st history of
your consciousness? Well, the miracle shall be accomplished. You have
never admitted to yourself the full extent of your doubts. I alone,
immovable in my faith, I can show it to you; I can terrify you with
yourself.

"You stand on the darkest side of Doubt. You do not believe in
God,--although you know it not,--and all things here below are secondary
to him who rejects the first principle of things. Let us leave aside the
fruitless discussions of false philosophy. The spiritualist generations
made as many and as vain efforts to deny Matter as the materialist
generations have made to deny Spirit. Why such discussions? Does not man
himself offer irrefragable proof of both systems? Do we not find in him
material things and spiritual things? None but a madman can refuse to
see in the human body a fragment of Matter; your natural sciences, when
they decompose it, find little difference between its elements and those
of other animals. On the other hand, the idea produced in man by the
comparison of many objects has never seemed to any one to belong to the
domain of Matter. As to this, I offer no opinion. I am now concerned
with your doubts, not with my certainties. To you, as to the majority of
thinkers, the relations between things, the reality of which is proved
to you by your sensations and which you possess the faculty to discover,
do not seem Material. The Natural universe of things and beings ends, in
man, with the Spiritual universe of similarities or differences which
he perceives among the innumerable forms of Nature,--relations so
multiplied as to seem infinite; for if, up to the present time, no one
has been able to enumerate the separate terrestrial creations, who
can reckon their correlations? Is not the fraction which you know, in
relation to their totality, what a single number is to infinity? Here,
then, you fall into a perception of the infinite which undoubtedly
obliges you to conceive of a purely Spiritual world.

"Thus man himself offers sufficient proof of the two orders,--Matter
and Spirit. In him culminates a visible finite universe; in him begins a
universe invisible and infinite,--two worlds unknown to each other. Have
the pebbles of the fiord a perception of their combined being? have they
a consciousness of the colors they present to the eye of man? do they
hear the music of the waves that lap them? Let us therefore spring over
and not attempt to sound the abysmal depths presented to