utes his glory. It is easy,
without having even a smattering of philosophy, to understand quite well
that science is formed by thought. Now, if we did not possess the
faculty of thinking, it would not be given to us by experience. Thought
does not enter by the eye or the ear. Imagine a living body not
possessed of reason: its eye will reflect objects like a mirror, its
tympanum will vibrate to the undulations of the air; but it will have no
thoughts, and will know nothing.

Is science formed by pure reason? No. No one can say what pure reason
is, for the exercise of our thought is connected indissolubly with
experience. But, without pausing at this consideration, let us ask what
pure reason can do, if deprived of all objects of experience? One thing
only, namely, take cognizance of itself. Now the reason, in taking
cognizance of itself, only creates logic, that is to say, the theory of
the laws of knowledge. Some philosophers, to be sure, have undertaken to
prove that reason, by dint of self-contemplation, might arrive at the
knowledge of all things. They have maintained that all the secrets of
the universe are contained in our thought, and that by just reasoning
one may form the science of astronomy without looking at the stars, and
write the history of the human race without taking the trouble to search
laboriously into the annals of the past. But these attempts to
_construct_ facts, instead of observing them, have succeeded too ill to
merit very serious attention.

Science does not proceed therefore either from pure experience or from
pure reason; whence does it really come? From the encounter of
experience and of reason. Man observes, and he ascertains that facts are
governed according to intelligent design. He creates mathematics, and
discovers that the phenomena of the heavens and the earth are ruled
according to the laws of the calculus. His thought meets in the facts
with traces of a thought similar to his own. If any one of you doubts
this, I once more appeal to the almanac. Science, then, has birth only
from a meeting of experience with reason; how is this meeting effected?
The whole question of the origin of science is here. This encounter is
not necessary; it does not result simply from perseverance in
observation. The encounter of mind and of facts constitutes a discovery.
The thought which has governed nature may remain long veiled from our
mind. All at once perhaps the veil is lifted, and the thought of