The events to which the remainder of the story refer, therefore, occur at times so advanced that one cannot even attempt to anticipate them today. By the same token, the contemporary imagination, in its most extreme audacities, is even more incapable of supporting the posteriority of the epoch in which these events, having disappeared in their turn, will have become mere memories.
The very nature of his narrative, however, constrained the author of The Supreme Progress to draw his pictures merely as retrospective sketches. He thus requested his listeners, insistently, to make the effort of increased attention.
The Thinker’s Other Half welcomed this advertisement with condescension. She thus continued to borrow the various more-or-less sincere attitudes of the cloudy Lady characterized in the dialogue.
The gentleman visitor extracted an affirmative gesture from the blackness of his frock-coat, and contrived an occipital oscillation over his white cravat, making it known that, for his part, not one word of the subsequent part of the incomparable work would be lost.
Continuation of the Manuscript
“Soon, in fact,” the reader continued, “mechanism had become preponderant. By virtue of ever-improving inventions, steam contrived to equal, if not to replace, the vital principle. Industrial machines were complicated by generative or constructive organs thanks to which the excess of their manufacturing power was employed in reproducing and coordinating the equivalent of their instrumental details. The consequence of these self-propagatory augmentations—their steel joints, metal intestines, fiery breath, and, finally their souls, proceeding from mysterious effluvia of electricity—and the transmission of their actions was an effective redoubling of automation. For example, while a locomotive as devouring distance, it engendered by its side an identical specimen of its tractional apparatus.
“In sum, a regime of mechanical vitality was established in which humans no longer filled any role but that of a mere vocal and visual adjunct. Led by nature, however, to impart as much of their strength as possible to the objects that they employ as auxiliaries, humans adapted themselves to these instrumentations in a fashion so intimate that they infused them into own external appearance, including their various sexes, with the benefits of the impulses and passions that followed therefrom. From then on, the machines were disencumbered of their surplus of extrinsic production. Eventually, clothed with animalism, they were able to devote themselves to the usual affectations of genital specialism, with the advantages of an immediate heredity.”
THE LADY: “What a terrible joke!”
THE GENTLEMAN: “Disabuse yourself, dear friend, I am speaking with all the seriousness of which I am capable—but don’t be too surprised by a phenomenon that is not without precedent. By going back to the remotest of the annals buried in my memory, I can, in fact, inform you of infinitely primitive epochs in which certain very powerful Terrans who claimed to be owners of the land undertook to furnish the motive energy of agricultural labor by means of individuals of a more-or-less dark hue known as ‘serfs’. It is probable that, by virtue of a disinhibition analogous to the one sketched above, these black-skinned individuals, these agitators of energy, were nothing but a concentration of coal in human form.”
SHE: “Once again, you’re taking facetiousness to burlesque lengths!”
HE: “Be persuaded, on the contrary, that I am doing my best to avoid badinage. We have just seen a striking example of professional appropriation. One cannot, after that, be astonished by what our species, so long supplemented by machinery as an agent of impulsion and transference, would finally become: purely and simply, machine-humans. Thus they attempted to justify, during that transitory era, the theory of a reciprocal penetration between creatures and their environments.
“This very considerable evolution, however, did not bring about any very extraordinary change in the mores of that society. As I have frequently said, by virtue of lack of suspicion of their true predestination, our forefathers remained convinced of their present worth, and paralyzed the progress that they still had to make—for one characteristic of powerlessness is constantly to admit the provisional as definitive. From the viewpoint of the intellect, there was still concurrence, instead of any haste toward fusion, and disputes persisted as ardently as ever between the ideophiles and the utilitarians.
“A few sects, without actually participating in them, praised the maintenance of old beliefs as a discipline salutary to economic innovation. For example, the question of whether or not young anthropolocomotives should receive religious instruction provoked several thousand centuries of civil war. As usual, however, the last word went to the defenders of common sense; and, not content with propagating and multiplying themselves to provide for the exigencies of relentless labor, the machine-humans—or, if you wish, the transport-humans, the ship-humans, the aerostat-humans, the bulldozer-humans, the mining-humans, the agriculture-humans and the factory-humans—persisted doggedly in improving one another indefinitely.
“It would be impossible to express in sufficiently descriptive terms how much anguish, subjugation and overwork our ancestors were subjected to in that period, being constrained to render themselves amenable to such excesses of utilization.
“We can see that, as this episode ran its course, the Earth began to cool, by virtue of the extinction of a certain number of suns. Note, in fact, how the reflection of these things on our indicator star has paled during the last few millions of centuries. Matter was disaggregating, and visibly returning to its former state of atomic turbulence. The machine-humans struggled desperately against the rarity and increasing inertia of supplies of indispensable energy.
