d evil, and to be as gods, knowers
of this knowledge? The vision of God--that is to say, the vision of the
Universe itself, in its soul, in its inmost essence--would not that
appease all our longing? And this vision can fail to satisfy only men of
a gross mind who do not perceive that the greatest joy of man is to be
more man--that is, more God--and that man is more God the more
consciousness he has.

And this intellectual love, which is nothing but the so-called platonic
love, is a means to dominion and possession. There is, in fact, no more
perfect dominion than knowledge; he who knows something, possesses it.
Knowledge unites the knower with the known. "I contemplate thee and in
contemplating thee I make thee mine"--such is the formula. And to know
God, what can that be but to possess Him? He who knows God is thereby
himself God.

In _La Degradation de l'energie_ (iv^e partie, chap. xviii., 2) B.
Brunhes relates a story concerning the great Catholic mathematician
Cauchy, communicated to him by M. Sarrau, who had it from Pere Gratry.
While Cauchy and Pere Gratry were walking in the gardens of the
Luxumbourg, their conversation turned upon the happiness which those in
heaven would have in knowing at last, without any obscurity or
limitation, the truths which they had so long and so laboriously sought
to investigate on earth. In allusion to the study which Cauchy had made
of the mechanistic theory of the reflection of light, Pere Gratry threw
out the suggestion that one on the greatest intellectual joys of the
great geometrician in the future life would be to penetrate into the
secret of light. To which Cauchy replied that it did not appear to him
to be possible to know more about this than he himself already knew,
neither could he conceive how the most perfect intelligence could arrive
at a clearer comprehension of the mystery of reflection than that
manifested in his own explanation of it, seeing that he had furnished a
mechanistic theory of the phenomenon. "His piety," Brunhes adds, "did
not extend to a belief that God Himself could have created anything
different or anything better."

From this narrative two points of interest emerge. The first is the idea
expressed in it as to what contemplation, intellectual love, or beatific
vision, may mean for men of a superior order of intelligence, men whose
ruling passion is knowledge; and the second is the implicit faith shown
in the mechanistic explanation of the world.