it, and the object of which is beauty.  Beauty is not only in nature and in works of art, it is everywhere, in whatever attracts our love.  The sciences are beautiful, and the harmony of the truths which are discovered in their order and mutual dependence causes us to experience a feeling similar to that produced by the most delightful music.  Virtue is beautiful; it shines in the view of the conscience with the purest brightness, and, as was said by one of the ancients, if it could reveal itself to our eyes in a sensible form, it would excite in our souls feelings of inexpressible love.  Vice is ugly when once stripped of the delusive fascination of the passions; the vicious excesses of the lower nature are ugly and repulsive as soon as the intoxication is over.  Error is ugly too; there are no beautiful errors but those which contain a larger portion of truth than the prosaic verities, which are nothing else than falsehoods put in a specious way.  Beauty therefore is the law of our feelings, as truth is the law of our thought, and good the law of our will.  We will not inquire now what secret relations shall one day bring together in an indissoluble unity of light, the good, the true, and the beautiful, and in a unity of darkness, evil, deformity, and falsehood.  Let it suffice to have pointed out how a threefold aspiration leads man to God, under the guidance of the conscience, the understanding, and the feelings; and that a threefold rebellion estranges him from God, by sinking him into the dark regions of deformity, error, and evil.  Humanity has therefore a law; it has been endowed with liberty, but that a liberty of which the legitimate end is determined.  It advances towards this end, or it swerves from it.  There is a rule above its acts.  The thing as it is may not be the thing as it ought to be; rebellion is not obedience, and good is not evil.

All these consequences are included in the idea of creation.  The struggle between two opposite principles, a struggle which sums up human destiny, is a fact of which each one of us can easily assure himself in his own person.  What will happen when man, sensible of the law of his nature, and conscious of this struggle, proceeds to encounter humanity?  Each one of us carries humanity in his own bosom.  But humanity, the character of man which is common to us, and which makes the spiritual unity of our species, is found to be altered by the influence of places, times, and circumstances.  Our reason is encumbered by prejudices of birth and education, and by such as we have ourselves created in our minds in the exercise of our will.  Our sense of beauty is vitiated and narrowed by local influences and habits.  Our conscience is likewise subjected to influences which impair its free manifestation.  Every one needs to enlarge his horizon.  By seeking occasions of intercourse with our fellows, we shall learn to discriminate true and eternal beauty in the diversity of its manifestations; we shall distinguish