Part 10

To that end strive to win a reputation among uncertain, hesitating people. Be prudent: this is the time when it is of great importance to choose the right ideas and words. But if you see one of your companions torn between two opposing reputations, imprison him in the better of the two.

I once knew a man who had done many good acts and a considerable number of reprehensible ones. One day, when I saw him hesitating between these two different tendencies, I began to address certain phrases to him that opened somewhat like this: “You who are so good.... You who have done such and such fine things.” ... And the result was that that man became really good, in order not to betray the reputation he had gained.

I foresee that you are about to pronounce the word vanity. Stop a moment! It is not a base stratagem that causes a barren soul to bring forth a fine harvest. If I had called the attention of that man to what was mean and sordid in his character, he would have perhaps become a villain altogether, and that would have been a shame for him, for me, and for everybody.

VI

We have discovered together, you will recall, that the world is offered to all men that it may be possessed by each with the help of all. You see, then, that in your modest rôle of apostle there is a means of making others rich while securing their help for your own undertakings.

Estimate your wealth according to the importance of what you give. Dispossess yourself boldly. Everything will be returned to you at the right time and a hundredfold.

If the great apostles were able to bring the good news, it was because they had faith; but nothing could have exalted their faith more than to bring the good news.

If you have been interested in something you have read, in a walk, if you have been astonished at some spectacle, invite all those whom you know to read what you have read, to take that walk, to contemplate that spectacle. Show some discernment in your invitations. Distrust the sceptics a little, the ironical, cruel, or contradictory spirits. Distrust them, but do not abandon them: they are the strayed sheep whose return ought to rejoice your heart supremely. When you have made them admit: “Yes, there’s something really fine! Yes, there’s something interesting, there’s something worth the pain of living!” you may fall asleep with a smile; your day will not have been lost.

At times, you will make a discovery so rare, so delicate that, by some secret warning, you will know it cannot be communicated, that it is strictly individual, that it ought to remain as a private relation between the world and your soul. In that case, keep your own counsel. Perhaps a day will come when your thought will have gained in precision through being amplified; on that day you will be mysteriously informed that your treasure has lost its private character, that it has become suitable for sustaining your communion with others. When that day comes, speak forth. Until that day, however, be patient; do not fall into the error of those spirits who are called obscure because they offer us impressions that have been insufficiently ripened and experienced, impressions that are not for all humanity.

On the other hand, when someone offers you one of these obscure impressions, do not reject it, do not laugh with disdain. Force yourself to feel what has been pictured for you in this faulty fashion. You will do your partner a service in visualizing his discovery, and you will perhaps be able to increase your own stock. Perhaps there will be something worth seizing and understanding at the bottom of it.

Always seek communion. It is the most precious thing men possess. In this respect, the symbol of the religions is indeed full of majesty. Where there is communion there is something that is more than human, there is surely something divine.

When you deem that you have grasped a truth do not forget, in communicating it to others, that there are two conditions of truth. Any truth one receives is but a small fortune in comparison with the value of that which one experiences. Therefore persuade those you love into the experiencing of truths, into the religious, courageous, persistent experiencing of the well-beloved truth.

VII

One dreams of a life in which everyone would be the apostle of what he possesses and where all would be the disciples of each.

If you wish to be an apostle, begin by never mislaying any of your wealth.

I once had a friend who said to me almost every day: “This morning I had a beautiful thought; but I can’t find it again, I’ve forgotten it, I’ve lost it.”

You have a purse to contain your money; condescend to have a scrap of paper on which you can put your thoughts, where you can set them in order. It is a slight means to what will eventually be a great end. Be economical of your treasures so that you may be lavish of them at the opportune moment. Do not lose what you wish to give away.

You are like the seeker after gold, on your knees by the bank of a river that rolls with sand and with nuggets.

The rushing flood of your soul flows by, and you watch it with fear and delight. Every sort of thing is in it: mud, grass, gold, flowers, formless and nameless debris. Gather to one side what you deem worthy to be preserved, do not let it escape in the torrent.

This mass of thoughts that crowd and elbow one another, this storm that tumbles its way over you, this unending dream that you have when you are awake, when your soul abandons itself to its natural, spontaneous impulses, there, indeed, is matter to terrify you! So many things appear and are swallowed up again that scandalize or horrify you; so many contradictions bewilder you, so many jewels shine furtively forth, that you are by turns filled with consternation, stupefied, dazzled.

You must choose among all these things. You must draw out of the current what you recognize as of value to you, and let the rest sink.

