Page:Toleration and other essays.djvu/247

Rh remembers it, has an idea of it, advances towards it as quickly as it can; it knows pleasure and pain. Yet you are not terrified when you are told that the animal has not a spiritual soul; that God has bestowed on it these gifts for a little time; that he who moves the stars moves also the insect. But when it comes to man you change your mind. This poor animal seems to you so worthy of your respect—that is to say, you are so proud—that you venture to place in its frail body something that seems to share the nature of God himself, yet something that seems to you at times diabolical in the perversity of its thoughts; something wise and foolish, good and execrable, heavenly and infernal, invisible, immortal, incomprehensible. And you have familiarised yourself with this idea, as you have grown accustomed to speak of movement, though there is no such being as movement; as you use abstract words, though there are no abstract beings.

There is, nevertheless, a principle of action in man. Yes, there is one everywhere. But can this principle be anything else than a spring, a secret first mover which is developed by the ever-active first principle—a principle that is as powerful as it is secret, as demonstrable as it is invisible, which we have recognised as the essential cause in the whole of nature?