“The race, you will tell me, is neither as strong nor as healthy.  That may be; alcohol and the other scourge are accidents that humanity has to surmount; ordeals, it may be, by which certain of our organs, those of the nerves, for instance, may benefit; for we invariably find that life profits by the ills that it overcomes.  Besides, a mere trifle that we may discover to-morrow may render these poisons innocuous.  These men have thoughts and feelings that those of whom La Bruyere speaks had not.”  “I prefer the simple, naked animal to the odious half-animal,” I murmured.  “You are thinking of the first semblance now,” he replied, “the semblance dear to the poet, that we saw before; let us not confuse it with the one we are now considering.  These thoughts and feelings are petty, if you will, and vile; but what is petty and vile is still better than that which is not at all.  Of these thoughts and feelings they avail themselves only to hurt each other, and to persist in their present mediocrity; but thus does it often happen in nature.  The gifts she accords are employed for evil at first, for the rendering worse what she had apparently sought to improve; but, from this evil, a certain good will always result in the end.  Besides, I am by no means anxious to prove that there has been progress, which may be a very small thing or a very great thing, according to the place whence we regard it.  It is a vast achievement, the surest ideal, perhaps, to render the condition of men a little less servile, a little less painful; but let the mind detach itself for an instant from material results, and the difference between the man who marches in the van of progress and the other who is blindly dragged at its tail ceases to be very considerable.  Among these young rustics, whose mind is haunted only by formless ideas, there are many who have in themselves the possibility of attaining, in a short space of time, the degree of consciousness that we both enjoy.  One is often struck by the narrowness of the dividing line between what we regard as the unconsciousness of these people and the consciousness that to us is the highest of all.”

“Besides, of what is this consciousness composed, whereof we are so proud?  Of far more shadow than light, of far more acquired ignorance than knowledge; of far more things whose comprehension, we are well aware, must ever elude us, than of things that we actually know.  And yet in this consciousness lies all our dignity, our most veritable greatness; it is probably the most surprising phenomenon this world contains.  It is this which permits us to raise our head before the unknown principle, and say to it:  ’What you are I know not; but there is something within me that already enfolds you.  You will destroy me, perhaps, but if your object be not to construct from my ruins an organism better than mine, you will prove yourself inferior to what I am; and the silence that will follow the death of the race to which I