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Title: The Circulus in Universality Author: Joseph DĂ©jacque Date: 1858 Language: en Topics: atheist, nature, progress, religion Source: http://libertarian-labyrinth.blogspot.com/2010/07/circulus-in-universality.html Notes: Translation by Shawn P. Wilbur
The circulus in universality is the destruction of every religion, of
all arbitrariness, be it elysian or tartarean, heavenly or infernal. The
movement in the infinite is infinite progress. This being the case, the
world can no longer be a duality, mind and matter, body and soul, which
is to say a mutable thing and an immutable one, which implies
contradiction — movement excluding immobility and vice versa — but must
be, quite to the contrary, an infinite unity of always-mutable and
always-mobile substance, which implies perfectibility. It is by eternal
and infinite movement that the infinite and eternal substance is
constantly and universally transformed. It is by a fermentation of all
instants; it is by passing through the filtering sieve of successive
metamorphoses, by the progressive emancipation of species, from mineral
to vegetable, from vegetable to animal and from instinct to
intelligence; it is by an ascending and continuous rotation that it is
raised gradually and constantly from the near inertia of the solid to
the subtle agility of the fluid, and that, from vaporization to
vaporization, it constantly approaches ever more pure affinities, always
in a work of purification, in the great crucible of the universal
laboratory of the worlds. Thus, movement is not separate from substance;
it is identical to it. There is no substance without movement, as there
is no movement without substance. What one calls matter is raw mind or
spirit; what one calls mind or spirit is wrought matter.
As with the human being, summary of all the terrestrial beings, essence
of all the inferior kingdoms, so with the universal being, encyclopedia
of all the atomic and sidereal beings, infinite sphere of all the finite
spheres — the universal being, like the human being, is perfectible. It
has never been, it is not, and will never be perfect. Perfectibility is
the negation of perfection. To limit the infinite is impossible, as it
would no longer be infinite. As far as thought can pierce, it cannot
discover its own limits. It is a sphere of extension which defies all
calculations, where the generations of universes and of sidereal
multiverses gravitate from evolution to evolution without ever being
able to reach the end of the voyage, the ever more remote frontiers of
the unknown. The absolute infinity in time and in space is eternal
movement, eternal progress. Put a limit to that infinity without limits
— a God, any heaven whatsoever — and immediately one limits movement,
limits progress. It is like putting it on a chain like the pendulum of a
clock, and to saying to it: “When you’re at the end of your swing, stop!
You shall go no further.” It is placing the finite in the place of the
infinite. Well! Don’t we realize that perfection is always relative,
that absolute perfection is immobility, and that consequently
immobilized perfection is something absurd and impossible? Only the
brains of idiots could dream this up. There is and can be no absolute
but perfectibility in the universal infinity. The more a being is
perfected, the more it aspires to perfect itself further. Would nature,
which has given us infinite aspirations, have lied to us, promising more
than it could give? Where has she ever been seen to lie? One must be a
Christian and a civilizee, which is to say a cretin and a eunuch, to
imagine as a place of delight a paradise in which old Jehovah is
enthroned. Could one imagine anything more stupid and boring? Could one
imagine these blessed ones, these saints cloistered in the clouds as in
a convent, whose whole pleasure consists in telling their rosaries and
ruminating, like brutes, on praises to the reverend father God, that
unchanging superior, that pope of popes, that king of kings, having the
mother abbess Virgin Mary to his left, and to his right the child Jesus,
the heir apparent, a great oaf who carries, with the air of a
seminarian, his roll of thorns, and who, — in the representation of the
mystery of the so-sacrosanct Trinity, — fills, with his immaculate
mother cradling in her lap the peacock Holy Spirit, which spreads its
tail, — the role of two thieves on the cross, nailed on each side of the
greatest of criminals, the supreme and divine creator of all the
oppressions and all the servitudes, of all the crimes and all the
abjections, the Word and the incarnation of evil! In the earthly
convents, at least, men and women can still console themselves for their
imperfection, for their deadly tortures by thinking of a future
perfection, of another and immortal life, of celestial bliss. But in
heaven every aspiration more elevated is forbidden them: are they not at
the apogee of their being? The very high and all-powerful magistrate,
the one who judges without appeal and in last resort the living and the
dead, has applied to them the maximum of beatitude. From now on, they
have taken on the cassock of the elect; they drag, in paradise, in
forced idleness, the ball and chain of their days; and they are
condemned for all time! There is no appeal for mercy possible; no hope
of change, no glimmer of future movement can reach down to them. The
hatch of progress is forever sealed above their heads; and, like the
conscript-for-life in his hulk, immortal galley slaves, they are forever
fastened to the chain of the centuries in the eternal heavenly stay!
