I'm not saying that the world will be reduced to expedient means and ridiculous disorder of the South American republics, - that we could maybe even … - Charles Baudelaire

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I'm not saying that the world will be reduced to expedient means and ridiculous disorder of the South American republics, - that we could maybe even return to savagery, and walk through the overgrown ruins of our civilization searching for food with a gun in our hand. No; - because such a destiny and such adventures would still presuppose a vital energy, an echo of primeval ages. As the new example and the new victims of inexorable moral laws, we shall perish by what we thought was our life-giver. Engineering will make us so Americanized, progress will create such great atrophy of everything spiritual in us, that the bloody, sacrilegious or unnatural dreams of the utopians could never compare with its positive results.