everything and
to the only laws possible, seeing that they are eternal, or, to speak
more humbly, that it judges what it wholly fails to understand.

XXXI

EVERYTHING MUST FINISH EXEMPT
FROM SUFFERING

Everything, therefore, must finish, or perhaps everything already is,
if not in a state of happiness, at least in a state exempt from all
suffering, all anxiety, all lasting unhappiness; and what, after all,
is our happiness upon this earth, if it be not the absence of sorrow,
anxiety and unhappiness?

But it is childish to talk of happiness and unhappiness where
infinity is in question. The idea which we entertain of happiness and
unhappiness is something so special, so human, so fragile that it
does not exceed our stature and falls to dust as soon as we go beyond
its little sphere. It proceeds entirely from a few accidents of our
nerves, which are made to appreciate very slight happenings, but which
could as easily have felt everything the reverse way and taken
pleasure in that which is now pain. We believe that we see nothing
hanging over us but catastrophes, deaths, torments and disasters; we
shiver at the mere thought of the great interplanetary spaces, with
their cold and formidable and gloomy solitudes; and we imagine that
the revolving worlds are as unhappy as ourselves because they freeze,
or clash together, or are consumed in unutterable flames. We infer
from this that the genius of the universe is an outrageous tyrant,
seized with a monstrous madness, and that it delights only in the
torture of itself and all that it contains. To millions of stars, each
many thousand times larger than our sun, to nebulae whose nature and
dimensions no figure, no word in our languages is able to express, we
attribute our momentary sensibility, the little ephemeral and chance
working of our nerves; and we are convinced that life there must be
impossible or appalling, because we should feel too hot or too
cold. It were much wiser to say to ourselves that it would need but
a trifle, a few papillae more or less to our skin, the slightest
modification of our eyes and ears, to turn the temperature, the
silence and the darkness of space into a delicious spring-time, an
unequalled music, a divine light. It were much more reasonable to
persuade ourselves that the catastrophes which we think that we behold
are life itself, the joy and one or other of those immense festivals
of mind and matter in which death, thrusting asi