All the diversion these poor souls enjoy consists of chanting hymns and
prostrating themselves before the sovereign master, that cruel old man
who, in the times of Moses, wore a blue robe and curly beard, and who
according to the current fashion, must wear today a black coat and a
stiff collar, mutton-chop sideburns or an imperial goatee, spittle in
place of the heart, and a rainbow of satin around the neck. The Empress
Marie and her divine ladies-in-waiting most certainly have crinolines
under their petticoats, and most certainly the saints, in the livery of
court, are starched, cravated, pomaded and curled neither more nor less
than the diplomats. Their blessed grandesses doubtless bang away at the
piano all of the holy eternity, and their blessed excellencies turn the
hand of the organ-of-paradise... What fun they must have! That must be
amusing! It is true that I am not rich, but I would certainly still give
some few sous to see such a spectacle — to watch for a moment, you
understand, not to remain there; and only on the condition of paying on
the way out, if I was pleased and satisfied. But, on reflection, I find
it hard to believe that what goes on inside is worth even a trifling sum
at the door. Is it not said: “Happy are the poor in spirit, the kingdom
of heaven belongs to them.” That property will never delight me.
Definitely, at times the holy Gospels display a naïveté that is...
amusing: bestow then some donkey’s ears on all the laureates of the
faith! These first fathers of the Church must have been mischievous:
might as well confess right off that paradise is not worth the four
fetters of a... Christian. And to admit that women have been left to
take the promises of these Lovelaces of superstition, that they have
smiled at all these cretinous seductions, that they have given their
love for this anti- and ultra-human paradise! To admit that the men have
been taken in like the women, that they have believed all these ignoble
ones — nonsense, that they have worshipped them! — Poor human nature! —
However, one will admit that it would be difficult to invent anything
more detrimental to the happiness of humans who have not absolutely the
pleasure of being poor in spirit. In truth, I would reckon myself
happier to be a convict in prison than one of the chosen in paradise. In
prison, I would still live by my hopes. Every outcome of progress would
not be completely closed to me, and my thought, like my physical
strength, could attempt an escape from the galleys. And then the
eternity of the life of a man is less long than the perpetuity of the
life of a saint. The universal movement, by transforming me from life to
death will finally deliver me from my torture. I will be reborn free.
While with the heavenly imprisonment it is immobility without end, knees
bent, hands clasped, head bowed, brow void of hope, which is to say an
unprecedented torture, with body and soul, muscles and fibers put to the
question under the inquisitorial eye of God...
When I think that, profiting from the deterioration of my faculties,
brought on by age or illness, a priest could come at the hour of my
death, and give me, one way or another, the absolution of my sins, of my
heresies; that he could deliver to me, a subject suspected or convicted
of lèse-divinité, a lettre de cachet for heaven, and send me to rot in
that divine Bastille without a ray of hope of ever leaving it,
brrrrrrr!... that gives me shivers. Happily, the expected paradises are
like castles in Spain: they only exist in imaginations struck by mental
alienation; or, like the houses of cards, the least breath of reason is
enough to knock them down. However, I declare it here: On the day when
death weighs down on me, let those who can surround me then, if they are
my friends, if they respect the wishes of my reason, and not allow my
agony to be soiled by a priest and my cadaver sullied by the church. A
free thinker, I want to die as I have lived, in rebellion. Living and
upright, I protest strongly and in advance against every such
profanation of my remains. A particle of humanity, I want to serve still
after my death the education and the life of humanity; that is why I
leave my body to the practitioner who wants to make an autopsy of it and
study the organs of a man who did all that he could to be worthy of that
name; and that I ask him, if it is possible, to inter the remains, as
fertilizer in a sown field.
But let us return to our subject, the circulus in universality. The
unlimited sphericity of the infinite and its absolute movement of
rotation and gravitation, — its perfectibility, in short, is
demonstrated by all that which strikes our view and our understanding.
Everything turns in us and around us, but never precisely in the same
circle. Every rotation tends to raise itself, to approach a purer ideal,
a remote utopia which will be realized one day in order to make place
for another utopia, and thus progressively from ideal to ideal and from
realization to realization.
