840 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



make it stand upon its feet, made hirn an incomparable historian. 

 And it may be said that be bas enlarged tbe domain of bistory by 

 admitting into it tbe bistory of religions. 



If Renan was not a creator in tbe domain of learning, neitber 

 was he an innovator in tbe domain of philosophy. His theologi- 

 cal studies, while they developed in him the qualities of the critic 

 and the savant, tended to disgust him with metaphysical systems. 

 He was too much a historian to see in these systems anything but 

 the dreams of human ignorance amid an assemblage of things it 

 could not understand, the successive mirages thrown up before 

 the mind by the changing spectacle of the world. But if be was 

 not a philosopher, he was a great thinker. He flung broadcast on 

 every subject he touched — on art or politics as on science or re- 

 ligion — the most original and the most pregnant ideas. 



As to bis skepticism and his so-called dilettanteism, they were 

 but tbe consequence of bis sincerity. Afraid, above all things, of 

 deceiving or being deceived, be bad no fear of proposing contra- 

 dictory hypotheses on subjects where he believed certainty to be 

 impossible. People have wondered that tbe same man who wished 

 to have the words "Veritateni dilexi" placed upon his tomb 

 should so often have asked with Pilate, " What is truth ? " But 

 these questions, not unmingled with irony, were themselves a 

 homage to the truth. He perceived that for most men the love of 

 the truth means intolerance, fanaticism, particular opinions re- 

 ceived by tradition or born of the imagination, always destitute 

 of proof and destructive of freedom of thought. To assert opin- 

 ions which he could not prove seemed to him an insufferable im- 

 pertinence, an infringement of intellectual liberty, a want of sin- 

 cerity toward himself and others. And he bore himself this testi- 

 mony : That he had never consciously uttered a lie. He regarded 

 it as stoicism, not skepticism, to go on in the practice of duty 

 without knowing whether it had any objective reality ; to live for 

 the ideal without believing in a personal God or in any future 

 life. 



And now, if we are to ask what is the special characteristic by 

 which Renan must take rank among the great writers and great 

 thinkers of the world, we shall find that his supremacy resides 

 in bis peculiar gift of seeing Nature and history in their in- 

 finite variety. He recreated the universe in bis own brain; he 

 thought it out again, so to speak ; and that in a variety of ver- 

 sions. The spectacle that he thus inwardly conceived and con- 

 templated it was given him to communicate to others by a sort of 

 enchantment of persuasive speech. This power of creative con- 

 templation was the main source of the continual gladness which 

 illumined his life, and of tbe serenity with which he accepted the 

 approach of death. 



