REGENERATION It does not fall within the scope of my rapid sketch to relate date by date the laborious vicissitudes of humanity since its settlement within the planet from the year 1 of the era of Salvation to the year 596, in which I write these lines in chalk on slabs of schist. I should only like to bring out for my contemporaries, who might very well fail to notice them (for we barely observe what we have always before our eyes), the distinctive and original features of this modern civilisation of which we are so justly proud. Now that after many abortive trials and agonizing convulsions it has succeeded in taking its final shape, we can clearly establish its essential characteristics. It consists in the complete elimination of living nature, whether animal or vegetable, man only excepted. That has produced, so to say, a purification of society. Secluded thus from every influence of the natural milieu into which it was hitherto plunged and confined, the social milieu was for the first time able to reveal and display its true virtues, and the real social bond appeared in all its vigour and purity. It might be said that destiny had desired to make in our case an extended sociological experiment for its own edification by placing us in such extraordinarily unique conditions.[1] The problem, in a way, was to learn, what would social man become if committed to his own keeping, yet left to himself--furnished with all the intellectual acquisitions accumulated through a remote past by human geniuses, but deprived of the assistance of all other living beings, nay, even of those beings half endowed with life, that we call rivers and seas and stars, and thrown back on the conquered, yet passive forces of chemical, inorganic and lifeless Nature, which is separated from man by too deep a chasm to exercise on him any action from the social point of view. The problem was to learn what this humanity would do when restricted to man, and obliged to extract from its own resources, if not its food supplies, yet at least all its pleasures, all its occupations, all its creative inspirations. The answer has been given, and we have realised at the same time what an unsuspected drag the terrestrial fauna and flora had hitherto been on the progress of humanity. [1] In appearance only: we must not forget that in accordance with all probability many extinct stars must have served as the scene of this normal and necessary phase of social life.