The World in 2000 Years Read online

  “Furthermore, their Hell was multiple in its tortures: ‘I then saw Tityon, said the Sibyl, that monstrous nursling of the Earth, whose extended body covers nine arpents: an enormous vulture with a curved beak was tearing at his immortal liver and his entrails fecund in torments, digging therein to nourish itself, and residing eternally I the depths of his torso without giving any truce to his incessantly-reborn flesh. Shall I tell you about the Lapiths, Ixion and Pirithous? A frightful rock is suspended over them, which will fall, which is already falling upon their heads, threatening them eternally. In front of them shine sumptuous beds with golden feet, and before their lips, tables laden with luxurious foodstuffs befitting kings; but seated at their side is the most redoubtable of the Furies, who forbids them to reach out their hands, standing up and brandishing her torch and making her voice thunder. Some are rolling an enormous rock, others are attached to the spokes of a wheel what carries them in its rotations. There, forever, seated beneath the stone, is the unfortunate Theseus, and Phlegyas, raising his masculine voice in the shadow of Tartarus, testifying to the justice of the gods in crying incessantly to the dead instructed by his torture: Learn from my example to respect justice and not to scorn the gods.’13

  “The ancients thus went so far as to deify evil, and did not hesitate to place themselves under the protection of infernal gods. Their mythology, profoundly rooted in the mind, has survived their religion, and when Christianity triumphed over paganism it felt obliged to conserve these ancient beliefs and to erect the bases of its doctrine on the ruins of pagan superstition. Hence the old prejudice of Hell, implanted even in our era—with the difference, however, that the new religion, in unifying the divinity, also unified punishment.

  “Time has reckoned with monuments and human beings, but prejudice remains, magnified by tradition. Christian priests, borrowing this image off Hell from antiquity, adapted it to the new doctrines they were propagating. In continually representing Hell to the eyes of credulous people, however, they do not suspect that they are diminishing God in the ideas of sane people. Return good for evil, says the Gospel; but, taking the opposite direction to their sacred text, they attribute our faults to God, without leaving him our qualities. They make him vindictive while he commands us to forgive our peers.”

  “What is the destiny of humans after death, then?” asked Hobson.

  “My head is heavy; I need to recover my strength,” the savant replied. “Wake me up.”

  Hobson did as he was asked—but the reawakening was painful. Monsieur Landet was profoundly steeped in the subject he had just been studying. The magnetizer took a good ten minutes bringing him back to reality.

  Finally, the savant opened his eyes. “Where am I?” he murmured.

  “In the Café Anglais in front of a glass of sherry, which is only awaiting your pleasure.”

  “In the Café Anglais!” the savant repeated. Then he slapped his forehead. “Ah! I’m here! I’ve come back from so far away!”

  The Incarnation of Souls

  The following morning, at eleven o’clock, Monsieur Landet’s domestic introduced Mr. Hobson into the savant’s study.

  The two friends exchanged a vigorous handshake in the American style and went into the dining-room, where a gourmet lunch had been laid out. Needless to say, the two stenographers were also there.

  They chatted about the previous day’s experiment, transporting themselves in the imagination into the night of centuries. They were lost in the limbo of the future to such an extent that Monsieur Landet, thinking that he was in the bosom of the reformed society he had glimpsed in the somnambulistic state, replied to his domestic, who was pouring out the Branne-Mouton: “You’re very kind, Monsieur...” He was fidgeting in his chair, though. He was impatient and preoccupied.

  From the dining-room they went back to the study.

  Monsieur Landet drew the curtains to create a discreet half-light, settled himself in a soft Voltaire chair and held his hand out toward the magnetizer.

  “Now, dear Master,” he said, “release the fluid and let’s depart for the higher regions of metaphysics.” He had no sooner finished speaking than his eyes closed. The pressure of the magnetizer’s will, combined with the savant’s free disposition, had established between them what is known in magnetism as a sympathetic current.

  Hobson gave him time to reach his destination and repeated the traditional phrase. “Are you there?”

  “I’m there.”

  “We paused on the matter of human destiny after death.”

  “I’m impregnating myself with the beliefs I’m analyzing,” the savant replied, and began: “God, in spite of his infinite bounty, cannot treat the virtuous and the wicked equally. It is necessary that his infinite bounty is in accord with his infinite justice. Thus, he condemns the wicked to a temporary pain, proportionate to their sins. That punishment consists of passing through a series of successive and compensatory incarnations, on the planet where he has lived, until the end of the world, the epoch in which they will finally be deemed worthy to share his blissful eternity and enjoy his contemplation.”

  “It is, then, a great felicity to enjoy the sight of God?” Hobson asked.

  “It is the highest summit of felicity that the soul can attain,” the savant went on. “God, enclosing within himself all the nuances of the universal infinity, suffices to fulfill the most extreme appetites of the soul, thus purified by the proof of existences.

  “Humans, chained to matter, and delighting in vulgar pleasures, cannot have any exact idea of it, but my mind, disengaged from my body in the somnambulistic state, comes close to it without comprehending it.”

  “And how is this incarnation achieved?”

