CHAPTER III.
While these great changes in the planets were taking place, humanity had continued to advance; for progress is the supreme law. Terrestrial life, which began with the rudimentary protozoans, without mouths, blind, deaf, mute and almost wholly destitute of sensation, had acquired successively the marvellous organs of sense, and had finally reached its climax in man, who, having also grown more perfect with the lapse of centuries, had risen from his primitive savage condition as the slave of nature to the position of a sovereign who ruled the world by mind, and who had made it a paradise of happiness, of pure contemplation, of knowledge and of pleasure.
Men had attained that degree of intelligence which enabled them to live wisely and tranquilly. After a general disarmament had been brought about, so rapid an increase in public riches and so great an amelioration in the well-being of every citizen was observed, that the efforts of intelligence and labor, no longer wasted by this intellectual suicide, had been directed to the conquest of new forces of nature and the constant improvement of civilization. The human body had become insensibly transformed, or more exactly, transfigured.
Nearly all men were intelligent. They remembered with a smile the childish ambitions of their ancestors whose aspiration was to be someone rather than something, and who had struggled so feverishly for outward show. They had learned that happiness resides in the soul, that contentment is found only in study, that love is the sun of the heart, that life is short and ought not to be lived superficially; and thus all were happy in the possession of liberty of conscience, and careless of those things which one cannot carry away.
Woman had acquired a perfect beauty. Her form had lost the fullness of the Greek model and had become more slender; her skin was of a translucent whiteness; her eyes were illuminated by the light of dreams; her long and silky hair, in whose deep chestnut were blended all the ruddy tints of the setting sun, fell in waves of rippling light; the heavy animal jaw had become idealized, the mouth had grown smaller, and in the presence of its sweet smile, at the sight of its dazzling pearls between the soft rose of the lips, one could not understand how lovers could have pressed such fervent kisses upon the lips of women of earlier times, specimens of whose teeth, resembling those of animals, had been preserved in the museums of ethnography. It really seemed as if a new race had come into existence, infinitely superior to that to which Aristotle, Kepler, Victor Hugo, Phryne, or Diana of Poictiers had belonged.
Thanks to the progress in physiology, hygiene, and antiseptic science, as well as to the general well-being and intelligence of the race the duration of human life had been greatly prolonged, and it was not unusual to see persons who had attained the age of 150 years. Death had not been conquered, but the secret of living without growing old had been found, and the characteristics of youth were retained beyond the age of one hundred.
But one fatherland existed on the planet, which, like a chorus heard above the chords of some vast harmony, marched onward to its high destiny, shining in the splendor of intellectual supremacy.
The internal heat of the globe, the light and warmth of the sun, terrestrial magnetism, atmospheric electricity, inter-planetary attraction, the psychic forces of the human soul, the unknown forces which preside over destinies,—all these science had conquered and controlled for the benefit of mankind. The only limits to its conquests were the limitations of the human faculties themselves, which, indeed, are feeble, especially when we compare them with those of certain extra-terrestrial beings.
All the results of this vast progress, so slowly and gradually acquired by the toil of centuries, must, in obedience to a law, mysterious and inconceivable for the petty race of man, reach at last their apogee, when further advance becomes impossible. The geometric curve which represents this progress of the race, falls as it rises: starting from zero, from the primitive nebulous cosmos, ascending through the ages of planetary and human history to its lofty summit, to descend thereafter into a night that knows no morrow.
