So much for old Europe: it will never revive. Does young Europe offer better prospects? The present world, the world without consecrated authority, seems placed between two impossibilities, the impossibility of the past and the impossibility of the future. And do not go to think, as some imagine, that, if we are badly off at present, good will come out of evil: human nature, when disordered at its source, does not proceed with such correctness. For instance, the excesses of liberty lead to despotism; but the excesses of tyranny lead only to tyranny; the latter, in degrading us, makes us incapable of independence: Tiberius did not cause Rome to go back to the Republic; he left only Caligula to follow him. To avoid explanations, we are satisfied to declare that the times may have hidden in their womb a political constitution which we do not perceive. Did the whole of antiquity, did the finest geniuses of that antiquity conceive a society without slaves? Yet we see it existing. We assert that, in this civilization as yet unborn, the human race will grow greater; I have advanced this theory myself: is it not to be feared, however, that the individual will grow less? We may become industrious bees occupied in common with the manufacture of our honey. In the _material_ world, men unite for purposes of labour; a multitude attains sooner and by different roads the thing after which it strives; masses of individuals will raise pyramids; by dint of study, each on his own side, those individuals will light upon scientific discoveries and explore every corner of physical creation. But are things the same in the _moral_ world? It will be vain for a thousand brains to combine: never will they compose the master-piece that issues from the head of a Homer.