LITTER DUMAS, PASTEUR, AND TAINE. 6 77 



ascertain whether he was born on a calcareous or a granite soil, learn 

 whether his ancestors and himself have drunk wine, cider, or beer, or 

 eaten meat, fish, or vegetables nay, you must penetrate the meanest 

 details of his existence, and descend from the heights of criticism and 

 from a scientific system to the gratification of a paltry curiosity." 



This sarcasm was not ill-directed to its mark, but M. Dumas went 

 on : " The physician and the naturalist may teach what is physical in 

 man, that his nerves are sometimes instruments of pain, and that his 

 body is but dust. That is their business. But philosophy and elo- 

 quence should cast their mantle of purple and gold over the baser 

 aspects of life. It is their business to strengthen the heart of man 

 and raise his soul to immortality. That is what you tell us has been 

 done by Mr. Tennyson, the greatest poet of his time, if not of his 

 country, whom some of his admirers place above Byron and not far 

 below Shakespeare." 



And the old man eloquent went on : " The philosophy of nature 

 played a considerable part in the events of the last century. The 

 schools of Greece thought they had penetrated to the elements of all 

 things ; the Roman poets, in turn, regarded themselves as the inter- 

 preters of creation ; Diderot and his rivals boasted that they possessed 

 the universe. But the discoveries of science in our own age prove 

 that none but the ignorant can suppose that the whole book of wisdom 

 has been revealed to us. The source of life and its essence are un- 

 known to us. We have not seized that mysterious link which connects 

 the body with the mind, and constitutes the unity of individual man. 

 We have no right to treat man as an abstract being, to disdain his 

 history, or to attribute to science an influence over the direction of the 

 moral axis of the world, which its progress does not justify. We 

 have, it is true, conquered the earth, measured the track of the planets, 

 calculated the mechanism of the heavens, analyzed the stars, resolved 

 the nebula?, and followed the eccentric course of comets ; but beyond 

 those stars, whose light is centuries in reaching us, there are other 

 orbs whose rays are lost in space ; and farther, farther still, beyond 

 all limits and all computation, are suns which we shall not behold, and 

 innumerable worlds hidden from our eyes. After two thousand years 

 of effort, if we reach the utmost extremity of the universe, which is 

 but a point in the immensity of space, we are arrested on the thresh- 

 old of the Infinite, of which we know nothing. ' The nature of man, 

 his present and future existence, are mysteries impenetrable to the 

 greatest genius, as well as to the rest of mankind,' said D'Alembert, 

 at the height of his fame. ' What we know is but little,' said La- 

 place on his death-bed. Those were the last words of the illustrious 

 rival of Isewton. Let them also be mine." 



The lofty idealism of these speakers repudiated alike the Comtism 

 of M. Littre, the materialism of M. Taine, and the destructive criticism 

 of M. Renan. It is no less opposed to that miscalled philosophy of 



