“Thus, those that we regard as virtues become crimes from her point of view. Whereas, contrariwise, if creatures destroy one another, they do well as regards Nature; for no obligation to reproduce has been imposed upon them, they have simply received the faculty to reproduce; turning to destruction, they cease exercising it, and give Nature the opportunity to resume the propagation from which she refrained so long as it was needless. You may perhaps object that if this possibility of propagation she has left her creatures were detrimental to her, she would not have bestowed it in the first place. But observe that she has no choice in these matters, that she is bound by her laws, that she cannot alter them, that one of her laws is the casting of creatures which are cast at a single stroke and emerge such as they must remain, and that another of her laws is that her creatures be invested with the possibility to propagate themselves. Observe as well that were these creatures to cease propagating, or to destroy themselves, Nature’s original rights, contested hitherto, would be restored to her; whereas in propagating, or in not destroying, we confine her to her secondary functions and deprive her of her primary powers. Thus, all the laws we humans have made, whether to encourage population or to prevent its destruction, necessarily conflict with all of hers: and every time we act in accordance with our laws, we directly thwart her desires; but, reversibly, every time we either stubbornly refuse to undertake the propagation she abhors, or cooperate in the murders which delight her and which serve her, we are sure to please her, certain of acting in harmony with her wishes. Ah, does she leave us in any doubt of the point to which our increase inconveniences her? can we not tell how eager she would be to halt our multiplication and be delivered of its ill effects? Is all this not proven by the disasters she sends to harry us, by the divisions and discords she sows in our midst, by the thirst for murder she constantly inspires in us? These wars, these famines she hurls at us, these pestilences she now and again looses with the aim of wiping us off the face of the earth, these great villains she fabricates in profusion, these Alexanders, these Tamurlanes, these Ghengis Khans, all these heroes who lay the world waste, by these tokens, I say, does she not plainly demonstrate that all our laws are contrary to hers, and that her purpose is to destroy them? Thus it is that these murders our laws punish so sternly, these murders we suppose the greatest outrage that can be inflicted upon Nature, not only, as you very well see, do her no hurt and can do her none, but are in some sort instrumental to her, since she is a great murderess herself and since her single reason for murdering is to obtain, from the wholesale annihilation of cast creatures, the chance to recast them anew. The most wicked individual on earth, the most abominable, the most ferocious, the most barbarous, and the most indefatigable murderer is therefore but the spokesman of her desires, the vehicle of her will, and the surest agent of her caprices.
“Let us go further. This murderer thinks he destroys, he thinks he consumes, and these beliefs sometimes engender remorse in his heart; let us put him confidently at ease, and if the system I have just developed is a little beyond his reach, let us prove to him from what happens before his very eyes that he has not even the honor of destroying; that the annihilation upon which he flatters himself when in sound health, or at which he shudders when he is sick, is no annihilation at all, and that annihilation is unfortunately something he cannot possibly achieve.
“The invisible chain which links all physical beings together, the absolute interdependence of the three kingdoms, animal, mineral, and vegetable, proves that all three are in the same case as regards Nature, that all three are resultant from her primary laws, but neither created nor necessary. These kingdoms are governed by the same laws. All three mechanically reproduce and destroy themselves, because all three are composed of the same elements, which sometimes combine in one fashion, sometimes in another; but these laws and workings are distinct from Nature’s laws and workings, and independent of them; upon the three kingdoms she acted only once, she cast them, cast them once and for all; since having been cast they have acted on their own; they have acted according to their own laws, the foremost of these being a perpetual metempsychosis, a perpetual variation, a perpetual permutation embracing all three in a perpetual movement.
