“Good.  If you were sure that you would not lose yourself amid temptation, or, if like Tobias, you had an angel to guide you in the stormy voyage you undertake.  Into what derangement of pride has not man fallen, from the fabulous Prometheus, who sought to snatch fire from heaven, to the Philosophers of the eighteenth century, who extinguished fire in the lights of their reason.  Prove to me that what you call human reason has in any manner purified or ennobled the moral sentiment, and I will bow myself before your logicians and rhetoricians.  To what direction soever I turn I see only vain puerilities, useless labor, doubtful hypotheses, presumption and falsehood.  I admit that you may count amid the multitude of books lumbering the shelves of your libraries many innocent and instructive works.  Those books, however, prove your impotence.

“Act as you please, and you will never be able to develop equally the various mental powers.  To expand one it is necessary to repress the others.  By giving your reason the rude aliment of scholastic argument, you neglect your imagination.  By illuminating your mind you overshadow your heart.  You congratulate yourself at the discovery of a problem, the solution of which you have long sought for.  Scientific journals become filled with numerous dissertations about it, academies decree crowns and medals to the author of the precious discovery.  No one remembers, that each of these solutions breaks one of the wonderful chains of charming symbols, of naive ideas which once animated and vivified the people.  That it strips it of poetry, of the emotions of the heart, and the delightful and fairy-like creations of the imagination.

“The ancients were not so learned as we, yet they were wiser.  They did not explain the phenomena of nature, but described with a graceful and imposing imagery.  The rainbow, reduced in our colleges to a mere conformation of matter, was the scarf of Iris; the light-footed hours preceded the car of night, and the rosy-fingered Aurora opened the horizon to permit the car of Jove to pass.  When the thunder rolled, Jupiter spoke to attentive mortals.  When volcanic mountains trembled, the old Titans sought to throw off the mass of rocks which weighed on them as an eternal punishment of crime.  The middle age, yet more naive and poetical, peopled the air, fields, woods, and waters with a crowd of mysterious beings who spoke to the senses and thought, and awakened in the human mind a mild sentiment of faith or healthful fear.

“Now, thanks to your haughty reason, we have banished, like idle fancies, all these creations of our forefathers.  Now we know that the air has no other voice than that of the wind and tempest; that the wood has no animals other than those the structure of whom has been minutely described; that there are no fairies in the green fields, and no invisible spirits watching over the hearth and fireside.  Man, relying on his reason, would be ashamed to suffer