HE
Which is not a genuine pride. Pride worthy of the name does not rebel against superior forces. It yields as quickly as possible and retires into itself, proud of what it is and disdainful of what it is not. Your human pride is often no more than a blind folly. The pride of the gods is clear-sighted. But what need have you of knowing us, since you have no power over us? Your prayers move us, as the songs of the birds move you, according to our mood; we find them painful or agreeable, and in either case pass on, thinking of serious matters, that is to say of the living of our lives. The gods, my friend, are selfish, and, if they busy themselves with men, it is from caprice, in order to vary their pleasures. Your joys, to tell you the truth, touch us more nearly than your sorrows, and, if we had the power, we would more willingly send new happinesses to the happy than joys to the doleful. For we hold in great scorn intellectual disorder, and unbalanced sensibility: now unhappiness is produced by one of these two troubles, or by both. He who is master of neither his nerves nor his thought does not seem to us very worthy of pity. Help, moreover, would be useless to him. Help would be for him no more than the brief sunbeam that passes between two storm-clouds that the wind has separated for a moment. And then, we have no power. Ruled, like you, by destiny, we contemplate the eternal movement of things, with a more perspicacious eye, but as powerless to alter their course.
None the less, I am not pitiless. Physical evil breaks my heart, and it is precisely that which is altogether beyond my power, that which is without a remedy. Life eternally devours itself. Every organism is a prey. The living is eaten alive. Every animal is a feast, and every animal is a guest. The healthy state is to be a feast. The gods do not escape this dilemma; they are so organised as to be a durable feast, that is all. They resist the attacks of the infinitely little, as a mountain resists a colony of ants. But let time pass, and century after century go by, and the ants will have got the better of the mountain, though they are, nevertheless, destined themselves to perish under invisible bites.
We shall see, as I have already told you, and it pains me to think of it, humanity disappear, and with it all the? animal species that people the earth to-day. Other forms are elaborating in the mysteries of eternal matter. The water of the oceans ferments and swells with life round the magnetic poles. That which is born rises tirelessly against that which has been born. The sorrow of living is the obscure consciousness of feeling oneself dying.
But when I see humanity disappear, it is at first in the manner of the ants and the bees, and of all the other animalities, once intelligent and creative, now reduced to mechanical existence. You will come to resemble marvellous clocks. Your mathematical complexity will be the admiration of the intelligences which have succeeded your own.
Their multiple and contradictory activity will stop sometimes, struck by surprise, to observe the sureness of your movements, and you will still be one of the terms, though no longer the same, in the disturbing problem of intelligence and instinct.
I have also sometimes thought that on your earth there would be a slow return towards primordial unity. Every organism would be re-absorbed into that formless yet living jelly, which has been differentiated, little by little, in the course of time, into myriads of dissimilar beings. The movement, after reaching its climax, would retrace its steps. Evolution would continue in retrogression. The vertebrate would become once more the annelid, the annelid the nothing that creeps like a spot of oil on the surface of water.
As for the destruction of our solar world by a cataclysm, it is a theatrical idea, but though theatrical, not impossible. It is at once dramatic and vulgar, within the reach of everybody, and without philosophical or scientific interest. Anybody can conceive a shock, and a bursting in pieces, as he conceives a fire, a wreck, or an explosion. If it is the truth, it is without interest. The truth is a bridge that must be crossed to gain the other side of the stream.
He rose. The young women, enchanted, shook their dresses, and arranged the folds of them. Elise threw me a tender look and joined her companions, who were already moving away.
HE