“A few obstinate progressivists proposed as-yet-untried expedients to avert the crisis, and declared that the maintenance of obligatory labor was justified by the very quest to find new ways of working—but humankind, overstretched and stupefied, began to ask questions. Why the Devil had people always wanted to do something, and why stubbornly persist in doing things, no matter what? History—more than empty of details regarding guilds and trades unions—scarcely traced a confused and hypothetical account of their enormous centuries-long efforts in the past. Would it be for the same negative result that they would accumulate their achievements during the terminal phase of an exhausted Earth? Were they not still living in an erroneous and deluded insouciance, like the existence that must doubtless have been led in the remotest eras of the past?
“Reasoning in this manner, they recognized that feeling and relaxing—or, quite simply, living—was the happiness that it was necessary to protect in advance, or recover after, any attempt at social planning. They fell into agreement on the point that, after having exploited to exhaustion all the resources of substance, there remained no further progress to industrialize. That irremediable lack of any reason to remain material finally brought us to the principal of the intelligence that was still subdivided between us, which it was necessary to constitute as a unique force in order to furnish, at least, a plausible pretext for continuing to live…
“Alas, the Earth crumbled away before the reign of comprehension in simplicity was ever able to establish itself. No other recourse remained but to erase the presence of humankind from the fragment of the universe that was ready to give way beneath it. The facile employment of certain electrochemical elements, which had fortunately remained destructive, assisted the cataclysm; the smoky fog and the red glow of flame that has just slid over our star, down there, is indicative of that explosion. Its inhabitants—its creatures and its peoples—were dissipated in single breath in a scattering that skillful preparations made a century in advance had rendered instantaneous.
“In consequence, the spiritual particles, simultaneously disencumbered of corporeal enslavement, combined with the thinking molecules that had previously only attained their liberty in a posthumous capacity, and their assembly ensured the coherent unity of intelligence in the fluid state…”
An Observation
The Thinker—who, durin
g these final words, had taken on the enthusiastic tone befitting the revelation of important truths—detached his gaze momentarily from the unpublished composition.
“By virtue of what excess of stupidity,” he said, “are we obstinate in holding back the advent of that hyperphysical fusion, when we could so easily obtain it by any means of combustion that comes to hand?” The generous prophet’s voice grew louder. “And we—yes, the people of today—lack all prescience of the true duty, when we avoid sublimating ourselves into an essence, or any sort of volatilization whatsoever, and remain so childishly attached to the flesh! And if it would be useful to offer an example to the future, what prevents me, then, from furnishing it by my own combustion?”
At this cry of ardent marital conviction, the Thinker’s wife seemed to be half-gripped by a sudden zeal also to dissolve herself in the ether.
The gentleman visitor struck the black of his frock-coat abruptly with his hand and rose to his feet, putting the forefinger of his other hand to his cravat to signify that, of the number of reflections evoked by the author of The Supreme Progress, the one that had just been proffered appeared to be the most important to take under advisement.
These audience reactions, however, passed unperceived. The Thinker was in a hurry to finish reading the pages that he had never ceased to hold in his hands.
Conclusion of the Manuscript
“Our former world,” he read, “had been annihilated, with the result that no reflection of it any longer appears on the star that we have been consulting. And that is why we find ourselves today in a virtuality of abstractive irrealism in which we summarize anthropomorphic thinking: I, the man, the rigid and indefatigable searcher for causes; you, the woman, more excited by the versatility of effects…”
Perhaps ruffled by this allusion to the special genius of her sex, the Lady raised a slight objection. “And what becomes, in the midst of all that, of animal instinct?” she asked, not without a certain hint of persiflage. “What do you make of the parcel of intellect that you say is included equally in every cell of inert matter, or hard bodies, or whatever you care to call them?”
The Gentleman marked by a furtive tremor the extent to which this slowness to comprehend the most obvious things on the part of his companion hurt and humiliated him, but his reply was no less imprinted with powerful forbearance.
“The brute elements of which you speak,” he professed, “implicate their dose of intellectualism in their latent or adventitious qualities. Their manner of having consciousness as an objective is dull and passive. It consists of manifestations such as acquiring or receiving a configuration, being modeled according to the exigencies of the surroundings, containing weight, yielding to the impulsion of a movement, submitting to and reflecting the shock of ambient vibrations. Their relative spirituality is translated into the actions of penetration, modification and disaggregation that they exercise upon one another.
“These faculties survive them today in the centralization of their atoms, and concur with us in giving our former planet its present physiognomy. Bodies now retain the impalpable equivalence of all former forms, in the same way that our souls enclose the totality of all former thought. The product of a universal order in which everything is transformed but nothing disappears, the material amalgam adds to our intangible ideality the circumference, the plenitude and the gasified dimensions of our former terrestrial globe—which, commuted as it is into an entity of pure thought, thus maintains its aeriform presence within the system of gravitation. These are the quintessential properties of substance, which assure us today—which is to say, for a vast number of billions of centuries—of the indispensable collaboration of a kind of physiological function, permitting us to remain in rapport with vibratory sensations by means of light, to note the limitations of our present duality, to interpret the diversity of our sentiments by means of interior language, etc, etc, etc.
“Don’t you find, dear friend, that our purely moral synthesization is a delectable state of affairs by comparison with the incoherent multitude of individuals and objects that we once were?”
