observed and proved, saying if man is on one side a "fierce and lascivious
gorilla," on the other side he is a mystic animal, and that in "a double
nature, mysterious hymen," as Hugo wrote, lay the explanation of all the
baseness in ideas and actions as well as all the sublimity in ideas and
actions of humanity. Personally he was a Stoic and his practice was the
continuous development of the intelligence regarded as the condition and
guarantee of morality.

RENAN.--Renan, destined for the ecclesiastical profession and always
preserving profound traces of his clerical education, was, nevertheless, a
Positivist and believed only in science, hoping everything from it in youth
and continuing to venerate it at least during his mature years. Thus
formed, a "Christian Positivist," as has been said, as well as a poet above
all else, he could not proscribe metaphysics and had a weakness for them
with which perhaps he reproached himself. He extricated himself from this
difficulty by declaring all metaphysical conceptions to be only "dreams,"
but sheltered, so to say, by this concession he had made and this
precaution he had taken, he threw himself into the dream with all his heart
and reconstituted God, the immortal soul, the future existence, eternity
and creation, giving them new, unforeseen, and fascinating names. It was
only the idea of Providence--that is, of the particular and circumstantial
intervention of God in human affairs, which was intolerable to him and
against which he always protested, quoting the phrase of Malebranche, "God
does not act by particular wills." And yet he paid a compliment, which
seems sincere, to the idea of grace, and if there be a particular and
circumstantial intervention by God in human affairs, it is certainly grace
according to all appearances.

He was above all an amateur of ideas, a dilettante in ideas, toying with
them with infinite pleasure, like a superior Greek sophist, and in all