On the earth, all beings, our subalterns, at whatever degree they are
placed in the hierarchy of kingdoms or of species, minerals, vegetables
or animals, tend towards the human ideal. As with the infinitely small,
so with the infinitely large — our globe and the multitude of globes
which follow it from a distance in one single whirl, tend equally,
whatever their relative superiority or inferiority, towards their
luminous ideal, the sun. And all approach it each day, however
insensibly: the man like the sun tends in his turn towards some more
utopian spheres, by an ascending and continuous gradation; and always
thus until the end of ends, or rather without end nor term. — The
mineral pivots imperceptibly on itself and draws to itself all that it
can appropriate of the lesser orders; it grows and extends itself, and
then it entrusts to some conducting agents a few fragments of its
exuberance and feeds the plant. — In its turn, the plant grows, rocking
in the breeze and blossoming in the light. The insects gather pollen
from it; it offers them its honey and its fibers, everything it has
stolen from the bowels of the earth and that it has made to rise to the
light of day through the filters of its tissues. The insects and worms
then become the prey of the birds; the plant itself is feed for the
large animals. Already the mineral has been transformed into flesh and
bone, and the sap has become blood; instinct is more prompt, and
movement more pronounced. The gravitation continues. Man assimilates the
vegetable and the animal, the grass and the grain, the honey and the
fruit, the flesh and the blood, the gas and the sap, the breezes and
rays. Terrestrial star, he pumps through all his pores the emanations of
his inferiors; he raises them drop by drop, bit by bit, to his level and
returns to them to knead again that which is still too coarse for him to
incarnate within himself. In just the same way, he exhales by thought
the aromas too pure to be retained in his chalice, and he scatters them
on humanity. Humanity, after having incorporated them, integrates
everything that can identify with its degree of perfection, and returns
for kneading to the instinctive species, to the inferior orders, that
which is too coarse for it in these fluids, and exhales that which is
too subtle towards the higher humanities of the outer spheres.
Thus it is with the planets moving around the sun, and with the sun
moving in its turn with all its satellites around another more elevated
center, star of that star.
Now, if everything turns first in a spiral, from its need for
preservation, and if, turning on itself, everything reaches beneath
itself, from its need for alimentation, and raises itself above itself,
from its need for expression; if life is a perpetual revolution, a
circle always in movement, each movement of which modifies its nature;
if all movement is a progress, and if the more rapid the movement of
rotation and gravitation is, the more it accelerates progress in us; men
and women, to whom analogy demonstrates all these things, can we do less
than to bow to the evidence? Can we not desire to be revolutionaries,
and, being revolutionaries, not want to be more revolutionary still? For
the human being, to live the life of the mineral, vegetable or animal,
to live the life of stones or brutes, is not to live; and to live the
life of the civilizees is to live the life of stones and brutes. Humans,
let us not stiffen against our destiny, but deliver ourselves with
passion to its teachings; let us advance boldly to the discovery of the
unknown; reach out to progress in order to accomplish with it humanitary
evolution in the great circle of perfectible beings and societies; let
us initiate ourselves fearlessly into the mysteries of the eternal and
universal revolution in the infinite. The infinite alone is great, and
the revolution only has malice for those who would remain outside its
circle. Let us live by movement for movement, by progress and for
progress, regardless of whether the grave is close and the cradle far.
What is death to us, if death is still movement, and if movement is
still progress? If that death is only a regeneration, the dissolution of
our crumbling unity, an organism incapable for the moment of moving
itself perfectibly in its continuous disaggregation, and, moreover, the
re-aggregation of the plurality of our being in younger and more
perfectible organisms? If that death, finally, is only the passage from
our state of senility to the embryonic state, the mold, the matrix of a
more turbulent life, the crucible of a purer existence, a transmutation
of our brass into gold and a transfiguration of that gold into a
thousand coins, animated and diverse, and all stamped with the effigy of
Progress? Death is only frightening for those who basks in his muck and
is transfixed in his porcine husk. For, at the hour of the decomposition
of his organs, it will adhere by its heaviness and vileness, as it
adhered during his life, to all that which is mud and stone, stench and
torpor. But the man who, instead of growing fat and sinking willingly in
his ignominy, burned his fat to produce light; the man who acted with
his voice and strength, with heart and intelligence which will be
invigorated by labor and love, by movement — that one, at the hour when
the last of his days is used up; when he has no more oil in his lamp nor
elasticity in his works; when the largest part of his substance, long
since volatilized, journeys already with the fluids; that one, I tell
you, will be himself reborn, in conditions made more perfectible to the
degree this he had labored at his own perfectibilization. Moreover, does
not death have a place in all the instants of the lives of beings? Can
the body of a man preserve for a single moment the same molecules? Does
not every contact constantly modify it? Can it not breathe, drink, eat,
digest, think, feel? Every modification is at once a new death and a new
life, more painful and more inferior to the degree that the alimentation
and the physical and moral digestion have been idler or more coarse;
easier and superior to the degree that they have been more active or
refined.
