He is already sensible of this wish to surrender at discretion when he considers the humblest, the lowliest of the sciences. What will it be when he attempts to embrace them all? The mind goes astray, becomes dizzy, asks to close its eyes. It must not close them. That would be the basest treachery that man could commit. We have no other thing to do in this life of ours than to seek to know where we are. We find no other reason for our existence; we have no other duty. Not to know is merely vexatious; no longer to seek to know is the supreme, the irremediable misfortune, the unpardonable desertion. 4 Yet, without renouncing, it is not well that we should feed ourselves upon too petty illusions. We should always keep before our eyes certain verities which put us in our place. There is no doubt that we shall never know everything; and so long as we do not know everything we shall be just as though we knew nothing. It is extremely possible, as the Rig-Veda suggests, that God Himself, or the first cause, does not know everything. It is equally possible that the universe has not yet, in any of its parts, become conscious of itself; that it knows not whence it came nor whither it is going, what it was nor what it will be, what it has accomplished nor what it is seeking to accomplish; and, on the other hand, it is probable that, if it has not yet learnt these things, it will never learn them, seeing that, as I have already said, there is no reason why it should be able, in the infinity of time which will come after us, to do what it has not been able to do in the infinity of time which went before. 5 If there be a consciousness of the universe, a God, He knows all that He should know, or He will never know it. And, if He knows it, why has He done what He has done, which cannot lead to anything, seeing that He might already have led us where we ought to go? Why did He not prefer nothingness, or at least that which we call nothingness, the only form of lasting happiness, immovable, incontestable and comprehensible? We could understand, if need were, an immobile, immutable, eternal universe, a finished universe; but we cannot understand a universe in movement, or one, at least, of which all the parts that we see are incessantly in movement, evolving through space and time, a universe hurling itself at a dizzy rate of speed towards an end which it will never attain, since it has not yet attained it. We may say, to console ourselves, that all despair comes only from the limited nature of our purview; but it is fair to add that our purview limits all hope in the same way. MACROCOSM AND MICROCOSM XIV MACROCOSM AND MICROCOSM 1 The biologists tell us that the human embryo repeats, very rapidly during the early months of its development and more slowly during the later months, all the forms of life which preceded man upon this earth.