ence of my heart, and discover by what
geometrical process God has regulated the form of the globe, and to what
pallet, to use the painter's phrase, he has ground his colors."

"There you express a pious and respectable sentiment, which, however,
permit me to say, cannot be admitted without some qualification. We must
not forget that the greatest gift with which God has endowed man is
intelligence, and that one of our first duties is to attempt to develop
that intelligence by means of every faculty and all the means of
application with which he has endowed us."

"Good. If you were sure that you would not lose yourself amid temptation,
or, if like Tobias, you had an angel to guide you in the stormy voyage
you undertake. Into what derangement of pride has not man fallen, from
the fabulous Prometheus, who sought to snatch fire from heaven, to the
Philosophers of the eighteenth century, who extinguished fire in the
lights of their reason. Prove to me that what you call human reason has
in any manner purified or ennobled the moral sentiment, and I will bow
myself before your logicians and rhetoricians. To what direction soever I
turn I see only vain puerilities, useless labor, doubtful hypotheses,
presumption and falsehood. I admit that you may count amid the multitude
of books lumbering the shelves of your libraries many innocent and
instructive works. Those books, however, prove your impotence.

"Act as you please, and you will never be able to develop equally the
various mental powers. To expand one it is necessary to repress the
others. By giving your reason the rude aliment of scholastic argument,
you neglect your imagination. By illuminating your mind you overshadow
your heart. You congratulate yourself at the discovery of a problem, the
solution of which you have long sought for. Scientific journals become
filled with numerous dissertations about it, academies decree crowns and
medals to the author of the precious discovery. No one remembers, that
each of these solutions breaks one of the wonderful chains of charming
symbols, of naive ideas which once animated and vivified the people. That
it strips it of poetry, of the emotions of the heart, and the delightful
and fairy-like creations of the imagination.

"The ancients were not so learned as we, yet they were wiser. They did
not explain the phenomena of nature, but described with a graceful and
imposing imagery. The rainbow, reduced in our colleges to a mere
confo