Human societies all have what is called in theatrical parlance, _a
third lower floor_. The social soil is everywhere undermined, sometimes
for good, sometimes for evil. These works are superposed one upon the
other. There are superior mines and inferior mines. There is a top and
a bottom in this obscure sub-soil, which sometimes gives way beneath
civilization, and which our indifference and heedlessness trample under
foot. The Encyclopedia, in the last century, was a mine that was almost
open to the sky. The shades, those sombre hatchers of primitive
Christianity, only awaited an opportunity to bring about an explosion
under the Cæsars and to inundate the human race with light. For in the
sacred shadows there lies latent light. Volcanoes are full of a shadow
that is capable of flashing forth. Every form begins by being night.
The catacombs, in which the first mass was said, were not alone the
cellar of Rome, they were the vaults of the world.
Beneath the social construction, that complicated marvel of a
structure, there are excavations of all sorts. There is the religious
mine, the philosophical mine, the economic mine, the revolutionary
mine. Such and such a pick-axe with the idea, such a pick with ciphers.
Such another with wrath. People hail and answer each other from one
catacomb to another. Utopias travel about underground, in the pipes.
There they branch out in every direction. They sometimes meet, and
fraternize there. Jean-Jacques lends his pick to Diogenes, who lends
him his lantern. Sometimes they enter into combat there. Calvin seizes
Socinius by the hair. But nothing arrests nor interrupts the tension of
all these energies toward the goal, and the vast, simultaneous
activity, which goes and comes, mounts, descends, and mounts again in
these obscurities, and which immense unknown swarming slowly transforms
the top and the bottom and the inside and the outside. Society hardly
even suspects this digging which leaves its surface intact and changes
its bowels. There are as many different subterranean stages as there
are varying works, as there are extractions. What emerges from these
deep excavations? The future.
The deeper one goes, the more mysterious are the toilers. The work is
good, up to a degree which the social philosophies are able to
recognize; beyond that degree it is doubtful and mixed; lower down, it
becomes terrible. At a certain depth, the excavations are no longer
penetrable by the spirit of civilization, the limit breathable by man
has been passed; a beginning of monsters is possible.
The descending scale is a strange one; and each one of the rungs of
this ladder corresponds to a stage where philosophy can find foothold,
and where one encounters one of these workmen, sometimes divine,
sometimes misshapen. Below John Huss, there is Luther; below Luther,
there is Descartes; below Descartes, there is Voltaire; below Voltaire,
there is Condorcet; below Condorcet, there is Robespierre; below
Robespierre, there is Marat; below Marat there is Babeuf. And so it
goes on. Lower down, confusedly, at the limit which separates the
indistinct from the invisible, one perceives other gloomy men, who
perhaps do not exist as yet. The men of yesterday are spectres; those
of to-morrow are forms. The eye of the spirit distinguishes them but
obscurely. The embryonic work of the future is one of the visions of
philosophy.
A world in limbo, in the state of fœtus, what an unheard-of spectre!
Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier, are there also, in lateral galleries.
Surely, although a divine and invisible chain unknown to themselves,
binds together all these subterranean pioneers who, almost always,
think themselves isolated, and who are not so, their works vary
greatly, and the light of some contrasts with the blaze of others. The
first are paradisiacal, the last are tragic. Nevertheless, whatever may
be the contrast, all these toilers, from the highest to the most
nocturnal, from the wisest to the most foolish, possess one likeness,
and this is it: disinterestedness. Marat forgets himself like Jesus.
They throw themselves on one side, they omit themselves, they think not
of themselves. They have a glance, and that glance seeks the absolute.
The first has the whole heavens in his eyes; the last, enigmatical
though he may be, has still, beneath his eyelids, the pale beam of the
infinite. Venerate the man, whoever he may be, who has this sign—the
starry eye.
The shadowy eye is the other sign.
With it, evil commences. Reflect and tremble in the presence of any one
who has no glance at all. The social order has its black miners.
There is a point where depth is tantamount to burial, and where light
becomes extinct.
Below all these mines which we have just mentioned, below all these
galleries, below this whole immense, subterranean, venous system of
progress and utopia, much further on in the earth, much lower than
Marat, lower than Babeuf, lower, much lower, and without any connection
with the upper levels, there lies the last mine. A formidable spot.
This is what we have designated as the _le troisième dessous_. It is
the grave of shadows. It is the cellar of the blind. _Inferi_.
This communicates with the abyss.