MODERN EVIDENCE
735
such families, such husbands are there! After all that what right
has a man to lose himself in
art,
in knowledge?
I am bearing down harder and harder on all the substantial
principles that bind the will of man to a creed! My God is nega–
tion! In history my heroes are the disrupters of the old-Luther,
Voltaire, the Encyclopaedists, the terrorists, Byron
(Cain),
etc.
Intelligence now stands higher with me than reason, and that is
why I now prefer the blasphemies of Voltaire to the authority of
religion, society, anything or anyone! I know that the Middle Ages
were a great epoch; I understand the sacredness, the poetry, the
grandeur of medieval religiosity; but I am more pleased with the
eighteenth century, the age of religion's decline; in the Middle
Ages heretics, freethinkers and witches were burned at the stake;
in the eighteenth century the guillotine chopped off the heads of
aristocrats, priests and other enemies of God, reason and humanity.
And there will come a time-I ardently believe it-when no one
will be burnt, no one beheaded, when the criminal pleading for
death as his mercy and salvation will not be granted death, for
life will be his punishment as death is now; when there will
be
no
senseless forms and rites, no contracts and conditions binding the
feelings, no duties and obligations, when will yields to love alone
but never to will; when there will be no husbands and wives but
only lovers, and when the mistress comes to her lover to tell him
that she loves another he will answer: "I cannot
be
happy without
you, I will suffer all my life, but go to the man you love."
If
through magnanimity she should wish to stay on with him, he will
not accept her sacrifice but will say to her: "I want blessings, not
sacrifices.''' Woman will not be the slave of society and of men but,
like men, will freely follow her inclinations without losing her good
name-that monstrosity of conventional notions. There will
be
no
rich, no poor, neither kings nor subjects, but only men and brothers,
and, at the word of the apostle Paul, Christ will give back his power
to the Father, and Father-Reason will again hold sway, this time
in a new heaven and over a new world. Don't think that I am
being excessively rational: no, I do not repudiate the past, I do
not repudiate history-I see in them an essential and rational de–
velopment of the idea; I want
the
golden age, not the unconscious
animal bliss of the past but one prepared by society, laws, marriage,
