Money.
It is hard to read without irritation the old pleasantries of the journalists and the ancient lamentations of socialists upon the worship of the golden calf. To rail at money, to wax indignant against it, are equally silly. Money is nothing; its power is purely symbolical. Money is the sign of liberty. To curse money is to curse liberty,—to curse life, which is nothing, if it be not free.
Popular simplicity adores money. Look at that poor huckstress: she makes the sign of the cross with the first coin she takes in during the morning. A God has come to visit her and bless her. It is a communion at once mystic and real, in the guise of metal.
Money, which is liberty, is also fecundation. It is the universal sperm without which human societies would remain but barren wombs. Paganism, which knew and understood everything, opens to a shower of gold from on high the conquered thighs of Danaë. That is what we should see on our coins, instead of a meaningless head, if we were capable of contemplating without embarrassment that religious tableau.
Antinomy
The most interesting thing about man is man as the human animal. Almost all the rest is folly. As soon as he loses contact with nature, with primitive nature, man wanders. Yet it is this very divagation that is called reason, wisdom, morality. And the natural conduct that man might follow, and which he sometimes does follow, is called unreason, immorality. But, through a balance of logic, this immorality that we disparage we make the sole object of our dreams, our desires, our speeches, our acts, our meditations, our dissertations, our art and our science.
The Supernumerary.
Monsieur Tarde, an ingenious and bitter philosopher, has thus defined life: "The pursuit of the impossible through the useless."
That deserves to endure. It is one of those sentences that one would like to see engraved in gold upon the marbles at street corners. It is undeniable that in endowing man with an immortal soul Christianity gave to life an inestimable worth.
Deprived of the infinite, man has become what he always was: a supernumerary.