"When a man discovers the results of the general movement, which is shared by all creations according to their faculty of absorption, you proclaim him mighty in science, as though genius consisted in explaining a thing that is! Genius ought to cast its eyes beyond effects.Your men of science would laugh if you said to them: 'There exist such positive relations between two human beings, one of whom may be here, and the other in Java, that they can at the same instant feel the same sensation, and be conscious of so doing; they can question each other and reply without mistake'; and yet there are mineral substances which exhibit sympathies as far off from each other as those of which I speak.You believe in the power of the electricity which you find in the magnet and you deny that which emanates from the soul! According to you, the moon, whose influence upon the tides you think fixed, has none whatever upon the winds, nor upon navigation, nor upon men; she moves the sea, but she must not affect the sick folk; she has undeniable relations with one half of humanity, and nothing at all to do with the other half.These are your vaunted certainties!
"Let us go a step further.You believe in physics.But your physics begin, like the Catholic religion, with an ACT OF FAITH.Do they not pre-suppose some external force distinct from substance to which it communicates motion? You see its effects, but what is it? where is it?
what is the essence of its nature, its life? has it any limits?--and yet, you deny God!
"Thus, the majority of your scientific axioms, true to their relation to man, are false in relation to the Great Whole.Science is One, but you have divided it.To know the real meaning of the laws of phenomena must we not know the correlations which exist between phenomena and the law of the Whole? There is, in all things, an appearance which strikes your senses; under that appearance stirs a soul; a body is there and a faculty is there.Where do you teach the study of the relations which bind things to each other? Nowhere.Consequently you have nothing positive.Your strongest certainties rest upon the analysis of material forms whose essence you persistently ignore.
"There is a Higher Knowledge of which, too late, some men obtain a glimpse, though they dare not avow it.Such men comprehend the necessity of considering substances not merely in their mathematical properties but also in their entirety, in their occult relations and affinities.The greatest man among you divined, in his latter days, that all was reciprocally cause and effect; that the visible worlds were co-ordinated among themselves and subject to worlds invisible.He groaned at the recollection of having tried to establish fixed precepts.Counting up his worlds, like grape-seeds scattered through ether, he had explained their coherence by the laws of planetary and molecular attraction.You bowed before that man of science--well! Itell you that he died in despair.By supposing that the centrifugal and centripetal forces, which he had invented to explain to himself the universe, were equal, he stopped the universe; yet he admitted motion in an indeterminate sense; but supposing those forces unequal, then utter confusion of the planetary system ensued.His laws therefore were not absolute; some higher problem existed than the principle on which his false glory rested.The connection of the stars with one another and the centripetal action of their internal motion did not deter him from seeking the parent stalk on which his clusters hung.Alas, poor man! the more he widened space the heavier his burden grew.He told you how there came to be equilibrium among the parts, but whither went the whole? His mind contemplated the vast extent, illimitable to human eyes, filled with those groups of worlds a mere fraction of which is all our telescopes can reach, but whose immensity is revealed by the rapidity of light.This sublime contemplation enabled him to perceive myriads of worlds, planted in space like flowers in a field, which are born like infants, grow like men, die as the aged die, and live by assimilating from their atmosphere the substances suitable for their nourishment,--having a centre and a principal of life, guaranteeing to each other their circuits, absorbed and absorbing like plants, and forming a vast Whole endowed with life and possessing a destiny.
"At that sight your man of science trembled! He knew that life is produced by the union of the thing and its principle, that death or inertia or gravity is produced by a rupture between a thing and the movement which appertains to it.Then it was that he foresaw the crumbling of the worlds and their destruction if God should withdraw the Breath of His Word.He searched the Apocalypse for the traces of that Word.You thought him mad.Understand him better! He was seeking pardon for the work of his genius.
"Wilfrid, you have come here hoping to make me solve equations, or rise upon a rain-cloud, or plunge into the fiord and reappear a swan.