This is why our efforts are difficult and worthy of praise.  We are setting ourselves—­we cannot too often repeat it—­against the will of earth.  Our enemies are urged forward by a force that drives us back.  They are marching with nature, whereas we are striving against the great current that sweeps the globe.  The earth has an idea, which is no longer ours.  She remains convinced that man is an animal in all things like other animals.  She has not yet observed that he is withdrawing himself from the herd.  She does not yet know that he has climbed her highest mountain-peaks.  She has not yet heard tell of justice, pity, loyalty and honour; she does not realize what they are, or confounds them with weakness, clumsiness, fear and stupidity.  She has stopped short at the original certitudes which were indispensable to the beginnings of life.  She is lagging behind us; and the interval that divides us is rapidly increasing.  She thinks less quickly; she has not yet had time to understand us.  Moreover, she does not reckon as we do; and for her the centuries are less than our years.  She is slow because she is almost eternal, while we are prompt because we have not many hours before us.  It may be that one day her thought will overtake ours; in the meantime, we have to vindicate our advance and to prove to ourselves, as we are beginning to do, that it is lawful to be in the right as against her, that our advance is not fatal and that it is possible to maintain it.

4

For it is becoming difficult to argue that earth or nature is always right and that those who do not blindly follow earth’s impulse are necessarily doomed to perish.  We have learnt to observe her more attentively and we have won the right to judge her.  We have discovered that, far from being infallible, she is continually making mistakes.  She gropes and hesitates.  She does not know precisely what she wants.  She begins by making stupendous blunders.  She first peoples the world with uncouth and incoherent monsters, not one of which is capable of living; these all disappear.  Gradually she acquires, at the cost of the life which she creates, an experience that is the cruel fruit of the immeasurable suffering which she unfeelingly inflicts.  At last she grows wiser, curbs and amends herself, corrects herself, returns upon her footsteps, repairs her errors, expending her best energies and her highest intelligence upon the correction.  It is incontestable that she is improving her methods, that she is more skillful, more prudent, less extravagant than at the outset.  And yet the fact remains that, in every department of life, in every organism, down to our own bodies, there is a survival of bad workmanship, of twofold functions, of oversights, changes of intention, absurdities, useless complications and meaningless waste.  We therefore have no reason to believe that our enemies are in the right because earth is with them.  Earth does not possess the truth any more than we do.