But one fatherland existed on the planet, which, like a chorus heard above the chords of some vast harmony, marched onward to its high destiny, shining in the splendor of intellectual supremacy.
The internal heat of the globe, the light and warmth of the Sun, terrestrial magnetism, atmospheric electricity, interplanetary attraction, the psychic forces of the human soul, the unknown forces which preside over destinies—all these science had conquered and controlled for the benefit of mankind. The only limits to its conquests were the limitations of the human faculties themselves, which, indeed, are feeble, especially when we compare them with those of certain extraterrestrial beings.
All the results of this vast progress, so slowly and gradually acquired by the toil of centuries, must, in obedience to a law, mysterious and inconceivable for the petty race of man, reach at last their apogee, when further advance becomes impossible. The geometric curve which represents this progress of the race, falls as it rises: starting from zero, from the primitive nebulous cosmos, ascending through the ages of planetary and human history to its lofty summit, to descend thereafter into a night that knows no morrow.
Yes! all this progress, all this knowledge, all this happiness and glory, must one day be swallowed up in oblivion, and the voice of history itself be forever silenced. Life had a beginning: it must have an end. The sun of human hopes had risen, had ascended victoriously to its meridian, it was now to set and to disappear in endless night. To what end then all this glory, all this struggling, all these conquests, all these vanities, if light and life must come to an end?
Martyrs and apostles, in every cause, have poured out blood upon the Earth, destined also in its turn to perish.
Everything is doomed to decay, and death must remain the final sovereign of the world. Have you ever thought, in viewing a village cemetery, how small it is, to contain the generations buried there from time immemorable? Man existed before the last glacial epoch, which dates back 200,000 years; and the age of man extends over a period of more than 250,000 years. Written history dates from yesterday. Cut and polished flints have been found at Paris, proving the presence of man on the banks of the Seine long before the first historic record of the Gauls. The Parisians of the close of the nineteenth century walk upon ground consecrated by more than ten thousand years of ancestry. What remains of all who have swarmed in this forum of the world? What is left of the Romans, the Greeks, and the Asiatics, whose empires lasted for centuries? What remains of the millions who have existed? Not even a handful of ashes.
A human being dies every second, or about 86,000 a day, and an equal number, or to speak more exactly, a little more than 86,000 are born daily. This figure, true for the nineteenth century, applies to a long period, if we increase it proportionately to the time. The population of the globe has increased from epoch to epoch. In the time of Alexander there were perhaps a thousand million living beings on the surface of the Earth. At the end of the nineteenth century fifteen hundred million; in the twenty-second century two thousand million; in the twenty-ninth three thousand million; at its maximum the population of the globe had reached one hundred thousand million. Then it had begun to decrease.
Of the innumerable human bodies which have lived, not one remains. All have been resolved into their elements, which have again formed new individuals.
All that fills the passing day—labor, pleasure, grief and happiness—vanishes with it into oblivion. Time flies, and the past exists no longer; what has been, has disappeared in the gulf of eternity. The visible world is vanishing every instant. Only the invisible is real and enduring.
During the ten million years of history, the human race, surviving generation after generation, as if it were a real thing, had been greatly modified from both a physical and moral point of view. It had always remained master of the world, and no new race had aspired to its sovereignty; for races do not come down from heaven or rise from hell; no Minerva is born full-armed, no Venus awakes full-grown in a shell of pearl on the seashore; everything grows, and the human race, with its long line of ancestry, was from the very beginning the natural result of the vital evolution of the planet. Under the law of progress, it had emerged from the limbo of animalism, and by the continued action of this same law of progress it had become gradually perfected, modified and refined.
But the time had come when the conditions of terrestrial life began to fail; when humanity, instead of advancing, was itself to enter upon its downward path.
The internal heat of the globe, still considerable in the nineteenth century, although it had ceased to have any effect upon surface temperature, which was maintained solely by the Sun, had slowly diminished, and the Earth had, at last, become entirely cold. This had not directly influenced the physical conditions of terrestrial life, which continued to depend upon the atmosphere and solar heat. The cooling of the Earth cannot bring about the end of the world.
Imperceptibly, from century to century, the Earth’s surface had become levelled. The action of the rain, snow, frost and solar heat upon the mountains, the waters of torrents, rivulets and rivers, had slowly carried to the sea the débris of every continental elevation. The bottom of the sea had risen, and in nine million years the mountains had almost entirely disappeared. Meanwhile, the planet had grown old faster than the Sun; the conditions favorable to life had disappeared more rapidly than the solar light and heat.
This conception of the planet’s future conforms to our present knowledge of
