But we should be wrong to complain of the indifference of the universe. We have no right to be astonished at an injustice in which we ourselves take a very active part. Look at poverty, for instance--we class it with ills that cannot be helped, such as pestilence and shipwreck, but it is surely a result of the injustice of our social organisation. We shudder from one end of the world to the other when a judicial error is committed (Dreyfus affair); but the error which condemns the majority of our fellowmen to wretchedness we attribute to some inaccessible, implacable power. Again (this argument is in the section "La Chance," Chapter VII), look at animals. Compare the fate of the pampered race-horse with that of the tortured cab-horse: for all your talk of predestination, it is a case of injustice. But to the animals we work to death we are as the powers behind Nature are to us. Should we then expect more justice from Nature than we mete out to animals? Let us not condone our culpability by any appeal to Nature: Nature is not concerned with justice; her one aim, as was shown in _The Life of the Bee_, is to maintain, renew, and multiply life. Nature is not just with regard to us; but she may be just with regard to herself. When we say that Nature is not just, it comes to the same thing as saying that she takes no notice of our little virtues; it is our vanity, not our sense of justice, that is wounded. But because our morality is not proportionate to the immensity of the universe, it does not follow that we ought to give it up; it is proportionate to our stature and to our restricted destiny. Justice is identical with logic. It is in himself, not in Nature, that man must find an approbation of justice.
The second part of the book, which has much in common with _The Life of the Bee_, is devoted to the "reign of matter." Maeterlinck here (Chapter V) takes the opportunity of praising vegetarianism, which he is said to have tried. He says:
"It is not my intention to go deeply into the question of vegetarianism, nor to meet the objections that can be made to it; but it must be recognised that few of these objections withstand a loyal and attentive examination; and it may be asserted that all those who have tried this diet have recovered or fortified their health, and felt their mind grow brighter and purer, as though they had been freed from an immemorial, nauseating prison."