he experiments and
chances are following one upon the other in unimaginable worlds,
compared wherewith all those which we see on starry nights are no more
than a pinch of gold-dust in the ocean depths. Lastly, it is very
nearly sure that we ourselves, or whatever remains of us--it matters
not--will profit one day by those experiments and those chances. That
which has not yet happened may suddenly supervene; and the best state,
as well as the supreme wisdom which will recognize and establish it,
is perhaps ready to arise from the clash of circumstance. It were not
at all astonishing if the consciousness of the universe, in the
endeavour to form itself, had not yet met with the aid of the
necessary chances and if human thought were seconding one of those
decisive chances. Here there is a hope. Small as man and his thought
may appear, he has exactly the value of the most enormous forces that
he is able to conceive, since there is neither great nor small in the
immeasurable; and, if our body equalled the dimensions of all the
worlds which our eyes can see, it would have exactly the same weight
and the same importance with regard to the universe that it has
to-day. The mind alone perhaps occupies in infinity a space which
comparisons do not reduce to nothing.

XXV

OUR FATE IN INFINITY

Whatever the ultimate truth may be, whether we admit the abstract,
absolute and perfect infinity--the changeless, immovable infinity
which has attained perfection and which knows everything, to which our
reason tends--or whether we prefer that offered to us by the evidence,
here below undeniable, of our senses--the infinity which seeks itself,
which is still evolving and not yet established--it behoves us above
all to foresee in it our fate, which, in any case, must end by
absorption in that very infinity.

The first infinity, the ideal infinity, is so strangely contrary to
all that we see that it is best not to attack it until we have tried
to explore the second. Moreover, it is quite possible that it may
succeed the other. As we have said, that which has not taken place in
the eternity before may happen in the eternity after us; and nothing
save innumerous accidents is opposed to the prospect that the universe
may at last acquire the integral consciousness that will establish it
at its climax. After giving a glance, useless, for that matter, and
impotent, at all that may perhaps arise, we shall try to interrogate,
without ho