Whether out of malice or a residual sulkiness, the Lady could not help disputing this last opinion. “You have rightly said, if I’ve understood you correctly,” she observed, “that these ancient varieties had the virtue of setting in contrast a host of characters and temperaments. In going through life like that, one experiences an incessant curiosity, the interest of an unending struggle, of an eternally incomprehensible dream, a total ignorance of the universal goal that everyone circumscribes in his own way, according to his own tastes. You have rightly said, I repeat, that all that can be whimsical, comical, enigmatic and painful—so be it!—but it is charming even so, by virtue of the secret pleasure of felling fear. And what of us? What diversion can we obtain in our sempiternal stagnation in this void wallpapered with reflections? How do we kill pitiless time, without the hope, which we had before, that time is killing us?”
With the most perfect calm, the Gentleman replied: “Don’t be guilty of infantile impatience, and let us savor, as is fitting, our immense joy in the interminable possession of the future. As for the retinue of our distractions, think of the multitude of other planets, still living, that will unfold during new periods of relative eternity before our eyes. Those myriads of constellations, so different from ours in their conditions of vitality, are no less in possession of a packaged deposit of the wisdom that, when those same constellations volatilize, will condense integrally and fuse with ours. Can one imagine a pleasure more grandiose than being both actors in and witnesses of such a marvel?”
“And after that ultimate phenomenon, what will remain to us?” said the Lady, anxious and unconvinced.
“After?” proclaimed the Gentleman, in a tumult of internal verbalization that unleashed his divinatory exaltation. “After! Our two spiritual sexes will receive their complements of intelligence originating from the dematerialization of the other cosmoses. O sublime prevision of an era in which all that is extent and form, movement and force, action and idea will fuse in the homogeneity of a thinking aspiration! Having thus attained the most absolute result of universal experimentation, our duality itself will disappear in the entente and harmony of a single consciousness.
“Then I shall be, or, rather—permit me this residue of old-fashioned gallantry—you shall be the final possessor, to the highest possible degree, of everything that was comprehension—which is to say Wisdom, which is to say God—during the entire duration of the Past. You will then know why that Wisdom or God—who implies boundless perfection, and could in consequence dispense with action—thought it necessary, on the contrary, to incarnate himself and plasticize himself in ideas and allow himself to produce, for such a long time, the illusion of an existence of objects. You will have the key to the frightful enigma of causes, which has thus far remained inaccessible to us.
“Above all, though, you will be the thought that exists beyond all objectivity, since it possesses the power of its own rationality, the thought that will understand why destinies have ceased to be, the thought that will know the effective and directive value embodied in the nature of things—and you will be informed of everything that could, should or must be created again it there is to be a renewal of the future…”
Postscript
The dialogue had ended. With a reassuring gesture, the Thinker displayed the last page that remained to be read, and which contained the conclusions:
“One may wonder, that addendum said, whether the imponderable couple, during that conversation, was really occupied with our Earth, or whether they might have confused it with some other planet long since rendered fluid. It is, besides, rather surprising to hear the Man-Woman, that double spirit of all defunct humankind, conversing with itself about these circumstances of eternity, which can only appear elementary and banal to its eyes, something akin to the ABC of the system of worlds. But why must we, whose fate it at least foresees by cosmic analogy—we, its sad predecesso
rs—stagnate in the ignorance of this indispensable truth? By virtue of what bitter stupidity must we oppose, during so many centuries of doubt, error, sophism, revolt, anguish and vain endeavor, our predestination of immaterial intellectualism? Why do we put so much persistence and pride in engraving the imprint of our labor and our desire on the ephemeral surface of a perishable substance? Why, I repeat, do we misunderstand the rigorous duty to liberate ourselves from the concrete, and direct our free souls toward that ungraspable effluvium where free ideas reign?”
Denouement
On this final line, the Thinker rose to his feet and displayed by his attitude an intrepidity of conviction entirely ready to put theory into practice. His broad pale forehead, his long grey hair—shaken by the horror of the gift of prophecy—and his eyes, staring into the distance, left no room for doubt in that regard.
And while he stood tall in that lofty attitude of a seer, the gaze of his spouse enveloped him in one of those conjugal adulations that are all the more passionate as their object veils himself in obscurities more sublime.
As for the gentleman visitor, he hurriedly took his leave, then ran down the stairs from the attic to the ground floor with such aerocole72 agility that the white of his cravat seemed to be lending wings to the black of his frock-coat, and dived like a premature gust of wind into the room where the Grand Council was sitting, under the presidency of the Director.
This gathering, whose curative purpose may be guessed, was deliberating as to the more or less vigorous treatment that it was appropriate to oppose to the opinions and behavior of the various inmates most recently confided to the care of the Institution by their families. The Thinker was one of these, and the gentleman inspector, unbuttoning the black of his frock-coat and loosening the white of his cravat slightly, immediately delivered his report on the manuscript and the principal aphorisms of which he had just received communication.
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