strict sense of the word, is determinist. But then, prolong this progress of science indefinitely; multiply it by ten, by a hundred, a thousand; what do you do but multiply proportionately the weight of universal determinism beneath which our soul groans and ceases to strive? We should then end in the still more tragic contradiction—between science and conscience, physical laws and moral laws, action and reflection. The more the one enlarges and triumphs the vainer seems the other. Hence that philosophical dualism in which modern thought ends—a science which cannot engender an acknowledged morality, and a morality which cannot be the object of positive science. We touch the cause of that strange malady le mal du siècle, a sort of internal consumption by which all cultivated minds are more or less affected. It is an intestine war which arms the human ego against itself and dries up all the springs of life. The more one reflects on the reasons that may be urged in favour of living and acting, the less capable one is of effort and of action. Clearness of thought is in inverse proportion to the energy of the will. The Pessimists tell us that if we were fully and perfectly conscious we should lose the will to act, and even the desire to be. And which of us is not more or less of a Pessimist nowadays? Who does not complain of "the weary weight of all this unintelligible world"? Who does not feel his weakness and the pressure of external things? Who has not marked that union now become almost habitual of frivolity of character and intellectual culture the most perfect and refined? That sad monotone which comes to us on every wind, from the latest volume of philosophy, from the most popular novel, from the most successful play,—what is it but the melancholy sigh of a life that seems to be ready to expire, of a world that seems about to disappear. Must one give up thinking then if he would retain the courage to live, and resign himself to death in order to preserve the right to think?

From this feeling of distress, from this initial contradiction of the inner life of man, religion springs. It is the rent in the rock through which the living and life-giving waters flow. Not that religion brings a theoretical solution to the problem. The issue it opens and proposes to us is pre-eminently practical. It does not save us by adding to our knowledge, but by a return to the very principle on which our being depends, and by a moral act of confidence in the origin and aim of life. At the same time this saving act is not an arbitrary one; it springs from a necessity. Faith in life both is and acts like the instinct of conservation in the physical world. It is a higher form of that instinct Blind and fatal in organisms, in the moral life it is accompanied by consciousness and by reflective will, and, thus transformed, it appears under the guise of religion.

Nor is this life-impulse (élan de la vie) produced in the void, or objectless. It rests upon a feeling inherent in every conscious individual, the feeling of dependence which every man experiences with respect to universal being. Which of us can escape this feeling of absolute dependence? Not only is our destiny, in principle, decided outside ourselves and apart from ourselves according to the general laws of cosmical evolution, in the course of which we appear at a given time and place with a heritage of forces which we have not chosen or produced, but, not being able to discover in ourselves or in any series of individuals the sufficient reason of our existence, we are obliged to seek outside ourselves, in universal being, the first cause and ultimate aim of our existence and our life. To be religious is, at first, to recognise, to accept with confidence, with simplicity and humility, this subjection of our individual consciousness; it is to bring this back and bind it to its eternal principle; it is to will to be in the order and the harmony of life. This feeling of our subordination thus furnishes the experimental and indestructible basis of the idea of God. This idea may possibly remain more or less indetermined, and may indeed never be perfected in our mind; but its object does not on that account elude our consciousness. Before all reflection, and before all rational determination, it is given to us and, as it were, imposed on us in the very fact of our absolute dependence; without fear we may establish this equation: the feeling of our dependence is that of the mysterious presence of God in us. Such is the deep source from which the idea of the divine springs up within us irresistibly. But it springs at once as religion and as an effect of religion.

At the same time, it is well to note at what a cost the mind of man accepts this subordination in relation to the principle of universal life. We have seen this mind in conflict with external things. The mind revolts against them because they are of a different nature to itself, and because it is the proud prerogative of mind to comprehend, to dominate, to rule things and not to be subordinate to them. Pascal's phrase is to the point: "Man is but a reed, the feeblest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. Were the universe to crush him, man would still be nobler than the universe that killed him, for he would be conscious of the calamity, and the universe would know nothing of the advantage it possessed." That is why the material universe is not the principle of sovereignty to which it is possible for man to submit. The superior dignity of spirit to the totality of things can only be preserved in our precarious individuality by an act of confidence and communion with the universal Spirit. It is only on a spiritual power that my consciousness does actually make both me and the universe to depend, and in making us both to depend on the same spiritual power, it reconciles us to each other, because, in that universal being conceived as spirit, both I and the universe have a common principle and a common aim. Descartes was right: the first step of the human mind desirous of confirming to itself the sense of its own worth and dignity is an essentially religious act. The circle of my mental life, which opens with the conflict of these two terms—consciousness of the ego, experience of the world—is completed by a third in which the other terms are harmonised: the sense of their common dependence upon God. But is not this account of the genesis of religion too philosophic and too abstract to be capable of universal application? If it explains the persistence of the religious sentiment in epochs of high culture, can it also explain its appearance in the pre-historic ages of humanity? Those who raise this objection have not sufficiently marked the permanent nature of the initial contradiction which constitutes, at the beginning as at the end, the empirical life of man, and which renders it in all degrees so precarious and so miserable. It is not a contradiction created by logic. To experience it and to suffer from it man did not need to wait until he became a philosopher. It manifested itself in the terrors of the savage in presence of the cataclysms of nature, in the midst of the perils of the primeval forest not less than in our troubled thought in presence of the enigma of the universe and the mystery of death. The expression of human misery and the consciousness thereof are different things; the religious thrill which brings relief, at bottom is the same. Pascal, with all his knowledge, did not experience less distress than primitive man, when he exclaimed: "The eternal silence of the infinite spaces terrifies me." The disciple of Kant, shutting himself up in despair within the impassable limits of phenomenal knowledge, or the disciple of Schopenhauer ending in the internecine conflict between intellect and will, are they not smitten with a feeling of impotence still more painful, and, when they cease to reason in order to decide to live, do they not feel forming within themselves, and in spite of themselves, a sigh which is the beginning of a prayer?

Religion, therefore, is immortal. Far from drying