To the mentality that assumes, more or less consciously, that we must of necessity find a solution to every problem, belongs the argument based on the disastrous consequences of a thing.  Take any book of apologetics—­that is to say, of theological advocacy—­and you will see how many times you will meet with this phrase—­“the disastrous consequences of this doctrine.”  Now the disastrous consequences of a doctrine prove at most that the doctrine is disastrous, but not that it is false, for there is no proof that the true is necessarily that which suits us best.  The identification of the true and the good is but a pious wish.  In his Etudes sur Blaise Pascal, A. Vinet says:  “Of the two needs that unceasingly belabour human nature, that of happiness is not only the more universally felt and the more constantly experienced, but it is also the more imperious.  And this need is not only of the senses; it is intellectual.  It is not only for the soul; it is for the mind that happiness is a necessity.  Happiness forms a part of truth.”  This last proposition—­le bonheur fait partie de la verite—­is a proposition of pure advocacy, but not of science or of pure reason.  It would be better to say that truth forms a part of happiness in a Tertullianesque sense, in the sense of credo quia absurdum, which means actually credo quia consolans—­I believe because it is a thing consoling to me.

No, for reason, truth is that of which it can be proved that it is, that it exists, whether it console us or not.  And reason is certainly not a consoling faculty.  That terrible Latin poet Lucretius, whose apparent serenity and Epicurean ataraxia conceal so much despair, said that piety consists in the power to contemplate all things with a serene soul—­pacata posse mente omnia tueri.  And it was the same Lucretius who wrote that religion can persuade us into so great evils—­tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.  And it is true that religion—­above all the Christian religion—­has been, as the Apostle says, to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the intellectuals foolishness.[29] The Christian religion, the religion of the immortality of the soul, was called by Tacitus a pernicious superstition (exitialis superstitio), and he asserted that it involved a hatred of mankind (odium generis humani).

Speaking of the age in which these men lived, the most genuinely rationalistic age in the world’s history, Flaubert, writing to Madame Roger des Genettes, uttered these pregnant words:  “You are right; we must speak with respect of Lucretius; I see no one who can compare with him except Byron, and Byron has not his gravity nor the sincerity of his sadness.  The melancholy of the ancients seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, who all more or less presuppose an immortality on the yonder side of the black hole.  But for the ancients this black hole was the infinite itself; the procession of their dreams is imaged against a background of immutable ebony.  The gods being no more and Christ being not yet, there was between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius a unique moment in which man stood alone.  Nowhere else do I find this grandeur; but what renders Lucretius intolerable is his physics, which he gives as if positive.  If he is weak, it is because he did not doubt enough; he wished to explain, to arrive at a conclusion!"[30]