  “The soul, freed from its material envelope, wanders in the Earth’s zone of attraction—assuming the Earth to be the planet on which it is incarnated—and continues to be in fluidic communication with the people who are still connected with it by links of blood, affection or hatred, by reason of the cohesion that links souls together. Then, when the death of those individuals has broken the magnetic attachment that welded it to them, and the soul is thus disengaged from all human contact and none of those particularly known to it survive down here, all memory is extinguished within it; the past dissipates like a dream glimpsed in the somnambulistic state, and it is clad in a new body. In that new incarnation, bearing within it the seed of progress in an intuitive state, it recommences life at the beginning, but in a more advanced society, until, purified by a series of successive stages, it attains the degree of relative perfection that brings it closer to the eternal Infinity.

  “These incarnations occur on the Earth—I am only occupied here with the Earth—and not between planets, as some modern philosophers claim. The soul, while being a simple substance, remains even after death within the Earth’s zone of attraction by reason of the magnetic principle, which is exercised on simple substances as well as composite substances. And as the force of attraction emitted by the terrestrial nucleus is felt in a considerable proportion, it continues to be subject to it until relative perfection, toward which its various incarnations gradually bring it, delivers it from all external influence and transports it of its own accord into the eternal Infinity with which it is confused.”

  “How can these various incarnations through which it passes before arriving at perfection free it from all external influence?” Hobson interjected.

  “The soul, as I have already said,” the savant replied, “is subject to the same magnetic laws as matter—or, rather, to analogous ones. God or Infinity, whatever you care to call it, is the central nucleus of which it is an infinitesimal part and toward which it tends, but its imperfection, which subjects it to the terrestrial magnetic fluid, prevents it from aggregating therewith. Each new incarnation gradually strips it of the material tendencies that subject it to that terrestrial magnetic fluid and guides it to relative perfection. In consequence, the further it advances in the series of incarnations, the more it is isolat
ed from material attraction, and the higher it rises toward the supreme goal. There comes a moment when, unburdened of the weight that held it captive, its crosses the frontier and launches itself toward the truth.”

  “The truth?” Hobson exclaimed.

  “The truth,” the savant went on. I shall explain the meaning of that abstract term. As I said before, God has created us with one objective: relative perfection. Take note that I say ‘relative,’ God alone realizing the absolute. Without that objective, we would have no reason for being. The only means of arriving at that relative perfection is the truth. The truth is the sum of all perfections, the supreme limit that fringes the eternal infinity. Now, as the eternal infinity is God—if one takes the attribute for the possessor—on the day when the soul, entirely purified by the proof of incarnations attains that objective, it will enjoy blissful felicity in the contemplation of God. That will be the end of the world.

  “This deduction follows from the fact that there is no effect without a cause, and that if we had been thrown upon the Earth to be abandoned to the caprice of our weaknesses, Creation would be the work of hazard. And everything, nature as well as our conscience, impresses us with the certainty of the existence of a Creator.

  “I have fathomed the depths of the future, but I cannot make out the epoch in which the cataclysm will occur. One obstacle opposes the march of progress: lies.”

  “What do you mean by lies?”

  “By lies, I mean everything that arises from human imperfection, with the free consent of human beings. And everything down here is lies: ambition, hatred, vanity, debauchery, cupidity, fraud. We are content in vice; we make it the object of our pleasures.”

  “Are we on the path of progress in the present century?”

  “No, not yet. Human beings, thus far, have only employed the thrust of their intelligence to the profit of their egoism. They have only employed them to the refinement of material pleasures, to the satisfaction of their perishable being. With their souls, they are unconcerned, or, if they are concerned with them, it is only to enslave hem to their bestiality. Commerce, Industry, Finance appear to them as appropriate means to slake their thirst for lucre. By dint of aiming for wealth, they destroy mutual confidence. Envy is closely related to dupery. And fortune, divided between a small number of the privileged, has engendered corruption, debauchery, intrigue and their criminal cortege. Good people, in the strict sense of the word, have become ridiculous. Self-interest has engendered egoism. The Christian religion, in spite of its errors, has nevertheless invented the most beautiful of maxims: charity. But humans, launched too far forward in the current of the passions, are carried toward evil by the violence of the turbulence. They admire charity, but lack the energy to practice it.”

  “Is science not destined to bring us back to the right path?”

  “On the contrary. It’s science that has lost it. The more it multiplies its researches, the further it strays into the mysterious abysses of metaphysics; the more it tries to fathom that which surpasses its conceptions, and the prouder it becomes, the more it deifies itself, the more it denies the existence of its Creator.

  “Philosophy, which would have been the most beautiful of sciences if it had been restricted to its own field of study, tends by its sophisms to make the world the fortuitous work of natural revolutions, which it explains by specious theories. So long as it was content with what nature furnished for its needs, it was happy. On the day when it created false pleasures, when it attempted to raise itself toward God, to comment on its own existence, it got lost. But God allows its mind to work; he laughs at its presumption and opposes a barrier to it on which it breaks: Infinity.

