Such are the views of Newton. Examine this course of thought, and see if
it is not natural. Observation reveals to us facts. Facts in themselves,
isolated facts, are nothing for the mind; but in the facts of nature,
human reason discovers an order, and in that order it recognizes its own
proper laws. To keep within the domain of astronomy--there is harmony
between our mind and the course of the stars. If you have any doubt
about this, I appeal to the almanac. We there find it stated that in
such a month, on such a day, at such an hour, there will be an eclipse
of the sun or of the moon. How comes the editor of the almanac to know
that? He has learnt it from the savants who have succeeded in explaining
the phenomena of the skies. The savant therefore can in his study meet
with the intelligence which directs the universe. If he makes no mistake
in his calculations, the eclipse begins at the precise hour which he has
indicated. If the eclipse did not take place at the instant foreseen, no
one would suspect Nature of not following the course prescribed by the
directing intelligence; the inference would be that there had been a
fault in observation, or an error of figures on the part of the
astronomer.

When science, then, does its part well, the mind of man encounters
another mind which is governing the world and maintaining it in order.
The special science of nature stops there, as we shall explain further
on; but this is not all that man requires, when he makes use of all his
faculties. All is passing and changing in the domain of experience; and
reason seeks instinctively the cause of changeable facts in an
unchangeable Being, the cause of transient phenomena in an eternal
Being. Nature, therefore, does not suffice to account to us for itself.
It demands a power to direct it, an intelligence to regulate it; an
absolute eternal Being as its cause. This is what reason imperatively