Chapter III: Part 3

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Let us then pay a last visit to one of those green tables which spread their length in the somewhat disreputable place of which I have written elsewhere[2] as the “Temple of Chance.” To-day I would rather call it the Factory of Chance, for it is here that, for more than half a century, without respite or repose, on weekdays, Sundays and holidays alike, daily from ten o’clock in the morning till twelve o’clock at night, with croupiers unintermittently relieving one another, men have obstinately manufactured Chance and doggedly consulted the formless and featureless god that shrouds good luck and ill within his shadow.

We do not yet know what he is nor what he wants; we are not even sure that he exists; but surely it would be astonishing if no result of any kind, no clue to the tantalizing puzzle, had emerged from this endless effort, the most gigantic, the most costly, the most methodical that has ever been made on the brink of this gloomy abyss, if nothing had been born of all this furious work, however trivial, however unhealthy and useless it may appear.

In any case, at these tables, as at all places where passions become intensified, we are able to make interesting observations and, among other things, to behold at first hand, violently foreshortened and harshly illuminated, certain aspects of man’s lifelong struggle with the unknown. The drama, which as a rule is long drawn out, projecting itself into space and time and breaking up amid circumstances that escape our eyes, is here knit together, gathered into a ball, held, so to speak, in the hollow of the hand. But, for all its speed, its abruptness of movement and its extreme compression, it remains as complex and mysterious as those which go on indefinitely. Until the ivory ball that rolls and hops around the wheel falls into its red or black compartment, the unknown veiling its choice or its destiny is as impenetrable as that which hides from us the choice or the destiny of the stars. The movements of the planets can be calculated almost to a second; but no mathematical operation can measure or predict the course of the little white ball.

Your most skilful players, indeed, have given up trying. Not one of them any longer seriously relies on intuition, presentiment, second sight, telepathy, psychic forces or the calculation of probabilities in the attempt to foresee or determine the fall of a destiny no larger than a hazel-nut. All the scientific part of human knowledge has failed; and all the occult and magical side of that same knowledge has been equally unsuccessful. The mathematicians, the prophets, the seers, the sorcerers, the sensitives, the mediums, the psychometrists, the spiritualists who call upon the dead for assistance, all alike are blind, confounded and impotent before the wheel and before Destiny’s thirty-seven compartments. Here Chance reigns supreme; and hitherto, though it all happens before our eyes, though it is repeated to satiety and may be held, let me say once more, in the hollow of our hand, no one has yet been able to determine a single one of its laws.

Yet such laws seem to exist; and thousands of players have ruined themselves in following their forms or their elusive and deceptive traces. Let us take a bundle of those records or _permanences_, published at Monte Carlo, which give day by day the list of all the numbers that have come up at one of the roulette or _trente-et-quarante_ tables. As everybody knows, these numbers are arranged in long parallel columns, the black on the left and the red on the right. When we look at one of these sheets, containing as a rule ten columns of sixty-five numbers each--dead and harmless cyphers now, though once so dangerous, once destructive of so many hopes and perhaps inspiring more than one disaster--we observe a tendency towards a fairly perceptible equilibrium between the red and the black. Most often the two chances balance each other, singly or in little groups, a black, a red, two blacks, three reds, three blacks, two reds and so on. When we come upon a series of five, six, seven, eight, sometimes eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve consecutive blacks, we are almost certain of finding not far away a compensating series of five, six, seven, eight or ten reds. There is a very real rhythm, a sort of breathing or a cadenced movement to and fro of the mysterious creature which we call Chance. This rhythm or balance is moreover confirmed by the final statistics of the day, from which we learn that, in a total of six hundred and so many spins of the ball, the difference between the black and the red very seldom exceeds twenty or thirty; and this difference is even smaller in the total for the week, that is to say, in a total of nearly five thousand spins, when it is usually reduced to a few units.

The monster has other strange habits. We see, for instance, that it is not uncommon for a number to come up twice in succession; and it is undeniable that, in each day’s play, two or three numbers are obviously favoured, so much so that we may hurl out a challenge to logic and declare that the more frequently a number occurs the more chances it has of reappearing. This seems to conflict with the law of equilibrium which we have remarked; but it must be observed that this equilibrium will be recovered later, that by the end of the week the difference will no longer be very great and that they will almost disappear when the month is over. The equilibrium is more slowly restored because we must multiply the number of series by eighteen and a half to reach the proportions of the even chances.

Players note yet another law which, for that matter, is but a corollary of the former habit, but which has something curiously human about it: the chances which lag behind show a greater eagerness to regain their lost ground at the moment that follows more or less closely upon a halt, as though they had recovered their breath after a brief rest on the landing of a staircase.

