you like, to which all men and each individual man must be sacrificed?
For I sacrifice myself for my neighbours, for my fellow-countrymen, for
my children, and these sacrifice themselves in their turn for theirs,
and theirs again for those that come after them, and so on in a
never-ending series of generations. And who receives the fruit of this
sacrifice?

Those who talk to us about this fantastic sacrifice, this dedication
without an object, are wont to talk to us also about the right to live.
What is this right to live? They tell me I am here to realize I know not
what social end; but I feel that I, like each one of my fellows, am here
to realize myself, to live.

Yes, yes, I see it all!--an enormous social activity, a mighty
civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of
morality, and afterwards, when we have filled the world with industrial
marvels, with great factories, with roads, museums, and libraries, we
shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist--for
whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?

"Why!" the reader will exclaim again, "we are coming back to what the
Catechism says: '_Q_. For whom did God create the world? _A_. For man.'"
Well, why not?--so ought the man who is a man to reply. The ant, if it
took account of these matters and were a person, would reply "For the
ant," and it would reply rightly. The world is made for consciousness,
for each consciousness.

A human soul is worth all the universe, someone--I know not whom--has
said and said magnificently. A human soul, mind you! Not a human life.
Not this life. And it happens that the less a man believes in the