Just as man digests the vegetable and animal, assimilates their juice or
essence and discharges their skin and excremental detritus as the manure
that will give birth to lesser beings; just so man digests the hominal
and the generations of hominals, their juice or essence and discharges
their skin and excremental detritus as the manure on which will wallow
and pasture the bestial and vegetative societies.
Like the works of a mill, the individual organism of man and the
organism of humanity grind in their gears the fruit of good and evil,
and separate the good from the bad, the bran from the flour. The bran is
cast in the trough for the livestock, the flour is gathered by man and
serves his nutrition. The good is destined to the highest classes of
beings, the bad to the lowest. The one is transformed into white bread
or into cake and is set on the table on trays of porcelain or silver at
the feast of the intelligences; the other remains raw or is transformed
into slops, and falls in the feed trough for the farm stock or beasts of
burden. The good or bad grain, and each grain of that grain, is treated
according to its value, punished or rewarded according to its merit.
Each carries within itself its chastisement and its recompense, the man
as much as the grain; its purity or impurity makes its paradise or hell
in the present, its hell or heaven in the future.
All labor is an instrument of progress, all idleness is litter for
decrepitude. Labor is the universal law; it is the organ of purification
for all beings. No one can take it away without committing suicide, for
one can be born and grow, form and develop only by labor. It is by labor
that the grain sprout in the furrow, put up its stalk and is crowned
with a rich fruit; it is also by labor that the human fetus closes off
and encircles itself in the womb of the mother, and that, obeying an
imperious attraction, it appears by escaping from the organ of
generation; it is by labor that the child stands on its feet, grows, and
that, become a man, he is crowned with the double fruit of his manual
and intellectual faculties; it is also by labor that he matures
physically and morally before falling under the scythe of Time, that
universal and eternal reaper, in order to begin again, in the eternal
and universal life, a new work and new destinies. — The being, whatever
it be, is called to labor to the degree that its attractions are lofty;
and its sensations are voluptuous to the degree that they are purified
by labor.
Happy are those whose productive faculties are overexcited by the love
of the good and the beautiful: they will be fruitful in goodness and in
beauty; no labor is fruitless. Unhappy are those whose productive
faculties sleep shrouded in the apathy of the horrible and of evil: they
will not know the joys that hard-working and generous passions give. All
inertia is infertile; all narcissism, every exclusive adoration of
itself is doomed to sterility. Happiness is a fruit that can be picked
only on the high summits, and that has a delicious flavor only after
having been cultivated. For the idle, the inert, as for the powerless
fox, it is too green a fruit: it ripens only for the agile, the
laborers. It is not by sequestering it in his being, by isolating his
breast from the breasts of his brothers that one can obtain it; it does
not belong to the fratricidal but to the fraternal. Those alone can
harvest it who do not fear to put arms and heart and head in the air,
and make communion from individual efforts.
Man and humanity carry within them the seed of individual and social
well-being; it is up to individual and social labor to cultivate it, if
they want to savor its fruits.
It is for having tasted the fruit of the tree of science that, according
to the Jewish and Christian mythologies, we have lost the terrestrial
paradise. Ah! If instead of having only a taste, Humanity had tried to
eat its fill of it, it would not be difficult to recover that Eden, so
narrow and so little regrettable. Then, we could have had it,
prodigiously, unlimited and replete with felicities with a very
different appeal than those of the primitive ages. I do not say that
with the aid of science we could, like the alleged gods, make something
from nothing, but we could regenerate that which exists, make from the
world a better world, from our societies in the civilized state a
society in the harmonic state, and enter almost without transition from
the life of present ages into the life of future ages.
