6
Now how is it that those millions of exactly similar human races, which from all time suffer what we have suffered and are still suffering, profit us nothing, that all their experiences and all their schools have had no influence upon our first efforts and that everything has to be done again and begun again incessantly?
As we see, the two theories balance each other. It is well to acquire by degrees the habit of understanding nothing. There remains to us the faculty of choosing the less gloomy of the two or persuading ourselves that the mists of the other exist only in our brain. As that strange visionary, William Blake, said:
“Nor is it possible to thought
A greater than itself to know.”
Let us add that it is not possible for it to know anything other than itself. What we do not know would be enough to create the world afresh; and what we do know cannot add one moment to the life of a fly. Who can tell but that our chief mistake lies in believing that an intelligence, were it an intelligence thousands of times as great as ours, directs the universe? It may be a force of quite another nature, a force that differs as widely from that on which our brain prides itself as electricity, for instance, differs from the wind that blows. That is why it is fairly probable that our mind, however powerful it become, will always grope in mystery. If it be certain that everything in us must also be in nature, because everything comes to us from her, if the mind and all the logic which it has placed at the culminating point of our being direct or seem to direct all the actions of our life, it by no means follows that there is not in the universe a force greatly superior to thought, a force having no imaginable relation to the mind, a force which animates and governs all things according to other laws and of which nothing is found in us but almost imperceptible traces, even as almost imperceptible traces of thought are all that can be found in plants and minerals.
In any case, there is nothing here to make us lose courage. It is necessarily the human illusion of evil, ugliness, uselessness and impossibility that is to blame. We must wait not for the universe to be transformed, but for our intelligence to expand or to take part in the other force; and we must maintain our confidence in a world which knows nothing of our conceptions of purpose and progress, because it doubtless has ideas whereof we have no idea, a world, moreover, which could scarcely wish itself harm.
7
“These are but vain speculations,” it will be said. “What matters, after all, the idea which we form of those things which belong to the unknowable, seeing that the unknowable, were we a thousand times as intelligent as we are, is closed to us for ever and that the idea which we form of it will never have any value?”
That is true; but there are degrees in our ignorance of the unknowable; and each of those degrees marks a triumph of the intelligence. To estimate more and more completely the extent of what it does not know is all that man’s knowledge can hope for. Our idea of the unknowable was and always will be valueless, I admit; but it nevertheless is and will remain the most important idea of mankind. All our morality, all that is in the highest degree noble and profound in our existence has always been based on this idea devoid of real value. To-day, as yesterday, even though it be possible to recognize more clearly that it is too incomplete and relative ever to have any actual value, it is necessary to carry it as high and as far as we can. It alone creates the only atmosphere wherein the best part of ourselves can live. Yes, it is the unknowable into which we shall not enter; but that is no reason for saying to ourselves: