To accomplish the majestically practical work, to shape the whole architecture like a statue, base nothing on impossible modifications of human nature; await nothing from pity.

Charity is a privilege, and must disappear.  For the rest, you cannot love unknown people any more than you can have pity on them.  The human intelligence is made for infinity; the heart is not.  The being who really suffers in his heart, and not merely in his mind or in words, by the suffering of others whom he neither sees nor touches, is a nervous abnormality, and he cannot be argued from as an example.  The repulse of reason, the stain of absurdity, torture the intelligence in a more abundant way.  Simple as it may be, social science is geometry.  Do not accept the sentimental meaning they give to the word “humanitarianism,” and say that the preaching of fraternity and love is vain; these words lose their meaning amid the great numbers of man.  It is in this disordered confusion of feelings and ideas that one feels the presence of Utopia.  Mutual solidarity is of the intellect—­common-sense, logic, methodical precision, order without faltering, the ruthless inevitable perfection of light!

In my fervor, in my hunger, and from the depths of my abyss, I uttered these words aloud amid the silence.  My great reverie was blended with song, like the Ninth Symphony.

* * * * * *

I am resting on my elbows at the window.  I am looking at the night, which is everywhere, which touches me, me, although I am only I, and it is infinite night.  It seems to me that there is nothing else left me to think about.  Things cling together; they will save each other, and will do their setting in order.

But again I am seized by the sharpest of my agonies—­I am afraid that the multitude may rest content with the partial gratifications to be granted them everywhere by those who will use all their clinging, cunning power to prevent the people from understanding, and then from wishing.  On the day of victory, they will pour intoxication and dazzling deceptions into you, and put almost superhuman cries into your mouths, “We have delivered humanity; we are the soldiers of the Right!” without telling you all that such a statement includes of gravity, of immense pledges and constructive genius, what it involves in respect for great peoples, whoever they are, and of gratitude to those who are trying to deliver themselves.  They will again take up their eternal mission of stupefying the great conscious forces, and turning them aside from their ends.  They will appeal for union and peace and patience, to the opportunism of changes, to the danger of going too quickly, or of meddling in your neighbor’s affairs, and all the other fallacies of the sort.  They will try again to ridicule and strike down those whom the newspapers (the ones in their pay) call dreamers, sectarians, and traitors; once again they will flourish all their