Let us add at once that it is wise to distrust these fluctuating habits and these gropings after laws. For instance, red has been known to beat black by seventy per cent. in the course of a day’s play. Black, on the other hand, as people still remember at Monte Carlo, one day came up twenty-nine times in succession and the second dozen twenty-eight times without a break. Chance has not our nerves; it is not, like us, impatient to make good its losses or to carry off its gains. It takes its time, awaits its hour and does not trouble to keep step with our ways of life.

Players as a rule attribute these habits or caprices to a trick of the croupier’s hand. This is hardly tenable. After all, we know how the thing is done. The ball drops into its compartment and the croupier announces, for instance:

“13, black, _impair_ and manque.”

The losses are raked in, the winnings are paid out, the players renew their stakes, there is sometimes a brief dispute, somebody asks for change and so on. These operations vary a good deal in length; and all this time the wheel carrying the ball is making hundreds of revolutions. The croupier stops it at last, takes the ball, reverses the wheel and sends the ball spinning in the opposite direction. It is impossible under these conditions for his particular trick of the hand to exercise any influence whatever. Besides, we can easily see from the chart of the _permanences_ that the change of croupier does not perceptibly affect the rhythm of the even chances. It is not the man who controls the rhythm but the rhythm that controls the man.

These gropings after laws in what would seem a negation of all or any law; these strivings on the part of Chance to quit its own domain and to organize its chaos; this god who denies himself and seeks to destroy himself by his own hand; these incomprehensible stammerings, these awkward efforts to achieve utterance and assume consciousness are rather curious, we must admit. For the rest, it is these efforts, these hankerings after equilibrium, this embryonic rhythm that constitute the gamblers’ good and bad luck. If Chance were simply Chance as we conceive it on first principles, one would stake any sum anyhow and at any moment. I am well aware that, according to the most learned theorists on roulette, each _coup_ is independent of all the others and begins as if nothing had happened before, as if nothing were to happen afterwards, as if the table were fresh from the shop, the wheel from the factory and the croupier from the hands of God. In theory this is quite accurate; but we have just seen that in practice it does not seem to be so. For that matter, it seems impossible to explain the reason. Players are satisfied to observe the fact, while yielding to a dangerous but very human tendency to exaggerate the scope and the certainty of their observations.

They are too ready to see laws where there is only a mass of coincidences as fleeting as clouds. It is of course necessary that the reds and blacks, emerging successively from nowhere, should find a place somewhere and form certain groups; and, if it is rather surprising that at the end of the month their numbers are nearly equal, it would be no less surprising if one of the colours were to prevail largely over the other. It is perfectly true that, at first sight, the reds and blacks seem to balance on the _permanence_ sheets; but it is also true that, when we examine more closely, a series of five or six reds, for instance, interrupted by one or two blacks, not infrequently begins a fresh run; and ill-luck may well have it that, at this moment, the player, in his search for equilibrium, will start punting on the black and in a few _coups_ behold the disappearance of all the winnings slowly and laboriously wrested from Chance, which is niggardly when one is winning and extremely generous--to the bank--when one is losing. For that matter, he will suffer the same disappointment if he bets on the variation, in other words, against the equilibrium, and will too often discover that these laws, when he puts his trust in them, are writ in water, whereas they seem to be graven in bronze so soon as they betray him.

In order to profit by these laws, which are perhaps fallacious and in any case untrustworthy, and to secure himself against their treachery, he has contrived a host of ingenious systems which sometimes enable him to win but most often merely retard his ruin.

But, before speaking of these systems, let us begin by saying that we shall concern ourselves here only with the even chances, red or black, _pair_ or _impair_, _passe_ or _manque_. These are sufficiently complicated in themselves and set us problems that would be enough to exhaust all the shrewdness of a human life. As for any other than the even chances, _en plein_, _à cheval_, _transversales_, _carrés_, _douzaines_ and so forth, these, both in theory and in practice, escape all control, calculation or explanation.

Whatever system he adopt, the gambler is always tossing heads or tails against the bank. He has a chance and the bank has a chance; but zero gives the bank odds against him; and, though zero is apparently a very mild tax, since at _rouge-et-noir_ in thirty-six chances the bank has only half a chance more than the player, it is bound to be ruinous in the end. To escape the abruptness of a decision which, if he placed all that he possessed on the red or the black, would end the game at a single stroke, the player divides his stake, so as to be able to defy a large number of chances, hoping that, thanks to a skilfully graduated progression, he will end by lighting on a favourable series in which the gains will exceed the losses. This is the underlying principle of all the systems, which are never anything but more or less ingenious, prudent and complicated martingales. There are not, there never will be any others, in the absence of a miracle which has not yet occurred, of an intuition which foresees what the ball will decide, or of an unknown force which will oblige it to act as a player wishes.

