It is by juggling with words that people have been able to attach the idea of true progress to the development of the mechanical, chemical or biological sciences. True progress concerns nothing but the soul, it remains independent of the expedients and the practices of science. This latter is able to triumph even when the true progress, the ascent of mankind toward happiness, is interrupted and thwarted in its profoundest tendencies. There are not lacking people to tell us that the war will mark with precision the advent of a new world, that it has bought in the blood and the flame the moral elevation necessary for a fruitful and final peace. We cannot share this optimism of official eloquence. It is not the performance of tasks of murder that opens to men the road to justice and converts them to good customs. Humanity must grow unaccustomed to crime, and it is not the armed intelligence that can accomplish this miracle. The pacifying work of the war will remain in peril if everything that is healthy and generous in humanity does not labor to dethrone this scientific civilization which still abuses society after having reduced it to helplessness. I consider as negligible the objection of the stoics who say that these miseries do not depend upon us and that we ought obstinately to seek our happiness through them, isolate our happiness from the surrounding degradation. No! These miseries do depend upon us. In spite of its disdainful nobility, the stoic resignation has here too much the look of egoism. This moral civilization, when its hour comes, will revive Christianity and propagate it; it will not leave the human race in the abandonment of the desperate misery of today. III The naturalists and the sociologists have contributed to spread this idea that moral progress is, for individuals, a function of the anatomical complex, and for societies of the complex of habits, institutions and industries. It is on this understanding that they have undertaken the classification of species and arranged the various human hierarchies. That is a view entirely external to things, it cannot be verified as regards individual thought, it is a sheer fabrication as regards collectivities: the war is a bloody refutation of it. If we mean by moral progress that which affects the conditions of happiness, nothing permits us to conjecture what advantages have been realized in this direction by the vegetable and animal organisms that have not chosen us as confidents. Habits, as we observe them, cannot be a criterion, even if we admit that we ought to seek for evidence among them; they seem as if designed to baffle all theories.