R PROGRE CHAPTER THE GREAT PRO EADER, whoever you may be (and injustice), I take it for granted that y than myself. I know neither your age, which you occupy in the world. But I am love of the good, and some propensity towa a tolerable amount of prejudices: a good d of your heart, and a little leaven of hatred and struggled, and suffered, somewhat, and cious hours when you have exclaimed tha little of everything, yet the sum of your ac comparison with the things of which you tion, and Reason, lead you by turns, and sacrifice your most evident interests to the is so that you maintain your self-esteem. ly) reader, you assuredly do, at interval devote myself to-day. You separate yours from all those tumultuous nothings which alone, in face of the Unknown, you seek, the great problem. Happy or unhappy, all men pass throu of afflictions and the satiety of happiness this obscure cross-roads, where the busies selves, bury their faces in their hands, and able litany of why and wherefore. How have I fallen upon this clod o Whither is he going? What is the obje this career between two nonentities an alone? Or, for others? Or, others for m is due to me? What is this moral bond a country, and perhaps even to the whole these obligations, which have often torr enchain me? These governments, whic This society where we are all heaped up another? Were those who preceded me And will those who are born a hundred y Ought I to bless or curse the lot which ha of yesterday, or to-morrow? Does the w from bad to worse? Or, does it only revo an evil to be born? *By ED. ABOUT. Translated from the F Nine times out of ten, man, exhausted, bewildered, a prey to all the hallucinations of lassitude and fear, sees a noble, gentle, and gravely smiling figure descend from the sky. "Shut your eyes," she says, "and follow me. I come from a world where all is good, just, and sublime; I will conduct you thither, if you wish, through the paths of earth, to make you enjoy eternal felicity. Let me place over your sight a bandage softer than silk; in your mouth, a bridle more savory than ambrosia; upon your forehead; a yoke lighter and more brilliant than royal crowns. At this price, you you will distinctly see the mysterious principle and the supernatural end of all earthly affairs; you will forever escape the anxiety of doubt: sustained in your fatigues, consoled in your sorrows, you will advance with certainty through virtue to happiness. I am FAITH!" Reader, if you are one of the nine who have arisen to follow the winged vision, I neither complain, nor blame you. But it is not for you that my book is written. I have especially thought for the tenth- for that proud, that unhappy man, who prefers to grope on through arduous paths, and to search with his gaze the gloomy shades, rather than to accept affirmations without proofs, and hope without certainty. It is to him that I come on foot (never having had wings) and clad like all who labor here below. I do not bear upon my forehead the phosphorescent aureole, but I have lighted a little lamp at the hearth of human science, and I will try not to let it become extinguished on the way. Without dragging you, even in thought, beyond the limitations of Life, I hope to show an object― progress; a path - labor; a support — association; a provision for the journey - liberty. Follow us for a moment, if you will; perhaps you will not regret the journey. As we travel together, I will show you the consideration which man owes to man. I will outrage nothing which you revere. I will even refrain from denying what you hold to be true. The school to which I belong, is composed of positive spirits, rebels against all the seductions of theory, resolved to take account only of demonstrated facts. We do not contest the existence of the supernatural World ; we only wait until it be proved and we shut ourselves up as to a new order, within the limits of Reality. It is there, in a clear horizon, dispeopled of all smiling apparitions, or menacing phantoms, that we seek to use the opportunities of a humble condition and a short life. Theological systems, from the grossest Fetichism to the most enlightened Christianity, all place at our disposal a complete and absolute solution of the great problem. But there is not one of them which does not begin by · exacting an act of Faith, i. e., a partial abdication of human reason. We, who speak to the world, in the name of the world, have no right to make any such demand. In accepting the law of affirming nothing without proofs, in interdicting ourselves from the resources of hypothesis, we condemn ourselves more than once to give solutions as incomplete as the Science of our time. But natural solutions, notwithstanding this capital defect, have one advantage over others. They can be accepted by men of every country, climate, and religion. We have seen the most sublime dogmas seek in vain to establish themselves in certain latitudes. The infinite variety of races and civilizations cause the earth to be subdivided between a multitude of religions, or of doctrines purely metaphysical. For this reason, it was perhaps not useless to seek for a system of rules, purely practical, which the absence of all dogmas and of every supernatural element would render acceptable to Christians, as well as Musselmen, to Deists, as well as Atheists. CHAPTER II. THE GOOD, Ar Paris, as at Bombay, every man who reasons, knows that, unless by a miracle, or in other words, by a supernatural fact, no single atom of matter can either begin, or cease to exist. Take a cubic centimetre of distilled water weighing a gramme: you may displace, dilate, contract it, transform it from the liquid to the gaseous, or solid state, decompose it by the galvanic pile, recombine it by the electric spark: yet experience and reason unanimously declare that this particle of the inorganic world, so readily transformed, so easy metamorphosed to our sight can never be annihilated, and has never been created, by any natural force. It is necessary, either to recur to supramundane hypothesis (from which we have interdicted ourselves at the outset), or else to believe that all the elements of which our sphere is composed, exist and will continue to exist to all eternity. On the surface of this inorganic globe, the only one which we can study close at hand; there has appeared, for some thousands of ages past, a phenomenon, new, complex, and terribly fugitive, called Life. This is an imperceptible efflorescence of brute matter, a microscopic modification of the most minute pellicle: to say that the one hundred millionth part of the earth is organized under animal or vegetable forms, one would greatly exaggerate. An observer, stationed in the moon, and supplied with the best optical instruments, would be unable to discern any symptom of Life, here below so small an item is organized matter in comparison with the total mass ! But, if it be impossible for us to perceive by our senses, or even to conceive by our imagination, the origin, or annihilation of a single molecule of matter, we see, on the other hand, and comprehend very well, that all life begins and terminates. The