seeks the final cause. Eternal
perplexity of the thinker. These creatures disturb his ideas of the
Creator. They are hideous surprises. They are the death's-head at the
feast of contemplation. The philosopher determines their characteristics
in dread. They are the concrete forms of evil. What attitude can he take
towards this treason of creation against herself? To whom can he look
for the solution of these riddles? The Possible is a terrible matrix.
Monsters are mysteries in their concrete form. Portions of shade issue
from the mass, and something within detaches itself, rolls, floats,
condenses, borrows elements from the ambient darkness, becomes subject
to unknown polarisations, assumes a kind of life, furnishes itself with
some unimagined form from the obscurity, and with some terrible spirit
from the miasma, and wanders ghostlike among living things. It is as if
night itself assumed the forms of animals. But for what good? with what
object? Thus we come again to the eternal questioning.

These animals are indeed phantoms as much as monsters. They are proved
and yet improbable. Their fate is to exist in spite of _a priori_
reasonings. They are the amphibia of the shore which separates life from
death. Their unreality makes their existence puzzling. They touch the
frontier of man's domain and people the region of chimeras. We deny the
possibility of the vampire, and the cephaloptera appears. Their swarming
is a certainty which disconcerts our confidence. Optimism, which is
nevertheless in the right, becomes silenced in their presence. They form
the visible extremity of the dark circles. They mark the transition of
our reality into another. They seem to belong to that commencement of
terrible life which the dreamer sees confusedly through the loophole of
the night.

That multiplication of monsters, first in the Invisible, then in the
Possible, has been suspected, perhaps perceived by magi and philosophers
in their austere ecstasies and profound contemplations. Hence the
conjecture of a material hell. The demon is simply the invisible tiger.
The wild beast which devours souls has been presented to the eyes of
human beings by St. John, and by Dante in his vision of Hell.

If, in truth, the invisible circles of creation continue indefinitely,
if after one there is yet another, and so forth in illimitable
progression; if that chain, which for our part we are resolved to doubt,
really exist, the cephaloptera at one extre