The religions, as absurd as they are, nonetheless represent the need for
an ideal innate in man. All the fables of the past and present represent
future hopes, the sense of immortality in mortals. Ignorance and
superstition have made shapeless monsters of these aspirations; it is up
to science, reason freed from its swaddling clothes, to give them
humanitary forms. Man and humanity, as perfected as they will be one
day, will nonetheless experience desires which will never find
satisfaction in any present time. The future will always be a beacon
towards which all their efforts will tend, the object of their constant
longings; the call of progress will always resonate in their ears.
Perception will always be higher and will always carry farther than the
realization. Man senses clearly that all is not closed forever under the
lid of the coffin. The idea of progress protests not only against all
destruction, but also against all degeneration; and not only against all
degeneration, but against all that which is not regeneration and
perfectibilization. Ignorance and superstition have supposed the
immortality of the soul and the heavenly resurrection. I believe I have
demonstrated that there is no soul distinct from the body; and there
would be duality, which is not admissible, if that soul still obeyed the
same laws of the decomposition of the body. The absolute soul and
absolute paradise would be the negation of progress; and we can no more
deny progress than we can movement. God, in the religious as in the
philosophical sense, can no longer exist with regard to us, as we
ourselves cannot exist as God with regard to the myriads of atoms of
which our body is the Great-All. It is not the human body, in its small
universality, which creates and directs these myriads of atoms of which
it is composed; it is these atoms, instead, that create it and direct it
by moving according to their passional attractions. Far from being their
God, the man is hardly anything but their temple: he is the beehive or
anthill animated by these innumerable multitudes of the imperceptible.
The universal being would not, any more than the human being, be the
creator nor the director of the colossal multitudes of worlds of which
it is made up; it is these worlds, instead, which create and direct it.
Far from being their maker, their producer — their God, as the
metaphysicians say — the universal being is hardly anything but the
workshop or, at most, the product of the infinity of beings. How then
would he be the motor of each, if he is only the machine of which each
is the motor? God and the absolute is denied by everything in nature
that has life. The progress which is movement and the movement which is
progress issue him a certificate of non-existence, characterize him as
an imposter. If the absolute could exist above us, we would be the
absolute for that which is below us, and movement and progress would not
exist. Life would be nothingness, and nothingness cannot be conceived.
All that we know is that life exists: thus movement exists, thus
progress exists, and thus the absolute does not exist. All that we can
conclude is that the circulus exists in universality as it exists in
individuality. Like every individuality, the universality, however
infinite it may be, is itself only a rotation and a spherical
gravitation which, moving more and more from the darkness and chaos and
approaching more and more light and harmony, perfects itself by working
itself ceaselessly, by a mechanism or organism that is constantly more
rectified... But all that absolutely contradicts the idea of a God from
which everything emanates and towards which everything returns, the idea
that everything has been created, by God, from nothingness, in order to
be annihilated in the bosom of the same God — which is to say, something
starting from nothing in order to lead to nothing, going beyond the
absurd in order to fall back into the absurd. God, source of all things,
central point from which everything follows and towards which all
returns, is one of these contradictory rationales that one can give to
the children of men and to the humanities-in-infancy, because their
still-sleeping intelligence cannot yet respond. But it is absolutely
absurd. A river cannot flow back towards its source; the source is no
more eternal than the river. They both exist only on the condition of
movement, which is to say of progress, of birth and of death, of
generation and regeneration. Like the river, the source has a cause. It
is not everything, this small central point from which gushes the living
water which produces the stream. The opening is only an effect, it is
not a cause; and, by returning from the effect to the cause, one would
find that the cause is still only the effect of another cause, and so
forth. God explains nothing. It is a word to cross out of the vocabulary
of men, since it serves to quibble with the difficulty without resolving
it. God is only a mannequin, the breastplate (or shirtfront) of
ignorance, a stick in the wheels of progress, a snuffer on the light,
a... rag in a lantern! It is time to cleanse the universal language of
it. Excrement of human cretinism, from now on it belongs to the Academy
Domange and the consorts: let it reign in the pits of the Villette, and
let it, reduced to powder and cast to the four winds, serve finally as
fertilizer to movement, to the eternal and universal and perfectible
creation, to the unlimited development of the infinite.
