itself the eternal axiom; and the prolonged resounding of this creative
formula composes, by its inexhaustible undulations, the immensity of the
universe. Every form, every change, every movement, every idea is one of
its acts."[137]

M. Taine is a man of humor, and the burlesque has a place in his
philosophical writings; but in the words which I have just read to you
he seems to have intended seriously to expound the system which replaces
God by an idea. Try now to form a definite conception of this universe
composed of the undulations of an axiom. Do you understand how an axiom
undulates, and how the heavens and the earth are only the undulations of
an axiom? Making all allowance for rhetoric and figures, do you
understand what can be the acts of an axiom, and how an axiom
_pronounces itself_ without being pronounced? You do not understand it,
as neither do I. Such doctrines, then, as we have said, can only be the
portion of a small number of thinkers who have lost, by dint of
abstraction, the sentiment of reality. The ideas--truth, beauty,
good--will only exist for the common order of men, under such a system,
in the human mind, where we have cognizance of them; and thenceforward,
the ideal, or God, is nothing else than the image of humanity which
contemplates itself in a sort of mirage. Thus it is that the adoration
of man by man is disengaged from the high theories of idealism. Let us
proceed to the examination of this worship, which is cried up
now-a-days in divers parts of the intellectual globe.

I open the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, of the 15th February, 1861. As the
author of the article I refer to[138] appears to admit "that one
assertion is not more true than another opposed to it,"[139] we will not
be so simple as to ask whether he adopts the opinions which he
propounds. He presents to us, in a rapid sketch, the principal