If we press them with questions, they answer
that there is nothing to be done, that no human power could avert
or thwart the issue. Are they mad, bored, irritable, or accessory
to a hideous pleasantry? Does our fate depend on the happy
solution of some petty enigma or childish conundrum, even as our
salvation, in most of the so-called revealed religious, is
settled by a blind and stupid cast of the die? Is all the liberty
that we are granted reduced to the reading of a more or less
ingenious riddle? Can the great soul of the universe be the soul
of a great baby?
16
But, rather than pursue this subject, let us be just and admit
that there is perhaps no way out of the maze and that our
reproaches are as incomprehensible as the conduct of the spirits.
Indeed, what would you have them do in the circle in which our
logic imprisons them? Either they foretell us a calamity which
their predictions cannot avert, in which case there is no use in
foretelling it, or, if they announce it to us and at the same
time give us the means to prevent it, they do not really see the
future and are foretelling nothing, since the calamity is not to
take place, with the result that their action seems equally
absurd in both cases.
It is obvious: to whichever side we turn, we find nothing but the
incomprehensible. On the one hand, the preestablished,
unshakable, unalterable future which we have called destiny,
fatality or what you will, which suppresses man's entire
independence and liberty of action and which is the most
inconceivable and the dreariest of mysteries; on the other,
intelligences apparently superior to our own, since they know
what we do not, which, while aware that their intervention is
always useless and very often cruel, nevertheless come harassing
us with their sinister and ridiculous predictions.
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