The critics group themselves about M. Renan.  The praises which they lavished a while ago on a bad book by that author seem at least to allow us to point him out as their chief.  They derive their name from studies in history and archaeology, with which we here have nothing to do.  They are regarded as forming a philosophical and religious school, and it is in that connection that they claim our attention.  Their influence is incontestable, and still, notwithstanding, their doctrinal value is nothing.  They form merely a literary branch of the positivist school engrafted upon the eclecticism of M. Cousin.  We find in their writings the pretension to limit science to the experimental study of nature and to humanity.  We afterwards find there the pretension to understand and to accept all doctrines alike.  Beyond this, nothing.  The critics bestow particular attention on the phenomena of religion, of art, and of philosophy; but this interest is purely historical.  Nothing is more curious than the successive forms of human beliefs; but the period of beliefs is over.  Religious faith no longer subsists except in minds which are behind the age; and philosophy, upheld in a final swoon by Hegel and Hamilton, has just yielded its last breath in the arms of M. Cousin:  so M. Renan informs us.[50] To choose a side between the defenders of the idea of God and its opponents; to choose between Plato and Epicurus, between Origen and Celsus, between Descartes and Hobbes, between Leibnitz and Spinoza, would be to make one’s self the Don Quixote of thought.  An honest man may find amusement in reading the Amadis of Gaul; the Knight of la Manche went mad through putting faith in the adventures of that hero.  A like fate befalls those minds which are simple enough to believe still, in the midst of the nineteenth century, in the brave chimeras of former days.  Let us study history, let us study nature; beyond that we do not know, and we never shall know, anything.  Our fashionable men of letters develop their thesis with so much assurance; they lavish upon believers so many expressions of amiable disdain; they appear so sure of being the interpreters of the mind of the age, that they seem ready to repeat to young people dazzled by their success, the lesson which Gilbert had expressed in these terms: 

     Between ourselves—­you own a God, I fear! 
     Beware lest in your verse the fact appear: 
     Dread the wits’ laughter, friend, and know your betters: 
     Our grandsires might have worn those old-world fetters;
     But in our days!  Come, you must learn respect,—­
     Content your age to follow, not direct.[51]

To believe in God would be vulgar; to deny the existence of God would be a want of taste; the divine world must remain as a subject for poetry.  So our critics speak.  Their direct affirmation is scepticism.  But they follow the destinies of the positivist school; they do not succeed in maintaining their balance between the affirmation and negation of God.  Alfred de Musset has described this position of the soul, and its inevitable issue.  Must I hope in God?  Must I reject all faith and all hope?