concert, to which man alone has the sublime privilege of adding the
accents of gratitude! Who is the author of this brilliant mechanism? I
exclaimed in the transport which animated me. Who is He that, opening
his creative hand, let fly the first swallow into the air? It is He who
gave commandment to these trees to come forth from the ground, and to
lift their branches toward the sky!"

Here is a charming page, and containing, though apparently trivial in
style, a good and sound philosophy. Let us translate this delightful
description into the heavier language of science.

The intellect is one of the things with which we are best acquainted;
logic is the science of thought, and logic is perhaps, among all the
sciences, the one best settled on its bases. The intellect discovers
itself to us in the exercise of our activity. We pursue an object, we
combine the means for attaining it, and it is the intellect which
operates this combination. What happens if we compare the results of our
activity with the results of the power manifested in the world? When we
consider in their vast _ensemble_ the means of which nature disposes,
when we remark the infinite number of the relations of things, the
marvellous harmony of which universal life is the produce, we are
dazzled by the splendor of a wisdom which surpasses our own as much as
boundless space surpasses the imperceptible spot which we occupy upon
the earth. Think of this: the science of nature is so vast that the
least of its departments suffices to absorb one human lifetime. All our
sciences are only in their very beginning; they are spelling out the
first lines of an immense book. The elements of the universe are
numberless; and yet, notwithstanding, all hangs together; all things are
linked one to another in the closest connection. The _savants_ therefore
find themselves in a strange embarrassment. They are obliged to