I have no intention of reviewing all these systems, which are innumerable and of unequal value: the _paroli_ pure and simple, that artless, violent, doubled stake which leads straight to disaster; the D’Alembert and all its variants; the descending progressions; the differential methods; the _montant belge_; the _parolis intermittents_; the snowball; the _photographie_; the staking of equal amounts on certain groups of figures, which is a Chinese puzzle demanding days of patient observation before it is attacked; and many others which I forget, from the most clear-cut to the most mysterious, which are sold at a high price, to credulous beginners, in sealed envelopes containing what is everybody’s secret and with all or nearly all of which I have become acquainted thanks to the kindness of an erudite player. A detailed account of those most frequently used will be found in D’Albigny’s treatise _Les Martingales modernes_, in Gaston Vessillier’s _Théorie des systèmes géométriques_, in Hulmann’s _Traité des jeux dits de hasard_, in Théo d’Alost’s _Théorie scientifique nouvelle des jeux de la roulette, trente-et-quarante, etc._, and, above all, in the _Revue de Monte Carlo_, which has given a system in every issue since the day of its foundation some fifteen years ago.

Whether mystic or transparent, all these methods present more or less the same dangers, being all founded on the quicksands of equilibrium and temporary disturbance. If they are very cautious, the loss is trifling, but the gain is still smaller; if they are bold, the gain is great, but the loss is two or three times greater. The best of them, in order to continue the defence of a moderate stake and of what has already been sacrificed, involve the risking on the cloth, at a given moment, of all the previous winnings, which are soon followed by the sums held in reserve. This is the inevitable revenge of the bank, at which you thought that you were nibbling with impunity, but which suddenly opens wide its jaws, like a blind and drowsy crocodile, and swallows profits and capital at a single gulp.

The players hearten themselves by maintaining that they have an incontestable advantage over the bank. They begin to play, they “punt” when they like and as they like and they withdraw when they please, whereas the bank is compelled to play without stopping, to accept every stake and to meet every _coup_ up to the limit of the maximum, which, as we know, is six thousand francs on the even chances. This advantage is a real one if the player, after winning a big sum, goes away and does not come back again. But the lucky gambler, even more infallibly than the one who has no luck, will return to the enchanted table and in so doing loses the only elective weapon that he had against his enemy. To choose your time for punting is but an illusory privilege, because everything, at any moment, is equally shifting and uncertain; and you never know beforehand when the precarious and deceptive law of equilibrium will reassert itself. After a long sequence of blacks, you wager on a fine series of reds, a certain run, you would say; but no sooner have you staked your money than the series gives up the ghost and remorseless black resumes its devastating course; or else you do the opposite: you bet on black and it is red that settles down for a run. At whatever moment you start punting, you are always fighting red against black, that is to say, one to one. Once more, the only real advantage is that you can go away when you like; but where is the gambler, whether losing or winning, who is able to go away and not come back?

After mature examination, all these systems merely carve the brutal and crushing mass of luck into small pieces. They act as a defensive padding against the blows of Chance, making them less grave. They prolong the player’s life or his agony. They enable the owner of a modest purse to stake as often as the multimillionaire, who would confine himself to betting double or quits indefinitely, if he were not stopped by the fatal barrier of the maximum. But all mathematical operations, all combinations of figures flutter and struggle like blind captives between bronze walls. They merely dash themselves in vain against these walls, whether black or red: both remain invulnerable and impregnable; and from their imprisoning embrace there is no escape.

Does this mean that there is no such thing as a defensible method and that the most skilful calculations have not revealed a means of defeating Chance? In theory, I cannot bring myself to believe that baseless calculations will ever do what they have not done up to the present. It is none the less true that, in practice, we come upon some which struggle with fair success against ill-luck. For instance, a friend of mine, a British officer, has a system which he has been using for a long time and which yields astonishing results. It is, of course, a progression, the whole of whose virtue lies in an ingenious and very simple key that seems to act as a sort of talisman. I have not found this method in any of either the recognized or the catchpenny treatises. It has its dangers, like the others; it has its difficult moments, when, to save your anticipated profits and your earlier losses, you have to risk a rather large amount. But, if you prudently stop playing during runs which are too obstinately hostile, if you allow the storm to pass as it spreads over a large number of chances, you end by obtaining the necessary compensation. At any rate, it has never seriously failed my friend so far.

Nevertheless it must not be supposed that we have only to use this system blindly and automatically. As with other systems, a certain science, a certain experience, a certain deftness are indispensable. Though science and experience are evasive qualities here, fugitive and at the mercy of Chance, they are by no means illusory. The careful and experienced player understands how to approach and nurse his luck, or at least how not to thwart it. He guesses the beginning and the end of a favourable series. He foresees alternations and intermittences; and, when he does not succeed in grasping their rhythm, he prefers to abstain from playing, rather than encounter them inopportunely. He makes more than one mistake, but makes far fewer than those who, faithful to the very scientific theory of the absolute independence of each _coup_, back either colour at any moment. He does not surrender to the fixed rigidity of logic, he does not throw the gauntlet down to fate, he does not defy the animosity of fortune. He is never obstinate. He does not struggle on, sullenly, to his last coin, against an iniquitous run, in order to gain the bitter satisfaction of learning the utmost depths of his ill-luck and the injustice of fate. He has no self-conceit, no prejudices, no inflexible opinions. He is docile, plastic and accommodating. Devoid of all false shame, he cheerfully abandons his pretensions and pays court to fortune. He retraces his steps and retracts at fitting times. He stops, starts afresh, yields, tacks about, allows himself to be borne upon the tide and comes safely to harbour, while the arrogant, overbold and headstrong pilot founders in deep water.

