s begun in the stars continued mechanically, by virtue
of the force acquired, without regard to their uselessness and to
their pitiful consequences, according to the custom of nature, which
knows nothing of our parsimony and squanders the suns in space as it
does the seed on earth, knowing that nothing can be lost? Or, again,
is the whole question of our peace and happiness, like that of the
fate of the worlds, reduced to knowing whether or not the infinity of
endeavours and combinations be equal to that of eternity? Or, lastly,
to come to the greatest probability, is it we who deceive ourselves,
who know nothing, who see nothing and who consider imperfect that
which is perhaps faultless, we, who are but an infinitesimal fragment
of the intelligence which we judge with the aid of the little shreds
of thought which it has vouchsafed to lend us?

XXIX

THE SAME, CONTINUED

How could we reply, how could our thoughts and glances penetrate the
infinite and the invisible, we who neither understand nor even see the
thing by which we see and which is the source of all our thoughts? In
fact, as has been very justly observed, man does not see light itself.
He sees only matter, or rather the small part of the great worlds
which he knows by the name of matter, touched by light. He does not
perceive the immense rays that cross the heavens save at the moment
when they are stopped by an object of the nature of those which his
eye is accustomed to see upon this earth: were it otherwise, the whole
space filled with innumerable suns and boundless forces, instead of
being an abyss of absolute darkness which absorbs and extinguishes the
clusters of beams that shoot across it from every side, would be but a
prodigious, untenable ocean of flashes. Shakespeare's famous lines:

"There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

have long since become utterly inadequate. There are no longer
more things than our philosophy can dream of or imagine: there is
none but things which it cannot dream of, there is nothing but the
unimaginable; and, if we do not even see the light, which is the only
thing that we believed we saw, it may be said that there is nothing
all around us but the invisible.

We move in the illusion of seeing and knowing that which is strictly
indispensable to our little lives. As for all the rest, which is
well-nigh everything, our organs not only d