nto it the shadow of a possibility of a No is to destroy
it....

The men of to-day are thus negatives or positives, as they range
themselves under one opinion or the other. And they must range
themselves under one of the two. They cannot escape. The question which
divides us, to know whether we live in vain, imposes itself upon every
one who opens his lips or moves his finger, upon every conscious being
who breathes. That So-and-so never speaks of it, never thinks of it, may
be; but their lives answer for them and testify loudly enough. I confess
that at first sight the negatives seem for the moment the more numerous.
They include many groups, which I shall not enumerate here. I range with
them the charming uncertain ones, like M. Renan and his melodious
disciples, the sombre and nihilistic Buddhists; all those to whom the
law of the completion of man through the good is indeed foolish and
chimerical, since their lives imply the negation of it: I mean to say
the immense multitude of those who live in any kind of way, good easy
people, refined possibly, from caprice, coquetry or laziness, but in
complete moral anaesthesia.

Now we come to the positives. They include first of all, true
Christians, and all true Jews, attached to the profound spirit of their
religion; then the philosophers and poets who affirm or sing the moral
ideal, the new disciples of Plato, the Stoics, the Kantians, famous or
unknown, to whom life alone, outside of all speculation, is a solid
affirmation of the possibility and sufficiency of the good. That the
actions of these men and women, on the way to creating themselves free
beings, human beings, have the same value as doctrine, cannot be denied.
They labor and suffer here and there, each one in his own cell; each one
making his own goodness consist in the realization of what he believes
to be the absolute good; making themselves faithful servants of
something; existing outside of themselves; the city, religion, charity,
justice, truth even, or beauty, conceived as modes of adoration.... All
these compose, it seems to me, one and the same Church, having the
philosophers and poets of duty for doctors of divinity, the heroes of
duty for congregation. These may be called by the general name of
"Positives."

Let our eyes be opened: everything that surrounds us is vitiated; many
of the children playing on the promenades are sickly, their little faces
are often enough marked with livid blotches, thei