; it is by this

persistence in encouragement that we wish to conclude these pages, an

austere interlude in a mournful drama. Beneath the social mortality, we

feel human imperishableness. The globe does not perish, because it has

these wounds, craters, eruptions, sulphur pits, here and there, nor

because of a volcano which ejects its pus. The maladies of the people

do not kill man.

And yet, any one who follows the course of social clinics shakes his

head at times. The strongest, the tenderest, the most logical have

their hours of weakness.

Will the future arrive? It seems as though we might almost put this

question, when we behold so much terrible darkness. Melancholy

face-to-face encounter of selfish and wretched. On the part of the

selfish, the prejudices, shadows of costly education, appetite

increasing through intoxication, a giddiness of prosperity which dulls,

a fear of suffering which, in some, goes as far as an aversion for the

suffering, an implacable satisfaction, the _I_ so swollen that it bars

the soul; on the side of the wretched covetousness, envy, hatred of

seeing others enjoy, the profound impulses of the human beast towards

assuaging its desires, hearts full of mist, sadness, need, fatality,

impure and simple ignorance.

Shall we continue to raise our eyes to heaven? is the luminous point

which we distinguish there one of those which vanish? The ideal is

frightful to behold, thus lost in the depths, small, isolated,

imperceptible, brilliant, but surrounded by those great, black menaces,

monstrously heaped around it; yet no more in danger than a star in the

maw of the clouds.

BOOK EIGHTH—ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS