The Supreme Progress

by Brian Stableford

  Slightly mortified by the regime inflicted on these flowers, which he loved most particularly, Graf von Zoellern continued to follow his guide as far as a chain of black and angular rocks that crowned the peaks of the mountain.

  Scarcely had they reached them than they were overtaken by a suffocating heat and acrid, caustic and nauseating vapors, by which Fottey seemed not to be affected at all. As for the voyager, he only had time to plunge a rapid glance over the depths of the opposite slope, where sulfurous and bituminous gulfs yawned.

  In the profound darkness, he thought he glimpsed a few vegetable forms, spectral in appearance, so shriveled, corroded and withered that no plant buried for ten years in a collector’s herbarium could ever have presented a more sickly and wretched appearance.

  The uncultivated, sterile place where they had just encountered the roses, balsamines, tulips and others was only a purgatory; this was an inferno. To this had been relegated the venomous plants and the magical plants, those that had aided the operations of witchcraft or the accomplishment of crimes. There too were found plants accused of exciting the human imagination and stirring up deceptive sensualities, at the expense of health, dignity and reason.

  Of these latter, Fottey only named three: the opium poppy, which has already killed two million people in China; Indian hemp, with which the Indians manufacture their bhang and the Turks and Arabs their hashish, which lightens their mood, intoxicates and decimates them; and, finally, absinthe, as deadly as the other two, and in the process of cretinizing Europe.

  Our friend Zoellern, did not have to beg him to come down again from those heights…

  At this point our sleeper brought his narration to a close, and after a few moments of silence, we heard him murmur in a low voice: “Goodbye, good and excellent Fottey… The isle is retreating before me… We’re doubling Cape Comorin… Goodbye, Maldive Sea!… Here’s Europe!... Here’s Paris!... Wake me up, Monsieur Marcillet.”

  Monsieur Marsillet made the regulation passes.

  When Zoellern opened his eyes again, he did not retain any memory of what he had seen and heard in the Paradise of Flowers.

  “Well,” I said to the doctor, “the séance must have interested you more than any other. It featured a magnetic dream, which I believe you have not yet classified in your scientific theory?”

  “Zigzag! Zigzag! Zigzag!” he replied, loudly this time, drumming more forcefully than ever on his snuff-box.

  X.B. Saintine: The Great Discovery of Animules

  (1864)

  It is said, and people are generally glad to think, that our souls have already encountered one another in an anterior world, and that some of them have even been paired, giving rise to sympathies that still attract them to one another today and often determine our affections. It is an ancient link that seeks to renew itself across the centuries, a pleasant habituation inclined to continue from heaven to earth. I would willingly endorse the ideas of poets, and lovers themselves, if reflection, and something even better than reflection had not demonstrated to me that they are vain and puerile.

  Petty as it is, our terrestrial globe has not neglected to populate itself adequately. How many human beings, and, in consequence, how many souls pullulate between its poles? India and China alone furnish 600 million, before adding Europe, Africa, the Americas, Australia and Oceania to the count. In the midst of such a multitude, dispersed over the surface of the earth, split up and separated to an infinite degree by mountains, deserts and oceans, admit that a meeting of two predestined souls is no more than exceptional. Now, it is the work of a madman to build systems on exceptions.

  This cannot happen as imagined. Fortunately, thanks to an unexpected and unlooked-for revelation, I find myself in a position to offer partisans of the ancient dogma something that will take the place of the belief that I have taken away from them, with sufficient compensation, and even some profit.

  If our mutual sympathies do not originate so remotely, they are exercised at close range with greater surety, strength and plausibility. Why should souls, like light and perfumes, not have their radiance, or, to put it better, their emanations?

  These emanations, these reciprocal attractions, not only attach souls to one another, but also, thanks to another universal law that desires nothing in nature to unite without fecundity, engender by their contact, not a soul—that is the work of God alone—but an animule: a more or less viable parcel of soul: animula vagula, blandula, as the great Emperor Hadrian once said.28

  These animules, atoms emanated by our souls, form a sensible atmosphere around us. Our individual soul, or divine guest, partakes more intimately in our joys and pains, our particular inclinations and personal affections; while assisting in that, our animules have another role to play: they compose the great chain, the great network of general affections. Love of family, that other love, broader but sometimes no less passionate, that makes itself felt by an entire people, which, on a given day, lifts them with the same enthusiastic impulse, evidently flows from them. There are ideas in the air, it is often said; in the air there are animules, which imprint thousand of souls with the same impulse simultaneously, exciting them and causing them to palpitate in the magnetic milieu that is their own essence.

  “But you have not announced a discovery,” it might be objected, “you have given us a hypothesis. Who has demonstrated the existence of these animules? How can you know that they populate the air if, like the air, they are impalpable and invisible?”

  As invisible and impalpable as the air: exactly. Listen! Scientists found the means to weigh air a long time ago, to divide it into its elementary components, and yet, in spite of their most complicated optical instruments, they have not been able to obtain any visual perception of it. One day, an intelligent man who was only a scientist in his leisure hours took a piece of card, made a hole in it with the point of a needle, looked through the hole, and saw the air; he saw all the gaseous atoms composing it moving and radiating before him. Well, it was very nearly the same for me with respect to that other supposedly invisible entity, the animule.

  Following a long botanical expedition, once evening, having returned home with many plants—aromatic for the most part—and occupying myself with analyzing them by the light of an excellent Carcel lamp,29 I was astonished to perceive white forms apparently passing under my magnifying glass. I thought it was some reflection of light on the instrument, and set it aside. The forms continued to appear to me, confused at first, then distinct, especially at the borders of my lampshade.

  Every great discovery initially causes a distressing hesitation, in which a residue of doubt painfully suppresses the explosion of triumphant joy. Almost frightened by my success, I stood up, went out and headed for the boulevards. Everywhere in the streets, along the house-fronts, around the gas-lamps and in the brightly-lit display windows of shops, I saw before me these floating animules, whose revelation had until then been only a revelation of my thought. This time, I had them, not under the error-prone lens of a microscope, but in my own line of sight, without any intermediary; I had not even needed to pierce a piece of card. To those who are endowed with the gift of prescience, heaven momentarily grants in the same way the faculty of verifying with their own eyes the calculations of their imagination.

  Having become calmer, I observed attentively, and made notes.

  These animules, almost diaphanous, presented at their central point a sort of dark patch, indicating the presence of some substance, doubtless borrowed from the air in whose environment they live; that is their material aspect.

  As for their forms, varied according to their different categories, at first sight, they presented the appearance of light shining bubbles of air, with a pearly gleam, surrounding the opaque nucleus I have already mentioned. Not one projected a shadow; on the contrary, the pearly mesh, composed of tiny imperceptible scales, that enveloped their diaphanousness without darkening it, not only amplified luminous radiance but gave off phosphorescent sparks, in all probab
ility electric.

  Momentarily, I found in them—regretfully, I confess—the physiognomy of an elongated aerostat floating horizontally. I examined them more attentively. Little silvery oars were beating on their flanks. With their shiny mesh, inflated by air, these oars gave them the appearance of those little feluccas with sails that appear through the morning mists at sunrise in Mediterranean waters.

  In the first instance, I had before me the infinitely tiny spectacle of an aerial fleet; in the second, a maritime fleet. But how was it imaginable that these emanations of the soul might be so similar to vulgar machines invented by humans?

  Fortunately, at that moment, my eyes, by virtue of an incredible nervous overexcitation, were endowed with the magnifying power of the finest microscopes. My new investigations allowed me to discover semblances of limbs, scarcely protruding from the body, and a conically-shaped and slightly-flattened head sunk between the shoulders—admitting as shoulders the two concave muscular structures between which the head was embedded. An animule of the strongest species, which I was fortunate enough to keep motionless before my gaze or a few seconds, permitted me to rectify my first judgment entirely. The little silvery oars of my feluccas became its slender silky fins, and it breathed air while lifting up, at regular intervals, a membranous partition not unlike the operculum of a fish.

  At first I had imagined for my animules a gracious, even mythological form, with wings on their backs, like sylphs or sylphides; I had seen them, in the first place, as balloons, and in the second place, as boats; the turn if the fish had come: I took them for fish, saw their scales, fins and opercula. Was not the air a fluid sufficient for them to be able to live in it and move through it at their ease?

  Now that I was no longer thinking of dressing them in a form according to my fancy, in truth, I found them very fine as they were: alert, graceful and charming. I ended up concluding that they were, in every detail, that which they ought to be.

  It remained for me to study their habits and inclinations.

  The majority swirled in swarms around certain individuals, especially young women and children; they enveloped them like an animate cloud, allowing themselves to be drawn along by the movement that the latter imparted to the ambient air; they crossed the road with them, pausing where they paused.

  On occasion, however, some of these little atomistic souls broke ranks and allowed themselves to be drawn into the orbit of another company. Sometimes, encountering one another as if unexpectedly, they made an abrupt movement of separation, which I attributed to an antipathetic influence; but every truth is proved by its antithesis, and if antipathy has its effects among the animules, by the same virtue, sympathy must make itself felt—as I was not long in observing, in the most convincing fashion.

  I saw several of them, belonging to different swarms, show themselves two by two, drawing apart and drawing closer by turns, as birds traveling together do, and when they drew closer, their pearly mesh shone more brightly on the two sides that made contact, and they interconnected like a shower of sparks.

  Experimenting in the busy street, I could hardly expect to verify the fact, but I do not doubt that, in the right circumstances, two entire groups might be combined by mutual fusion. These groups cannot be content to be thus confused for a few seconds; they accompany, and alternately escort the two individuals from which they have emanated. The latter may not have met yet, but they are already subject to the influence of the magnetic atmosphere that surrounds them; they sense one another and seek one another, without being aware of the invisible magnet that is attracting them to one another. When they finally establish a relationship, the sympathetic effects are immediately manifest, creating, in proportion to their strength and vivacity, those furious spontaneous infatuations that so often have no other rationale, which fade away as quickly as they have come, or the calmer, more rational sentiment of progressive affections, ardent love-affairs and long friendships.

