1 THIS war, which is one such as had never yet been waged upon this earth of ours, leads us to consider the great problem of the future of mankind.
 
Dare we hope that humanity will one day renounce¹ these monstrous² follies³ and that they will become altogether impossible? To this question, if we wish to meet it at its source, I see but one reply, which I have already given elsewhere and which I will here recapitulate⁴ and complete, namely, that we are engulfed⁵ in a universe which has no more limit in time than it has in space, which had no beginning, as it will have no end, and which has behind it as many myriads⁶ of myriads of years as it discovers ahead of it. Yesterday’s eternity⁷ and to-morrow’s are precisely⁸ identical. All that the universe is going to do it must have already done, for it has had[166] as many opportunities of doing so as it will ever have. All the things that it has not done are things which it will never be able to do, because nothing will be added, in space or time, to what it has already possessed⁹ in space or time. It has necessarily made in the past all the efforts and all the experiments which it will make in the future; and all that has gone before, having been subject to the same chances, is perforce the same as all that is to follow.
 
2
It is probable, therefore, that there was once an infinity¹⁰ of worlds similar to our own, even as it is likely that there is an infinity of such similar worlds at present, the infinity of space being comparable with that of time. These coincidences, however difficult for us to picture, must inevitably¹¹ occur and recur¹² in the immeasurable and the innumerous in which we are immersed, that is, unless the infinity of possible combinations be less unlimited¹³ than those of time and space.
 
[167]This is where our capacity of imagination halts, for it is easier for us to conceive the infinities¹⁴ of space and time than the infinity of combinations. To obtain some idea of the latter, we should have to understand the substance and the nature, the laws and the forces, in a word, the whole riddle¹⁵ of existence. None the less is it true that this possible infinity of combinations is our only hope; without it there would be nothing more to expect of a universe which obviously would have tried and exhausted¹⁶ everything before our coming.
 
But, if this number of combinations is really infinite, it is open to us to say that the earth is an experiment which had not yet been made and an experiment which has failed, since suffering and evil have the upper hand of happiness and goodness. If the experiment has failed, we are its victims; but we are not forbidden to hope that our efforts will in some way modify combinations which will be more fortunate in other places or at another time. If the[168] experiment has failed, it does not follow that others have not succeeded and are not more fortunate, at this very moment, in other worlds than ours. We may even suppose that, in the infinity of these combinations and experiments, the most successful tend to become fixed¹⁷ and crystallized and that, in view of their infinite number, they will bring about successfully in the future what they have not brought about successfully in the past. This is a hazardous¹⁸ glimmer¹⁹; but I doubt whether any others will be discovered to keep us uplifted above despair.
 
3
Let us for a moment assume that the experiment of this world had not miscarried as it has; that the mind of man, which, since the beginning, has been struggling painfully against matter and winning but a few brief, uncertain and precarious²⁰ victories, were a million times more powerful and better-armed. It would no doubt have triumphed over all that weighs us[169] down and keeps us where we are; it would have freed itself from the apparently²¹ illusory fetters²² of space and time. It is not unreasonable²³ to admit that, among the myriads of worlds which people the infinite, there are some in which these better conditions are realized. Perhaps, after all, it would be impossible to imagine anything that does not exist somewhere in reality, for we may very rightly maintain that our imaginings can be nothing more than stray reflections of things that already exist. Now, if we lived in one of those worlds and if we could see, as we should perhaps be allowed to see, all that is happening at this moment on the earth which we now inhabit and on others which are perhaps even worse and more unfortunate, it seems to us that we should know neither rest nor ease until we had intervened and helped to make it better and wiser and more habitable.
 
4
For that matter, no one can tell us that this is not so now and that all our spiritual[170] victories, all that seems, at certain moments, to be leading us towards a future less hideous²⁴ than the past, all the mysterious currents of good that sometimes flow through our world, all that awaits us after death, no one, I say, can tell us that all this is not due to the intervention²⁵ of one of those worlds. It is true that we cannot perceive the act of intervention, that we are hardly sensible of it; but it is also true that these creatures of a higher world, being of necessity less encumbered²⁶ with matter and more spiritual than we, must necessarily remain invisible to us. In the infinity of the firmament²⁷ we discover myriads of worlds that are material worlds like our own; and we are able to discover only these, because all that does not more or less closely resemble our own world must needs escape us. But the space lying............