The criticism of religious
opinions makes us smile today both at ourselves and at religions;
and yet the resume of this criticism is but a reproduction of the
problem. The human race, at the present moment, is on the eve of
recognizing and affirming something equivalent to the old notion
of Divinity; and this, not by a spontaneous movement as before,
but through reflection and by means of irresistible logic. I
will try, in a few words, to make myself understood.
If there is a point on which philosophers, in spite of
themselves, have finally succeeded in agreeing, it is without
doubt the distinction between intelligence and necessity, the
subject of thought and its object, the me and the not-me; in
ordinary terms, spirit and matter. I know well that all these
terms express nothing that is real and true; that each of them
designates only a section of the absolute, which alone is true
and real; and that, taken separately, they involve, all alike, a
contradiction. But it is no less certain also that the absolute
is completely inaccessible to us; that we know it only by its
opposite extremes, which alone fall within the limits of our
experience; and that, if unity only can win our faith, duality is
the first condition of science.
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