The fact is that the best of our scientific work, the best of our industry (that part of it I mean—and it is a large part—that does not tend to destruction), is directed towards retarding this fatal process of the degradation of energy. And organic life, the support of our consciousness, is itself an effort to avoid, so far as it is possible, this fatal period, to postpone it.
It is useless to seek to deceive ourselves with pagan pæans in praise of Nature, for as Leopardi, that Christian atheist, said with profound truth in his stupendous poem La Ginestra, Nature "gives us life like a mother, but loves us like a step-mother." The origin of human companionship was opposition to Nature; it was horror of impious Nature that first linked men together in the bonds of society. It is human society, in effect, the source of reflective consciousness and of the craving for immortality, that inaugurates the state of grace upon the state of Nature; and it is man who, by humanizing and spiritualizing Nature by his industry, supernaturalizes her.
In two amazing sonnets which he called Redemption, the tragic Portuguese poet, Antero de Quental, embodied his dream of a spirit imprisoned, not in atoms or ions or crystals, but—as is natural in a poet—in the sea, in trees, in the forest, in the mountains, in the wind, in all material individualities and forms; and he imagines that a day may come when all these captive souls, as yet in the limbo of existence, will awaken to consciousness, and, emerging as pure thought from the forms that imprisoned them, they will see these forms, the creatures of illusion, fall away and dissolve like a baseless vision. It is a magnificent dream of the penetration of everything by consciousness.
May it not be that the Universe, our Universe—who knows if there are others?—began with a zero of spirit—and zero is not the same as nothing—and an infinite of matter, and that its goal is to end with an infinite of spirit and a zero of matter? Dreams!
May it be that everything has a soul and that this soul begs to be freed?
Oh tierras de Alvargonzález,
en el corazón de España,
tierras pobres, tierras tristes,
tan tristes que tienen alma!
sings our poet Antonio Machado in his Campos de Castilla.[50] Is the sadness of the field in the fields themselves or in us who look upon them? Do they not suffer? But what can an individual soul in a world of matter actually be? Is it the rock or the mountain that is the individual? Is it the tree?