fail to
drench our streets in gore. For the questions which are useless and even
harmful have always the knack of rousing the passions, provided they are
insoluble.

These are our religious quarrels. In fact the sum total of the sciences
bequeathed to us by the past has become definitely and inevitably a
religion. Our _savants_ to-day who work deductively on these data from
henceforth changeless and inviolate, exactly recall on a much larger
scale the theologians of the ancient world. This new encyclopaedic
theology, not less fertile than others in schisms and heresies, is the
unique but inexhaustible source of divisions in the bosom of our Church
which is otherwise so compact. It is perhaps the most profound and
fascinating charm of our intellectual leaders.

"All the same, they are dead sciences!" say certain malcontents. Let us
accept the epithet. They are dead, if one likes, but after the fashion
of those languages in which a whole people chanted its hymns although no
one speaks them any longer. This is also the case with certain faces
whose beauty only appears in its fulness when their last sleep has come.
Let none therefore be surprised if our love fastens on these majestic
dogmas, by which we are more and more overshadowed, on these higher
inutilities which are our vocation. Above all, mathematics, as being the
most perfect type of the new sciences, has progressed with giant steps.
Descending to fabulous depths, analysis has allowed the astronomers at
length to attack and to solve problems whose mere statement would have
provoked an incredulous smile in their predecessors. And so they
discover every day, chalk in hand, not with the telescope to the eye, I
know not how many intra-mercurial or extra-neptunian planets, and begin
to distinguish the planets of the nearer stars. There are in this
department, in the comparative anatomy and physiology of numerous solar
systems, the most novel and profound views. Our Leverriers are reckoned
by hundreds. Being all the better acquainted with the sky because they
no longer see it, they resemble Beethoven, who only wrote his finest
symphonies when he had lost his hearing. Our Claude Bernards and
Pasteurs are almost as numerous. Although we are careful as a matter of
fact not to accord to the natural sciences the exaggerated and
fundamentally anti-social importance they formerly usurped during two or
three centuries, we do not completely neglect them. Even the applied
scien