inue
endlessly to revolve with their train of planets, doomed to an eternity
of night and cold. Well, if this is the case, I ask you: Can we suppose
that life, thought, and love, are the exclusive privilege of an infinite
minority of solar systems still possessed of light and heat, and deny to
the immense majority of gloomy stars every manifestation of life and
animation, the very highest reason for their existence? Thus
lifelessness, death, the void in movement would be the rule; and life
the exception! Thus the nine-tenths, the ninety-nine hundredths,
perhaps, of the solar systems, would idly revolve like senseless and
gigantic mill-wheels, a useless encumbrance of space. That is impossible
and idiotic, that is blasphemous. Let us have more faith in the unknown!
Truth, here as everywhere else, is without doubt the antipodes of
appearance. All that glitters is not gold. These splendid constellations
which attempt to dazzle us are themselves relatively barren. Their
light, what is it? A transient glory, a ruinous luxury, an ostentatious
squandering of energy, born of illimitable senselessness. But when the
stars have sown their wild oats, then the serious task of their life
begins, they develop their inner resources. For frozen and sunless
without, they literally preserve in their inviolate centres their
unquenchable fire, defended by the very layers of ice. There, finally,
is to be relit the lamp of life, banished from the surface above. For a
last time, therefore, let us look upwards in order there to find hope.
Up there innumerable races of mankind under ground, buried, to their
supreme joy, in the catacombs of invisible stars, encourage us by their
example. Let us act like them, let us like them withdraw to the interior
of our planet. Like them, let us bury ourselves in order to rise again,
and like them let us carry with us into our tomb, all that is worthy to
survive of our previous existence. It is not merely bread alone that man
has need of. He must live to think, and not merely think to live.

"Recall the legend of Noah: to escape from a disaster almost equal to
our own, and to dispute with it all that the earth had most precious in
his eyes; what did he do, though he was but a simple-minded fellow and
addicted to drink? He turned his ark into a museum, containing a
complete collection of plants and animals, even of poisonous plants, of
wild beasts, boa-constrictors, and scorpions, and by reason of this
picture