IV
This digression, too long for our restlessness, but too succinct in view of the facts it involves, raises several criticisms.
One might, in the first place, object that evolution is a thing which species undergo and which they cannot influence themselves. If that is true, humanity finds itself forced into an adventure against which it is puerile and presumptuous to contend.
This attitude implies a submissive fatalism that denies both our sense of experience and our thirst for perfection. We are apt to construe our lessons in such a way as to draw instruction from them. We have shown this in many moments of crisis, and we feel a certain repugnance to thinking that we cannot turn to our own profit the most majestic lesson that has ever been given to men.
Certain minds, on the other hand, have concluded that humanity is altogether too old, too highly evolved a species to be capable of ever again renouncing what is fundamental in its inveterate intellectual traditions, its scientific acquisitions and the customs that have sprung from them.
If this conception of the world did not appear as if stamped with lassitude and scepticism, it would seem to leave us in the presence of a desperate alternative: either the acceptance of a life without restraint, given over to every sort of folly, exposed to every sort of lapse into crime, or the solitary search for an oblivion that only waits for death.
But will the peoples who have struggled so fiercely for their material interests remain disarmed in the face of the moral danger that threatens the very morning of the race, will they undertake nothing truly efficacious for the sake of posterity?
That is the anxiety that haunts generous souls today.
The political arrangements that will mark the end of this war will be of no real interest if the minds that control the spiritual direction of the peoples do not labor, from now on-and in the future, to modify the meaning of the ideas of progress and civilization.
We cannot believe that humanity is so deeply sunk in its convictions and its intellectual habits as to remain forever incapable of sudden change and reform.
The human world has already passed through important crises; it has already been forced several times to reshape the idea it had formed of culture and civilization.
It has always been amid its ruins that it has meditated the conditions of a new life. If it is true that ruins demand the revolution of customs, let us admit that the heart of man has never been more urgently entreated than today.
In any case, there is no question of giving up those customs that form an integral part of our vital economy. It would be fantastic to consider the regeneration of a society that was deprived, for example, of the means of communication which have obtained for a century and which we could scarcely abandon now without suicide. But it is fair to consider how great and dangerous is the hold of the false needs which the study of the “external sciences” creates in us and not to permit our ideal activity to be blindly enslaved any longer by our material ingenuity.
There exist in our nature ardent forces that one cannot condemn without appeal and that will manifest themselves against all discipline.
The passion of the sciences must be deeply-rooted when we see men, in love with love, peace, humanity, consecrating themselves, as if in their own despite, under the cover of some abstract sophistry, to tasks whose results may contribute seriously to the wretchedness and the debasement of society.
If one might gather together all the faculties of the spirit for the single cause of happiness!
At least, and from now on, let us cease to consider that the monstrous development of industrial science represents civilization; otherwise let us withdraw from this word its whole moral significance and seek another for the needs of our ideal.
Let us cease humiliating moral culture, the only pledge we have of peace and happiness, before the irresponsible and unruly genius that haunts the laboratories. Scientific civilization, let us say, to allow it to keep this name for a moment, has been for us so prodigal in bitterness that we can no longer abandon it uncontrolled to its devouring activity. We must make use of it as a servant and cease any longer to adore it as a goddess.