For men are made to live their life in its depth, and also in all its length.  Stronger than the elements and keener than all terrors are the hunger to last long, the passion to possess one’s days to the very end and to make the best of them.  It is not only a right; it is a virtue.

Contact dissolves fear and dwindles danger.  The wild beast attacks the solitary man, but shrinks from the unison of men together.  Around the home-fire, that lowly fawning deity, it means the multiplication of the warmth and even of the poor riches of its halo.  Among the ambushes of broad daylight, it means the better distribution of the different forms of labor; among the ambushes of night, it stands for that of tender and identical sleep.  All lone, lost words blend in an anthem whose murmur rises in the valley from the busy animation of morning and evening.

The law which regulates the common good is called the moral law.  Nowhere nor ever has morality any other purpose than that; and if only one man lived on earth, morality would not exist.  It prunes the cluster of the individual’s appetites according to the desires of the others.  It emanates from all and from each at the same time, at one and the same time from justice and from personal interest.  It is inflexible and natural, as much so as the law which, before our eyes, fits the lights and shadows so perfectly together.  It is so simple that it speaks to each one and tells him what it is.  The moral law has not proceeded from any ideal; it is the ideal which has wholly proceeded from the moral law.

* * * * * *

The primeval cataclysm has begun again upon the earth.  My vision—­beautiful as a fair dream which shows men’s composed reliance on each other in the sunrise—­collapses in mad nightmare.

But this flashing devastation is not incoherent, as at the time of the conflict of the first elements and the groping of dead things.  For its crevasses and flowing fires show a symmetry which is not Nature’s; it reveals discipline let loose, and the frenzy of wisdom.  It is made up of thought, of will, of suffering.  Multitudes of scattered men, full of an infinity of blood, confront each other like floods.  A vision comes and pounces on me, shaking the soil on which I am doubtless laid—­the marching flood.  It approaches the ditch from all sides and is poured into it.  The fire hisses and roars in that army as in water; it is extinguished in human fountains!

* * * * * *

It seems to me that I am struggling against what I see, while lying and clinging somewhere; and once I even heard supernatural admonitions in my ear, as if I were somewhere else.

I am looking for men—­for the rescue of speech, of a word.  How many of them I heard, once upon a time!  I want one only, now.  I am in the regions where men are earthed up,—­a crushed plain under a dizzy sky, which goes by peopled with other stars than those of heaven, and tense with other clouds, and continually lighted from flash to flash by a daylight which is not day.