answered for us this question:


En présence du Ciel, il faut croire ou nier.[161]


A famous writer expands the same thought as follows: "Doubt about things
which it highly concerns us to know," says Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "is a
condition which does too great violence to the human mind; nor does it
long bear up against it, but in spite of itself comes to a decision one
way or another, and likes better to be mistaken than to believe
nothing."[162] Such is the law. We have met with the pretension to
maintain the mind independent of God, without either denying or
asserting His existence, and we have seen how completely this pretension
fails in the presence of facts. The sceptic makes vain efforts to
continue in a state of doubt, but the ground fails him, and he slips
into negation: he affirms that humanity has been mistaken, and that God
is not. But neither does this negation succeed any the more in keeping
its ground; it strikes too violently against all the instincts of our
nature. The human mind is under an imperious necessity to worship
something; if God fails it, it sets itself to adore nature or humanity;
atheism is transformed into idolatry. Recollect the destinies of the
critical school and of the positive philosophy! Let us now examine, with
serious attention, that attempt to _eliminate_ God which is the
starting-point in this course along which the mind is hurried so
fatally.

God is not, I grant, an object of experience. I grant it at least in
this sense, that God is not an object of sensible experience. The
experience of God (if I may be allowed the expression), the feeling of