SCIENCE AND CULTURE 37 



tion to which they belonged. Such a preten- 

 sion, today, would be madness: if we were to 

 divide among so many different objects the 

 small amount of intellectual force we possess, 

 we should condemn ourselves to have nothing 

 but vague and useless ideas in regard to every 

 one of them. 



Universality can, in the second place, be 

 understoood in a perfectly logical sense as the 

 possession of the general ideas which are the 

 underlying principles of the different sciences 

 and the different arts. 



But such ideas, taken by themselves — 

 that is to say, separated from the consideration 

 of the details of things — are scarcely more than 

 empty rubrics, useful at best only to furnish 

 subjects for commonplace conversations or 

 for abstract and sterile disputations. 



There is a third way of understanding uni- 

 versality, and that is to look for it, not in the 

 objects of knowledge, or, even, in the con- 

 cepts which interpret their common character- 

 istics, but in the spirit of man as a living 

 nature, the virtualities of which surpass both 

 the concepts of the intelligence, and the objects 



