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THE LOWEST DEPTHS
There disinterestedness vanishes.
The demon is vaguely outlined; each one is for himself.
The _I_ in the eyes howls, seeks, fumbles, and gnaws.
The social Ugolino is in this gulf.
The wild spectres who roam in this grave, almost beasts, almost
phantoms, are not occupied with universal progress; they are ignorant
both of the idea and of the word; they take no thought for anything
but the satisfaction of their individual desires. They are almost
unconscious, and there exists within them a sort of terrible obliteration.
They have two mothers, both step-mothers, ignorance and misery.
They have a guide, necessity; and for all forms of satisfaction,
appetite.
They are brutally voracious, that is to say, ferocious, not
after the fashion of the tyrant, but after the fashion of the
tiger.
From suffering these spectres pass to crime; fatal affiliation,
dizzy creation, logic of darkness. That which crawls in the social
third lower level is no longer complaint stifled by the absolute;
it is the protest of matter. Man there becomes a dragon.
To be hungry, to be thirsty--that is the point of departure;
to be Satan--that is the point reached. From that vault Lacenaire
emerges.
We have just seen, in Book Fourth, one of the compartments
of the upper mine, of the great political, revolutionary, and
philosophical excavation.
There, as we have just said, all is pure, noble, dignified,
honest.
There, assuredly, one might be misled; but error is worthy
of veneration there, so thoroughly does it imply heroism.
The work there effected, taken as a whole has a name:
Progress.
The moment has now come when we must take a look at other
depths, hideous depths.
There exists beneath society, we insist upon this point, and
there will exist, until that day when ignorance shall be dissipated,
the great cavern of evil.
This cavern is below all, and is the foe of all.
It is hatred, without exception.
This cavern knows no philosophers; its dagger has never cut
a pen.
Its blackness has no connection with the sublime blackness
of the inkstand.
Never have the fingers of night which contract beneath this
stifling ceiling, turned the leaves of a book nor unfolded a newspaper.
Babeuf is a speculator to Cartouche; Marat is an aristocrat
to Schinderhannes.
This cavern has for its object the destruction of everything.
Of everything.
Including the upper superior mines, which it execrates. It
not only undermines, in its hideous swarming, the actual social
order; it undermines philosophy, it undermines human thought,
it undermines civilization, it undermines revolution, it undermines
progress. Its name is simply theft, prostitution, murder, assassination.
It is darkness, and it desires chaos.
Its vault is formed of ignorance.
All the others, those above it, have but one object--to suppress
it. It is to this point that philosophy and progress tend, with
all their organs simultaneously, by their amelioration of the
real, as well as by their contemplation of the absolute.
Destroy the cavern Ignorance and you destroy the lair Crime.
Let us condense, in a few words, a part of what we have just
written. The only social peril is darkness.
Humanity is identity.
All men are made of the same clay. There is no difference,
here below, at least, in predestination. The same shadow in front,
the same flesh in the present, the same ashes afterwards.
But ignorance, mingled with the human paste, blackens it.
This incurable blackness takes possession of the interior
of a man and is there converted into evil.
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