I beg you, keep the reckoning of your own soul. Keep a little book in your pocket that is carefully brought up to date. And do not trust your memory; it is a net full of holes; the most beautiful prizes slip through it.

You must not have too much fear of not being up to your task when you are approaching great problems and great works.

That is something worth meditating for him who sets himself to obtaining possession of the world, who wishes to invite his companions to do the same.

Though it may have all the appearance of naïveté, confidence is less to be feared than the terror of ridicule that paralyzes so many souls at the beginning of the most beautiful adventures.

The fear of enthusiasm does as much harm as obvious wickedness.

It is better to pass for a simpleton and become the laughing-stock of the disillusioned than to miss the opportunity to serve as the apostle of one’s beloved verities. It is better to squander one’s fortune than to run the risk of being the only one to profit from it. There will always be a farthing to fall into eager hands.

The main thing is to be, above everything else, a man of good will.

The true enemy, if there is any such, is the pharisee, the man of outward observance, he who adopts every religion as a matter of fashion, who speaks frequently and passionately of his soul in the same way in which he speaks of his necktie.

VIII

If you are only two against a thousand in leading this beautiful, pure life, rejoice that there are at least two of you and do not despair of your course of action.

Is it not Renan who has uttered this profound saying: “The great things in any race are usually accomplished by the minority”?

Do not rejoice because there are slaves. Let their example be a fearful warning to you; let it fill you with an overmastering desire to free them from servitude.

To the apostle Paul is ascribed that disquieting utterance of the conquering soldier: “Oportet hæreses esse.”

Yes, undoubtedly, whoever wishes to fight needs an enemy.

The dazzling chance of such conquests is not, alas, the thing you will be most likely to miss. But every conquest is vain that does not tend toward peace.

One thinks with ecstasy of the joy of a universal communion, from which no one would be left out, in which no one would be the victim.

Must there be heretics? Yes! To convince them, but not to vanquish them, and still less to put them to the stake.

X ON THE REIGN OF THE HEART

“The knowledge of external things does not make up for me, in times of affliction, for my ignorance of the moral world; but my knowledge of the moral world always consoles me for my ignorance of external things.”--_Pascal_.

I

It has come, the time of affliction!

Whatever may be the outcome of this war, it marks a period of profound despair for humanity. However great may be the pride of victory, however generous such a victory may be, under whatever light the distant consequences may be presented to us, we live, none the less, in a blighted age, on an earth that will be devastated for long years, in the midst of a society that is decimated, ruined, crushed by its wounds.

Among all our disillusionments, if there is one that remains especially painful to us it is the sort of bankruptcy of which our whole civilization is convicted.

Man had never been prouder than at the beginning of the twentieth century of the discoveries he had realized in the domain of what Pascal called “the external sciences.”

We must admit that there was some excuse for this intoxication, this error. In its struggle with matter, humanity had experienced a success that was so daring, so disconcerting, and above all so repeated that it lost a just conception of its adversary and forgot that its principal enemy was itself.

Events have recalled this to it in a flash. In the last year or two it has expressed its discomfiture through millions of simple lips. It has asked with anguish how “a century so advanced in civilization” could give birth to this demoralizing catastrophe. Stupefied, it sees turning against itself all those inventions which, it had been told, were made for its happiness. For hardly one is absent. Even those that seemed the highest in moral significance, even they, have contributed in some degree to the disaster. Only the fear of creating an uncontrollable situation has prevented certain of the belligerents from forming an alliance with the very germs of epidemic diseases and thus debasing the noblest of all the acquisitions of science.

A doubt has grown up in all hearts: what, after all, is this civilization from which we draw such pride and which we claim the right to impose upon the peoples of the other continents? What is this thing that has suddenly revealed itself as so cruel, so dangerous, as destitute of soul as its own machines?

Eyes have been opened, spirits have been illuminated: never did barbarism, in all its brutality and destructiveness, attain results as monstrous as those of which our industrial and scientific civilization has proved itself capable. Is it indeed anything but a travesty on barbarism?

What inclines one to believe this is that the peoples which have dedicated to the gods of the factory and the laboratory the most fervent and the most vainglorious worship have shown themselves in this way by far the cruellest, the most fertile in inhumane and disgraceful inventions.

M. Bergson has said, of the intelligence, that it is “characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.” To this one might add: and by a complete incomprehension of happiness, which is the very aim of life.

