The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

PART II PHILOSOPHICAL MYSTERIES PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS It has been said that beauty is the splendour of truth. Now moral beauty is goodness. It is beautiful to be good. To be intelligently good, one must be just. To be just, one must act reasonably. To act reasonably, one must have the knowledge of reality. To have the knowledge of reality, one must have conscious- ness of truth. To have consciousness of truth, one must have an exact notion of being. Being, truth, reason and justice are the common objects of the researches of science, and of the aspirations of faith. The conceptions, whether real or hypothetical, of a supreme power, transform justice into Providence; and the notion of divinity, from this point of view, becomes accessible to science herself. Science studies Being in its partial manifestation; faith supposes it, or rather admits it a Jrtord as a whole. Science seeks the truth in everything; faith refers every- thing to an universal and absolute truth. Science records realities in detail ; faith explains them by 98