e
flux and reflux of substances which come and go across your crystals and
your instruments on the impalpable filaments of heat or light conducted
and projected by the affinities of metal or vitrified flint. You obtain
none but dead substances, from which you have driven the unknown force
that holds in check the decomposition of all things here below, and of
which cohesion, attraction, vibration, and polarity are but phenomena.
Life is the thought of substances; bodies are only the means of
fixing life and holding it to its way. If bodies were beings living of
themselves they would be Cause itself, and could not die.

"When a man discovers the results of the general movement, which is
shared by all creations according to their faculty of absorption, you
proclaim him mighty in science, as though genius consisted in explaining
a thing that is! Genius ought to cast its eyes beyond effects. Your men
of science would laugh if you said to them: 'There exist such positive
relations between two human beings, one of whom may be here, and
the other in Java, that they can at the same instant feel the same
sensation, and be conscious of so doing; they can question each other
and reply without mistake'; and yet there are mineral substances which
exhibit sympathies as far off from each other as those of which I speak.
You believe in the power of the electricity which you find in the magnet
and you deny that which emanates from the soul! According to you, the
moon, whose influence upon the tides you think fixed, has none whatever
upon the winds, nor upon navigation, nor upon men; she moves the sea,
but she must not affect the sick folk; she has undeniable relations
with one half of humanity, and nothing at all to do with the other half.
These are your vaunted certainties!

"Let us go a step further. You believe in physics. But your physics
begin, like the Catholic religion, with an _act of faith_. Do they not
pre-suppose some external force distinct from substance to which it
communicates motion? You see its effects, but what is it? where is it?
what is the essence of its nature, its life? has it any limits?--and
yet, you deny God!

"Thus, the majority of your scientific axioms, true to their relation to
man, are false in relation to the Great Whole. Science is One, but you
have divided it. To know the real meaning of the laws of phenomena must
we not know the correlations which exist between phenomena and the law
of the Whole? The