Such, Gentlemen, is the real state of the question.  Our savants, when they remain faithful to their method, seek to determine the laws of phenomena, and do not occupy themselves either with the First Cause of nature, or with its general object; they leave the question of God on one side.  Whence come then the negations of naturalists?  They arise in this way:  those savants who succeed in strictly confining themselves within the limits of their science are rare exceptions.  Almost always the man introduces his thoughts into the work of the savant, and the results of his study appear to him religious or irreligious, according to his views of religion.  Newton ends his book with a hymn to the Creator; but it is not the mathematical principles of nature which have revealed to him the Sovereign God.  He perceives the rays of His glory because he believes in Him.  In the same way, the atheist thinks that his researches disprove the existence of God, because God is veiled from his soul.  In both cases it is a doctrine foreign to pure natural science which gives a color to its results.  Self-deception is very common in this matter, and in both directions.  The religious mind does not understand how it is possible to contemplate the universe, and not see inscribed upon it distinctly the name of its Author; and the intrusion of atheism into the sciences of observation is veiled beneath confusions of ideas which it is of importance for us to dissipate.

Modern science, as we have said, stops at laws, without troubling itself with causes.  The laws which determine the series of facts as they offer themselves to observation express the mode of the action of the causes.  There are here two ideas absolutely distinct:  the power which acts, and the manner in which it acts.  If the naturalist thinks that his science is everything, he must conclude that we can know nothing beyond the laws, and that an insuperable ignorance hides from our view the power of which they express the action.  But he rarely succeeds in keeping this position, and deceives his reason by confounding the laws which he discovers with the causes with which his mind is not able to dispense.  He says first of all with Franchi, “the universe is what it is”; this is the general formula of all the truths of experience; then he adds with the same author, “it is because it is.”  This because means nothing, or means that laws are their own causes.  If it is asked, What is the cause of the motion of the stars? they will give for answer the astronomical formulae which express this motion, and will think that they have explained the phenomena by stating in what way they present themselves to observation.  This is a curious example of that confusion of ideas which opens the door to atheism.