From the Unconscious to the Conscious 



ones. Better still, it is not forbidden to hope from human 

 evolution a triumph over matter itself an organism 

 less liable to sickness, and the incidence of old age put 

 back; a psychism more conscious, more detached not 

 from ignorance only, but above all from the base and 

 wicked sentiments which still pervade humanity as it is. 

 We may hope for an era with fewer sufferings, less 

 poverty, and fewer repulsive diseases. From the night 

 of misfortunes and sufferings, lightened by a few passing 

 rays of joy we may catch a glimpse of a dawn of happi- 

 ness in which the pale shadows of residual pain will but 

 bring into relief bright and harmonious beauty. 



We may hope all this! We may imagine humanity 

 one day reaching this ideal; but such a humanity will 

 establish its victory only on hecatombs of vanished men. 

 Thus for centuries and centuries men will have suffered 

 in order that their privileged descendants may at last 

 reach happiness ; a happiness which they will have deserved 

 no more than their progenitors had deserved their 

 miseries ! 



All the efforts, the sorrows, the infinite pains of the 

 former will have ended in this single result the 

 monstrous building up of this privilege for their 

 posterity. 



There is in this concept such injustice as would 

 suffice to bring us irresistibly back into philosophic 

 pessimism. 



But this is not all. Even the concept of an ideally 

 privileged humanity, highly evolved and happy, is weak 

 in its foundations. This humanity would see its happy 

 life poisoned by the idea of inevitable and approaching 

 annihilation. The thought of death as the end of all 

 would be unendurable to hypersensitive beings unpre- 

 pared by daily trials for the renunciation of life itself. 



The man of the future, we are told, will travel on 

 a wide and easy road through a dream-country in which 

 every one of his senses will bring him joy! Vanity! 



296 



