Why should not humanity succeed in changing nature to the extent of making it pacific?
Why should not humanity, miserably puny though it is and will be, succeed, some day, in suppressing, or at least in controlling the struggle for life?
Why indeed should not humanity abolish the law of murder?
We may expect a great deal from chemistry.

Yet I do not guarantee anything.

It is possible that our race will persist in melancholy, delirium, mania, dementia, and stupor until its lamentable end amid ice and darkness.
This world is perhaps irremediably wicked.

At all events, I shall have got plenty of amusement out of it.

It affords those who are in it an interesting spectacle, and I am beginning to think that Chevalier was madder than the rest in that he voluntarily left his seat." Nanteuil took a pen from the desk, and held it out, dipped in ink, to the doctor.
He began to write: "Having been called on several occasions to attend----" He interrupted himself to ask Chevalier's Christian name.
"Aime," replied Nanteuil.
"Aime Chevalier, I have noticed in his system certain disorders of sensibility, vision and motor control, ordinary indications of----" He went to fetch a book from a shelf of his library.
"It's a thousand chances that I shall find something to confirm my diagnosis in the lectures of Professor Ball on mental diseases." He turned over the leaves of the book.
"Just see, my dear Romilly, this is what I find to begin with; in the eighteenth lecture, page 389: 'Many madmen are to be met with among actors.' This remark of Professor Ball's reminds me that the celebrated Cabanis one day asked Dr.Esprit Blanche whether the stage was not a cause of madness." "Really ?" asked Romilly uneasily.
"Not a doubt of it," replied Trublet.