God!... in truth is it possible that two men agree on the meaning that
they give to this word? I do not accept that for the needs of the
dialectic it should be necessary to resort to it. Let a philosopher
employ it in his writings, and, if it is a Catholic who reads them, he
would only want to see, — whatever cautions the author has given, — the
God of his own religion. If he is a Calvinist, a Lutheran, a Israelite,
a Muslim, a Hindu, a believing philosopher or a philosophical believer,
each would not want and not be able to see anything but the God of his
own imagination. Finally, these three cabalistic letters will represent
as many different Gods as there are readers or listeners. I do not see
what need the dialectic could have of it, and I believe that it would do
better and more wisely to do without it. New things require new words. I
know that there are many other expressions which we use, myself as much
as anyone, and which do not have the same meaning for everyone: it is an
evil which it is necessary to try to remedy, otherwise we would discuss
a long time without understanding each other. God being the first cause
of all the social falsities, the source of all the human errors, the
capital lie, God can no longer be employed in the discussion except as
an abusive term, as a spatter spit from our lips or our pen. It is not
enough to be atheist, it is necessary to be a theocide. It is not enough
to deny the Absolute; it is necessary to affirm Progress, and to affirm
it in all and everywhere.
Defects in logic, that is what misleads the greatest thinkers, what
carries perturbation to the mass of intelligences. It is because one is
not in agreement with themselves that often one cannot come to agreement
with others. All of us who affirm the movement in the infinite and
consequently infinite progress, the single and solidary universality,
equally affirm the movement in us and consequently progress, the single
and solidary individuality. Let is deny duality in the finite as we deny
it in the infinite. Let us reject that absurd hypothesis of the
immortality of the soul, which is to say of the absolute in the finite,
when we have the proof by the body that every finite thing is
perishable, which is to say divisible and multipliable, which is to say
progressively perfectible. Matter is not one thing and spirit another
thing, but one same and single thing that movement constantly
diversifies. The spiritual is only the result of the corporeal; this is
not a matter of spirituality but of spirituosity. The soul or, to put it
better, thought is to the man what alcohol is to wine. When one speaks
of the spirit of wine, it is certainly of an entirely material thing.
Why should it be otherwise when it is a question of the spirit of man!
Do you still believe then that the earth is flat, that the heavens are a
cupola to serve it as a dome, and that the sun and stars are candles lit
by the creator God in honor of Adam and Eve and their descendants? And
if you no longer believe in these supposed revelations, in these
charlatanries or in this aberration of the faith, and if you believe in
what science and the genius of observation teaches you, in virtue of
what reason would you want spirit to be distinct from matter? And, even
being distinct, that the one be the movement and the other inertia, and
that precisely the one to which you attribute movement was
never-changing in his individuality? Inexplicable paradox! Well,
observation tells you, by my testimony, that all that which has been
vapor or dust and is grouped and has taken finished, definite form, will
come away grain by grain, drop by drop, molecule by molecule and will
scatter in the undefined in order to assume, not another form, but a
multiplicity of other forms, and will leave anew these multiple forms in
order to divide again and multiply and progress eternally in the
infinite. In order to be convinced of it, there is no need of having
studied Greek or Latin, it is only necessary to examine the analogy, to
infer and deduce.
I have established that all that which is inferior to man tends to
gravitate towards him. Man is the summary of terrestrial creation. The
Earth is a being animated like all beings and endowed with various
organs proper to life. Humanity is its brain, or rather it is that part
of it which, with regard to the human brain, one has called the gray
matter, that is to say the eminently intelligent part, for the animal
and the vegetal, and the mineral even, — in a certain proportion, — also
live under the terrestrial skull and form the ensemble of its brain.
