Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/693

Rh 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 eloquence 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 interpreters 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 unknown 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 threshold 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 Laplace on his death-bed. Those were the last words of the illustrious rival of Newton. Let them also be mine."

The lofty idealism of these speakers repudiated alike the Comtism of M. Littré, the materialism of M. Taine, and the destructive criticism of M. Renan. It is no less opposed to that miscalled philosophy of