Activity will become consciousness; the earth
will see herself. Then will be the time for her to blush for her
disorders, her hideousness, her misery, her crime and to throw herself
at last with energy and perseverance into the pursuit of justice. When
humanity has cut its wisdom-teeth, then perhaps it will have the grace
to reform itself, and the will to attempt a systematic reduction of the
share of the evil in the world. The _Weltgeist_ will pass from the state
of instinct to the moral state. War, hatred, selfishness, fraud, the
right of the stronger, will be held to be old-world barbarisms, mere
diseases of growth. The pretenses of modern civilization will be
replaced by real virtues. Men will be brothers, peoples will be friends,
races will sympathize one with another, and mankind will draw from love
a principle of emulation, of invention, and of zeal, as powerful as any
furnished by the vulgar stimulant of interest. This millennium--will it
ever be? It is at least an act of piety to believe in it.
March 14, 1881.--I have finished Merimee's letters to Panizzi. Merimee
died of the disease which torments me--"_Je tousse, et j'etouffe_."
Bronchitis and asthma, whence defective assimilation, and finally
exhaustion. He, too, tried arsenic, wintering at Cannes, compressed air.
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