At that time it disposed of but a single force, the most destructive that we knew, fire. If everything was born of fire, which itself seemed to be born only to destroy, what will not be born of that which seems to be born only to produce, beget and multiply? If it was able to do so much with the lava and the red-hot cinders which were the only elements that it possessed, what will it not be able to do with all that it will end by possessing?
7
It is well sometimes to tell ourselves that we are at least living in a world which has not yet exhausted its future and which is much nearer to its beginning than to its end. It was born only yesterday and has but lately disentangled its original chaos. It is at the starting-point of its hopes and its experiments. We believe that it is making for death, whereas all its past, on the contrary, shows that it is much more probably making for life. In any case, as its years pass by, the quantity and still more the quality of the life which it engenders and maintains tend to increase and to improve. It has given us only the first-fruits of its miracles; and in all likelihood there is no more connection between what it was and what it is than there will be between what it is and what it will be. No doubt, when its greatest marvels burst into being, we shall no longer possess the lives which we possess to-day; but we shall still be there under another form, we shall still be existing somewhere, on its surface or in its depths; and it is not utterly improbable that one of its last prodigies will reach us in our dust, awaken us and recall us to life, in order to impart to us at last the share of happiness which we had not enjoyed and to teach us that we were wrong not to interest ourselves, on the further side of our graves, in the destiny of this earth of ours, of which we had never ceased to be the immortal offspring.
THE TWO LOBES
XII
THE TWO LOBES
1
A SOLDIER writes me the following letter from the front:
“There are quagmires and skeletons in the forest. I have discovered and admired the ruined gods under the still living and wonderful vegetation: their spirit has evaporated. The odour of Christ has little charm for me; I prefer that of Buddha. What I adore in him is the fundamental contradiction that seeks to assure us of our immortality by proving our inevitable annihilation. He taught, in the same breath, the illusion of the Ego and its periodical reincarnation, an obvious absurdity which implies a knowledge of the profoundest truth, of the very nature of being, at the same time and alternately collective and individual. This discovery, which he did not formulate, should have led him elsewhere than to Nirvana, that paradise of unripe fruits....
“Man is so fashioned as to perceive only one half of the universe; and the mind of ordinary texture sees barely a hemisphere of truth. Afflicted with a congenital ‘nervous headache,’ humanity thinks with only one half of its brain, with the eastern lobe or the western, the ancient or the modern; its mind nibbles its own tail; the antinomies pursue one another in an endless circle, which Kant believed that he had discovered, but which Buddha had striven to open. He possessed the complementary virtues; he was religious and rational; while he summed up within himself the mysticism of the east, his was the most scientific of the minds of antiquity, at a time when science did not exist but was merged in philosophy. The moderns who have sought to condense into a system the collective and hardly initiated effort of science have pitiably failed, for they have thought only as westerners, entangled in the contradiction of idealistic aspirations and materialistic arguments, whereas Buddha’s formula might still and almost without breaking down contain this gigantic effort and yet not hamper it. From the death of the prince-philosopher, down to the flights of contemporary science, true thought has not advanced one step; Arab or Christian spiritualism and its reagent, positivist or scientific materialism, are recoils in contrary directions, false monisms which, taking the extreme for the supreme, seek to fix the centre of gravity on the circumference of the wheel. The explorers of the Beyond must set out from the cross-roads of religious synthesis and scientific analysis and drag these rival sisters by the hand.
“Truth shines at the centre of a circle of onlookers and we must pass through its flame to recognize a brother in the adversary opposite. We must reach the centre of space to discern the identity of its cardinal points: ‘Totum et Nihil, Alter et Ego.’ The longing to convert others must yield to the need of completing and balancing our own point of view. In the sacred forest, which pioneers have penetrated on all sides and in all ages, the more greatly daring must necessarily draw nearer one to the other. Even if they cannot meet, they can hear one another and give one another mutual encouragement. The most modest cry of discovery may be welcome in the solitude and silence in which the truth of the future is ripening....”