He was naturally considered mad, but it could not be denied that he reasoned pertinently on all subjects. Absorbed in books, he had for sole company the men of all time, and felt himself far better acquainted with Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, Newton, Laplace, Darwin, and Auguste Comte than with Bismarck or General Trochu. Shut up day and night in a great room to which no one had admittance, he lived over with delight the vast poem of the creation of the world. In waking to consciousness, the universe, he was wont to say, had set us a riddle, after the manner of the Sphinx, and he, a new Oedipus, was challenging the monster. He would tear out its secret, he would proclaim it from the earth to the stars, while disdaining the glory dear to ordinary mortals. For he had taken every precaution to ensure the author's name remaining absolutely unknown when his great work should be published. In order to avert suspicion, the book was first to be printed in a foreign tongue.
If the Abbé was mad—the peasants still called him by his ecclesiastical title, either from old habit, or respect for his mysterious investigations—his madness was certainly not a mania for self-aggrandizement. Disinterested truth, truth with no other reward than success in the effort to reach it, was the single impulse moving this monkishly cloistered existence. One might say that there was proof of an unbalanced mind. I will not argue the point. Absolute truth is undoubtedly beyond our reach. It is none the less true that the sustained effort to attain truth remains the noblest distinction of man. If it is reasonable to desire to know, who shall say at what point it becomes folly, through aspiration outstripping the possibility of satisfaction? Since, furthermore, this possibility increases with the progressive evolution of the mind, might not it follow that one who had been thought mad, in olden days, would be called wise to-day and that the madman of to-day will in future ages be a prodigy of luminous intellect? Find the boundary line between reason and unreason in this inextricable tangle!
But to return to our excellent "Abbé," with whom, by a curious chance, I became intimately acquainted, a few months before his death, I must say that he never troubled himself with these considerations, to him inane. He did not deny that there were maladies of the mind, but he professed complete scorn for the "collection of low prejudices" to which the name of "reason" was given by the general public. "I have come too soon," he said to me. "In a few thousand years they will erect statues to the man who will be a repetition of me. So far, men have parted at the cross-roads where the paths of science and faith diverge. Some day there will be one broad highroad to knowledge. The time has not come to lay that road. As barbarism covered over the premature flowering of Greek thought, so our present savagery would soon crowd out truths too newly arrived at, which only very gradually will take root in men's minds."
"Tell me," I said to him one day, "since you stand on such a height that you are free from the pride of the precursor, that you are insensible to human glory, that you do not even intend to leave to posterity your name as a seeker, have you never, alone with your conscience, and stripped of all personal interest, asked yourself whether you were sure, after all, entirely sure, of possessing this total and absolute truth?"
The Abbé's little gray eyes twinkled. He answered with a melancholy smile: "The final and irreparable failure of my religious faith was a fearful blow to me. I no longer believed. What had appeared to me good evidence on the day before looked to me from that day onward like the irrational wanderings of delirium. But I realize to-day, after so many years of meditation, that although my old conceptions of existence could not stand the test of experience, yet the framework of my mind has remained the same. I had abandoned the Theological Absolute; I was in search of a Scientific Absolute, no more to be found than the other. I do not regret my error, for I owe to it the greatest joys of my life. For thirty years the marvel of seeing the veil of Isis slowly raised, and the world, bit by bit, taken to pieces and put together again, according to infallible laws, brought me the supreme delight of grasping the world by thought. When I had exhausted analysis and synthesis, I undertook to tell my discoveries, and such was my mastery of my subject that in ten years I wrote a volume of five hundred pages, in which, I can say it now, for I have burned it, was contained what, in incalculable centuries to come, will be considered the treasure of human knowledge."
"You burned this work of yours?"
"Yes, to replace it by another."
"And is this other one final?"
"You want my complete confession? I am so near death that I will afford you this pleasure. Having finished my book, I decided to devote the rest of my life to going over it, pen in hand, and annotating it. Alas! When I became my own critic I found the fine frenzy of creation replaced by a power of keenly reasoning destructiveness which I had up to that time not suspected in myself. The creators of systems in the past were only gifted with the power of induction and prophecy. I had the power to dissect, to undermine my own inductions and prophecies. What we term truth is but an elimination of errors. I thought, I still think, that I had attained truth, pure and simple, but the edifice so laboriously built could not escape the pitiless criticism of the builder. The same mental gymnastics which had led to my replacing former doubts by demonstrated affirmations now raised fresh doubts in the face of my new demonstrations. What would have been their effect upon the unprepared intelligences for which the result of my labour was intended? I spent five years of painful spiritual tension in rewriting and condensing my work."
"And this time you were satisfied?"