Beyond all else, he studies the character and temper of the table at which he takes his seat, for each table has its psychology, its habits, its history, which vary from day to day and yet by the end of the year form a homogeneous whole wherein all temporary errors, all anomalies and injustices are compensated. The question is to know on what page of this history he should prepare to play his part. He will not learn this at once. It is of little use for him to peep at the notes and _permanences_ of the players who have come before him. What he wants is the immediate contact, the very breath of the hidden god. But the god is already thrilling into life, taking shape and countenance, giving a whispered hint of his intentions, speaking words of approval or condemnation; and the tragic struggle begins between the player, so infinitely small, and Chance, so enormous and omnipotent.

Now that the battle is joined, now that the player has done what he could to summon and welcome luck, there is nothing left for him to do but wait; for luck, when all is said, will remain the supreme power that pronounces the final verdict, the formidable and inevitable unknown factor in every combination. The best of systems cannot overcome an abnormal and pitiless run of bad luck which makes you stake incessantly on the losing colour. A run like this, without favourable intermittences, is extremely rare but always possible. It corresponds, for that matter, with the extraordinary strokes of good luck, which seem more frequent only because they attract more attention. From time to time we see a man, or rather let me say a woman--for it is nearly always female players who have these inspirations--walk up to the table and with a high hand and not the least hesitation gamble _en plein_ or _en cheval_, on a _transversale_ or _carré_, and win time after time, as though she saw beforehand where the ball would fall. These moments of intuition are always very brief; and, if the player insists or grows stubborn, she will soon lose whatever she has won. It is none the less true that, when we observe this very obvious and striking phenomenon, we wonder whether there is not something more in it than mere coincidence. When all is said, can luck be anything other than a passing and dazzling intuition of what will flash into actuality before everybody’s eyes a second later? Is not the compartment which does not yet contain the little ball, but which in an instant will snap it up and hold it, is not this compartment already, somewhere, a thing of the present and even of the past? But these are questions which would lead us too far afield in space and time.

Be this as it may, to return to the system of which we were speaking, even if I were at liberty to divulge its secret I should not do so. I am not a very austere moralist and I look upon gambling as one of those profoundly human evils which we shall never be able to uproot and which, for all our efforts, will always reappear in a new form. Still, the least that we can do is not to encourage it. The gambler, I mean the inveterate, almost professional gambler, is not interesting. To begin with, he is an idler and nearly always a part of the world’s flotsam, with no justification for his existence. If he be rich, he is making the most foolish, the most dismal use of his money that can be imagined. If he be poor, he is even less easily to be forgiven: he should know better than to sacrifice his days and too often the welfare and the peace of mind of those dependent on him to a will-o’-the-wisp. Underlying the gambler we find too often a sluggard, an incompetent, a boneless egoist, greedy of vulgar and unmerited pleasures, a dissatisfied and inefficient individual. Gambling is the stay-at-home, imaginary, squalid, mechanical, anæmic and unlovely adventure of those who have never been able to encounter or create the real, necessary and salutary adventures of life. It is the feverish and unhealthy activity of the wastrel. It is the purposeless and desperate effort of the debilitated, who no longer possess or never possessed the courage and patience to make the honest, persevering effort, the unspasmodic, unapplauded effort which every human life demands.

There is also a great deal of puerile vanity about the gambler. Taken for all in all, he is a child still seeking his place in the universe. He has not yet realized his position. He thinks himself peerless in the face of destiny. In his self-infatuation he expects the unknown or the unknowable to do for him what it does not do for any one whomsoever. And he expects this for no reason, simply because he is himself and because others have not that privilege. He must tempt fate incessantly, hurriedly, anxiously, in I know not what idle and pretentious hope of learning to know himself from without. Whatever fortune’s decision may be, he will find cause for preening himself. If he have no luck, he will feel flattered because he is specially persecuted by fortune; if he be lucky, he will think all the more highly of himself because of the exceptional gifts which she bestows upon him. For the rest, he does not need to believe that he deserves these gifts; on the contrary, the less right he has to them, the prouder he will be of them; and the unjust and manifestly undeserved chance which makes them his will form the best part of the vainglorious satisfaction which he will contrive to extract from them.