“In all living beings the principle of life is no other than that of death: at the same time we receive the one we receive the other, we nourish both within us, side by side. At the instant we call death, everything seems to dissolve; we are led to think so by the excessive change that appears to have been brought about in this portion of matter which no longer seems animate. But this death is only imaginary, it exists figuratively but in no other way. Matter, deprived of the other portion of matter which communicated movement to it, is not destroyed for that; it merely abandons its form, it decays—and in decaying proves that it is not inert; it enriches the soil, fertilizes it, and serves in the regeneration of the other kingdoms as well as of its own. There is, in the final analysis, no essential difference between this first life we receive and this second, which is the one we call death. For the first is caused by a forming of some of the matter which renews and reorganizes itself within the entrails of mother earth. Thus does exhausted matter re-enter the regenerating womb, there to refertilize particles of ethereal matter which, but for it, would remain in their apparent inertia. And there, in brief, is the whole science of the laws of these three kingdoms, laws which exist apart from Nature, independently of her, laws which they received at their first emergence into being, laws which thwart this Nature’s will to erupt anew; there, in brief, are the sole means through which the laws inherent in these kingdoms operate. The first generation, which we call life, is as it were an example. Only from exhaustion do its laws become operative; only through destruction are these laws transmitted; the former requires a kind of corrupted matter, the latter, petrified matter. And there is the sole cause of this immensity of successive creations: each of them consists of a repetition of the first principles of exhaustion or of destruction, which shows you that death is as necessary as life, that there is indeed no real death, and that all the plagues we have just spoken of, all the cruelties of tyrants, the crimes of the wicked, are as necessary to the laws of the three kingdoms as the action which revivifies them; that when Nature sends them forth upon the earth, with the intention of annihilating these kingdoms which prevent her from using her faculty for casting new creatures, she acts from sheer impotence, because the first laws received by these kingdoms at the time of their first casting engraved the reproductive faculty in them forever, and this, Nature could erase only by destroying her own self, which she is powerless to do, because she is herself subject to laws from whose authority she cannot possibly escape, and which shall last eternally. Thus, through his murderings the wicked man not only aids Nature to attain ends she will nonetheless never entirely achieve, but also aids even the laws the three kingdoms received at their original casting. I say original casting to facilitate the intelligence of my system, for, there never having been any creation and Nature being timeless, the first casting of a given being endures so long as that being’s line survives; and would end were that line to be extinguished; the extinction of all beings would make room for the new castings Nature desires; to this end the one means is total destruction, and that is the result toward which crime strives. Whence it comes out certainly that the criminal who could smite down the three kingdoms all at once by annihilating both them and their capacity to reproduce would be he who serves Nature best. Now look again at your legislations in the light of this startling truth, and see how just they be.
“No destruction, no fodder for the earth, and consequently man deprived of the possibility to reproduce man. Fatal truth, this, since it contains inescapable proof that the virtues and vices of our social system are nought, and that what we characterize as vices are more beneficial, more necessary than our virtues, since these vices are creative and these virtues merely created; or, if you prefer, these vices are causes, these virtues only effects; proof that a
too perfect harmony would have more disadvantages than has disorder; and proof that if war, discord, and crime were suddenly to be banished from the world, the three kingdoms, all checks upon them removed, would so flourish as to unsettle and soon destroy all the other laws of Nature. Celestial bodies would come all to a halt, their influences would be suspended because of the overly great empire of one of their number; gravitation would be no more, and motion none. It is then the crimes of man which, stemming the rise of the three kingdoms, counteracting their tendency to preponderate, prevent their importance from becoming such as must disrupt all else, and maintains in universal affairs that perfect equilibrium Horace called rerum concordia discors. Therefor is crime necessary in the world. But the most useful crimes are without doubt those which most disrupt, such as refusal to propagate and destruction; all the others are petty mischief, they are less even than that, or rather only those two merit the name of crime: and thus you see these crimes essential to the laws of the kingdoms, and essential to the laws of Nature. An ancient philosopher called war the mother of all things. The existence of murderers is as necessary as that bane; but for them, all would be disturbed in the order of things. It is therefore absurd to blame or punish them, more ridiculous still to fret over the very natural inclinations which lead us to commit this act in spite of ourselves, for never will too many or enough murders be committed on earth, considering the burning thirst Nature has for them. Ah, unhappy mortal! boast not that thou art able to destroy, it is something far beyond thy forces; thou canst alter forms, thou art helpless to annihilate them; of the substance of Nature, not by one grain can thou lessen its mass, how wouldst thou destroy since all that is, is eternal? Thou changest the forms of things, vary those forms thou may, but this dissolution benefits Nature, since ’tis these disassembled parts she recomposes. Thus does all change effected by man upon organized matter far more serve Nature than it displeases her. What is this I say? Alas! to render her true service would require destructions more thorough, vaster than any it is in our power to operate; ’tis atrocity, ’tis scope she wants in crimes; the more our destroying is of a broad and atrocious kind, the more agreeable it is to her. To serve her better yet, one would have to be able to prevent the regeneration resultant from the corpses we bury. Only of his first life does murder deprive the individual we smite; one would have to be able to wrest away his second, if one were to be more useful to Nature; for ’tis annihilation she seeks, by less she is not fully satisfied, it is not within our power to extend our murders to the point she desires.
