Being connected in time as well as in spirit, the facts
accomplished determine and legitimate the facts to be
accomplished; science and destiny are in accord; everything which
happens resulting from reason, and, reciprocally, reason
judging only from experience of that which happens, science has a
right to participate in government, and that which establishes
its competency as a counsellor justifies its intervention as a
sovereign.
Science, expressed, recognized, and accepted by the voice of all
as divine, is queen of the world. Thus, thanks to the hypothesis
of God, all conservative or retrogressive opposition, every
dilatory plea offered by theology, tradition, or selfishness,
finds itself peremptorily and irrevocably set aside.
I need the hypothesis of God to show the tie which unites
civilization with Nature.
In fact, this astonishing hypothesis, by which man is assimilated
to the absolute, implying identity of the laws of Nature and the
laws of reason, enables us to see in human industry the
complement of creative action, unites man with the globe which he
inhabits, and, in the cultivation of the domain in which
Providence has placed us, which thus becomes in part our work,
gives us a conception of the principle and end of all things.
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