2.M.7.1. MINES AND MINERS
HUMAN societies all have what is called in theatrical
parlance,
a third lower floor. The social soil is everywhere
undermined,
sometimes for good, sometimes for evil. These works
are superposed one upon the other. There are superior mines
and inferior mines. There is a top and a bottom in this
obscure sub-soil, which sometimes gives way beneath civilization,
and which our indifference and heedlessness trample
under foot. The Encyclopedia, in the last century, was a
mine that was almost open to the sky. The shades, those
sombre hatchers of primitive Christianity, only awaited an
opportunity to bring about an explosion under the Caesars and
to inundate the human race with light. For in the sacred
shadows there lies latent light. Volcanoes are full of a
shadow that is capable of flashing forth. Every form begins
by being night. The catacombs, in which the first mass was
said, were not alone the cellar of Rome, they were the vaults
of the world.
Beneath the social construction, that complicated marvel
of
a structure, there are excavations of all sorts. There is the
religious mine, the philosophical mine, the economic mine, the
revolutionary mine. Such and such a pick-axe with the idea,
such a pick with ciphers. Such another with wrath. People
hail and answer each other from one catacomb to another.
Utopias travel about underground, in the pipes. There they
branch out in every direction. They sometimes meet, and
fraternize
there. Jean-Jacques lends his pick to Diogenes, who
lends him his lantern. Sometimes they enter into combat
there. Calvin seizes Socinius by the hair. But nothing arrests
nor interrupts the tension of all these energies toward the
goal, and the vast, simultaneous activity, which goes and
comes, mounts, descends, and mounts again in these obscurities,
and which immense unknown swarming slowly transforms
the top and the bottom and the inside and the outside. Society
hardly even suspects this digging which leaves its surface intact
and changes its bowels. There are as many different
subterranean stages as there are varying works, as there are
extractions. What emerges from these deep excavations? The
future.
The deeper one goes, the more mysterious are the toilers.
The work is good, up to a degree which the social philosophies
are able to recognize; beyond that degree it is doubtful and
mixed; lower down, it becomes terrible. At a certain depth,
the excavations are no longer penetrable by the spirit of
civilization,
the limit breathable by man has been passed; a beginning
of monsters is possible.
The descending scale is a strange one; and each one of the
rungs of this ladder corresponds to a stage where philosophy
can find foothold, and where one encounters one of these workmen,
sometimes divine, sometimes misshapen. Below John
Huss, there is Luther; below Luther, there is Descartes; below
Descartes, there is Voltaire; below Voltaire, there is Condorcet;
below Condorcet, there is Robespierre; below Robespierre,
there is Marat; below Marat there is Babeuf. And so it goes
on. Lower down, confusedly, at the limit which separates the
indistinct from the invisible, one perceives other gloomy men,
who perhaps do not exist as yet. The men of yesterday are
spectres; those of to-morrow are forms. The eye of the spirit
distinguishes them but obscurely. The embryonic work of the
future is one of the visions of philosophy.
A world in limbo, in the state of foetus, what an
unheard-of
spectre!
Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier, are there also, in lateral
galleries.
Surely, although a divine and invisible chain unknown to
themselves, binds together all these subterranean pioneers who,
almost always, think themselves isolated, and who are not so,
their works vary greatly, and the light of some contrasts with
the blaze of others. The first are paradisiacal, the last are
tragic. Nevertheless, whatever may be the contrast, all these
toilers, from the highest to the most nocturnal, from the wisest
to the most foolish, possess one likeness, and this is it:
disinterestedness.
Marat forgets himself like Jesus. They throw
themselves on one side, they omit themselves, they think not of
themselves. They have a glance, and that glance seeks the
absolute. The first has the whole heavens in his eyes; the last,
enigmatical though he may be, has still, beneath his eyelids,
the pale beam of the infinite. Venerate the man, whoever he
may be, who has this sign — the starry eye.
The shadowy eye is the other sign.
With it, evil commences. Reflect and tremble in the
presence
of any one who has no glance at all. The social order has
its black miners.
There is a point where depth is tantamount to burial, and
where light becomes extinct.
Below all these mines which we have just mentioned, below
all these galleries, below this whole immense, subterranean,
venous system of progress and utopia, much further on in the
earth, much lower than Marat, lower than Babeuf, lower, much
lower, and without any connection with the upper levels, there
lies the last mine. A formidable spot. This is what we have
designated as the le troisieme dessous. It is the grave
of shadows.
It is the cellar of the blind. Inferi.
This communicates with the abyss.