CHAPTER 8. A DIG AT THE EVOLUTIONISTS.

To rear a caterpillar-eater on a skewerful of Spiders is a very innocent
thing, unlikely to compromise the security of the State; it is also a
very childish thing, as I hasten to confess, and worthy of the schoolboy
who, in the mysteries of his desk, seeks as best he may some diversion
from the fascinations of his exercise in composition. And I should not
have undertaken these investigations, still less should I have spoken
them, not without some satisfaction, if I had not discerned, in
the results obtained in my refectory, a certain philosophic import,
involving, so it seemed to me, the evolutionary theory.

It is assuredly a majestic enterprise, commensurate with man's immense
ambitions, to seek to pour the universe into the mould of a formula
and submit every reality to the standard of reason. The geometrician
proceeds in this manner: he defines the cone, an ideal conception; then
he intersects it by a plane. The conic section is submitted to algebra,
an obstetrical appliance which brings forth the equation; and behold,
entreated now in one direction, now in another, the womb of the formula
gives birth to the ellipse, the hyperbola, the parabola, their foci,
their radius vectors, their tangents, their normals, their conjugate
axes, their asymptotes and the rest. It is magnificent, so much so that
you are overcome by enthusiasm, even when you are twenty years old, an
age hardly adapted to the austerities of mathematics. It is superb. You
feel as if you were witnessing the creation of a world.

As a matter of fact, you are merely observing the same idea from
different points of view, which are illumined by the successive phases
of the transformed formula. All that algebra unfolds for our benefit was
contained in the definition of the cone, but it was contained as a
germ, under latent forms which the magic of the calculus converts into
explicit forms. The gross value which our mind confided to the equation
it returns to us, without loss or gain, in coins stamped with every sort
of effigy. And here precisely is that which constitutes the inflexible
rigour of the calculus, the luminous certainty before which every
cultivated mind is forced to bow. Algebra is the oracle of the absolute
truth, because it reveals nothing but what the mind had hidden in
it under an amalgam of symbols. We put 2 and 2 into the machine; the
rollers work and show us 4. That is all.

But to this calculus