The Buried Temple | Page 2

our life; which approves or disapproves, rewards
or punishes. Does this come from without? Does an inflexible,
undeceivable moral principle exist, independent of man, in the universe
and in things? Is there, in a word, a justice that might be called mystic?
Or does it issue wholly from man; is it inward even though it act from
without; and is the only justice therefore psychologic? These two terms,
mystic and psychologic justice, comprehend, more or less, all the
different forms of justice, superior to the social, that would appear to
exist to-day.
3
It is scarcely conceivable that any one who has forsaken the easy, but
artificially illumined, paths of positive religion, can still believe in the
existence of a physical justice arising from moral causes, whether its

manifestations assume the form of heredity or disease, of geologic,
atmospheric, or other phenomena. However eager his desire for illusion
or mystery, this is a truth he is bound to recognise from the moment he
begins earnestly and sincerely to study his own personal experience, or
to observe the external ills which, in this world of ours, fall
indiscriminately on good and wicked alike. Neither the earth nor the
sky, neither nature nor matter, neither air nor any force known to man
(save only those that are in him) betrays the slightest regard for justice,
or the remotest connection with our morality, our thoughts or intentions.
Between the external world and our actions there exist only the simple
and essentially non-moral relations of cause and effect. If I am guilty of
a certain excess or imprudence, I incur a certain danger, and have to
pay a corresponding debt to nature. And as this imprudence or excess
will generally have had an immoral cause--or a cause that we call
immoral because we have been compelled to regulate our life according
to the requirements of our health and tranquillity--we cannot refrain
from establishing a connection between this immoral cause and the
danger to which we have been exposed, or the debt we have had to pay;
and we are led once more to believe in the justice of the universe, the
prejudice which, of all those that we cling to, has its root deepest in our
heart. And in our eagerness to restore this confidence we are content
deliberately to ignore the fact that the result would have been exactly
the same had the cause of our excess or imprudence been--to use the
terms of our infantine vocabulary--heroic or innocent. If on an intensely
cold day I throw myself into the water to save a fellow-creature from
drowning, or if, seeking to drown him, I chance to fall in, the
consequences of the chill will be absolutely the same; and nothing on
this earth or beneath the sky--save only myself, or man if he be
able--will enhance my suffering because I have committed a crime, or
relieve my pain because my action was virtuous.
4
Let us consider another form of physical justice: heredity. There again
we find the same indifference to moral causes. And truly it were a
strange justice indeed that would throw upon the son, and even the
remote descendant, the burden of a fault committed by his father or his

ancestor. But human morality would raise no objection: man would not
protest. To him it would seem natural, magnificent, even fascinating. It
would indefinitely prolong his individuality, his consciousness and
existence; and from this point of view would accord with a number of
indisputable facts which prove that we are not wholly self-contained,
but connect, in more than one subtle, mysterious fashion, with all that
surrounds us in life, with all that precedes us, or follows.
And yet, true as this may be in certain cases, it is not true as regards the
justice of physical heredity, which is absolutely indifferent to the moral
causes of the deed whose consequences the descendants have to bear.
There is physical relation between the act of the father, whereby he has
undermined his health, and the consequent suffering of the son; but the
son's suffering will be the same whatever the intentions or motives of
the father, be these heroic or shameful. And, further, the area of what
we call the justice of physical heredity would appear to be very
restricted. A father may have been guilty of a hundred abominable
crimes, he may have been a murderer, a traitor, a persecutor of the
innocent or despoiler of the wretched, without these crimes leaving the
slightest trace upon the organism of his children. It is enough that he
should have been careful to do nothing that might injure his health.
5
So much for the justice of Nature as shown in physical heredity. Moral
heredity would appear to be governed by similar principles; but as