Page:Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence (1915).djvu/278

264 moment when so many futile intellects were announcing the renascence of idealism and foreseeing progressive tendencies in a Church that was at length reconciled with the modern world. But all his life Renan had been too favoured by fortune not to be optimistic; he believed, therefore, that the evil of the future would consist simply in the necessity of passing through a bad period, and he added: "No matter, the resources of humanity are infinite. The eternal designs will be fulfilled, the springs of life ever forcing their way to the surface will never be dried up."

He had finished, several months before, the fifth volume of his History of the People of Israel, and this volume, having been printed from the unaltered manuscript, contains a more imperfect expression of his ideas on this subject; (it is known that he corrected his proofs very carefully). We find in this the most gloomy presentiments; the author even questions whether humanity will ever attain its real end. "If this globe should happen not to fulfil its purpose, there will be others to carry on to its final end the programme of all life—Light, Reason, and Truth." The times to come frightened him. "The immediate future is dark. The triumph of Light is not assured." He dreaded Socialism, and there is no doubt that by Socialism he meant the humanitarian idiocy which he saw emerging in the stupid middle-class world; it was, in this way, that he came to think that Catholicism might perhaps be the accomplice of Socialism.

On the same page he speaks of the divisions which may exist in a society, and this is of considerable importance. "Judea and the Greco-Roman world were like two universes revolving one beside the other under opposing influences. … The history of humanity by no means synchronises in its various parts. Tremble! At this