calm observation,
prove to us that this justice cannot exist, it is enough that an event
should take place which touches us somewhat more nearly, or that there
should be two or three curious coincidences, for conviction to fade in
our heart, if not in our mind. Notwithstanding all our reason and all
our experience, the merest trifle recalls to life within us the
ancestor who was convinced that the stars shone in their eternal places
for no other purpose than to predict or approve a wound he was to
inflict on his enemy upon the field of battle, a word he should speak
in the assembly of the chiefs, or an intrigue he would bring to a
successful issue in the women's quarters. We of to-day are no less
inclined to divinise our feelings for the benefit of our interests; the
only difference being that, the gods having no longer a name, our
methods are less sincere and less precise. When the Greeks, powerless
before Troy, felt the need of supernatural signal and support, they
went to Philoctetes, deprived him of Hercules' bow and arrows, and
abandoned him, ill, naked, and defenceless, on a desert island. This
was the mysterious Justice, loftier than that of man; this was the
command of the gods. And similarly do we, when some iniquity seems
expedient to us, cry loudly that we do it for the sake of posterity, of
humanity, of the fatherland. On the other hand, should a great
misfortune befall us, we protest that there is no justice, and that
there are no gods; but let the misfortune befall our enemy, and the
universe is at once repeopled with invisible judges. If, however, some
unexpected, disproportionate stroke of good fortune come to us, we are
quickly convinced that we must possess merits so carefully hidden as to
have escaped our own observation; and we are happier in their discovery
than at the windfall they have procured us.

9

"One has to pay for all things," we say. Yes, in the depths of our
heart, in all that pertains to man, justice exacts payment in the coin
of our personal happiness or sorrow. And without, in the universe that
enfolds us, there is also a reckoning; but here it is a different
paymaster who measures out happiness or sorrow. Other laws obtain;
there are other motives, other methods. It is no longer the justice of
the conscience that presides, but the logic of nature, which cares
nothing for our morality. Within us is a spirit that weighs only
intentions; without us, a power that only ba