Is all this nothing more than imagination, than the dreams of brains more ardent than our own, the hallucinations of ascetics which amaze the young and the immobility or the echo of immemorial traditions bequeathed by other races, or by races anterior to man and more spiritual? It is impossible to decide; but, whatever its origin, it is certain that the monument whereof we have seen but a corner of the pedestal is prodigious and that it has not a human aspect. All that we can say is that our modern sciences, notably archæology, geology and biology, confirm rather than invalidate either of these revelations.
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But this is not the question for the moment. Let us suppose that one of these revelations, for instance, that of the sacred books of India, were true, incontestable and scientifically proved by our researches; or that an interplanetary communication or a declaration of some superhuman being no longer permitted us to doubt its authenticity: what influence would such a revelation have upon our life? What would it transform in our life, what novel element would it add to our morality or our happiness? No doubt it would work but a very slight change. It would pass too high above us; it would not descend to our level; it would not touch us; we should lose ourselves in its immensity; and upon the whole, knowing everything, we should be neither happier nor wiser than when we knew nothing.
Not to know what he has come upon this earth to do: that is man’s great and everlasting torment. Now we must perforce admit that the actual truth of the universe, if some day we learn it, will probably be very similar to one or other of those revelations which, while appearing to teach us everything, teach us nothing at all. It will at least possess the same inhuman character. It will necessarily be as unlimited in both space and time, as abysmal, as foreign to our senses and our brain. The more tremendous, the more majestic the revelation, the greater chance will it have of being true; but also, the more remote from us it is, the less will it interest us. We can hardly hope to escape from this discouraging dilemma: those revelations, explanations or interpretations which are too petty will not satisfy us, because we shall instinctively feel them to be insufficient; while those which are too great will pass us by too far to affect us.
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It nevertheless seems desirable that this revelation of the sacred books of India should be authentic and that our knowledge, still so slight, so unimportant, so timid and so incoherent, should gradually confirm, as indeed it unwittingly does daily, certain points scattered through the boundless immensity of this immemorial truth.
It would in any case, even if it did not succeed in affecting us directly, possess the advantage of enlarging our horizon, which is narrower than we suppose, until it embraces infinity; of studding this infinity with magnificent landmarks; of animating it, peopling it, filling it with wonderful faces, making it a living, perceptible, almost comprehensible thing.
We all know that we dwell in infinity; but this infinity is, for us, only a bare and barren word, a black and uninhabitable void, a formless abstraction, a lifeless expression, to which our imagination can give only a momentary vitality, at the cost of a tiring, solitary, unskilful, unassisted, ungrateful and unfruitful effort. We hold ourselves, in fact, pent in this terrestrial world of ours and in our brief historic ages; and at the most we raise our eyes, from time to time, towards the other planets of our solar system and project our thoughts, which are discouraged from the beginning, as far as the nebulous periods that preceded man’s advent on our globe. More and more deliberately we are directing the whole activity of our intelligence upon ourselves; and, by a regrettable optical illusion, the more it restricts its field of action, the deeper we believe it to be probing. Our thinkers and philosophers, fearing lest they should stray as their predecessors did before them, no longer concern themselves with any but the least disputable aspects, problems and secrets; but, if these are the least disputable, they are also the least sublime; and man, in his quality as a terrestrial animal, becomes the sole object of their investigations. The scientists, on the other hand, are accumulating minor data and observations whose weight is stifling them; yet they no longer dare to thrust them aside or open them out, so as to ventilate them by some general law, some salutary hypothesis, for those which they have hitherto ventured to advance have been pitiably contradicted, one after the other, and scouted by experience.
Nevertheless, they are right to act as they do and to continue their investigations according to their narrow and restricted methods; but we are entitled to observe that, the closer they believe that they have drawn to a fugitive truth, the greater are their uncertainty and confusion, the more precarious, imaginary and insufficient seem the foundations upon which they based their confidence and the more fully do they perceive the immense distance that still divides them from the least of life’s secrets. As one of the most illustrious of them, Sir William Grove, prophetically remarked: