We will not insist upon this point; this is not the proper place for that.
If nature calls itself Providence, society should call itself foresight.
Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material improvement.
To know is a sacrament, to think is the prime necessity, truth is nourishment as well as grain.
A reason which fasts from science and wisdom grows thin.
Let us enter equal complaint against stomachs and minds which do not eat.
If there is anything more heart-breaking than a body perishing for lack of bread, it is a soul which is dying from hunger for the light.
The whole of progress tends in the direction of solution.
Some day we shall be amazed.
As the human race mounts upward, the deep layers emerge naturally from the zone of distress.
The obliteration of misery will be accomplished by a simple elevation of level.
We should do wrong were we to doubt this blessed consummation.
The past is very strong, it is true, at the present moment.
It censures.
This rejuvenation of a corpse is surprising.
Behold, it is walking and advancing.
It seems a victor; this dead body is a conqueror.
He arrives with his legions, superstitions, with his sword, despotism, with his banner, ignorance; a while ago, he won ten battles.
He advances, he threatens, he laughs, he is at our doors.
Let us not despair, on our side.
Let us sell the field on which Hannibal is encamped.
What have we to fear, we who believe?
No such thing as a back-flow of ideas exists any more than there exists a return of a river on its course.
But let those who do not desire a future reflect on this matter.
When they say “no” to progress, it is not the future but themselves that they are condemning.
They are giving themselves a sad malady; they are inoculating themselves with the past.
There is but one way of rejecting To-morrow, and that is to die.
Now, no death, that of the body as late as possible, that of the soul never,—this is what we desire.
Yes, the enigma will utter its word, the sphinx will speak, the problem will be solved.
Yes, the people, sketched out by the eighteenth century, will be finished by the nineteenth.
He who doubts this is an idiot!
The future blossoming, the near blossoming forth of universal well-being, is a divinely fatal phenomenon.
Immense combined propulsions direct human affairs and conduct them within a given time to a logical state, that is to say, to a state of equilibrium; that is to say, to equity.
A force composed of earth and heaven results from humanity and governs it; this force is a worker of miracles; marvellous issues are no more difficult to it than extraordinary vicissitudes.
Aided by science, which comes from one man, and by the event, which comes from another, it is not greatly alarmed by these contradictions in the attitude of problems, which seem impossibilities to the vulgar herd.
It is no less skilful at causing a solution to spring forth from the reconciliation of ideas, than a lesson from the reconciliation of facts, and we may expect anything from that mysterious power of progress, which brought the Orient and the Occident face to face one fine day, in the depths of a sepulchre, and made the imaums converse with Bonaparte in the interior of the Great Pyramid.
In the meantime, let there be no halt, no hesitation, no pause in the grandiose onward march of minds.
Social philosophy consists essentially in science and peace.
Its object is, and its result must be, to dissolve wrath by the study of antagonisms.
It examines, it scrutinizes, it analyzes; then it puts together once more, it proceeds by means of reduction, discarding all hatred.
More than once, a society has been seen to give way before the wind which is let loose upon mankind; history is full of the shipwrecks of nations and empires; manners, customs, laws, religions,—and some fine day that unknown force, the hurricane, passes by and bears them all away.
The civilizations of India, of Chaldea, of Persia, of Syria, of Egypt, have disappeared one after the other.
Why?
We know not.
What are the causes of these disasters? We do not know. Could these societies have been saved?
Was it their fault?
Did they persist in the fatal vice which destroyed them?
What is the amount of suicide in these terrible deaths of a nation and a race?
Questions to which there exists no reply.
Darkness enwraps condemned civilizations.