He feels that he loses the most sublime part of himself if he attach himself only to the things of earth. He feels, also, that in a world altogether material, the despising of matter could not be a perfection. We are condemned to live with a body, because all is substance around us. If man attenuate himself by discipline and fasting, still a skeleton of him must remain; and in this labour against a part of himself, it is not an angel which he developes, it is the harmony of a world which he falsifies or destroys. And again, if the one or the other of these theories procured the happiness which they appear to promise; but they produce nothing but degradation and death; and this truth, already sufficiently striking in the annals of convents, becomes a luminous truth in the annals of nations,-man can only be enslaved by being made incomplete. The most opposite despotisms, the religious and the philosophical despotism, have no other origin than this-they divide the work of God in order to debase it, and they debase it in order to rule over it. Observe what takes place in India and in China, the ancient cradles of these two kinds of despotism. In India the brahmins devote to contempt the material man, his intelligence, his science, and even his reason; stifling the lights which would guide him, exalting the superstitions which degrade him, leaving only allpowerful in the soul the sentiment of infinity, and by the light of this devouring flame precipitating an entire people of martyrs into the sacred waters of the Ganges, or beneath the bloody wheels of the car of Jaggernaut. In China, on the other hand, it is the faculties of the soul which they extinguish, and those of the animal which are favoured. There, no sentiment of infinity exists; the soul is walled. in like the nation. All the sciences are without progress, all the arts without movement, all the operations of the mind without ideality. Three thousand years ago, the thoughts of the Chinese came to a stop, and an immense people became as if automatized beneath the influence of its terrestrial doctrines. Given up to pleasure, they remain beneath the yoke of their tyrants, who surround them with keepers, enclose them within walls, watch over their safety, provide for their wants, and without caring for their souls, encourage even the depravation of their manners. Nothing is more admirable than the regulations of the Chinese police, when the object is the cleanliness of the towns, the perfection of agriculture, the abundance of the markets, or the development of industry. Thus the mechanical part of the sciences and the arts is carried even to a prodigy of perfection. But by the side of this material order, the most hideous vices are publicly practised. There, slavery is in honour; women are a merchandize; fathers sell their children, and infanticide, consecrated by custom, is abominably protected by the magistrates. In order to render this nation moral, to tear it from its depravations, what is required? To awaken its soul, which has slumbered for thirty centuries. Give to China the sentiment of infinity which consumes the Indian; to the Indian, the industrious intelligence which materialises the Chinese; you will render man more complete. You will resuscitate these nations to reason and truth; you will restore them to the human race. CHAPTER XXVI. WHAT CONSTITUTES INTELLECT SEPARATED FROM THE SOUL. "Ils sentent leur néant sans le connaître." PASCAL. THUS, human intelligence extends to all things which are on the earth; the soul only appears there by the sentiment of the beautiful, the good, the true, and the infinite. It is intellect which calculates the shape of a sail, and the form of a ship; which divides even the sun's rays and the invisible air into different elements: it creates the chemist, the naturalist, the geometrician, the astronomer; it does more, it communicates to brute matter those sublime sciences which measure time and space; it causes them to emanate from some ingenious wheel-work, just as nature causes them to emanate from thought. Pascal constructed a machine which executed the most complicated rules of arithmetic. Babbage increased the power of this machine; he made of it a geometrician, an astronomer; he submitted sums to its calculation, and the astonished world now sees produced from a mechanical instrument the same learned formulæ which occupy the intellectual sphere of the Aragos and of the Poissons. The operation of intellect, when continual and without the presence of God, dries up and exhausts the soul. Because intellect controls the elements, fabricates our arms, fertilizes our lands, embellishes our cities, causes our vessels to skim the ocean; because it attaches steam to our carriages, hydrogen gas to our balloons; because it lodges, clothes, feeds, and enriches us, we have supposed that it was everything; yes, if man merely belonged to earth, it would suffice him to possess, to develope all the germs of earthly power and pleasure which are in him. Master of the elements, passing from one pleasure to another, he might at least satiate himself; but suppose him to know all; flatter his passions, satisfy his desires, give him a world he will still lament, and like a child will complain of the limits of his empire. : All may become obliterated, or deceive us in thought: sensation has its deceptions, memory its forgetfulness, intellect its illusions and its prejudices; and yet this is the power with which we try to create and to comprehend everything. Like the wonderful pillar which guided the Israelites in the desert, so long as it advances it presents its brightness to us, but as soon as it stops we see only its dark side. : The soul, on the contrary,-I mean the complete soul, always appears in the light all with which it inspires us is immortal, and partakes of its nature. Thus the sentiment of the beautiful presents to us models of all things so perfect, that intellect which sees them, and which seeks to imitate them, despairs of so doing, and feels its inability to equal them. Thus, in its generous transports, the moral sense exacts those magnanimous sacrifices which stir up the vulgar, and for which great souls deserve the gratitude of the human race. It is the same with reason, before which all errors disappear, and also with the sentiment of infinity, the light of which loses itself in heaven. Whilst intellect wanders amidst the illusions of this material life, the soul sets it right by the contemplations of another life; it manifests itself in the wonders of the invisible, by the A PRENORIN TRES Timelesna work I easier suffery USUAL. * alal is mal Wanever mer be the chususu wa vint ria and the meferens the NL wman is erran de re of every mà must wan ji, vind is desire is wel the frente a sou Tus a te rason why the sin is Ers, s wy, it is gest acm, bermonses witÈ DIY aer now is perfections. The consequence is that defed verre & every and alone survive. Chenal consciousness, stronger the £ the bad passions with a ritiated taste engenders, marks with a fatal stroke in human works that which is to fire, and that which is to be forgotten. The grand never dies; the indifferent (mediore) never lives; an is immense selection, this work of every day, per 1 by the hand of time beneath the influence of gre |