Man is un-get-at-able; the slightest of his habitual sentiments has multiple and contradictory roots in a sensibility variable and always excessive. He is the least poised and the least reasonable of all animals, although the only one who has been able to construct for himself an idea of reason; he is an animal lunatic, that is to say one who flows out on all sides, who unravels everything in theory, and tangles up everything in fact, who desires and wills so many things, who throws his muscles into so many divers activities that his acts are at once the most sensible and the most absurd, the most conforming and the most opposed to the logical development of life. But he profits even by error, especially by the error fatal to all animals, and that constitutes his originality, as Pascal noted, and as Nietzsche repeats. If the word modesty (_pudeur_) is not exact, when applied to animals, although one finds in their habits the distant origin of this complex and refined sentiment, the word cruelty, is not so either, when applied to their natural acts of defence or nutrition. Human cruelty is often an aberration; the cruelty of beasts is a necessity, a normal fact, often the very condition of their existence. An anarchist philosopher, ardent and naive disciple of Jean-Jacques believed that he traced an universal altruism in nature; he has redone with other words and another spirit, and a few new examples, the infantile works of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and has abused, under pretext of inclining mankind to kindness, the right which one has to promenade about nature without seeing and without understanding her. Nature is neither good, nor evil, nor altruist, nor egoist; she is an ensemble of forces whereof none cedes save under superior pressure. Her conscience is that of a balance; being of a perfect indifference, it is of an absolute equity. But the sensibility of a balance is of a single order, single dimension; the sensibility of nature is infinite, to all actions and reactions. Whether the strong devour the weak, or the weak the strong, there is no compensation save in our human illusion; in reality one life is enlarged at the expense of another life, in one case as in the other, the total energy has been neither diminished nor augmented. There is neither strong, nor weak, there is a level which tends to remain constant. Our sentimentalism makes us see dramas where nothing occurs more disturbing than the general facts of nutrition. One may however look at these facts a little more closely, and then the parity of animal organism and the human organism will lead us to qualify as cruel, certain acts which would deserve this title if committed by man. One must say cruelty in order to understand it oneself; it is also necessary to remember that this cruelty is unconscious, that it is not felt by the devouring animal, that no element of ill-will enters into its act, and that man himself, the judge, in no way deprives himself of