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_ 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 Caesars 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 foetus, 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
troisieme dessous. It is the grave of shadows. It is the cellar
of the blind. Inferi.
This communicates with the abyss. _
Read next: VOLUME III: BOOK SEVENTH - PATRON MINETTE: CHAPTER II. The Lowest Depths
Read previous: VOLUME III: BOOK SIXTH - THE CONJUNCTION OF TWO STARS: CHAPTER IX. Eclipse
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