3
Let us for a moment assume that the experiment of this world had not miscarried as it has; that the mind of man, which, since the beginning, has been struggling painfully against matter and winning but a few brief, uncertain and precarious victories, were a million times more powerful and better-armed. It would no doubt have triumphed over all that weighs us down and keeps us where we are; it would have freed itself from the apparently illusory fetters of space and time. It is not unreasonable to admit that, among the myriads of worlds which people the infinite, there are some in which these better conditions are realized. Perhaps, after all, it would be impossible to imagine anything that does not exist somewhere in reality, for we may very rightly maintain that our imaginings can be nothing more than stray reflections of things that already exist. Now, if we lived in one of those worlds and if we could see, as we should perhaps be allowed to see, all that is happening at this moment on the earth which we now inhabit and on others which are perhaps even worse and more unfortunate, it seems to us that we should know neither rest nor ease until we had intervened and helped to make it better and wiser and more habitable.
4
For that matter, no one can tell us that this is not so now and that all our spiritual victories, all that seems, at certain moments, to be leading us towards a future less hideous than the past, all the mysterious currents of good that sometimes flow through our world, all that awaits us after death, no one, I say, can tell us that all this is not due to the intervention of one of those worlds. It is true that we cannot perceive the act of intervention, that we are hardly sensible of it; but it is also true that these creatures of a higher world, being of necessity less encumbered with matter and more spiritual than we, must necessarily remain invisible to us. In the infinity of the firmament we discover myriads of worlds that are material worlds like our own; and we are able to discover only these, because all that does not more or less closely resemble our own world must needs escape us. But the space lying between the stars, which to us appears void, is infinitely wider than the space which they themselves occupy; and it would be strange indeed if it were not filled with worlds which we cannot perceive at all, or rather if it were not itself one vast world which our eyes are incapable of taking in.
It is, moreover, thinkable that, if we do not see these other worlds, they, not being material worlds, do not perceive matter and are consequently as unaware of us as we are unaware of them; for we are doubtless mistaken in believing that, because we are visible to one another, we are necessarily visible to all other beings. On the contrary, there is reason to presume that these spiritual beings pass through us without suspecting our presence and that, as they are conscious and sensible only of that which emanates from the spirit, they do not suspect or discover our existence except in so far as we approach the conditions in which they exist.
5
Consider the earth in its origin: at first, a shapeless nebula, becoming gradually more and more condensed; next, a globe of fire, of rocks in fusion, whirling for millions of years through space, with no other object than that of forming into a mass and cooling: an inconceivable incandescence, which none of our sources of heat can enable us to picture; an essential, scientific, absolute barrenness which may well have proclaimed itself irremediable and everlasting. Who would have thought that from these torrents of matter in eruption, which seemed to have destroyed for ever all life or the least germ of life, there would emerge each and every form of life itself, from the most enormous, the strongest, the most enduring, the most impetuous, the most abundant, down to the slightest, the least visible, the most precarious, the most ephemeral, the most exiguous? Who above all could have dared foresee that they would give birth to what seems so utterly alien to the liquefied or pasty rocks and metals that alone formed the surface, the nucleus and the very entity of our globe, I mean our human intelligence and consciousness?
6
Is it possible to imagine a more unexpected evolution and ending? What could astonish us after so great an astonishment and what are we not entitled to hope of a world which, after being what it was, has produced what we see and what we are? Considering that it started from a sort of negation of life, from integral barrenness and from worse than nothing, in order to end in us, where will it not end after starting from ourselves? If its birth and formation have elaborated such prodigies, what prodigies may not its existence, its indefinite prolongation and its dissolution hold in store for us? There are an immeasurable distance and inconceivable transformations between the one frightful material of the early days and the human thought of this moment; and there will doubtless be a like distance and like transformations as difficult to conceive between the thought of this moment and that which will succeed it in the infinity of time.
It seems as if, in the beginning, our earth did not know what to do with its material and with its force, which inter-devoured each other. In the vast, flaming void in which it was being consumed, it had not yet the shadow of an object or an idea; to-day, it has so many that our scholars wear out their lives to no purpose in seeking them and are overwhelmed by the number of its mysterious and inexhaustible combinations.