On their return to their own residence, Bouvard and Pécuchet perceive Foureau’s man-servant galloping along the road from Falaise at full speed.
They go to bed, quite jaded, without suspecting how many plots are fermenting against them.—Explain the motives for ill-will towards them actuating the curé, the physician, the mayor, Marescot, the people, everybody.
Next day, at breakfast, they talk about the conference.
Pécuchet sees the future of humanity in dark colours.
The modern man is lessened, and has become a machine.
Final anarchy of the human race. (Buchner, I., II.)
Impossibility of peace. (Id.) Savagery traceable to the excess of individualism and the frenzy of science.
Three hypotheses—first: pantheistic radicalism will break every tie with the past, and an inhuman despotism will result; second: if theistic absolutism triumphs, the liberalism with which humanity has been penetrated since the era of reform succumbs—all is thrown back; third: if the convulsions which have been going on since ’89 continue, without an end between the two issues, these oscillations will carry us away by their own force. There will be no longer ideal, religion, morality.
The United States will have conquered the earth.
Future of literature.