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.