I
It has come, the time of affliction!
Whatever may be the outcome of this war, it marks a period of profound despair for humanity. However great may be the pride of victory, however generous such a victory may be, under whatever light the distant consequences may be presented to us, we live, none the less, in a blighted age, on an earth that will be devastated for long years, in the midst of a society that is decimated, ruined, crushed by its wounds.
Among all our disillusionments, if there is one that remains especially painful to us it is the sort of bankruptcy of which our whole civilization is convicted.
Man had never been prouder than at the beginning of the twentieth century of the discoveries he had realized in the domain of what Pascal called “the external sciences.”
We must admit that there was some excuse for this intoxication, this error. In its struggle with matter, humanity had experienced a success that was so daring, so disconcerting, and above all so repeated that it lost a just conception of its adversary and forgot that its principal enemy was itself.
Events have recalled this to it in a flash. In the last year or two it has expressed its discomfiture through millions of simple lips. It has asked with anguish how “a century so advanced in civilization” could give birth to this demoralizing catastrophe. Stupefied, it sees turning against itself all those inventions which, it had been told, were made for its happiness. For hardly one is absent. Even those that seemed the highest in moral significance, even they, have contributed in some degree to the disaster. Only the fear of creating an uncontrollable situation has prevented certain of the belligerents from forming an alliance with the very germs of epidemic diseases and thus debasing the noblest of all the acquisitions of science.
A doubt has grown up in all hearts: what, after all, is this civilization from which we draw such pride and which we claim the right to impose upon the peoples of the other continents? What is this thing that has suddenly revealed itself as so cruel, so dangerous, as destitute of soul as its own machines?
Eyes have been opened, spirits have been illuminated: never did barbarism, in all its brutality and destructiveness, attain results as monstrous as those of which our industrial and scientific civilization has proved itself capable. Is it indeed anything but a travesty on barbarism?
What inclines one to believe this is that the peoples which have dedicated to the gods of the factory and the laboratory the most fervent and the most vainglorious worship have shown themselves in this way by far the cruellest, the most fertile in inhumane and disgraceful inventions.
M. Bergson has said, of the intelligence, that it is “characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.” To this one might add: and by a complete incomprehension of happiness, which is the very aim of life.
With its retinue of ingenious inventions and clever complications, the intelligence plays the part of something irresponsible or criminal in the great disorder of the world. It seems not only incapable of giving happiness to men, but actually adapted to bewilder them, corrupt them, set them quarreling. It knows how to provoke conflicts; it is unable either to exorcise them or to resolve them.
Scientific and industrial civilization based upon the intelligence is condemned. For long years it has monopolized and distracted all human energies. Its reign has ended in an immense defeat.