  “Science, however, has not said its last word; it will make immense progress yet. To begin with, in the next few centuries from now, physical science will obtain a material preponderance that will exercise its empire on philosophy. That philosophy, based on the sovereignty of matter, cannot survive for long; it is in contradiction with the secret intuition of human beings. Theories, by dint of competing with one another, and becoming ingenious in the invention of new combinations, will collide with an inevitable shock and annihilate one another. Then error will dissipate as if by enchantment.

  “Humans, frightened by the consequences of their presumption, alarmed by the harm that science will have caused them, will fall back on themselves; they will look around, compare themselves to that Infinity which thought has been fathoming for centuries without being able to find an end; they will contemplate those innumerable worlds gravitating in space, the existence of which science will have revealed, the fixed stars in the celestial vault being as many lamps illuminating worlds, as the sun is the central focal point of our system, blinding in its light. They will reflect on their immortal souls, imprisoned within perishable bodies, and see themselves face to face with their own oblivion. Vanquished, they will bow their heads.

  “That revolution will only begin in the society to which I am transported, but many more centuries will pass before the truth fuses with Infinity.”

  “You condemn science, then?”

  “Notice that I am making an abstraction from my own opinions here. I am penetrating the mind of the society that I am studying. The further science has been extended, the more avid humans have become for the hunt. Physical science has led them to deify matter. Applied to Industry, it has taught them to sacrifice the general interest to individual interest; it has caressed their weaknesses, initiated cunning and, by enriching the privileged few, has inaugurated poverty among the rest. The exact sciences, no less than the physical sciences, have contributed to the progress of Industry, which concentrates fortunes within a restricted group—but the most terrible of humankind’s enemies is still metaphysical science; it leads it astray into a maze of erroneous speculations, flatters its pride, deceives its reason and proclaims it God.

  “It is not that human intelligence ought to remain in a latent state. Humans were given intelligence in order that it should bear fruit, in steering them toward the study of nature, toward everything that falls upon their senses, toward everything that is within the range of their reflection, and finally toward themselves, according to Socrates’ dictum: Know thyself. It should not violate that which its conscience, an infallible arbiter, recognizes as beyond its faculties, trespassing in the domain of the Creator. The struggle is unequal; it wastes its time there and its good instincts.”

  “You’ve only told me thus far about the end of the moral world. What about the end of the physical world—how should that be translated? One cannot happen without the other.”

  “To arrive at the end, it is necessary to return to the beginning. This is what out descendants imagine on that subject. In the beginning, before the planets and the stars occupied space, there were only suns in Infinity. A formidable cataclysm occurred; there was chaos. Those suns were shattered into millions of billons of fragments, which were disseminated in space and became as many fiery nuclei, around which vapors condensed, forming crusts by virtue of cooling. Hence the internal fire that burns at the center of the Earth and which, through the craters of volcanoes, secretes torrents of lava, the primal matter of new strata of land.

  “Thus, every fixed star is a sun around which an entire planetary system gravitates, formed, like ours, from the debris of that sun.

  “All these worlds are endowed with an attractive force emanating from their incandescent nuclei, which draws satellites in their wake, and retains them, as well as the souls distributed on their surfaces. But they gravitate around their suns, whose attractive force, as a central nucleus, possesses a seed of primal intensity so many times superior to each of them that it draws them into a perimeter proportional to the attractive power that they themselves exert. Thus, the most powerful are the most distant, and the weakest the closest.

  “This is the reason for that: each planet, in describing its ellipse annually, or in a longer or shorter lapse of time, according to the distance that separates it from its
sun, diminishes in volume, worn away by friction against its atmospheric layers, and loses its magnetic force by virtue of the gradual extinction of its central fire. Diminishing in volume and magnetic force, it first casts off its satellites, if it has any; the diminution of its own weight then brings it further and further into the zone of attraction of its sun. Its ellipse shrinking continually, as a direct result of its decrease in weight and in the intensity to its central fire, it ends up falling into the sun, which volatilizes it and absorbs it.

  “That absorption, therefore, affects each planet successively, in proportion to the volume and the magnetic force that keeps it distant from the sun. It follows that the closer a planet is to the sun, the closer it is to its end. And as everything is regulated with a marvelous wisdom, the end of the physical world coincides with the end of the moral world; one is the consequence of the other. Thus, in conclusion, the absorption of souls by Infinity and the absorption of matter by the sun.”

  “At that culminating point, then, humans will have acquired the summit of relative perfection indispensable for their souls to fuse with Infinity?”

  “Necessarily. Just as the planets return to their central nucleus, the sun, souls return to their central nucleus, Infinity, both having conserved the force to remain themselves, because the divine principle and the material principle in combination constituted the primal cause. Both were fragmented at the same time—but the divine principle rules over the material principle, as the soul rules the body.

  “The inequality that separates beings of the same epoch is as insensible, in the whole, as the asperities on the skin of an orange or the mountain on the Earth’s surface. Incarnations will level them out, and progress will melt souls into a perfect unity.”

  “But if souls must return to Infinity at the same time as planets return to the sun,” Hobson objected, “you’re reducing merit and demerit to negligibility. On that account, it’s quite unnecessary to employ one’s free will in being an honest man, since one will not be rewarded for it in the long run.”