None but a madman can refuse to see in the human body a fragment of
Matter; your natural sciences, when they decompose it, find little
difference between its elements and those of other animals. On the
other hand, the idea produced in man by the comparison of many objects
has never seemed to any one to belong to the domain of Matter. As to
this, I offer no opinion. I am now concerned with your doubts, not
with my certainties. To you, as to the majority of thinkers, the
relations between things, the reality of which is proved to you by
your sensations and which you possess the faculty to discover, do not
seem Material. The Natural universe of things and beings ends, in man,
with the Spiritual universe of similarities or differences which he
perceives among the innumerable forms of Nature,--relations so
multiplied as to seem infinite; for if, up to the present time, no one
has been able to enumerate the separate terrestrial creations, who can
reckon their correlations? Is not the fraction which you know, in
relation to their totality, what a single number is to infinity? Here,
then, you fall into a perception of the infinite which undoubtedly
obliges you to conceive of a purely Spiritual world.

"Thus man himself offers sufficient proof of the two orders,--Matter
and Spirit. In him culminates a visible finite universe; in him begins
a universe invisible and infinite,--two worlds unknown to each other.
Have the pebbles of the fiord a perception of their combined being?
have they a consciousness of the colors they present to the eye of
man? do they hear the music of the waves that lap them? Let us
therefore spring over and not attempt to sound the abysmal depths
presented to our minds in the union of a Material universe and a
Spiritual universe,--a creation visible, ponderable, tangible,
terminating in a creation invisible, imponderable, intangible;
completely dissimilar, separated by the void, yet united by