POINCARE AND THE FRENCH ACADEMY 273 



Sciences, you have been called into the majority of the scientific socie- 

 ties of two hemispheres; you have received all the honors that a legiti- 

 mate ambition could crave. Your name, going out beyond the narrow 

 circle where your work can be appreciated, has become illustrious and 

 added to a nation's glory, and this fame you owe only to yourself; it is 

 the gift of no one, you have followed no master, you belong to no 

 school, you are yourself — and that is enough. 



Similarly, when you undertake a criticism of science, you make it a 

 personal matter, and without adopting any tradition, without bowing 

 to any formula, you walk on in your independence and because you 

 choose to. You run indeed, and so fast, with such bounds, that in order 

 to follow you it is necessary to leap ditches and fill in gaps ; but you are 

 built so. Original in mathematics, you remain so in this branch of 

 philosophy; you apply to it, at the same time, a highly-developed in- 

 terest in psychology, a rare aptitude for observing physiological phe- 

 nomena in your own person, and that mathematical habit which organ- 

 izes precision and with refined subtlety binds arguments together with 

 chains that seem impossible to break. Eestrained by nothing which you 

 place confidence in or accept a priori, you build up your doubt against 

 official science and sound its nothingness. So your work is double : in 

 mathematics you erect to scientific truth a temple accessible only to the 

 few initiates; and with your philosophic artillery you hurl into the air 

 the chapels about which throng the crowds of rationalists and free- 

 thinkers who by a common school certificate have acquired the right to 

 believe in nothing which is not proved to them, to celebrate the mys- 

 teries of a pretended religion of science. Ah, sir, what havoc you are 

 making in these demonstrations ! Nothing would survive the rudeness 

 of the blows you are dealing if you did not stop from time to time to 

 banter your victims, or if, seized with a sort of remorse, you did not 

 amuse yourself by gluing together again the members you have broken. 

 The axioms which seemed established by the wisdom of the ages are no 

 longer more than definitions when you have passed; the laws become 

 hypotheses; and at the same time that you prove the essential role of 

 these hypotheses, you show their merely temporary utility — you make 

 it evident that these definitions are convenient but ephemeral. What 

 remains ? Nothing, or little more than nothing, and the most precious 

 idols of primary religion go to join the dead stars in the depopulated 

 heavens. 



Does this mean, sir, that you doubt science more than truth? 

 Neither the one nor the other ; but the latter gives way constantly before 

 the advance of the former, and, as man proceeds one step farther, the 

 space he must cross withdraws before him; beyond the steppe whose 

 extent his eye embraces, others await him, and still others, for he only 

 is assured of reaching the end who stopped with the rudiments — and 

 learned them by heart. . . . 



VOL. lxiv. — 18. 



