"Poet!" said Leo, with a smile creasing about his lean jaws. "The world does not become socialist, it becomes Chinese; our civilisation tends to a variety of forms, becomes uniform, and then again becomes diverse in endless recurrence. Continue, Monsieur, but let us keep within the bounds of our own age. Socialism is a definite political force; and even if it do not triumph completely it must create certain new conditions. I, myself, have condemned socialism in one of my encyclicals. I have denied the sacred right of insurrection. Human institutions, which we may think have survived their usefulness, are in reality only waiting for their transformation, their character is moulded from outside. We may sometimes fail to understand their mission, or to grasp the reasons which impel them to follow certain paths, because these reasons are pale reflections of some unappreciated causes. The world seems to progress, within the limits of natural laws, by a series of unforeseen developments. The future is latent in us; but the force which impels it is hidden."
"Yes," answered Renan; "some internal conscience directs all progress, and is the force which impels humanity on its way. This conscience has a secret action long before it finds a voice. Its influence at first is something subterranean and obscure; its bias is necessarily against the official creeds, but it moves against them slowly, informing them with the new spirit. I like to find this conscience acting through the poorer and humbler classes of the people, the folk who are of the soil, whose faith is something native and spontaneous, whose life and happiness depends upon the sun and rain. It is significant that all the gods were originally agricultural gods, that the history of every nation begins in Eden. To the artisan, the dweller in towns, whose whole life consists in turning out from a machine certain articles of a stereotyped pattern, the universe is simply a piece of mechanism; he is himself merely a machine, or part of a machine, performing a certain number of invariable motions to produce a definite and invariable result. He lacks inspiration, he has no vivid knowledge of the great element of chance which moves, like one of those primitive elemental gods, behind all human affairs, at times compassionate and friendly to man, at times bursting out into a sudden fury of wanton destruction. He demands a fixed wage, fixed hours of work, fixed prices for the commodities which he consumes, the certainty of a pension in his old age. In a world of fluctuations and vicissitudes he demands absolute security. He is confident that he is going to do great things, that he has already worked wonders. With the aid of science and art, which he starves, he is going to make the earth pleasant and beautiful. He is quite confident that in a few generations he will be born in an incubator, and die, without pain, of sheer satiety. For him a fantastic assembly of politicians, removable at his own will, represents Providence and the divine wisdom. Is he less absurd than the savages who employ rain-makers and witch doctors? I do not think so. Clearly he is not a person from whom we can expect any but the most crude and mechanical readings of life; his vague, restless, childish discontent, that hunger for barren and tawdry pleasures which is characteristic of half-educated minds, that lack of intercourse with the great elemental forces of Nature, can issue in nothing but his own mental, moral, and physical damnation.