It would be extremely surprising, I said when I began, if this indefatigable and exhaustive enquiry into Chance, pursued for over fifty years, had failed to yield some sort of result. I am wondering, at the end of this investigation, what that result is. At the cost of an insane waste of money, time, physical, nervous and moral energy and spiritual forces perhaps more precious still, it has taught us that Chance is in short Chance, that is to say, an aggregate of effects whereof we do not know the causes. But we knew as much as this before; and our new discovery is a little derisory. We have seen the shadowy appearance of certain laws or habits from which a few players appear to derive advantage, though this advantage is always precarious. But these apparent laws, which tend obscurely and uncertainly to instil a little order into Chance, are, like Chance itself, but inconsistent and ephemeral summaries of results from unknown causes. Upon the whole we have learnt nothing, unless perhaps it be that we were wrong to attach greater importance to those manifestations of destiny than they possess. If we look at them more closely, we find that there is nothing more behind all these catastrophes and all these mysteries of luck than the catastrophe and the mysteries which we put there. We link our fate to the fate of a little ball which is not responsible for it; and, because we entrust it for a moment with our fortune, we fondly imagine that mysterious moral powers are bent on directing and ending its course at the right or wrong moment. It knows nothing of all this; and, though the lives of thousands of men depended on its fall to the right or the left of the point at which it stops, it would not care. It has laws of its own, which it must obey and which are so complex that we do not even try to explain them. It is just a little ball, honestly seeking the little red or black hole in which to go to sleep and having nothing very much to tell us of the secrets of a luck or destiny which exist only within ourselves.

THE RIDDLE OF PROGRESS

This war, which is one such as had never yet been waged upon this earth of ours, leads us to consider the great problem of the future of mankind.

Dare we hope that humanity will one day renounce these monstrous follies and that they will become altogether impossible? To this question, if we wish to meet it at its source, I see but one reply, which I have already given elsewhere and which I will here recapitulate and complete, namely, that we are engulfed in a universe which has no more limit in time than it has in space, which had no beginning, as it will have no end, and which has behind it as many myriads of myriads of years as it discovers ahead of it. Yesterday’s eternity and to-morrow’s are precisely identical. All that the universe is going to do it must have already done, for it has had as many opportunities of doing so as it will ever have. All the things that it has not done are things which it will never be able to do, because nothing will be added, in space or time, to what it has already possessed in space or time. It has necessarily made in the past all the efforts and all the experiments which it will make in the future; and all that has gone before, having been subject to the same chances, is perforce the same as all that is to follow.

It is probable, therefore, that there was once an infinity of worlds similar to our own, even as it is likely that there is an infinity of such similar worlds at present, the infinity of space being comparable with that of time. These coincidences, however difficult for us to picture, must inevitably occur and recur in the immeasurable and the innumerous in which we are immersed, that is, unless the infinity of possible combinations be less unlimited than those of time and space.

This is where our capacity of imagination halts, for it is easier for us to conceive the infinities of space and time than the infinity of combinations. To obtain some idea of the latter, we should have to understand the substance and the nature, the laws and the forces, in a word, the whole riddle of existence. None the less is it true that this possible infinity of combinations is our only hope; without it there would be nothing more to expect of a universe which obviously would have tried and exhausted everything before our coming.

But, if this number of combinations is really infinite, it is open to us to say that the earth is an experiment which had not yet been made and an experiment which has failed, since suffering and evil have the upper hand of happiness and goodness. If the experiment has failed, we are its victims; but we are not forbidden to hope that our efforts will in some way modify combinations which will be more fortunate in other places or at another time. If the experiment has failed, it does not follow that others have not succeeded and are not more fortunate, at this very moment, in other worlds than ours. We may even suppose that, in the infinity of these combinations and experiments, the most successful tend to become fixed and crystallized and that, in view of their infinite number, they will bring about successfully in the future what they have not brought about successfully in the past. This is a hazardous glimmer; but I doubt whether any others will be discovered to keep us uplifted above despair.

Let us for a moment assume that the experiment of this world had not miscarried as it has; that the mind of man, which, since the beginning, has been struggling painfully against matter and winning but a few brief, uncertain and precarious victories, were a million times more powerful and better-armed. It would no doubt have triumphed over all that weighs us down and keeps us where we are; it would have freed itself from the apparently illusory fetters of space and time. It is not unreasonable to admit that, among the myriads of worlds which people the infinite, there are some in which these better conditions are realized. Perhaps, after all, it would be impossible to imagine anything that does not exist somewhere in reality, for we may very rightly maintain that our imaginings can be nothing more than stray reflections of things that already exist. Now, if we lived in one of those worlds and if we could see, as we should perhaps be allowed to see, all that is happening at this moment on the earth which we now inhabit and on others which are perhaps even worse and more unfortunate, it seems to us that we should know neither rest nor ease until we had intervened and helped to make it better and wiser and more habitable.

