3
Let us for a moment assume that the experiment of this world had not miscarried as it has; that the mind of man, which, since the beginning, has been struggling painfully against matter and winning but a few brief, uncertain and precarious victories, were a million times more powerful and better-armed. It would no doubt have triumphed over all that weighs us down and keeps us where we are; it would have freed itself from the apparently illusory fetters of space and time. It is not unreasonable to admit that, among the myriads of worlds which people the infinite, there are some in which these better conditions are realized. Perhaps, after all, it would be impossible to imagine anything that does not exist somewhere in reality, for we may very rightly maintain that our imaginings can be nothing more than stray reflections of things that already exist. Now, if we lived in one of those worlds and if we could see, as we should perhaps be allowed to see, all that is happening at this moment on the earth which we now inhabit and on others which are perhaps even worse and more unfortunate, it seems to us that we should know neither rest nor ease until we had intervened and helped to make it better and wiser and more habitable.