08 ESSAYS AND LEITERS
youth to throw away its books and desert its masters, there are already saints and propliets to bo found goin^i about to exalt the virtue of ignorance, the serenity of simplicity, and to j)roclaim the need a too-learned and decrepit humanity should experience of recuperating itself in the dei»tlis of a prehistoric village, among ancestors hardly detached from the earth, antcccding all society and all knowledge.
I do not at all deny the crisis we are passing through — this lassitude and revolt at the end of the century, after such feverish and colossal labour, whose ambition it was to know all and to say all. It seeiU'Ml that Science, which had just overthrown the old order, would promptly reconstruft it in accord with our ideal of justice and of happiness Twenty, fifty, even a hundred years passed. And then, when it was seen that justice aid not reign, that hapjii- ness did not come, many j)eople yielded to a growing impatience, falling into despair, and denying that by know- ledge one can over reach the happy land. It is a common occurrence ; there can be no action without reaction, and we are witnessing the fatigue inevitably incidental to long journeys : people sit down by the roadside — seeing the inter minable plain of another century stretch before them, the despair of ever reaching their destination, and they finish by even doubting the road they have travelled, and regretting not to have reposed in a field, to sleep for ever un(br the stars. What is the good of advancing, if the goal is ever further removed ? What is the use of know ing, if one may not know everything ? As well let us keep our unsullied simplicity, the ignorant happiness of a child.
And thus it seemed that Science, which was supposed to have promised happiness, had reached bankruptcy.
But did Science promise hajjpiness ? I do not believe it. Slie promised truth, and the question is, whether one will ever reach happine.«»3 by way of truth. In order to content one's self with what truth gives, much stoicism will certainly be needed : absolute self-abnegation and a serenity of the satisfied intelligence w^hich seems to be discoverable only among the chosen few. But, meanwhile, what a cry of despair rises from suffering humanity ! How can life be lived without lies and illusions ? If there is no other world — where justice reigns, where the wicked are punished and the good are recompensed — how are we to live through this
