uth denotes the
quality of the judgments of intelligences. Goodness (I speak of moral
goodness) expresses a certain direction of the free will. There exists
no means of causing to proceed from nature, or from matter, the
attributes of the spiritual being. This is only done by imaginary
transformations, by a course of arrant juggling. The flame does not feel
its own heat, light does not see itself, the planets know nothing of the
laws of Kepler. Materialism is the result of a modesty wholly misplaced
which leads man to forget himself, in order to attribute gratuitously to
nature realities which exist only in spiritual beings connected with
nature by a marvellous harmony. In order therefore to account for the
universe, we must raise ourselves above the atom in motion, and
penetrate into a higher world where truth, beauty, goodness become the
objects of thought. Truth, beauty, goodness conduct the mind to God,
their eternal source. But there is a philosophy which endeavors to stop
midway in the ascent of the Divine ladder, and thinks to satisfy itself
in the contemplation of the true, the beautiful, the good, without
connecting them with their cause. This philosophy considers the true,
the beautiful, the good, as ideas which exist by themselves, without a
supreme Spirit of which they are the manifestation. It has received, in
consequence, the name of idealism.

To conceive of ideas without a mind, ideas having an existence by
themselves, is a thing impossible; such a conception is expressed by
words which give back a hollow sound, because they contain nothing. We
have already stated this thesis; let us now confirm it by an example. A
literary Frenchman, M. Taine, would make us understand in what manner
the universe may be explained without reference to God, and by means of
a pure idea. Listen well, not to understand, but to make sure that you
do not understand: "The universe forms a unique being, indivisible, of
which all the beings are members. At the supreme summit of things, at
the highest point of the luminous and inaccessible ether, pronounces
itself the eternal axiom; and the prolonged resounding of this creative
formula composes, by its inexhaustible undulations, the immensity of the
universe. Every form, every change, every movement, every idea is one of
its acts."[137]

M. Taine is a man of humor, and the burlesque has a place in his
philosophical writings; but in the words which I have just read to you
he seems