Chapter 200 second floor

Here, the selflessness has disappeared.The devil is vaguely taking shape, each for himself.I, without eyes, growled, searched, touched, and gnawed.The gregarious Ugolins are in this black hole. Those ferocious ghosts that resemble beasts and demons wandering in this black hole have no regard for general progress. They do not understand thought and words, and they are concerned only with personal gratification.They have almost no concept of good and evil, and their hearts are frighteningly empty.They have two mothers, both stepmothers: ignorance and poverty; one guide: need; and only form of satisfaction: eating and drinking.They munched roughly, that is to say, ferociously... not like tyrants, but like tigers.These ghosts go from suffering to crime, the inevitable inheritance, the dizzying succession, the logic of the black area.What crawls in this third subterranean layer of society is no longer the stifled demand for absolute truth, but the protest of the flesh.Here, man becomes a poisonous dragon.Hunger and thirst are the beginning and the end is becoming Satan.From this cellar came Rathner.

We have just seen a corner of the Upper Tunnel, the Great Tunnel of Politics, Revolution, and Philosophy, in Book IV.There we point out that everything is noble, pure, honorable, and honest.There, of course, one may go astray, and on the wrong track, but there error is admirable because it involves sacrifice.The work there, in the big picture, has a name: progress. Now is the time to look at some other depths, some deeply ugly ones. Underneath society, let us emphasize this, until the day when ignorance is purged, there will always be great caverns of evil. This cave is below all caves, and it is also the enemy of all caves.That is universal hate.This cave knows no philosophy, its sharp knife has never sharpened a pen.Its blackness has nothing to do with the remarkable blackness of the inkblot.Those black fingers curled up in this noxious hole never turned a page of a book, never opened a newspaper.To Katouche, Babeuf is an exploiter, to Schindhans, Marat is a nobleman.The purpose of this cavern is to overthrow everything.

everything.Including those upper tunnels it spurned.In its most hideous creeps, it is not only trying to tear down the present social order, it is trying to break down philosophy, science, law, human thought, civilization, revolution, Crash progress.Its name, simply put, is Stealing, Fornication, Murder, and Assassination.It represents darkness, and what it wants is darkness.The roof of this cavern is made of ignorance. Those cellars above it all have one wish, to destroy it.This is the aim to which philosophy and progress, simultaneously employing all their human and material resources, are striving with all their might, through the improvement of reality and the yearning for absolute truth.Destroy this cavern of ignorance, and that den of crime is also destroyed.

Let us summarize in a few words part of what we have just said, that the only danger to society is darkness. Human beings are of the same kind.All men are the same lump of clay.There is no difference in predestined destiny, at least in the Nether.In the past, the same shadow; now, the same body; in the future, the same pinch of ashes.But add ignorance to the batter of being human, and it turns black.This irreparable blackness penetrates into people's hearts and becomes evil.