himself to her by means of the most severe speculations, and with her
soars aloft in search of truth; then he disengages himself from her,
and his imagination creates over and above Nature herself. In this
manner man seems to reflect divine attributes; the marvelous and
miraculous issue from him in such grandiose form that the man of the
past, the wren without the eagle, could not even have conceived it.

Original sin is an allegory of this eternal story, of the man _who
wished to act for himself_, to substitute himself for God, to
emancipate himself from Him, and to create. Whereupon he fell into
impotence, slavery and misery.

The mind that works by itself, independently of truth, works in a
void. Its creative power is a _means_ for working upon _reality_. But
it confuses the means with the end, it is lost.

This kind of _sin_ of the intelligence, so akin to original sin, the
sin of confounding the means with the end, recurs in every form as a
"force of inertia" which pervades the psychical life. Thus man
confounds the means, which is simpler, easier and more comprehensible,
with the end in many of his functions. Thus, for example, when
nutrition is made a pretext for gluttony, and the appetite an end in
itself, the body, instead of renewing itself in health and purity, is
poisoned. Again, when in the reproduction of species the sexual
emotion becomes an end in itself rather than a means for the renewal
of life, degeneration and sterility result. Man is guilty of a like
sin against the intelligence when he employs his creative activity of
thought for its own sake, without basing it upon truth; by so doing he
creates an unreal world, full of error, and destroys the possibility
of creating in reality, like a god, producing external works.

Thus positive science represents to us the "redemption" of thought;
its purification from original sin, a return to the _natural laws_ of
psychical energy. Scientists are like those men of the Bible story
who, after Israel had come out of Egypt, were permitted to explore the
Land of Promise, and who came back with such a huge cluster of grapes
that it took two men to carry it, and the people saw it with
amazement.

So have the scientists of to-day penetrated into the Promised Land of
truth, where lies the secret which enables man to scrutinize Nature;
and they have come out therefrom, bearing marvelous fruits for all men
to see. The secret is a simple one: it consists of an exa