nt, the imagination, the passions, vices,
virtues, and feelings natural to man, may combine to impose upon it.
But the moment the burden becomes too overwhelming, and disaster
threatens, the species will instantaneously, with the utmost
indifference, fling it aside. It is careless as to the means; it will
adopt the one that is nearest, the simplest, most practical, being
doubtless perfectly satisfied that its own idea is the justest and
best. And of ideas it has only one, which is that it wishes to live;
and truly this idea surpasses all the heroism, all the generous dreams,
that may have reposed in the burden which it has discarded.

And indeed, in the history of human reason, the greatest and the
justest thoughts are not always those which attain the loftiest
heights. It happens somewhat with the thoughts of men as with a
fountain; for it is only because the water has been imprisoned and
escapes through a narrow opening that it soars so proudly into the air.
As it issues from this opening and hurls itself towards the sky, it
would seem to despise the great, illimitable, motionless lake that
stretches out far beneath it. And yet, say what one will, it is the
lake that is right. For all its apparent motionlessness, for all its
silence, it is tranquilly accomplishing the immense and normal task of
the most important element of our globe; and the jet of water is merely
a curious incident, which soon returns into the universal scheme. To
us the species is the great, unerring lake; and this even from the
point of view of the superior human reason that it would seem at times
to offend. Its idea is the vastest of all, and contains every other;
it embraces limitless time and space. And does not each day that goes
by reveal more and more clearly to us that the vastest idea, no matter
where it reside, always ends by becoming the most just and most
reasonable, the wisest and the most beautiful?

33

There are times when we ask ourselves whether it might not be well for
humanity that its destinies should be governed by the superior men
among us, the great sages, rather than by the instinct of the species,
that is always so slow and often so cruel.

It is doubtful whether this question could be answered to-day in quite
the same fashion as formerly. It would surely have been highly
dangerous to confide the destinies of the species to Plato or
Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Shakespeare, or Montesquieu. At the very
worst