e of numbers exists, but cannot be
proved.

"God, dear pastor, is a Number endowed with motion,--felt, but not seen,
the Believer will tell you. Like the Unit, He begins Number, with which
He has nothing in common. The existence of Number depends on the Unit,
which without being a number engenders Number. God, dear pastor is a
glorious Unit who has nothing in common with His creations but who,
nevertheless, engenders them. Will you not therefore agree with me that
you are just as ignorant of where Number begins and ends as you are of
where created Eternity begins and ends?

"Why, then, if you believe in Number, do you deny God? Is not Creation
interposed between the Infinite of unorganized substances and the
Infinite of the divine spheres, just as the Unit stands between the
Cipher of the fractions you have lately named Decimals, and the Infinite
of Numbers which you call Wholes? Man alone on earth comprehends Number,
that first step of the peristyle which leads to God, and yet his reason
stumbles on it! What! you can neither measure nor grasp the first
abstraction which God delivers to you, and yet you try to subject His
ends to your own tape-line! Suppose that I plunge you into the abyss of
Motion, the force that organizes Number. If I tell you that the Universe
is naught else than Number and Motion, you would see at once that we
speak two different languages. I understand them both; you understand
neither.

"Suppose I add that Motion and Number are engendered by the Word, namely
the supreme Reason of Seers and Prophets who in the olden time heard the
Breath of God beneath which Saul fell to the earth. That Word, you
scoff at it, you men, although you well know that all visible works,
societies, monuments, deeds, passions, proceed from the breath of your
own feeble word, and that without that word you would resemble the
African gorilla, the nearest approach to man, the Negro. You believe
firmly in Number and in Motion, a force and a result both inexplicable,
incomprehensible, to the existence of which I may apply the logical
dilemma which, as we have seen, prevents you from believing in God.
Powerful reasoner that you are, you do not need that I should prove to
you that the Infinite must everywhere be like unto Itself, and that,
necessarily, it is One. God alone is Infinite, for surely there cannot
be two Infinities, two Ones. If, to make use of human terms, anything
demonstrated to you here below seems to you infi