truth; for truth is not conceived except in opposition to at least
possible error. If there is no truth, the human reason, which seeks
truth by a natural impulse belonging to its very essence, as the
magnetized needle seeks the pole,--reason, I say, is a chimera. The
truth which reason seeks is an exact relation of human thought to the
reality of the world. If the search for this relation is chimerical, the
two terms, mind, and the world, may be illusions. A fugitive illusion in
presence of an infinite illusion: there is all. You see that these
thoughts hang together with rigorous precision. The darkness is becoming
visible to us, or, in other words, we are acquiring a perfect
understanding of the origin and developments of the absurdity. Put God
aside, the law of our will, the warrant of our thought; deify human
nature; and a fatal current will run you aground twice over--on the
shores of moral absurdity, and on those of intellectual absurdity. These
sad shipwrecks are set before our eyes in striking examples; it has been
easy to indicate their cause.

The consideration of the beautiful would give occasion to analogous
observations. The human mind becoming the object of our adoration, we
must give up judging it in every particular, and suppress the rules of
the ideal in art, as those of morals in the conduct, and truth in the
intellect. We must form a system of æsthetics which accepts all, and
finds equally legitimate whatever affords recreation to the
Humanity-God, in the great variety of its tastes. Then high aspirations
are extinguished, the beautiful gives place to the agreeable; and since
the ugly and misshapen please a vicious taste, room must be made for the
ugly in the Pantheon of beauty. Art despoiled of its crown becomes the
sad, and often the ignoble slave of the tastes and caprices of the
public. I do not insist further. The pretension of the worshippers of
humanity is to make their conscience wide enough to accept all, and to