that of nothingness which ceases to be so, in order to recognize itself and to assert itself?"[157] We are gone back to ancient India.  You will remark here three stages of thought.  The fugitive illusion is man.  The infinite illusion is the universe.  The universal principle of the appearances which compose the universe is nothingness.  Here is the explanation of the universe!  Nothingness takes life; nothingness takes life only to know itself to be nothingness; and the nothingness which says to itself, “I am nothingness,” is the reason of existence of all that is.  I said just now that the sun was declining to the horizon.  Now the last glimmer of twilight has disappeared; night has closed in—­a dark and starless night.  Yes, Sirs, but there is never on the earth a night so dark as to warrant us in despairing of the return of the dawn.  If the modern mind is such as it is described to us, it has lost all the rays of light; but the sun is not dead.

The doctrine of non-existence and of illusion is entirely incomprehensible, in the sense in which to comprehend signifies to have a clear idea, and one capable of being directly apprehended.  But, if one follows the chain of ideas as logically unrolled, in the way that a mathematician follows the transformations of an algebraical formula, without considering its real contents, it is easy to account for the origin of this theory.  If the human mind has no rule superior to itself, if it is the absolute mind, God, all its thoughts are equally true, since we cannot point out error without having recourse to a rule of truth.  If all doctrines are equally true, propositions directly and absolutely contradictory are equally true.  If all is true, there is no truth; for truth is not conceived except in opposition to at least possible error.  If there is no truth, the human reason, which seeks truth by a natural impulse belonging to its very essence, as the magnetized needle seeks the pole,—­reason, I say, is a chimera.  The truth which reason seeks is an exact relation of human thought to the reality of the world.  If the search for this relation is chimerical, the two terms, mind, and the world, may be illusions.  A fugitive illusion in presence of an infinite illusion:  there is all.  You see that these thoughts hang together with rigorous precision.  The darkness is becoming visible to us, or, in other words, we are acquiring a perfect understanding of the origin and developments of the absurdity.  Put God aside, the law of our will, the warrant of our thought; deify human nature; and a fatal current will run you aground twice over—­on the shores of moral absurdity, and on those of intellectual absurdity.  These sad shipwrecks are set before our eyes in striking examples; it has been easy to indicate their cause.