  Does this mean that all human beings are equally liable to experience or to communicate these sympathetic impulses? The opposite is easy to demonstrate.

  A man walking two paces in front of me was only escorted by a few animules. These, although apparently weak and, I dare say, unhealthy, left his company to mingle with other swarms, but they came back to him hastily, and always alone. I overtook the man in order to inspect his physiognomy; he had a fixed stare, thin lips and a harsh expression—and grey hair to boot. He had to be an old misanthropic bachelor.

  I also made many other observations that it would take too long to report; but one that I ought not to pass over in silence is the truly remarkable incident that crowned my experiments.

  I was continuing my investigations in the open street, in the corners of squares, in front of cafes and shops—everywhere that a bright enough light permitted my eyes to take advantage of the singular clarity of vision with which I was endowed at that moment—when I suddenly noticed a liveliness, and extraordinary coming-and-going, in my animules. They were no longer arrayed as exactly around certain individuals; all of them, as if obedient to a general commotion, were allowing themselves to be borne along by the same current, into the same whirlwind, like a blizzard of snow blown by a storm-wind—and yet the air was calm, and there as not a cloud moving in the sky.

  Without losing its force, this emigration took on a more regular appearance; it was as if invisible leaders had established order and discipline in the ranks, and among these ranks thus aligned I never once perceived the antipathetic somersaults that had previously been possible. Our animules went along the Rue de Richelieu, in such great numbers that the majority were lost in the shade, and even in the darkness, of the upper floors.

  Suddenly, as if to give me the power to observe them even at those heights, and in their various directions, all Paris lit up from the bottom to the top of its houses and palaces. Then I was able to see them emerging from every window, descending from every balcony and even from every attic, in order to join the great procession.

  On turning into the boulevards, I perceived that the Parisian population, hurled outside by innumerable waves, was filling and cluttering the sidewalks, experiencing that evening an impulse and an agitation entirely similar to that of my animules.

  That same Saturday, the 25th of June in the year 1859, when my great discovery should have received its consecration, the news had just arrived by telegraph of the important victory won by the Franco-Sardinian army on the banks of the Mincio.

  The victory of Solferino was that of good,30 which serves to prove the role that the animules play in great popular emotions, whose explosive spontaneity has never before been explained.

  Since that day, it has not been given to me to renew my experiments—which, at any rate, have not yet been contested by anyone.

  Eugène Mouton: The End of the World

  (1872)

  And the world will end by fire.

  Of all the questions that interest humankind, none is more worthy of research than that of the destiny of the planet we inhabit. Geology and history have taught us many things about the Earth’s past; we know the age of our world, within a few hundred million years or so; we know the order of development in which life progressively manifest itself and propagated over its surface; we know in which epoch humans finally arrived to sit down at the banquet that life had prepared for them, and for which it had taken several thousand years to set the table.

  We know all that, or at least think we know it, which comes down to exactly the same thing—but if we are sure of our past, we are not of our future.

  Humankind scarcely knows and more about the probable duration of its existence than each one of us knows about the number of years that he has yet to live:

  The table is laid,

  The exquisite parade,

  That gives us cheer!

  A toast, my dear!

  All well and good—but are we on the soup, or the dessert? Who can tell us, alas, that the coffee will not be served very soon?


  We go on and on, heedless of the future of the world, without ever asking ourselves whether, by chance, this frail boat that is carrying us across the ocean of infinity is not at risk of capsizing suddenly, or whether its old hull, worn away by time and impaired by the agitations of the voyage, does not have some leak though which death is filtering into its carcass—which is, of course, the very carcass of humankind—one drop at a time.

  The world—which is to say, our terrestrial globe—has not always existed. It had begun, so it will end. The question is, when?

  First of all, let us ask ourselves whether the world might end by virtue of an accident, a perturbation of present laws.

  We cannot admit that. Such a hypothesis would, in fact, be in absolute contradiction with the opinion that we intend to sustain in this work. It is obvious, therefore, that we cannot adopt it. Any discussion is impossible if one admits the opinion that one is setting out to combat.

  Thus, one point is definitely established: the Earth will not be destroyed by accident; it will end as a consequence of the continued action of the laws of its present existence. It will die, as they say, its appropriate death.

  But will it die of old age? Will it die of a disease?

  I have no hesitation in replying: no, it will not die of old age; yes, it will die of a disease—in consequence of excess.

  I have said that the world will end as a consequence of the continued action of the laws of its present existence. It is now a matter of figuring out which, of all the agents functioning for the maintenance of the life of the terraqueous globe, is the one that will have the responsibility of destroying it someday.