they go? And what distance have they
already gone? What, in short, are the intellectual characteristics of
our time? We must endeavour to distinguish the deeper tendencies, those
which herald and prepare and near future.

One of the essential and frequently cited features of the generation
in which Taine and Renan were the most prominent leaders was the
passionate, enthusiastic, somewhat exclusive and intolerant cult of
positive science. This science, in its days of pride, was considered
unique, displayed on a plane by itself, always uniformly competent,
capable of gripping any object whatever with the same strength, and of
inserting it in the thread of one and the same unbroken connection.
The dream of that time, despite all verbal palliations, was a universal
science of mathematics: mathematics, of course, with their bare and
brutal rigour softened and shaded off, where feasible; if possible,
supple and sensitive; in ideal, delicate, buoyant, and judicious; but
mathematics governed from end to end by an equal necessity. Conceived as
the sole mistress of truth, this science was expected in days to come
to fulfil all the needs of man, and unreservedly to take the place of
ancient spiritual discipline. Genuine philosophy had had its day:
all metaphysics seemed deception and fantasy, a simple play of empty
formulae or puerile dreams, a mythical procession of abstraction and
phantom; religion itself paled before science, as poetry of the grey
morning before the splendour of the rising sun.

However, after all this pride came the turn of humility, and humility of
the very lowest. This deified science, borne down in its hour of triumph
by too heavy a weight, had necessarily been recognised as powerless to
go beyond the order of relations, and radically incapable of telling
us the origin, end, and basis of things. It analysed the conditions of
phenomena, but was ill-suited ever to grasp any real cause, or any deep
essence. Further, it became the Unknowable, before which the human mind
could only halt in despair. And in this way destitution arose out of
ambition itself, since thought, after trusting too exclusively to its
geometrical strength, was compelled at the end of its effort to confess
itself beaten when confronted with the only questions to which no man
may ever be indifferent.

This double attitude is no longer that of the contemporary generation.
The prestige of illusion has vanished. In the religion of science we