He no longer acknowledges any restraint in his desires. The quantity which vanquishes quality, the liberty which vanquishes authority, the desires which blaze out anew each time they are satisfied—these are the forces and the phenomena which shape and fashion our civilisation. For this reason we can, it is true, accumulate vast hordes of wealth and conquer the earth with iron and fire. But we must resign ourselves to living in a new Tower of Babel, in the midst of a confusion of tongues. The æsthetic, intellectual, and moral confusion of our times is the price nature exacts for the treasures which she is obliged to resign into our power. This book and its successor have been written with the object of throwing light on the obscure but vital bond which links together in a living unity the most diverse phenomena of contemporary life. They have not been written, as some have thought, with the view of comparing the ancient and the modern civilisations, Europe and America, to the detriment of the one or of the other; much less with the view of denouncing the régime of liberty, on the ground that it corrupts the world, and of demanding that it be suppressed. To find fault with the tendency of a civilisation, one must postulate the fact that history has gone wrong. And what criterion, what standard is there which justifies a man in declaring to successive generations that they ought to have held different objects in view, and adopted other means to attain them? No: the author’s only object has been to sound the depths of life, in the hope of tracing that unity from which flow forth and into which flow back again so many apparently diverse phenomena; that unity in which alone thought can find some respite from its weary search after the secret of its own being and of that of things in general. Without a doubt each one of us attains only provisional success in his search for this unity; but is not every work of man only provisional, and what are we but beings destined to live only for an instant? Therefore, I have endeavoured in this book to reveal, by way of an analytical and rational exposition, set out in the simplest and plainest terms, the vital bond of this unity. But, inasmuch as a unity is a synthesis, and analysis necessarily modifies and disfigures while trying to explain, I have availed myself in my other work of what is perhaps the most effective method of representing the phenomena of life in their synthesis: I mean, art. For this reason I have written a dialogue, in which I have made my characters begin by wandering haphazard over a wide field and jumping, apparently at random, from one to another of a series of widely different topics. But at the end the various topics are gathered into a united whole, showing the bond which unites them, in the speeches of the most acute and intelligent of the passengers; especially in that speech which coincides with the entry of the ship