For that matter, no one can tell us that this is not so now and that all our spiritual victories, all that seems, at certain moments, to be leading us towards a future less hideous than the past, all the mysterious currents of good that sometimes flow through our world, all that awaits us after death, no one, I say, can tell us that all this is not due to the intervention of one of those worlds. It is true that we cannot perceive the act of intervention, that we are hardly sensible of it; but it is also true that these creatures of a higher world, being of necessity less encumbered with matter and more spiritual than we, must necessarily remain invisible to us. In the infinity of the firmament we discover myriads of worlds that are material worlds like our own; and we are able to discover only these, because all that does not more or less closely resemble our own world must needs escape us. But the space lying between the stars, which to us appears void, is infinitely wider than the space which they themselves occupy; and it would be strange indeed if it were not filled with worlds which we cannot perceive at all, or rather if it were not itself one vast world which our eyes are incapable of taking in.

It is, moreover, thinkable that, if we do not see these other worlds, they, not being material worlds, do not perceive matter and are consequently as unaware of us as we are unaware of them; for we are doubtless mistaken in believing that, because we are visible to one another, we are necessarily visible to all other beings. On the contrary, there is reason to presume that these spiritual beings pass through us without suspecting our presence and that, as they are conscious and sensible only of that which emanates from the spirit, they do not suspect or discover our existence except in so far as we approach the conditions in which they exist.

Consider the earth in its origin: at first, a shapeless nebula, becoming gradually more and more condensed; next, a globe of fire, of rocks in fusion, whirling for millions of years through space, with no other object than that of forming into a mass and cooling: an inconceivable incandescence, which none of our sources of heat can enable us to picture; an essential, scientific, absolute barrenness which may well have proclaimed itself irremediable and everlasting. Who would have thought that from these torrents of matter in eruption, which seemed to have destroyed for ever all life or the least germ of life, there would emerge each and every form of life itself, from the most enormous, the strongest, the most enduring, the most impetuous, the most abundant, down to the slightest, the least visible, the most precarious, the most ephemeral, the most exiguous? Who above all could have dared foresee that they would give birth to what seems so utterly alien to the liquefied or pasty rocks and metals that alone formed the surface, the nucleus and the very entity of our globe, I mean our human intelligence and consciousness?

Is it possible to imagine a more unexpected evolution and ending? What could astonish us after so great an astonishment and what are we not entitled to hope of a world which, after being what it was, has produced what we see and what we are? Considering that it started from a sort of negation of life, from integral barrenness and from worse than nothing, in order to end in us, where will it not end after starting from ourselves? If its birth and formation have elaborated such prodigies, what prodigies may not its existence, its indefinite prolongation and its dissolution hold in store for us? There are an immeasurable distance and inconceivable transformations between the one frightful material of the early days and the human thought of this moment; and there will doubtless be a like distance and like transformations as difficult to conceive between the thought of this moment and that which will succeed it in the infinity of time.

It seems as if, in the beginning, our earth did not know what to do with its material and with its force, which inter-devoured each other. In the vast, flaming void in which it was being consumed, it had not yet the shadow of an object or an idea; to-day, it has so many that our scholars wear out their lives to no purpose in seeking them and are overwhelmed by the number of its mysterious and inexhaustible combinations.

At that time it disposed of but a single force, the most destructive that we knew, fire. If everything was born of fire, which itself seemed to be born only to destroy, what will not be born of that which seems to be born only to produce, beget and multiply? If it was able to do so much with the lava and the red-hot cinders which were the only elements that it possessed, what will it not be able to do with all that it will end by possessing?

It is well sometimes to tell ourselves that we are at least living in a world which has not yet exhausted its future and which is much nearer to its beginning than to its end. It was born only yesterday and has but lately disentangled its original chaos. It is at the starting-point of its hopes and its experiments. We believe that it is making for death, whereas all its past, on the contrary, shows that it is much more probably making for life. In any case, as its years pass by, the quantity and still more the quality of the life which it engenders and maintains tend to increase and to improve. It has given us only the first-fruits of its miracles; and in all likelihood there is no more connection between what it was and what it is than there will be between what it is and what it will be. No doubt, when its greatest marvels burst into being, we shall no longer possess the lives which we possess to-day; but we shall still be there under another form, we shall still be existing somewhere, on its surface or in its depths; and it is not utterly improbable that one of its last prodigies will reach us in our dust, awaken us and recall us to life, in order to impart to us at last the share of happiness which we had not enjoyed and to teach us that we were wrong not to interest ourselves, on the further side of our graves, in the destiny of this earth of ours, of which we had never ceased to be the immortal offspring.

