engaged from all exercise of the reflective faculties.

You think you are employed about philosophy when you shut yourself up in
your own individual thoughts. A mistake! The most powerful genius of
modern times failed in this enterprise. Descartes conceived the project
of forgetting all that he had known, and of producing a system of
doctrine which should come forth from his brain as Minerva sprang all
armed from the brain of Jupiter. Now-a-days a mere schoolboy, if he has
been well taught, ought to be able to prove that Descartes was mistaken,
because the current of tradition entered his mind together with the
words of the language. It is not so easy as we may suppose to break the
ties by which God has bound us all together in mutual dependence. Man
speaks, he only thinks by means of speech, and speech is a river which
takes its rise in the very beginnings of history, and brings down to the
existing generation the tribute of all the waters of the past. No one
can isolate himself from the current, and place himself outside the
intellectual society of his fellows. We have more light than we had on
this subject, and the attempt of Descartes, which was of old the happy
audacity of genius, could in our days be nothing but the foolish
presumption of ignorance.

As for the purely passive reception of tradition, this may be conceived
when only unimportant legends are in question, or doctrines which occupy
the mind only as matters of curiosity; but when life is at stake, and
the interests of our whole existence, the mind labors upon the ideas
which it receives. Religion is only living in any soul when all the
faculties have come into exercise; and faith, by its own proper nature,
seeks to understand. The distinction between traditional data therefore
and pure philosophy is far from being so real or so extensive as it is
commonly thought to be. But for lack of time, I might undertake to prove
to you more at length that the labor of individual thought upon the
common tradition is the absolute and permanent law of development for
the human mind.

We have to steer between two extreme and contrary pretensions. What
shall we say to those theologians who deny all power to man's reason,
and consider the understanding as a receiver which does nothing but
receive the liquid which is poured into it? to those theologians who,
not content with despising Aristotle and Plato, think themselves obliged
to vilify Socrates and calumniate Regulu