V
We must revise all our definitions, all our values, our whole vocabulary.
All fervent spirits should set themselves to this work, and their task will be all the heavier the more widely extended they are assured their influence will be.
We must strive to make our stunned humanity realize that happiness does not consist in travelling at the rate of sixty miles an hour, rising up into the air on a machine or talking under the ocean, but above all else in being rich in beautiful thoughts, contented with its work, honored with warm affections.
We must restore the cult of the arts which contribute to the purification of the soul, which are consoling in times of affliction and remain, by their nature, incapable of serving ignoble ends.
We must employ our strength to altering the meaning of the words “riches,” “possessions,” “authority,” to showing that they are things of the soul and that the material acceptance of these terms corresponds to realities that are perfidious and ironical. We must at the same time transform the ideas of benevolence and ambition, open a new career to these virtues, create for them new ends and new satisfactions. Those who consider such a program with irony or scepticism make a great mistake. Its realization may seem illusory, but it will undoubtedly become a necessity. The material goods at the disposal of humanity will find themselves considerably reduced both by the destruction of which they have been the object and by the long arrest of the production of them.
Their rarity and their growing expensiveness will be the source of grave and almost insoluble conflicts, which new effusions of blood will only make more venomous.
Humanity can hurl against this terrible future a defiance full of grandeur. It can, under the influence of its spiritual masters, seek its happiness in a wise and passionate transformation of its desires.
Let us not urge it toward resignation but toward the conquest of the true riches, those that assure it the moral possession of the world.