Whence does science proceed?  Does it result from mere experience?  No.  What does experience teach us when quite alone?  Nothing.  Experience, separated from all element of reason, only reveals to us our own sensations.  This, a Scotch philosopher, Hume, has proved to demonstration,—­a demonstration which constitutes his glory.  It is easy, without having even a smattering of philosophy, to understand quite well that science is formed by thought.  Now, if we did not possess the faculty of thinking, it would not be given to us by experience.  Thought does not enter by the eye or the ear.  Imagine a living body not possessed of reason:  its eye will reflect objects like a mirror, its tympanum will vibrate to the undulations of the air; but it will have no thoughts, and will know nothing.

Is science formed by pure reason?  No.  No one can say what pure reason is, for the exercise of our thought is connected indissolubly with experience.  But, without pausing at this consideration, let us ask what pure reason can do, if deprived of all objects of experience?  One thing only, namely, take cognizance of itself.  Now the reason, in taking cognizance of itself, only creates logic, that is to say, the theory of the laws of knowledge.  Some philosophers, to be sure, have undertaken to prove that reason, by dint of self-contemplation, might arrive at the knowledge of all things.  They have maintained that all the secrets of the universe are contained in our thought, and that by just reasoning one may form the science of astronomy without looking at the stars, and write the history of the human race without taking the trouble to search laboriously into the annals of the past.  But these attempts to construct facts, instead of observing them, have succeeded too ill to merit very serious attention.

Science does not proceed therefore either from pure experience or from pure reason; whence does it really come?  From the encounter of experience and of reason.  Man observes, and he ascertains that facts are governed according to intelligent design.  He creates mathematics, and discovers that the phenomena of the heavens and the earth are ruled according to the laws of the calculus.  His thought meets in the facts with traces of a thought similar to his own.  If any one of you doubts this, I once more appeal to the almanac.  Science, then, has birth only from a meeting of experience with reason; how is this meeting effected?  The whole question of the origin of science is here.  This encounter is not necessary; it does not result simply from perseverance in observation.  The encounter of mind and of facts constitutes a discovery.  The thought which has governed nature may remain long veiled from our mind.  All at once perhaps the veil is lifted, and the thought of man meets and recognizes itself in the phenomena which it is contemplating.  We encounter in this case the exercise of a special faculty, which is neither the faculty of observing nor the