ity any other purpose than that; and if only
one man lived on earth, morality would not exist. It prunes the
cluster of the individual's appetites according to the desires of the
others. It emanates from all and from each at the same time, at one
and the same time from justice and from personal interest. It is
inflexible and natural, as much so as the law which, before our eyes,
fits the lights and shadows so perfectly together. It is so simple
that it speaks to each one and tells him what it is. The moral law has
not proceeded from any ideal; it is the ideal which has wholly
proceeded from the moral law.

* * * * * *

The primeval cataclysm has begun again upon the earth. My
vision--beautiful as a fair dream which shows men's composed reliance
on each other in the sunrise--collapses in mad nightmare.

But this flashing devastation is not incoherent, as at the time of the
conflict of the first elements and the groping of dead things. For its
crevasses and flowing fires show a symmetry which is not Nature's; it
reveals discipline let loose, and the frenzy of wisdom. It is made up
of thought, of will, of suffering. Multitudes of scattered men, full
of an infinity of blood, confront each other like floods. A vision
comes and pounces on me, shaking the soil on which I am doubtless
laid--the marching flood. It approaches the ditch from all sides and
is poured into it. The fire hisses and roars in that army as in water;
it is extinguished in human fountains!

* * * * * *

It seems to me that I am struggling against what I see, while lying and
clinging somewhere; and once I even heard supernatural admonitions in
my ear, _as if I were somewhere else_.

I am looking for men--for the rescue of speech, of a word. How many of
them I heard, once upon a time! I want one only, now. I am in the
regions where men are earthed up,--a crushed plain under a dizzy sky,
which goes by peopled with other stars than those of heaven, and tense
with other clouds, and continually lighted from flash to flash by a
daylight which is not day.

Nearer, one makes out the human shape of great drifts and hilly fields,
many-colored and vaguely floral--the corpse of a section or of a
company. Nearer still, I perceive at my feet the ugliness of skulls.
Yes, I have seen them--wounds as big as men! In this new cess-pool,
which fire dyes red by night and the multitude