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XIII
HOPE AND DESPAIR
1
THE same soldier, who has
become my war-time "god-child," writes to me again:
"I experience an
ineffable delight in remaining the average man and in professing emptiness. I
felt a great peace descend within me on the day when I resigned myself to the
common lot, in other words, to ignorance and death. I have found life by
renouncing it and, now that I am no longer anything, I feel rich indeed. Do not
tempt me in the direction of that subtle spiritual vanity which constitutes one
of the most formidable obstacles to the final liberation from self. Proud I
certainly was and I am still only too much so; but we cannot extract virtues
otherwise than from our vices. More ardently than when I embraced the phantom
of individual superiority, I stretch my arms towards homogeneous equality,
towards the fullness of vacancy. . ."
2
He is right; but he is
thinking, here, with the eastern lobe of his brain, the Asiatic lobe; and the
philosophy of this lobe counsels only inaction and renunciation, the
"enchantment of the disenchanted," as Renan used to say, or rather the
satisfaction of despair. Certainly all we that see, all that we feel and all
that we know pledges us to this despair, which our meditations -- above all,
those of this same Asiatic lobe -- may, for that matter, render very spacious
and as beautiful, almost as habitable, as hope. But what do we know, as
compared with what we do not know? We are ignorant of all that goes before and
of all that comes after us, in a word, of the whole universe. Our despair,
which appears at first the last word and the last effort of wisdom, is
therefore based upon what we know, which is nothing, whereas the hope of those
whom we believe to be less wise can be based upon what we do not know, which is
everything.
Moreover, if we would be
quite just, there is more than one reason for hoping which we will not recall
here; let us confess therefore that in this nothing which we know there exists
naught but despair and that hope can lie only in that everything which we do
not know. But, instead of listening only to our eastern lobe, which counsels us
to accept this inactive ignorance and to bury our lives therein, is it not more
reasonable at the same time to set our western lobe to work, the lobe which
seeks to discover that everything? It is possible that here too, when all is said,
it will find despair; but it is unlikely, for we cannot imagine a world which
would be merely an act of despair. Now, if the world is not an act of despair,
nothing that exists in it has reason to despair. In any case and in the
meanwhile, this search will doubtless permit us to hope as long as the world
exists.
3
One of the most dangerous
temptations that assail him who scrutinizes nature and who sees, as he advances
in his enquiries, that her mysteries become more and more numerous, reaching
forth unendingly in every direction, is the temptation to grow discouraged by
the impossible task and to abandon it. He drops his weapons. On the last slope
of life particularly, he is too much inclined to resign himself, to go no
farther forward, to make no further effort, to fall into a humour of saying,
"What is the good?" and to drop asleep and learn nothing more, since
he has learnt that he will never know anything.
He is already sensible of
this wish to surrender at discretion when he considers the humblest, the
lowliest of the sciences.
What will it be when he
attempts to embrace them all? The mind goes astray, becomes dizzy, asks to
close its eyes. It must not close them. That would be the basest treachery that
man could commit. We have no other thing to do in this life of ours than to
seek to know where we are. We find no other reason for our existence; we have
no other duty. Not to know is merely vexatious; no longer to seek to know is
the supreme, the irremediable misfortune, the unpardonable desertion.
4
Yet, without renouncing, it
is not well that we should feed ourselves upon too petty illusions. We should
always keep before our eyes certain verities which put us in our place. There
is no doubt that we shall never know everything; and so long as we do not know
everything we shall be just as though we knew nothing. It is extremely
possible, as the Rig-Veda suggests, that God Himself, or the first cause, does
not know everything. It is equally possible that the universe has not yet, in
any of its parts, become conscious of itself; that it knows not whence it came
nor whither it is going, what it was nor what it will be, what it has
accomplished nor what it is seeking to accomplish; and, on the other hand, it
is probable that, if it has not yet learnt these things, it will never learn
them, seeing that, as I have already said, there is no reason why it should be
able, in the infinity of time which will come after us, to do what it has not
been able to do in the infinity of time which went before.
5
If there be a consciousness
of the universe, a God, He knows all that He should know, or He will never know
it. And, if He knows it, why has He done what He has done, which cannot lead to
anything, seeing that He might already have led us where we ought to go? Why
did He not prefer nothingness, or at least that which we call nothingness, the
only form of lasting happiness, immovable, incontestable and comprehensible?
We could understand, if need
were, an immobile, immutable, eternal universe, a finished universe; but we cannot
understand a universe in movement, or one, at least, of which all the
parts that we see are incessantly in movement, evolving through space and time,
a universe hurling itself at a dizzy rate of speed towards an end which it will
never attain, since it has not yet attained it.
We may say, to console
ourselves, that all despair comes only from the limited nature of our purview;
but it is fair to add that our purview limits all hope in the same way.
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