“I am closing all the doors and all the windows; henceforth, I shall interest myself only in things which my everyday intelligence can compass. Those things alone have the right to influence my actions and my thoughts.”
Where should we arrive at that rate? What things can my intelligence compass? Is there a thing in this world that can be separated from the inconceivable? Since there is no means of eliminating that inconceivable, it is reasonable and salutary to make the best of it and therefore to imagine it as stupendously vast as we are able. The gravest reproach that can be brought against the positive religions and notably against Christianity is that they have too often, if not in theory, at least in practice, encouraged such a narrowing of the mystery of the universe. By broadening it, we broaden the space wherein our mind will move. It is for us what we make it: let us then form it of all that we can reach on the horizon of ourselves. As for the mystery itself, we shall, of course, never reach it; but we have a much greater chance of approaching it by facing it and going whither it draws us than by turning our backs upon it and returning to that place where we well know that it no longer is. Not by diminishing our thoughts shall we diminish the distance that separates us from the ultimate truths; but by enlarging them as much as possible we are sure of deceiving ourselves as little as possible. And the loftier our idea of the infinite, the more buoyant and the purer becomes the spiritual atmosphere wherein we live and the wider and deeper the horizon against which our thoughts and feelings stand out, the horizon which is all their life and which they inspire.
“Perpetually to construct ideas requiring the utmost stretch of our faculties,” wrote Herbert Spencer, “and perpetually to find that such ideas must be abandoned as futile imaginations, may realize to us more fully than any other course, the greatness of that which we vainly strive to grasp.... By continually seeking to know and being continually thrown back with a deepened conviction of the impossibility of knowing, we may keep alive the consciousness that it is alike our highest wisdom and our highest duty to regard that through which all things exist as the Unknowable.”
8
Whatever the ultimate truth may be, whether we admit the abstract, absolute and perfect infinity—the changeless, immovable infinity which has attained perfection and which knows everything, to which our reason tends—or whether we prefer that offered to us by the evidence, undeniable here below, of our senses—the infinity which seeks itself, which is still evolving and not yet established—it behoves us above all to foresee in it our fate, which, for that matter, must, in either case, end by absorption in that very infinity.
CHAPTER XI
OUR FATE IN THOSE INFINITIES
1
The first infinity, the ideal infinity, corresponds most nearly with the requirements of our reason, which is not a reason for giving it the preference. It is impossible for us to foresee what we shall become in it, because it seems to exclude any becoming. It therefore but remains for us to address ourselves to the second, to that which we see and imagine in time and space. Furthermore, it is possible that it may precede the other. However absolute our conception of the universe, we have seen that we can always admit that what has not taken place in the eternity before us will happen in the eternity after us and that there is nothing save an untold number of chances to prevent the universe from acquiring in the end that perfect consciousness which will establish it at its zenith.
2
Behold us, then, in the infinity of those worlds, the stellar infinity, the infinity of the heavens, which assuredly veils other things from our eyes, but which cannot be a total illusion. It seems to us to be peopled only with objects—planets, suns, stars, nebulæ, atoms, imponderous fluids—which move, unite and separate, repel and attract one another, which shrink and expand, are for ever shifting and never arrive, which measure space in that which has no confines and number the hours in that which has no term. In a word, we are in an infinity that seems to have almost the same character and the same habits as that power in the midst of which we breathe and which, upon our earth, we call nature or life.