The description of the future of humanity inflamed all Luna’s ardour.  He spoke of the happiness of men, after a revolutionary crisis which would change all the organisation of humanity with mystic rapture, like a Christian preacher describing heaven.

“Man ought to seek happiness solely in this world, for after death there only existed the infinite life of matter with its endless combinations, but the human being was effaced as entirely as a plant or an animal—­he fell into oblivion when he sank into the tomb.  Immortality of the soul was one of the illusions of human pride worked up by religions, who laid their foundations on this lie.  It was only in this life that man could find heaven.  Everyone embarked on immensity in the same ship, the earth.  We were all comrades in our dangers and our struggles, and we ought to look upon one another as brothers seeking the common welfare.  And what about the unequal distribution of goods, the division of classes, the ability to work, and, above all, the struggle for existence, that the philosophers and poets of the oppressing classes paint as an indispensable condition of progress?  Communism is the holiest aspiration of humanity, the divine dream of man since he began to think in the first dawn of civilisation.  Religions had endeavoured to establish it, but religion had been shipwrecked and was moribund, and only science could enforce it in the future.  They must stop on the way they were going, as humanity was marching on the road to perdition, therefore it was necessary to return to the point of departure.  The first man who had cultivated a portion of the earth and garnered the fruits of his toil, thought it was his for ever, and left it to his sons as their property; they engaged other men to cultivate it for them—­so these men became robbers, appropriators of the universal heritage.  It was the same with those who possessed themselves of the invention of human genius, machines, etc., for the benefit of a small majority, subjecting the rest of mankind to the law of hunger.  No, everything was for everyone.  The earth belonged to all human beings without exception, like the sun and the air; its products ought to be divided between everyone with due regard to their necessities.  It was shameful that man, who only appeared for an instant on this planet—­a minute, a second, for his life was no more than this in the life of immensity—­should spend this mere breath of existence fighting with his kin, robbing them, excited by the fever of plunder, not even enjoying the majestic calm of a wild beast, which when it has eaten, rests, without ever thinking of doing harm from vanity or avarice.  There ought to be neither rich nor poor—­nothing but men.  The only inevitable division must be that between brains more or less highly organised.  But the wise, from the fact of being so, ought to show their greatness, sacrificing themselves for the more simple, without seeking to assist the greatness of their minds by material