tions,
the Spanish _ciencia_, the French _science_, the German _Wissenschaft_,
is often opposed the word _wisdom, sabiduria, sagesse, Weisheit_.

Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,
Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest,

says another lord, Tennyson, in his _Locksley Hall_. And what is this
wisdom which we have to seek chiefly in the poets, leaving knowledge on
one side? It is well enough to say with Matthew Arnold in his
Introduction to Wordsworth's poems, that poetry is reality and
philosophy illusion; but reason is always reason and reality is always
reality, that which can be proved to exist externally to us, whether we
find in it consolation or despair.

I do not know why so many people were scandalized, or pretended to be
scandalized, when Brunetiere proclaimed again the bankruptcy of science.
For science as a substitute for religion and reason as a substitute for
faith have always fallen to pieces. Science will be able to satisfy, and
in fact does satisfy in an increasing measure, our increasing logical or
intellectual needs, our desire to know and understand the truth; but
science does not satisfy the needs of our heart and our will, and far
from satisfying our hunger for immortality it contradicts it. Rational
truth and life stand in opposition to one another. And is it possible
that there is any other truth than rational truth?

It must remain established, therefore, that reason--human reason--within
its limits, not only does not prove rationally that the soul is
immortal or that the human consciousness shall preserve its
indestructibility through the tracts of time to come, but that it proves
rather--within its limits, I repeat--that the individual consciousness
cannot persist after the death of the physical organism upon which it
depends. And these limits, within which I say that human reason proves
this, are the limits of rationality, of what is known by demonstration.
Beyond these limits is the irrational, which, whether it be called the
super-rational or the infra-rational or the contra-rational, is all the
same thing. Beyond these limits is the absurd of Tertullian, the
impossible of the _certum est, quia impossibile est_. And this absurd
can only base itself upon the most absolute uncertainty.

The rational dissolution ends in dissolving reason itself; it ends in
the most absolute scepticism, in the phenomenalism of Hume or in the
doct