In order to reach the stage that has been described, man must have lost the use of the faculties which in normal times allowed him to pass beyond the bounds of the sensible world, the loss being due to the existence of ‘materialization’ or ‘solidification’, naturally as effective in him as in the rest of the cosmic manifestation of which he is a part, and producing considerable modifications in his ‘psycho-physiological’ constitution. For even if the sensible world is in a very real sense surrounded by barriers that can be said to be thicker than they were in its earlier states, it is nonetheless true that there can never anywhere be an absolute separation between different orders of existence; any such separation would have the effect of cutting off from reality itself the domain thus isolated, so that in any such event the existence of that domain, that of the sensible world in this instance, would instantly vanish. It might however legitimately be asked how so complete and so general an atrophy of certain faculties has actually come about. In order that it might take place, man had first of all to be induced to turn all his attention exclusively to sensible things; the work of deviation had necessarily to begin in this way, that work which could be said to consist in the ‘manufacturing’ of the present world, and it clearly could not ‘succeed’ in its turn except precisely at this phase of the cycle, and by using, in ‘diabolical’ mode, the existing conditions of the environment itself. So much for this matter, which need not be further insisted on for the moment; nevertheless, the solemn silliness of certain declamations dear to scientific (or rather ‘scientistic’) ‘popularizers’ can scarcely be too much admired, when they are pleased to assert on all occasions that modern science ceaselessly pushes back the boundaries of the known world, which is in fact the exact opposite of the truth: never have those boundaries been so close as they are in the conceptions admitted by this profane self-styled science, never have either the world or man been so shrunken, to the point of their being reduced to mere corporeal entities, deprived, by hypothesis, of the smallest possibility of communication with any other order of reality!
There is also yet another aspect of the question, both reciprocal and complementary to the aspect considered hitherto: man is not restricted at any stage to the passive role of a mere spectator, who must confine himself to forming an idea more or less true, or more or less false, of what is happening around him; on the contrary, he is himself one of the factors that intervene actively in the modification of the world he lives in; and it must be added that he is even a particularly important factor, by reason of the characteristically ‘central’ position he occupies in that world. The mention of this human intervention does not imply that the artificial modifications to which industry subjects the terrestrial environment are alone in view, and in any case they are too obvious to be worth spending time on: they are certainly something to be taken into account, but they are not everything, and the matter now particularly to be considered in relation to the point of view of the present discussion is something quite different, and is not willed by man, at least expressly or consciously, though it nonetheless actually covers a much wider field than do any artificial modifications. The truth is that the materialistic conception, once it has been formed and spread abroad in one way or another, can only serve to further reinforce the very ‘solidification’ of the world that in the first place made it possible; and all the consequences directly or indirectly derived from that conception, including the current notion of ‘ordinary life’, tend only toward this same end, for the general reactions of the cosmic environment do actually change according to the attitude adopted by man toward it. It can be said with truth that certain aspects of reality conceal themselves from anyone who looks upon reality from a profane and materialistic point of view, and they become inaccessible to his observation: this is not a more or less ‘picturesque’ manner of speaking, as some people might be tempted to think, but is the simple and direct statement of a fact, just as it is a fact that animals flee spontaneously and instinctively from the presence of anyone who evinces a hostile attitude toward them. That is why there are some things that can never be grasped by men of learning who are materialists or positivists, and this naturally further confirms their belief in the validity of their conceptions by seeming to afford a sort of negative proof of them, whereas it is really neither more nor less than a direct effect of the conceptions themselves. It is of course by no means the case that the things that elude the materialists have in any sense ceased to exist since the time of, or because of, the birth of materialism and positivism, but they do actually ‘cut themselves off from the domain that is within the reach of profane learning, refraining from penetrating into it in any way that could allow their action or even their existence to be suspected, very much as, in another order not unrelated to the order under consideration, the repository of traditional knowledge veils itself and shuts itself in ever more strictly before the invasion of the modern spirit. This is in a sense the ‘counterpart’ of the limitation of the faculties of the human being to those that are by their nature related to the corporeal modality alone: because of that limitation man becomes, as has been explained, incapable of getting out of the sensible world; because of what has just been called its ‘counterpart’ he loses in addition all chance of becoming aware of a manifest intervention of supra-sensible elements in the sensible world itself. So for him that world has become to the greatest possible extent completely ‘closed’, for it has become ever more ‘solid’ as it has become more isolated from every other order of reality, even from those orders that are nearest to it and simply constitute separate modalities of one and the same individual domain. From the inside of such a world it may appear that ‘ordinary life’ has only to roll on henceforward without trouble or unforeseen accidents, just like the movements of a well regulated ‘mechanism’; is not modern man, having ‘mechanized’ the world around him doing his very best to ‘mechanize’ himself, in all the forms of activity that still remain open to his narrowly limited nature?
Nevertheless, the ‘solidification’ of the world, to whatever length it may actually be carried, can never be complete, and there are limits beyond which it cannot go, since, as explained earlier, arrival at its extreme end-point would be incompatible with any real existence, even of the lowest degree; and moreover, the further ‘solidification’ goes the more precarious it becomes, for the lowest reality is also the least stable; the ever-growing rapidity of the changes taking place in the world today provides all too eloquent a testimony to the truth of this. It cannot but be that ‘fissures’ should develop in this imagined ‘closed system’, which has moreover, owing to its ‘mechanical’ character, something ‘artificial’ about it (this word of course being used in a sense much broader than in its usual application to industrial products alone) that is not such as to inspire confidence in its duration; and there are already at this moment numerous signs indicating most clearly that its unstable equilibrium is on the point of being interrupted. So true is this that what has been said about the materialism and mechanism of the modern period could almost in a certain sense be relegated to the past even now; this of course does not mean that their practical consequences may not continue to develop for a certain time to come, nor that their influence on the general mentality will not persist for a more or less considerable period, if only as a consequence of ‘popularization’ in its various forms, including education in schools at all levels, where there are always plenty of ‘survivals’ of that sort hanging on (this point will be expanded shortly); but it is nonetheless true that at the present moment the very notion of ‘matter’, so painfully worked out through so many different theories, seems to be in course of fading away; nevertheless, there is perhaps no reason to be unduly pleased at the occurrence, because, as will become clearer later on, it can only properly be taken to represent yet one more step toward final dissolution.