been determined and happiness defined, we declared that this was not
_really_ the good.

Those who are shocked at the assertion that God and Nature are ideal,
and that their contrasted prerogatives depend on that fact, may, of
course, use the same words in a different way, making them synonymous,
and may readily "prove" that God or Nature exists materially and has
absolute being. We need but agree to designate by those terms the sum of
existences, whatever they (or it) may be to their own feeling. Then the
ontological proof asserts its rights unmistakably. Science and religion,
however, are superfluous if what we wish to learn is that there is
Something, and that All-there-is must assuredly be All-there-is.
Ecstasies may doubtless ensue upon considering that Being is and
Non-Being is not, as they are said to ensue upon long enough considering
one's navel; but the Life of Reason is made of more variegated stuff.
Science, when it is not dialectical, describes an ideal order of
existences in space and time, such that all incidental facts, as they
come, may fill it in and lend it body. Religion, when pure, contemplates
some pertinent ideal of intelligence and goodness. Both religion and
science live in imaginative discourse, one being an aspiration and the
other a hypothesis. Both introduce into the mind an ideal society.

The Life of Reason is no fair reproduction of the universe, but the
expression of man alone. A theory of nature is nothing but a mass of
observations, made with a hunter's and an artist's eye. A mortal has no
time for sympathy with his victim or his model; and, beyond a certain
range, he has no capacity for such sympathy. As in order to live he must
devour one-half the world and disregard the other, so in order to think
and practically to know he must deal summarily and selfishly with his
materials; otherwise his intellect would melt again into endless and
irrevocable dreams. The law of gravity, because it so notably unifies
the motions of matter, is something which these motions themselves know
nothing of; it is a description of them in terms of human discourse.
Such discourse can never assure us absolutely that the motions it
forecasts will occur; the sensible proof must ensue spontaneously in its
own good time. In the interval our theory remains pure presumption and
hypothesis. Reliable as it may be in that capacity, it is no replica of
anything on its own level existing beyond. It creates, like all
i