“Oh, Juliette, bear it ever in mind that there is no real destruction, that death is itself nothing of the sort, that, physically and philosophically viewed, it is only a further modification of the matter in which the active principle or, if you like, the principle of motion, acts without interruption, although in a less apparent manner. Thus a man’s birth is no more the commencement of his existence than his death is its cessation; and the mother who bears him no more gives him life than the murderer who kills him gives him death; the former produces some matter organized in a certain way, the latter provides the occasion for the renascence of some different matter; and both create.
“Nothing is essentially born, nothing essentially perishes, all is but the action and reaction of matter; all is like the ocean billows which ever rise and fall, like the tides of the sea, ebbing and flowing endlessly, without there being either the loss or the gain of a drop in the volume of the waters; all this is a perpetual flux which ever was and shall always be, and whereof we become, though we know it not, the principal agents by reason of our vices and our virtues. All this is an infinite variation; a thousand thousand different portions of matter which appear under every form are shattered, are reconstituted to appear again under others, again to be undone and to rearise. The principle of life is but the result of the four elements in combination; with death, the combination dissolves, each element returning entire into its own sphere, ready to enter new combinations when the laws of the kingdoms summon them forth; it is only the whole that changes form, the parts remain intact, and from these parts joined anew to the whole, new beings are forever being recomposed. But the principle of life, uniquely the fruit of the combining of elements, does not exist by itself, only through this union does it exist and it changes entirely when this union ceases, becomes more or less perfect depending upon the new work created out of the debris of the old. Now, as these beings are both completely indifferent one to the other, and completely indifferent not only to Nature but to the laws of the kingdoms also, the changes I make in the modifications of matter can be of no importance: of what importance is it if, as Montesquieu says, I make a round lump of something into a square lump; what can it matter if of a man I make a cabbage, a lettuce, a butterfly, or a worm; in this I do nothing but exercise the right I have been given to do it, and if I wish, if I can, I may thus trouble or destroy all beings without being able to say that I have acted contrary to the laws of the three kingdoms and consequently to the laws of Nature. Far from it; I serve those laws one and all; I serve the three kingdoms in giving the earth the nutriment which facilitates her other productions, which is indispensable to them, and without which her productions would be at an end; I serve Nature’s laws in acting in consonance with the aims of perpetual destruction Nature announces, and whose purpose is to enable her to develop new castings, the faculty wherefor is suspended in her owing to the continuing presence of what she has cast before.
“Are you able to believe that this blade of grass, this mite, this maggot, into which the body I slew has latterly metamorphosed, is of more or less outstanding importance to the laws of the three kingdoms which, embracing them all three, can have a predilection for none? Shall it be in the eyes of Nature, who vomits forth her castings indiscriminately, that some one production or other of these castings shall attain to exceptional value? This would be tantamount to upholding that of the millions of leaves growing upon this aged oak tree one of them is the darling of the trunk, because it is perhaps a little larger than its neighbors. ‘It is our pride,’ Montesquieu continues, ‘which prevents us from sensing our puniness and which, puny as we are, causes us to want to be taken account of in the world, to be of mention there, to be a figure of note in it. We are wont to fancy that the loss of such a perfect being as we would be ruinous to Nature, and we do not conceive that one man the more in the world, or the less, or all mankind, or one hundred million earths like ours and each full of men, are but subtle atoms, very tiny and indifferent to Nature.’ So rend away, hack and hew, torment, break, wreck, massacre, burn, grind to dust, melt, in a word: reshape into however many forms all the productions of the three kingdoms, and you simply shall have done them so many services, you shall have done nothing but be useful to them. You shall have been the minion of their laws, you shall have executed those of Nature, because we are creatures of too little strength and too narrow possibilities ever to cooperate in anything but the general order of things, and what you call disorder is nothing else than one of the laws of the order you comprehend not and which you have erroneously named disorder because its effects, though good for Nature, run counter to your convenience or jar your opinions. Ah, if these crimes were not necessary to the general economy, would they be, as they are, inspired in us? Would we in the depths of our hearts sense both the need to commit them and the charm of having committed them? How dare we think that Nature could instill in us impulses which cross her purposes? Eh, indeed, we may rather believe this: that she took all good care to place well outside our reach the power to do anything that might really discomfort or harm her. Come, little girl, let us try to drink dry of its rays the sun that lights our world, let us try to alter the stars’ rhythmed march, reverse the flight of heavenly bodies in space; aye, those are crimes that would veritably offend Nature; and Nature has seen to it that we shall never commit them. As for what she has put in our power to do, we have thereby her authorization to do it; all that is inside our grasp is ours to
have; let us tamper with it, destroy it, change it without fear of harming her. Let us be rather persuaded that we are aiding her, and that the more we turn our hands to deeds of the species we improperly term criminal, the better servants to her we are.
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