beauty, goodness conduct the mind to God, their eternal source.  But there is a philosophy which endeavors to stop midway in the ascent of the Divine ladder, and thinks to satisfy itself in the contemplation of the true, the beautiful, the good, without connecting them with their cause.  This philosophy considers the true, the beautiful, the good, as ideas which exist by themselves, without a supreme Spirit of which they are the manifestation.  It has received, in consequence, the name of idealism.

To conceive of ideas without a mind, ideas having an existence by themselves, is a thing impossible; such a conception is expressed by words which give back a hollow sound, because they contain nothing.  We have already stated this thesis; let us now confirm it by an example.  A literary Frenchman, M. Taine, would make us understand in what manner the universe may be explained without reference to God, and by means of a pure idea.  Listen well, not to understand, but to make sure that you do not understand:  “The universe forms a unique being, indivisible, of which all the beings are members.  At the supreme summit of things, at the highest point of the luminous and inaccessible ether, pronounces itself the eternal axiom; and the prolonged resounding of this creative formula composes, by its inexhaustible undulations, the immensity of the universe.  Every form, every change, every movement, every idea is one of its acts."[137]

M. Taine is a man of humor, and the burlesque has a place in his philosophical writings; but in the words which I have just read to you he seems to have intended seriously to expound the system which replaces God by an idea.  Try now to form a definite conception of this universe composed of the undulations of an axiom.  Do you understand how an axiom undulates, and how the heavens and the earth are only the undulations of an axiom?  Making all allowance for rhetoric and figures, do you understand what can be the acts of an axiom, and how an axiom pronounces itself without being pronounced?  You do not understand it, as neither do I. Such doctrines, then, as we have said, can only be the portion of a small number of thinkers who have lost, by dint of abstraction, the sentiment of reality.  The ideas—­truth, beauty, good—­will only exist for the common order of men, under such a system, in the human mind, where we have cognizance of them; and thenceforward, the ideal, or God, is nothing else than the image of humanity which contemplates itself in a sort of mirage.  Thus it is that the adoration of man by man is disengaged from the high theories of idealism.  Let us proceed to the examination of this worship, which is cried up now-a-days in divers parts of the intellectual globe.