With its retinue of ingenious inventions and clever complications, the intelligence plays the part of something irresponsible or criminal in the great disorder of the world. It seems not only incapable of giving happiness to men, but actually adapted to bewilder them, corrupt them, set them quarreling. It knows how to provoke conflicts; it is unable either to exorcise them or to resolve them.

Scientific and industrial civilization based upon the intelligence is condemned. For long years it has monopolized and distracted all human energies. Its reign has ended in an immense defeat.

II

It is toward the resources of the heart that our hope turns. Betrayed by this clever intelligence, whose formidable works have at times the very look of stupidity itself, we aspire to the reign of the heart; all our desires turn toward a moral civilization, such as is alone capable of exalting us, satisfying us, protecting us, assuring us the true burgeoning of our race.

It is by juggling with words that people have been able to attach the idea of true progress to the development of the mechanical, chemical or biological sciences. True progress concerns nothing but the soul, it remains independent of the expedients and the practices of science. This latter is able to triumph even when the true progress, the ascent of mankind toward happiness, is interrupted and thwarted in its profoundest tendencies.

There are not lacking people to tell us that the war will mark with precision the advent of a new world, that it has bought in the blood and the flame the moral elevation necessary for a fruitful and final peace. We cannot share this optimism of official eloquence. It is not the performance of tasks of murder that opens to men the road to justice and converts them to good customs. Humanity must grow unaccustomed to crime, and it is not the armed intelligence that can accomplish this miracle. The pacifying work of the war will remain in peril if everything that is healthy and generous in humanity does not labor to dethrone this scientific civilization which still abuses society after having reduced it to helplessness.

I consider as negligible the objection of the stoics who say that these miseries do not depend upon us and that we ought obstinately to seek our happiness through them, isolate our happiness from the surrounding degradation. No! These miseries do depend upon us. In spite of its disdainful nobility, the stoic resignation has here too much the look of egoism.

This moral civilization, when its hour comes, will revive Christianity and propagate it; it will not leave the human race in the abandonment of the desperate misery of today.

III

The naturalists and the sociologists have contributed to spread this idea that moral progress is, for individuals, a function of the anatomical complex, and for societies of the complex of habits, institutions and industries. It is on this understanding that they have undertaken the classification of species and arranged the various human hierarchies.

That is a view entirely external to things, it cannot be verified as regards individual thought, it is a sheer fabrication as regards collectivities: the war is a bloody refutation of it.

If we mean by moral progress that which affects the conditions of happiness, nothing permits us to conjecture what advantages have been realized in this direction by the vegetable and animal organisms that have not chosen us as confidents. Habits, as we observe them, cannot be a criterion, even if we admit that we ought to seek for evidence among them; they seem as if designed to baffle all theories.

Those animals whose anatomical structure closely resembles ours, not to say that it is exactly analogous to ours, such as cattle and sheep, give proof of a moral activity that is insignificant beside the real genius shown by the bee and so many other insects whose nervous systems are still rudimentary in comparison with those of the mammals.

Certain sea animals, the barnacles, have suffered, because of their sedentary existence, an anatomical regression. We know that the mobile larvæ of the barnacles possess more complicated organisms than those of the adult and stationary animal. To conclude from that that this anatomical regression is a lowering of the species is to assume a great deal, and it is to accord to movement a very debatable significance.

There exist species of plant life, especially among the conifers and the ferns, which, for thousands of centuries, seem to have remained in an almost stable anatomical and functional stage. These species are none the less very widely scattered and very long-lived, very adaptable. They offer an outward appearance of happiness and prosperity. On the other hand, nothing permits us to affirm that certain species, like the orchids, which have undergone a delirious evolution resulting in forms of extreme anatomical complexity, have attained a true progress, have improved, that is to say, their moral destiny: we see them subject to innumerable external servitudes. Their reproduction, even, is only possible thanks to the intervention of outside agencies and is fraught with perils. A seductive argument that smacks of anthropomorphism inclines us to believe that these species, intoxicated with their material difficulties, ought to have a less free and less serene philosophical existence.

The complexity of the individual organism, which corresponds strictly to the political, economic and scientific complexity of societies, adds neither to the possibilities of life, nor to its scope of activity, nor to its hopes.

Certain fish, the pleuronectes, have sought their salvation in a very bold, precocious development that ends in a displacement of their eyes, of their mouth and in a profound disorder of their original symmetry. Looking at them, one has the impression that this development has thrown them into an impasse, into a _cul-de-sac_ from which it would be difficult for them to escape into a new evolution; one has the impression that this whole biological stratagem has considerably restricted the destiny of the species.