THE TWO LOBES

XII

THE TWO LOBES

A soldier writes me the following letter from the front:

“There are quagmires and skeletons in the forest. I have discovered
and admired the ruined gods under the still living and wonderful
vegetation: their spirit has evaporated. The odour of Christ has
little charm for me; I prefer that of Buddha. What I adore in him
is the fundamental contradiction that seeks to assure us of our
immortality by proving our inevitable annihilation. He taught,
in the same breath, the illusion of the Ego and its periodical
reincarnation, an obvious absurdity which implies a knowledge of the
profoundest truth, of the very nature of being, at the same time and
alternately collective and individual. This discovery, which he did
not formulate, should have led him elsewhere than to Nirvana, that
paradise of unripe fruits....

“Man is so fashioned as to perceive only one half of the universe;
and the mind of ordinary texture sees barely a hemisphere of truth.
Afflicted with a congenital ‘nervous headache,’ humanity thinks with
only one half of its brain, with the eastern lobe or the western, the
ancient or the modern; its mind nibbles its own tail; the antinomies
pursue one another in an endless circle, which Kant believed that he
had discovered, but which Buddha had striven to open. He possessed
the complementary virtues; he was religious and rational; while he
summed up within himself the mysticism of the east, his was the most
scientific of the minds of antiquity, at a time when science did not
exist but was merged in philosophy. The moderns who have sought to
condense into a system the collective and hardly initiated effort
of science have pitiably failed, for they have thought only as
westerners, entangled in the contradiction of idealistic aspirations
and materialistic arguments, whereas Buddha’s formula might still
and almost without breaking down contain this gigantic effort and
yet not hamper it. From the death of the prince-philosopher, down to
the flights of contemporary science, true thought has not advanced
one step; Arab or Christian spiritualism and its reagent, positivist
or scientific materialism, are recoils in contrary directions, false
monisms which, taking the extreme for the supreme, seek to fix the
centre of gravity on the circumference of the wheel. The explorers of
the Beyond must set out from the cross-roads of religious synthesis
and scientific analysis and drag these rival sisters by the hand.

“Truth shines at the centre of a circle of onlookers and we must pass
through its flame to recognize a brother in the adversary opposite.
We must reach the centre of space to discern the identity of its
cardinal points: ‘_Totum et Nihil, Alter et Ego_.’ The longing to
convert others must yield to the need of completing and balancing
our own point of view. In the sacred forest, which pioneers have
penetrated on all sides and in all ages, the more greatly daring must
necessarily draw nearer one to the other. Even if they cannot meet,
they can hear one another and give one another mutual encouragement.
The most modest cry of discovery may be welcome in the solitude and
silence in which the truth of the future is ripening....”

I thought it well to preserve this page. It sets forth, in a remarkable, though perhaps too rapid summary, two or three of the great problems which in reality are only one and to which, unless we give up everything, we are bound to attempt the answer: the problems of immortality or annihilation, of flux and reflux, of existence alternatively collective and individual, of exteriorization and interiorization, which make up the mighty cosmic rhythm whereof our life and death are but infinitesimal pulsations.

But let us begin by observing that the fundamental contradiction which seeks to assure us of our immortality by proving our inevitable annihilation is not to be found in Buddha and that it is not true to say that he teaches in the same breath the illusion of the Ego and its periodical reincarnation. The doctrine of reincarnation is not Buddha’s. He found it ready-made; it existed before him and was so deeply rooted in his people that he does not even dream of disputing it. From the exoteric point of view, he tries only to disarm it, to deprive it of its sting, to render it harmless. He tries to reduce life to the point where it can find nothing wherewith to reincarnate itself. According to the exoteric doctrine, which is but a preparation for esoteric truth, life is naught but suffering; and its only aim is the redemption or the extinction of suffering. This extinction is to be found in Nirvana, which is not annihilation but the absorption of the individual into the universe. Ordinary death, by reason of the perpetual reincarnation of the same individual, cannot suppress suffering. We must therefore find a sort of superdeath, which makes any reincarnation impossible; and this superdeath can be obtained only by the man who has been striving to die all his life long and who has deliberately cut off all the ties that bind him to existence: all love, all hope, all desire, all possession. When, at the end of this systematic and voluntary superdeath, the actual death arrives, it will no longer find a living germ capable of achieving reincarnation. This superdeath, thus obtained, will precede by many centuries or millenaries purification, final redemption and the absorption into the absolute One.

It has been said that this is exactly the reverse of the doctrine of Christ. With Buddha, life is only the gate of death; with Christ, death is the gate of life. In reality, it is the same thing and everything ends by the absorption into the divine, for the doctrine of Christ is nothing more than a mutilated branch of the great trunk of the mother religion.

Here we have the solution offered to us by the most wonderful mind, the greatest sage that humanity has ever known; by one who knew things which we no longer know and which, it may be, we shall never recover. It is the foundation of the religion of five hundred millions of men. There is nothing nearer to the ultimate truth.

