And yet such is perpetually the case in life. We all of
us pay for the faults of the few.
Human solidarity is a fact more evident and more certain than personal
responsibility, and even than individual liberty. Our dependence has it
over our independence; for we are only independent in will and desire,
while we are dependent upon our health, upon nature and society; in
short, upon everything in us and without us. Our liberty is confined to
one single point. We may protest against all these oppressive and fatal
powers; we may say, Crush me--you will never win my consent! We may, by
an exercise of will, throw ourselves into opposition to necessity, and
refuse it homage and obedience. In that consists our moral liberty. But
except for that, we belong, body and goods, to the world. We are its
playthings, as the dust is the plaything of the wind, or the dead leaf
of the floods. God at least respects our dignity, but the world rolls us
contemptuously along in its merciless waves, in order to make it plain
that we are its thing and its chattel.
All theories of the nullity of the individual, all pantheistic and
materialist conceptions, are now but so much forcing of an open door, so
much slaying of the slain. As soon as we cease to glorify this
imperceptible point of conscience, and to uphold the value of it, the
individual becomes naturally a mere atom in the human mass, which is but
an atom in the planetary mass, which is a mere nothing in the universe.
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