Chapter I

I remember a sentence of Bossuet, a sentence that implies a scorn of antiquity: "As soon as the cross began to appear in this world, all that men used to adore on the earth was buried in oblivion. The world opened its eyes and was astonished at its ignorance...."

HE

And it is I! It is I! So many absurdities in my name!... But our young women have fallen asleep, their hair mingled with the flowers they were arranging. Let them be. Take away these lilacs which would give them headaches. O divine creatures, you know all, knowing love, and you have no need of our vain philosophies.

He rose, and, walking round the table, kissed all three upon the cheek. Then he sat down again beside me, and spoke:

HE

I shall not tell you what matter is; I do not know. Matter is that which is, that which has always been, that which will always be. With Epicurus, I conceived it as an infinity of atoms, or of points, meeting at hazard, and forming groups here and there; it appears to me now more like a tissue, but that comes to the same thing, since there must always be space between the continuous elements of this tissue. Otherwise we should have a mass, immobile, and consequently inert. One cannot suppress space, whose reality, however, it is impossible to conceive; for if space is empty it is nothing, and yet without this nothingness nothing could exist.

In admitting matter in the form of a tissue, we suppose an infinity of lines cutting each other in all ways; but a line is made up of points. Let us return then to points; that is clearer, though not much so.

Your chemistry believed that it reached the limits of analysis, in discovering the molecules that it counts and weighs. But it is evident that a ponderable point can be cut into two points equally ponderable, and so on to infinity, and so on without limit of space or of time. There would be, then, two infinites: one above us, since every number can be increased; the other below us, since every number can be diminished. However, since space must be considered as an absolute void, as a perfect nothingness, as nothing, it is possible that each of these two infinites would abut sharply on this void, on this nothing. The world is perhaps limited. This tissue is, perhaps, a sphere isolated in the midst of the nothingness. As one does not well see how something can come out of the nothingness, or how something can become nothingness, we shall conclude that the eternity of matter coincides with the eternity of this nothingness. In this way we shall have being and not-being. But, as not-being is perfectly inconceivable though necessary to the existence of being, we shall leave it aside; what else should we do with it?

I am aware that one of your learned men has lately been able to speak with a certain logic of the final annulment of matter; I do not think that this idea has a really perceptible meaning, either for men or for gods. What is, is. Disintegration, moreover, does not signify destruction, but change. The face of things has changed and will change again, but the very essence of things is as eternal as chance. This universe is only one of the innumerable tricks of chance, one of the fortuitous moments in the eternal movement ... You find this tedious?

I

What is more interesting, next to our personal life, than the personal life of the world?

HE

You will die, and the world as you see it will die also. The movement that created it by accident will destroy it by its own continuity. The vulgar eternity that you conceive is only a moment. Have you seen a top spinning? There is a moment, about the middle of its gyration, when the circles described by one of the points on its circumference are all described with a sensibly equal speed. The solar system, by its precision, should make us admit that the top of which we form some of the atoms is pretty nearly half way through its spin. Motion is not perpetual, as you know; so the gyration will go on with necessarily slackening speed, until the top lies down on its side and dies.

I

Oh! our dreams of eternity!

HE

Do I touch them? A man dies, a man is born. A world dies, a world is born.

I

Renewal is not eternity.

HE

It is not of eternity you dream, but of immobility. The eternity you have conceived is only a stoppage of movement. What should be conceived is the perpetuity of movement. Men, gods, and worlds; eternal movement walks us for a moment among the infinities of chance.

I

And so all human effort, our philosophies, our sciences, the dolorous and superb edifice of our civilisations....

HE

Destiny is more beautiful than all civilisations.