“Better to work and to forget and not to probe into this vast mystery of the universe!” Carducci wrote in his Idilio Maremmano, the same Carducci who at the close of his ode Sul Monte Mario tells us how the earth, the mother of the fugitive soul, must roll its burden of glory and sorrow round the sun “until, worn out beneath the equator, mocked by the last flames of dying heat, the exhausted human race is reduced to a single man and woman, who, standing in the midst of dead woods, surrounded by sheer mountains, livid, with glassy eyes watch thee, O sun, set across the immense frozen waste.”

But is it possible for us to give ourselves to any serious and lasting work, forgetting the vast mystery of the universe and abandoning all attempt to understand it?  Is it possible to contemplate the vast All with a serene soul, in the spirit of the Lucretian piety, if we are conscious of the thought that a time must come when this All will no longer be reflected in any human consciousness?

Cain, in Byron’s poem, asks of Lucifer, the prince of the intellectuals, “Are ye happy?” and Lucifer replies, “We are mighty.”  Cain questions again, “Are ye happy?” and then the great Intellectual says to him:  “No; art thou?” And further on, this same Lucifer says to Adah, the sister and wife of Cain:  “Choose betwixt love and knowledge—­since there is no other choice.”  And in the same stupendous poem, when Cain says that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a lying tree, for “we know nothing; at least it promised knowledge at the price of death,” Lucifer answers him:  “It may be death leads to the highest knowledge”—­that is to say, to nothingness.

To this word knowledge which Lord Byron uses in the above quotations, the Spanish ciencia, the French science, the German Wissenschaft, is often opposed the word wisdom, sabiduria, sagesse, Weisheit.

    Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,
    Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest,

says another lord, Tennyson, in his Locksley Hall.  And what is this wisdom which we have to seek chiefly in the poets, leaving knowledge on one side?  It is well enough to say with Matthew Arnold in his Introduction to Wordsworth’s poems, that poetry is reality and philosophy illusion; but reason is always reason and reality is always reality, that which can be proved to exist externally to us, whether we find in it consolation or despair.

I do not know why so many people were scandalized, or pretended to be scandalized, when Brunetiere proclaimed again the bankruptcy of science.  For science as a substitute for religion and reason as a substitute for faith have always fallen to pieces.  Science will be able to satisfy, and in fact does satisfy in an increasing measure, our increasing logical or intellectual needs, our desire to know and understand the truth; but science does not satisfy the needs of our heart and our will, and far from satisfying our hunger for immortality it contradicts it.  Rational truth and life stand in opposition to one another.  And is it possible that there is any other truth than rational truth?