The eyes of love and
pleasure are powerless to recognize beauty in a skeleton, harmony
in naked viscera, life in dark and coagulated blood: consequently
the secrets of the social organism are a sealed letter to the man
whose brain is beclouded by passion and prejudice. Such
sublimities are unattainable except by cold and silent
contemplation. Suffer me, then, before revealing to your eyes
the leaves of the book of life, to prepare your soul by this
sceptical purification which the great teachers of the
people--Socrates, Jesus Christ, St. Paul, St. Remi, Bacon,
Descartes, Galileo, Kant, etc.--have always claimed of their
disciples.
Whoever you may be, clad in the rags of misery or decked in the
sumptuous vestments of luxury, I restore you to that state of
luminous nudity which neither the fumes of wealth nor the poisons
of envious poverty dim. How persuade the rich that the
difference of conditions arises from an error in the accounts;
and how can the poor, in their beggary, conceive that the
proprietor possesses in good faith? To investigate the
sufferings of the laborer is to the idler the most intolerable of
amusements; just as to do justice to the fortunate is to the
miserable the bitterest of draughts.
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