Let us observe, however, that the problem of immortality or annihilation ought not to be set in these terms, since the word annihilation cannot be employed, save in a metaphorical sense, to denote a life which we no longer comprehend, seeing that Nihil or nothingness is the one thing whose existence is utterly impossible and whose non-existence is absolutely certain.

As for immortality, here again there is ambiguity, for, as annihilation cannot exist, immortality is inevitable; and the only question that remains to be solved is whether this immortality will or will not be accompanied by some sort of continuance of our present consciousness.

But, while it is probable that the problem of immortality, more or less accompanied by consciousness, will long remain in suspense, the answer to the problem of the “nervous headache,” or rather of congenital hemiphlegia, is doubtless easier to find. In any case, it occupies a domain which our direct investigations are able to explore. It is, after all, an historical and geographical question. It seems that there are in fact in the human brain an eastern lobe and a western lobe, which have never acted at the same time. The one produces, here, reason, science and consciousness; the other secretes, yonder, intuition, religion and subconsciousness. One reflects only the infinite and the unknowable; the other is interested only in what it is able to delimit, in what it may hope to understand. They represent, employing a perhaps imaginary image, the conflict between the material and the moral ideal of humanity. They have more than once endeavoured to penetrate each other, to mingle and to work in concert; but the western lobe, at least over the most active part of the world, has hitherto paralysed and almost annihilated the efforts of the other. We are indebted to it for extraordinary progress in all the material sciences, but also for such catastrophes as those which we are undergoing to-day, catastrophes which, if we are not careful, will not be the last nor the worst. The time would seem to have come to awaken the paralysed lobe; but we have neglected it so greatly that we no longer quite know what it is capable of doing.

HOPE AND DESPAIR

XIII

HOPE AND DESPAIR

The same soldier, who has become my war-time “god-child,” writes to me again:

“I experience an ineffable delight in remaining the average man and
in professing emptiness. I felt a great peace descend within me on
the day when I resigned myself to the common lot, in other words,
to ignorance and death. I have found life by renouncing it and, now
that I am no longer anything, I feel rich indeed. Do not tempt me in
the direction of that subtle spiritual vanity which constitutes one
of the most formidable obstacles to the final liberation from self.
Proud I certainly was and I am still only too much so; but we cannot
extract virtues otherwise than from our vices. More ardently than
when I embraced the phantom of individual superiority, I stretch
my arms towards homogeneous equality, towards the fullness of
vacancy....”

He is right; but he is thinking, here, with the eastern lobe of his brain, the Asiatic lobe; and the philosophy of this lobe counsels only inaction and renunciation, the “enchantment of the disenchanted,” as Renan used to say, or rather the satisfaction of despair. Certainly all we that see, all that we feel and all that we know pledges us to this despair, which our meditations--above all, those of this same Asiatic lobe--may, for that matter, render very spacious and as beautiful, almost as habitable, as hope. But what do we know, as compared with what we do not know? We are ignorant of all that goes before and of all that comes after us, in a word, of the whole universe. Our despair, which appears at first the last word and the last effort of wisdom, is therefore based upon what we know, which is nothing, whereas the hope of those whom we believe to be less wise can be based upon what we do not know, which is everything.

Moreover, if we would be quite just, there is more than one reason for hoping which we will not recall here; let us confess therefore that in this nothing which we know there exists naught but despair and that hope can lie only in that everything which we do not know. But, instead of listening only to our eastern lobe, which counsels us to accept this inactive ignorance and to bury our lives therein, is it not more reasonable at the same time to set our western lobe to work, the lobe which seeks to discover that everything? It is possible that here too, when all is said, it will find despair; but it is unlikely, for we cannot imagine a world which would be merely an act of despair. Now, if the world is not an act of despair, nothing that exists in it has reason to despair. In any case and in the meanwhile, this search will doubtless permit us to hope as long as the world exists.

One of the most dangerous temptations that assail him who scrutinizes nature and who sees, as he advances in his enquiries, that her mysteries become more and more numerous, reaching forth unendingly in every direction, is the temptation to grow discouraged by the impossible task and to abandon it. He drops his weapons. On the last slope of life particularly, he is too much inclined to resign himself, to go no farther forward, to make no further effort, to fall into a humour of saying, “What is the good?” and to drop asleep and learn nothing more, since he has learnt that he will never know anything.

He is already sensible of this wish to surrender at discretion when he considers the humblest, the lowliest of the sciences. What will it be when he attempts to embrace them all? The mind goes astray, becomes dizzy, asks to close its eyes. It must not close them. That would be the basest treachery that man could commit. We have no other thing to do in this life of ours than to seek to know where we are. We find no other reason for our existence; we have no other duty. Not to know is merely vexatious; no longer to seek to know is the supreme, the irremediable misfortune, the unpardonable desertion.

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Mountain PathsChapter III: Part 3

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