Besides, and the naturalists know it very well, the species that are most highly evolved, most differentiated, to employ the consecrated expression, are in a certain sense the oldest species, imprisoned in their own tradition and scarcely to be counted upon for a new adaptation, a profound reformation of their organs and their habits.

IV

This digression, too long for our restlessness, but too succinct in view of the facts it involves, raises several criticisms.

One might, in the first place, object that evolution is a thing which species undergo and which they cannot influence themselves. If that is true, humanity finds itself forced into an adventure against which it is puerile and presumptuous to contend.

This attitude implies a submissive fatalism that denies both our sense of experience and our thirst for perfection. We are apt to construe our lessons in such a way as to draw instruction from them. We have shown this in many moments of crisis, and we feel a certain repugnance to thinking that we cannot turn to our own profit the most majestic lesson that has ever been given to men.

Certain minds, on the other hand, have concluded that humanity is altogether too old, too highly evolved a species to be capable of ever again renouncing what is fundamental in its inveterate intellectual traditions, its scientific acquisitions and the customs that have sprung from them.

If this conception of the world did not appear as if stamped with lassitude and scepticism, it would seem to leave us in the presence of a desperate alternative: either the acceptance of a life without restraint, given over to every sort of folly, exposed to every sort of lapse into crime, or the solitary search for an oblivion that only waits for death.

But will the peoples who have struggled so fiercely for their material interests remain disarmed in the face of the moral danger that threatens the very morning of the race, will they undertake nothing truly efficacious for the sake of posterity?

That is the anxiety that haunts generous souls today.

The political arrangements that will mark the end of this war will be of no real interest if the minds that control the spiritual direction of the peoples do not labor, from now on-and in the future, to modify the meaning of the ideas of progress and civilization.

We cannot believe that humanity is so deeply sunk in its convictions and its intellectual habits as to remain forever incapable of sudden change and reform.

The human world has already passed through important crises; it has already been forced several times to reshape the idea it had formed of culture and civilization.

It has always been amid its ruins that it has meditated the conditions of a new life. If it is true that ruins demand the revolution of customs, let us admit that the heart of man has never been more urgently entreated than today.

In any case, there is no question of giving up those customs that form an integral part of our vital economy. It would be fantastic to consider the regeneration of a society that was deprived, for example, of the means of communication which have obtained for a century and which we could scarcely abandon now without suicide. But it is fair to consider how great and dangerous is the hold of the false needs which the study of the “external sciences” creates in us and not to permit our ideal activity to be blindly enslaved any longer by our material ingenuity.

There exist in our nature ardent forces that one cannot condemn without appeal and that will manifest themselves against all discipline.

The passion of the sciences must be deeply-rooted when we see men, in love with love, peace, humanity, consecrating themselves, as if in their own despite, under the cover of some abstract sophistry, to tasks whose results may contribute seriously to the wretchedness and the debasement of society.

If one might gather together all the faculties of the spirit for the single cause of happiness!

At least, and from now on, let us cease to consider that the monstrous development of industrial science represents civilization; otherwise let us withdraw from this word its whole moral significance and seek another for the needs of our ideal.

Let us cease humiliating moral culture, the only pledge we have of peace and happiness, before the irresponsible and unruly genius that haunts the laboratories. Scientific civilization, let us say, to allow it to keep this name for a moment, has been for us so prodigal in bitterness that we can no longer abandon it uncontrolled to its devouring activity. We must make use of it as a servant and cease any longer to adore it as a goddess.

V

We must revise all our definitions, all our values, our whole vocabulary.

All fervent spirits should set themselves to this work, and their task will be all the heavier the more widely extended they are assured their influence will be.

We must strive to make our stunned humanity realize that happiness does not consist in travelling at the rate of sixty miles an hour, rising up into the air on a machine or talking under the ocean, but above all else in being rich in beautiful thoughts, contented with its work, honored with warm affections.

We must restore the cult of the arts which contribute to the purification of the soul, which are consoling in times of affliction and remain, by their nature, incapable of serving ignoble ends.

We must employ our strength to altering the meaning of the words “riches,” “possessions,” “authority,” to showing that they are things of the soul and that the material acceptance of these terms corresponds to realities that are perfidious and ironical. We must at the same time transform the ideas of benevolence and ambition, open a new career to these virtues, create for them new ends and new satisfactions. Those who consider such a program with irony or scepticism make a great mistake. Its realization may seem illusory, but it will undoubtedly become a necessity. The material goods at the disposal of humanity will find themselves considerably reduced both by the destruction of which they have been the object and by the long arrest of the production of them.