admit its consequences?  Can the finite have a perfect knowledge of the infinite?  If you cannot perceive those relations which, according to your own admission, are infinite, how can you grasp a sense of the far-off end to which they are converging?  Order, the revelation of which is one of your needs, being infinite, can your limited reason apprehend it?  Do not ask why man does not comprehend that which he is able to perceive, for he is equally able to perceive that which he does not comprehend.  If I prove to you that your mind ignores that which lies within its compass, will you grant that it is impossible for it to conceive whatever is beyond it?  This being so, am I not justified in saying to you:  ’One of the two propositions under which God is annihilated before the tribunal of our reason must be true, the other is false.  Inasmuch as creation exists, you feel the necessity of an end, and that end should be good, should it not?  Now, if Matter terminates in man by intelligence, why are you not satisfied to believe that the end of human intelligence is the Light of the higher spheres, where alone an intuition of that God who seems so insoluble a problem is obtained?  The species which are beneath you have no conception of the universe, and you have; why should there not be other species above you more intelligent than your own?  Man ought to be better informed than he is about himself before he spends his strength in measuring God.  Before attacking the stars that light us, and the higher certainties, ought he not to understand the certainties which are actually about him?’

“But no! to the negations of doubt I ought rather to reply by negations.  Therefore I ask you whether there is anything here below so evident that I can put faith in it?  I will show you in a moment that you believe firmly in things which act, and yet are not beings; in things which engender thought, and yet are not spirits; in living abstractions which the understanding cannot grasp in any shape, which are in fact nowhere, but which you perceive everywhere; which have, and can have, on name, but which, nevertheless, you have named; and which, like the God of flesh upon whom you figure to yourself, remain inexplicable, incomprehensible, and absurd.  I shall also ask you why, after admitting the existence of these incomprehensible things, you reserve your doubts for God?

“You believe, for instance, in Number,—­a base on which you have built the edifice of sciences which you call ‘exact.’  Without Number, what would become of mathematics?  Well, what mysterious being endowed with the faculty of living forever could utter, and what language would be compact to word the Number which contains the infinite numbers whose existence is revealed to you by thought?  Ask it of the loftiest human genius; he might ponder it for a thousand years and what would be his answer?  You know neither where Number begins, nor where it pauses, nor where it ends.  Here you call it Time,