Humanity has its martyrs and its apostates: to what, I ask again,
must this division be attributed?
To the antagonism of society, you always say; to the state of
separation, isolation, hostility to his fellows, in which man has
hitherto lived; in a word, to that alienation of his heart which
has led him to mistake enjoyment for love, property for
possession, pain for labor, intoxication for joy; to that warped
conscience, in short, which remorse has not ceased to pursue
under the name of ORIGINAL SIN. When man, reconciled with
himself, shall cease to look upon his neighbor and nature as
hostile powers, then will he love and produce simply by the
spontaneity of his energy; then it will be his passion to give,
as it is today to acquire; and then will he seek in labor and
devotion his only happiness, his supreme delight. Then, love
becoming really and indivisibly the law of man, justice will
thereafter be but an empty name, painful souvenir of a period of
violence and tears.
Certainly I do not overlook the fact of antagonism, or, as it
will please you to call it, of religious alienation, any more
than the necessity of reconciling man with himself; my whole
philosophy is but a perpetuity of reconciliations.
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