And yet, even in such a case, you must not boast too loudly of your power; for you will find it necessary to turn and return the term you have arrived at, in every direction; nor will it furnish you with the relation or the cause of the formidable progression whose alpha and omega, whose beginning and end, escape us so absolutely.
Whence, in all its interminable metamorphoses, whence comes life? Whither goes it? Were our world to perish, its ruins would not cease, in their apparently disordered movements, to obey the law of universal gravitation: they would so group themselves as to form other worlds, resembling the system of which they were anteriorly the framework. But this force in no wise tells you why, when, and how life will make its appearance on these spheroids of revolution, which, in their state of ponderation, are attracted in the direct ratio of their masses and in the inverse ratio of the square of their distances.
This is not all. Man justly plumes himself on having arrived, by a process of experiment, at the following irrefragable axiom: that "the matter which serves for the movements of life renews itself, while the mould or form remains." You may even affirm, without appearing too adventurous, that the innumerable whirling globules which enter into the composition of the human blood are so many microscopical individuals, each with its own proper life,—infinitesimal forms which are born, and move to and fro, and disappear, and are renewed, without the individual—whose aggregate they perform—having any consciousness of all this activity.
Thus it is that the collective integral being which we call humanity, lives and is developed through the removal of the individuals composing it,—ephemeral creatures, each of whom thinks himself a god!
Must we stop there? That would be to declare humanity the last term of a progression whose commencement and end, according to our own acknowledgment, completely escape us: it would be at once a contradiction and a flagrant violation of the great law of infinite continuity which reigns everywhere.
To suppose that beyond humanity there is only nothingness, would be to enunciate an hypothesis as puerile as that which pretended the earth was not only the centre of our system, but the sole inhabited or inhabitable point in the immensity of space, and that the stars of the firmament were created for the service and pleasure of mortals. Suppose that this absurd belief were true; of what use, I ask you, would be all our agitations, all our flutterings, all our conceptions, all our conquests, all our glories, all our memories, when the end of the world would sweep away and annihilate our race? It was well worth the trouble, truly, of being born, of living, and of suffering, to terminate, after all, in so inglorious a fashion!... Adhere to your hypothesis, materialist, if you have the courage; surely, no man of sense can accept it!
Let us now resume the thread of our meditations.
The end of our system has come at last: the sun, the planets, and their satellites form but one chaotic igneous mass,—a brilliant fugitive luminary, new-born to the inhabitants of worlds which have escaped intact.
The dust of our extinguished world will not be scattered hap-hazard; the molecules of matter, indissolubly linked together by universal gravitation, will so arrange themselves as to constitute a new, and perhaps a more perfect world. But in the constitution of this new world, balanced like the old, our human bones, our ashes united with those of our ancestors, may have, as far as they are matter, their due share. As for the Thought which makes the true power of humanity, which gives to man all his value,—Thought, perfectible and transmissible,—it will contribute nothing, because it is absolutely imponderable and impassible. Will it then be lost for ever?
If the world is to last for ever, you may justly regard as immortal the indefinite transmission of Thought, and the perpetuity of the memory of certain great men. But will all this avail, if the world must perish?