Another Choice

Terror

Born human, we are first and foremost physical creatures.

And as physical creatures, immersed in the immense milieu of physical nature, we are afraid of dying.

We have of death, of its destroying act, a terror called “visceral”.

A physical terror.

It is only, and very gradually, by the civilizing effect of shared values, that we are able to raise ourselves beyond this terror and to distance ourselves from what our physical organism brutally feels.

Little by little, helped by the mental and vital forces which circulate everywhere in the terrestrial atmosphere and have their respective organic instruments in our bodies, we learn to constitute ourselves, no longer merely as creatures ruled by the most elementary instincts, but as distinct and separate personalities capable of functioning vitally and mentally – at once as individuals and as members of the group.

This evolution however in no way frees us from physical death.

But it allows us to seek and to make use of other modes and qualities of satisfaction.

For, deprived of any satisfaction of any kind, our situation would be positively intolerable and unbearable.

And it is by this evolution that we progressively become able to stand straight, in the moral sense of the term, that is, to affirm human dignity.

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