aggregation of certain simple bodies under an organic form, appears to us like a happy accident of too short duration. It seems as though all the forces of nature were in a conspiracy against the living being, this privileged character of a few hours; they reclaim and recall incessantly each one of the atoms which he has borrowed, into the common stock. Life only sustains itself by a struggle of every instant, by a continual reparation. The most robust plant, or animal, maintains the combat for a few years, and then lies down in death. Science proves to us that the time was, when organized life was absent and even impossible, here below. Ages on ages must have elapsed, before a gaseous mass, detached from the atmosphere of some sun, could cool down to the point of permitting life to exist. The plants and animals of the primitive Ages could no longer live to-day; the earth has already become too cold for them. The day will come perhaps, when Man himself will enrich with his last bones, the great collection of fossil species. But we have some time still before us, and if it were demonstrated that only a thousand centuries remain to us, we could none the less, employ them for good. But what is good? Aside from all metaphysics, you see clearly that the lowest of plants, even if it be badly grown, knotty, deformed, and poisonous, is still a thing more perfect and better, in an absolute point of view, than a hundred million tons selected from the universe of inorganic matter. Organization the most incomplete and defective is a good, which all the treasures of brute matter could not balance for an instant. And if the plant in question add to this first merit all the qualities which constitute, so to speak, vegetable perfection; if it be healthy, beautiful, large, vigorous; if its stem is a magnificent timber, if its flowers gleam with the richest colors, if its fruit perfume the neighborhood; the combination of so many advantages would augment the value of so happy an organism. No one could deny that the appearance of such a tree upon the earth would carry with it a considerable sum of good; that its life was deserving of long duration, that its death would be an evil. Supposing that there were no other organism on the earth's surface, but this plant alone, it would be good that it should prosper and multiply, that no accident should arrest its development and reproduction, that the brute forces of matter should never prevail against it. But now, behold a new phenomenon, which all minds will unite in declaring superior and better, whatever the diversity of opinions may be as to its original cause. An animal is born. The animal, like the plant, is a combination of simple molecules, of inorganic materials. It draws its body from the same stock, it will return it to the same mass after death. But the matter now takes upon itself new properties, special attributes, a complete set of positive qualities. Between the cedar tree of the garden of plants and the miserable wood-louse which creeps at its foot, the hierarchical distance is great; this little crustacian is placed much higher in the scale of Being than his majestic neighbor. This is an organism which goes beyond an organism eternally immovable; an organism which sees is above an organism without sight. The constituent elements of these two unequal beings are almost the same, as the steel of a sledge hammer and the steel of a watch spring proceed from the same mineral; but the properties of the one are much more delicate, refined, and precious, than those of the other. Organization has ascended in grade when it has passed from the plant to the animal. In doing so, it has made progress — that is to say, an increase of good on earth.. The existence of a lizard is, absolutely speaking, better than that of a wood-louse. The animal is more complete, better endowed, more finished. It possesses a vertebral column and lungs; it has red blood. Matter, more refined in the lizard, is endowed with somewhat greater sensibility. Ascend still higher, and tell me if the sum of good is not notably increased in the world, on the day when red blood circulates, for the first time, in the veins of a bird? What progress! Inorganic matter, after a slow process of refinement, sublimates itself, if I may say so, and takes wings. Under the action of one, or of many causes, which metaphysics still seek to define, Progress has appeared to take place all alone, here below, for some thousands of centuries. In other words, good (or existence,) has spontaneously increased in quantity and quality on the surface of this globe. If you get a geologist to relate to you all the shapeless and monstrous attempts which served as a prelude to the birth of the mammifers of our epoch, you seem to be witnessing the heroic struggles, the angry gropings of Life assuming more forms and more disguises than Proteus, for the purpose of remaining mistress of the world and escaping the dissolution which reclaims each molecule of all bodies. You see her ascending a step at a time, and all at once from lower to higher; multiplying organized beings, sowing germs by handfulls, but always refining and subtilizing matter, and never despairing of producing her definite master-piece; the organism which thinks. This long drama, broken by eruptions, earthquakes, and inundations, which have for more than twenty times changed the aspect of the scene, enters a new phase, the day when Man appears upon the stage. Whether he was hatched by spontaneous generation, or formed by a supreme refinement of matter in the cellule of the animal immediately inferior, is a question of slight importance. Certain it is, that between the great apes of Central Africa, impassioned and intelligent, and the first men naked, unarmed, ignorant, and brutal, all the difference consisted in a degree of perfectibility. History shows us well enough that hundreds of ages have been required to enable this most perfectible of animals to develop his intelligence and to regulate his relations by Reason. Even to-day, in the year 1864, of an era altogether recent, you will still find, in the centre of Africa and in some of the islands of the Pacific ocean, men who feed upon each other like wolves or pikes; men who, in facial angle, in volume of brain and in intellectual faculties, still stand on the level of the gorilla, or nearly so. Those are the laggards of the army. But, dating back from the advent of the first men, the unconscious forces of Life have found in our species an active auxiliary. This latest comer and best endowed of all Beings has been, from the start, associated with that work of universal amelioration which, up to that time, had proceeded all alone. All beings tend to live and to reproduce themselves; in other words to preserve their individuality and their species. The first men, in this respect, resembled other living beings. The Individual, to whatever kingdom he belongs, subordinates everything to his needs, effaces, or destroys everything which inconveniences or menaces him, and assimilates with avidity all which can preserve him. Each organized species does all which it can |