Alone, of all the atoms which live obscurely in the innards of the
planetary body or rest, vegetate, crawl, walk or fly by the light
between the soil and the atmosphere, — man is a perfectible species. He
possesses some faculties unknown to the other beings or which are hardly
sensible among them, that of memory, for example, or calculation; that
of the emission and transmission of idea. Unlike the mineral, vegetable
and animal, the hominal generations succeed and do not resemble one
another; they always progress and do not know the limit of their
perfectibility. Eh! well, that which exists for the earth obviously
exists for man. The man is another globe, a small world which also has
in it its privileged race, its humanity in miniature, ideal of all the
atomic species that people and form its body. That humanity is called
the brain. It is towards it that gravitate all the kingdoms or all the
molecular species of the human body. These molecules, — the most filthy
as well as what one could call the most inert, — all tend to rise from
their beds and their lower natures to that type of superiority which
lives under the human skull. And, as humanity, the intelligent part of
the brain of the terrestrial body, is perfectible, the cervellity, or
intelligent part of the brain, which is the humanity of the human body,
is also perfectible. While outside of the brain, the lower molecules
only act mechanically, so to speak, and with more inertia the lower they
are place on the scale of the progression of the kingdoms or species; in
the brain, on the contrary, capstone of hominal creation, the movement
is rapid and intelligent. The brain of the man, like the brain of the
planet, also has its three, or rather its four gradations which
corresponds to the four kingdoms: the mineral, the vegetable, the animal
and the hominal. The cretin, for example, who in the human race is the
being most dispossessed of intelligence, has, in the brain, in the state
of development, only matter recumbent and vegetative, that which
correspond to the mineral and vegetable, but where the mineral prevails
in volume over the vegetable. The imbecile is the one in whose brain the
vegetable prevails over the mineral, and where there can be found a
little of the animal, which is to say of matter of a creeping and
somewhat instinctive sort. In the civilizee, all three kingdoms are
developed in his brain, but the animal kingdom prevails over the other
two. That which corresponds to the hominal, which is to say to
intelligent matter, is still in the state of infancy or savagery and
dispersed under the skull amid the virgin forests of the vegetal system,
between the blocks of rock of the mineral system and exposed in its
weakness and nudity to the ferocity of the animal system. — It is then
the industrial and scientific labors of these generations of perfectible
atoms moving between our two temples as between two poles; it is their
joys and their pains, their science or their ignorance, their individual
and social struggles which constitute our thought. Depending on whether
these infinitesimals are more or less in the harmonic state; whether
they obey among them the natural law of liberty, to anarchy, to
autonomy, or the artificial law of authority, to monarchy, to tyranny;
whether they are under the empire of superstition or they are freed from
it; whether their populations are more or less given over to pauperism
and aristocracy, or rich with equality and fraternity; whether these
small diminutives of men are more or less penned up between national
barriers and the fences of private property, or circulate more or less
easily from a passional eminence, home or homeland, to another, and from
a craneologic continent to another continent; finally, according to
whether they are more or less free or more or less slaves, and also,
whether we ourselves are more or less dignified, more or less close to
slavery or liberty. — The cervelain being, like the human being, takes
in through diet everything that is below it, discharges from the lower
organs that which is too coarse, assimilates that which is perfectible
enough to become incarnate in it, and exhales outside, on the wings of
human thought, that which is too subtle to remain captive in it. Thus it
is wrongly that we make that classification of mind and matter as being
two distinct things, the one mobile and immutable, the other mutable and
immobile, the one invisible and impalpable, the other palpable and
visible. Everything that is mobile is mutable, and everything that is
mutable is mobile. That which is palpable and visible for the human
being, the infinitely large, is invisible and impalpable for the
cervelain being, the infinitely small. That which is impalpable and
invisible for the human being is visible and palpable for the being
placed higher in the hierarchy of beings, the humanitary beings or the
terrestrial being. For the beings infinitely more perfected than us, —
the humanities of the astral spheres, I suppose, — what we will regard,
ourselves, as a fluid, they will themselves consider as a solid; and
what they will regard as fluid is regarded as solid by the humanities
still more elevated in superiority. The most subtle, here, for the one,
is, there, for the other, what becomes the coarsest. Everything depends
on the point of view and the condition in which the being is placed. The
last word of the cervelain being is certainly not the skull, as the last
word of the human being is certainly not the terrestrial skull. The man
is not the absolute of the one, humanity is not the absolute of the
other. Without doubt, the cervellity gives birth to generations which,
like the human generations, produce and transmit ideas, and accumulate
in the memory of the man of gigantic labors. Without doubt also,
humanity piles generations on generations and progress on progress. The
better, the good, and the best, increase as a result of the efforts of
each. But the planets, like men, are born, grow and die. At the death of
men or globes, the purified humanities or cervellities rise by whatever
fluid character they have towards spheres in formation or in expansion
and of a more perfectible nature. The progress is eternal and infinite,
after one step another step, after one life another life, and still and
always.
Any being whatsoever, a man, or the superior or the inferior the man, is
like a sack of grain or of molecules of all the sorts, that movement,
that is to say life and death, fills and empties without ceasing. These
grains, come from the field of production, returns to the field of
production or, according to their degree of perfectibility, they produce
rye or wheat. The content of the sack procreates a multitude of stalks,
and on each stalk each of grains subdivides and multiplies in the ear.
