You admit
that the divergence of our nature is the preliminary of society,
or, let us rather say, the material of civilization. This is
precisely the fact, but, remember well, the indestructible fact
of which I seek the meaning. Certainly we should be very near an
understanding, if, instead of considering the dissidence and
harmony of the human faculties as two distinct periods, clean-cut
and consecutive in history, you would consent to view them with
me simply as the two faces of our nature, ever adverse, ever in
course of reconciliation, but never entirely reconciled. In a
word, as individualism is the primordial fact of humanity, so
association is its complementary term; but both are in incessant
manifestation, and on earth justice is eternally the condition of
love.
Thus the dogma of the fall is not simply the expression of a
special and transitory state of human reason and morality: it is
the spontaneous confession, in symbolic phrase, of this fact as
astonishing as it is indestructible, the culpability, the
inclination to evil, of our race.
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