nts again in these obscurities,
and which immense unknown swarming slowly transforms the top and the
bottom and the inside and the outside. Society hardly even suspects this
digging which leaves its surface intact and changes its bowels. There
are as many different subterranean stages as there are varying works,
as there are extractions. What emerges from these deep excavations? The
future.

The deeper one goes, the more mysterious are the toilers. The work
is good, up to a degree which the social philosophies are able to
recognize; beyond that degree it is doubtful and mixed; lower down,
it becomes terrible. At a certain depth, the excavations are no longer
penetrable by the spirit of civilization, the limit breathable by man
has been passed; a beginning of monsters is possible.

The descending scale is a strange one; and each one of the rungs of this
ladder corresponds to a stage where philosophy can find foothold, and
where one encounters one of these workmen, sometimes divine, sometimes
misshapen. Below John Huss, there is Luther; below Luther, there is
Descartes; below Descartes, there is Voltaire; below Voltaire, there
is Condorcet; below Condorcet, there is Robespierre; below Robespierre,
there is Marat; below Marat there is Babeuf. And so it goes on. Lower
down, confusedly, at the limit which separates the indistinct from the
invisible, one perceives other gloomy men, who perhaps do not exist as
yet. The men of yesterday are spectres; those of to-morrow are forms.
The eye of the spirit distinguishes them but obscurely. The embryonic
work of the future is one of the visions of philosophy.

A world in limbo, in the state of foetus, what an unheard-of spectre!

Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier, are there also, in lateral galleries.

Surely, although a divine and invisible chain unknown to themselves,
binds together all these subterranean pioneers who, almost always, think
themselves isolated, and who are not so, their works vary greatly, and
the light of some contrasts with the blaze of others. The first are
paradisiacal, the last are tragic. Nevertheless, whatever may be the
contrast, all these toilers, from the highest to the most nocturnal,
from the wisest to the most foolish, possess one likeness, and this
is it: disinterestedness. Marat forgets himself like Jesus. They
throw themselves on one side, they omit themselves, they think not of
themselves. They have a glance, and that glance seeks the absolute. The
fi