¶13 Let us, however, for a moment place ourselves at the point of view of those who place their ideal in material ‘well-being’, and who, as such, rejoice in all the improvements brought to existence by modern ‘progress’; are they quite sure that they are not being duped?¹ Is it true that men are happier today than in former times, because they have more rapid means of communication or other things of that sort, because they have a busy and more complicated life?² It seems to us that it is just the opposite: disequilibrium cannot be the condition of true happiness; moreover, the more needs a man has, the more he risks lacking something, and consequently being unhappy;³ modern civilisation aims to multiply artificial needs, and, as we have already said above, it will always create more needs than it can satisfy, for, once one has set out on this path, it is very difficult to stop, and there is no reason even to stop at any determined point.⁴ Men could not suffer from being deprived of things that did not exist and which they had never thought of; now, on the contrary, they necessarily suffer if these things are lacking, since they have become accustomed to regarding them as necessary, and, in fact, they have truly become necessary to them.⁵ Thus they strive, by every means, to acquire what can procure for them all material satisfactions, the only ones they are capable of appreciating: it is only a question of ‘earning money’, because this is what allows one to obtain things, and the more one has, the more one wants to have still more, because one constantly discovers new needs; and this passion becomes the sole goal of all life.⁶ Hence the ferocious competition that certain ‘evolutionists’ have raised to the dignity of a scientific law under the name of ‘struggle for life’, the logical consequence of which is that the strongest, in the most narrowly material sense of the word, have the sole right to existence;⁷ hence also the envy and even hatred of which those who possess wealth are the object on the part of those who are deprived of it; how could men to whom ‘egalitarian’ theories have been preached not revolt on observing around them inequality in the form that must be most perceptible to them, because it is of the coarsest order?⁸ If modern civilisation were one day to collapse under the pressure of the disordered appetites it has given rise to in the mass, one would have to be very blind not to see in this the just chastisement of its fundamental vice, or, to speak without any moral phraseology, the ‘recoil’ of its own action in the very domain where it has been exercised.⁹ It is said in the Gospel: ‘For all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.’¹⁰ he who unleashes the brutal forces of matter will perish crushed by those same forces, of which he is no longer master when he has imprudently set them in motion, and which he cannot boast of indefinitely holding back in their fatal course; forces of nature or forces of human masses, or both together, it matters little, it is always the laws of matter that come into play and inexorably break him who believed he could dominate them without rising himself above matter.¹¹ And the Gospel also says: ‘Every house divided against itself shall not stand.’¹² this saying also applies exactly to the modern world, with its material civilisation, which can, by its very nature, only give rise everywhere to struggle and division. The conclusion is too easy to draw, and it is not necessary to appeal to other considerations in order to be able, without fear of error, to predict for this world a tragic end, unless a radical change, amounting to a true reversal, occurs in the near future.¹³