Nothing of that which is can preserve for one minute its full
individuality. Life is a perpetual exchange to the profit of each. The
richest in the perfectibility are the most lavish, those who venture the
most of their being in circulation: the more the laborer sows and
harvests! The poorest are the stingiest, those who have their gaze
turned inward, who stack molecule on molecule in the hollows of their
being, who seal themselves in innermost selves, and waste, in a stupid
private contemplation, a capital of faculties, troves of sensations that
external contact would have made bear fruit.
What I want to make well understood, and what I strive to generalize at
the risk of repeating myself, is that the religions, the artificial or
deceitful moralities have had their day, and that they are nothing more
today than immorality or irreligion; it is that there is a morality, one
natural religion to inaugurate on the rubble of the old superstitions,
and that that morality or that religion can be found only in the science
of man and of humanity, of humanity and of the universality; it is that
the man like the universe, is one and not double: not matter and spirit,
nor body and soul (matter or inert body, spirit or immaterial soul), but
animated and passional substance, susceptible of thousands and thousands
of metamorphoses and constrained by his animation and his passionality,
by his attractions, to a perpetual upward movement. — What it is
important to note in order to destroy all of the secular theologies and
with the authoritarian system which still serves as the basis of the
organization of contemporary societies and postpones the fraternal
communion of humans, is that with movement the absolute cannot exist; it
is that the individuality of the man and of humanity like the
individuality of all the atomic and sidereal beings cannot preserve for
one single instant their absolute personality, it is that the movement
revolutionize them without ceasing and constantly add something and take
away something from them; it is that we all, minerals, vegetables,
animals, men, stars, we would not know how to live in ourselves and by
ourselves; that there is no life without movement, and that movement is
an infinite transformation of the finite thing; it is that we live only
on the condition of taking part in the lives of others, and that the
life in us is as much more fruitful as we sow it outside the plots,
plots which returns to us in ripe and abundant crops; and as much more
lively as we give it more external elements, as we put passions in
combustion on its hearth. Finally, it is that the more we give off light
and caloric, the more we expend intelligence and love and the more we
raise ourselves with swiftness from apotheosis to apotheosis in regions
more and more superior, more and more ethereal.
Everything is solidary in universality. Everything is composed,
decomposed and recomposed according to its reciprocal and progressive
attractions, the atom like the man, the man like the stars, and the
stars like the universes. The universes are atoms in universality, as
the atom is itself a universe in its individuality. The infinite exists
at the two antipodes of creation, for the divisibility on a small scale
as for the multiplicity on a grand scale. The short view of the man, his
weak understanding cannot sound its incommensurable depths. The finite
cannot embrace the infinite, it can only sense it. But what the thinker,
supplied in the powerful instrument that we call analogy, can touch and
make thought touch, what he must proclaim by strokes of logic on all the
places and in all the public papers, is that the individual being is not
the consequence of the universal being, but that the being universal is
the consequence of individual beings; it is the infinitely large group
of which the infinitely small are the constitutive members. God, the
soul, the spirit are myths that Humanity approaching the age of reason
must toss without regret into the rag basket like some dolls from our
youth. Science, from now on, and no longer superstition, must occupy its
thought. Let it not forget that it is a daughter of progress and fiancée
of progress. The polichinelles, the good gods and the devils, all the
Guignols and the puppets armed with sticks are of childishness unworthy
of it, today that its minority comes to its end. It is time, high time,
that it thinks of its emancipation; that it girds its forehead with the
intellectual banner; that it finally prepares itself for its social
destinies, if it does not want to serve forever as laughingstock for the
Humanities of other globes.
To sum up, I say:
Movement, which is to say progress, being proven, the absolute can no
more exist in the finite than in the infinite, and thus the absolute
does not exist.
As a consequence, God, universal or absolute soul of the infinite, does
not exist.
And as a further consequence, the soul, the absolute of man,
individuality one and indivisible, eternally finished form, does not
exist.
Matter is all. Movement is the attribute of matter, and progress the
attribute of movement.
Like matter and movement, progress is eternal and infinite.
The circulus in universality does not lead to absolute perfection. It
conducts to infinite perfectibility, to unlimited progress, consequence
of eternal and universal movement.
Thus, absolute perfection does not exist, and cannot exist. If it
existed, progress would not exist.
Absolute perfection is against all the evidence, and absurd.
Movement is, obviously, truth.
No transaction is possible between these two terms: it is necessary
either to believe in God and in his diminutives and deny movement, or to
affirm movement and invalidate God.
— God is the negation of Progress.
— Progress is the negation of God.