“Speech is the endowment of us all,” resumed the mysterious creature, gravely.  “Woe to him who keeps silence, even in a desert, believing that no one hears him; all voices speak and all ears listen here below.  Speech moves the universe.  Monsieur Becker, I desire to say nothing unnecessarily.  I know the difficulties that beset your mind; would you not think it a miracle if I were now to lay bare the past history of your consciousness?  Well, the miracle shall be accomplished.  You have never admitted to yourself the full extent of your doubts.  I alone, immovable in my faith, I can show it to you; I can terrify you with yourself.

“You stand on the darkest side of Doubt.  You do not believe in God, —­although you know it not,—­and all things here below are secondary to him who rejects the first principle of things.  Let us leave aside the fruitless discussions of false philosophy.  The spiritualist generations made as many and as vain efforts to deny Matter as the materialist generations have made to deny Spirit.  Why such discussions?  Does not man himself offer irrefragable proof of both systems?  Do we not find in him material things and spiritual things?  None but a madman can refuse to see in the human body a fragment of Matter; your natural sciences, when they decompose it, find little difference between its elements and those of other animals.  On the other hand, the idea produced in man by the comparison of many objects has never seemed to any one to belong to the domain of Matter.  As to this, I offer no opinion.  I am now concerned with your doubts, not with my certainties.  To you, as to the majority of thinkers, the relations between things, the reality of which is proved to you by your sensations and which you possess the faculty to discover, do not seem Material.  The Natural universe of things and beings ends, in man, with the Spiritual universe of similarities or differences which he perceives among the innumerable forms of Nature,—­relations so multiplied as to seem infinite; for if, up to the present time, no one has been able to enumerate the separate terrestrial creations, who can reckon their correlations?  Is not the fraction which you know, in relation to their totality, what a single number is to infinity?  Here, then, you fall into a perception of the infinite which undoubtedly obliges you to conceive of a purely Spiritual world.

“Thus man himself offers sufficient proof of the two orders,—­Matter and Spirit.  In him culminates a visible finite universe; in him begins a universe invisible and infinite,—­two worlds unknown to each other.  Have the pebbles of the fiord a perception of their combined being? have they a consciousness of the colors they present to the eye of man? do they hear the music of the waves that lap them?  Let us therefore spring over and not attempt to sound the abysmal depths presented to our minds in the union of a Material universe and a Spiritual universe,—­a creation visible,