THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES
totalized reality to which science cannot bear witness, but
which the very existence of the details seems to force her to
recognize and to admit.
Science submits the reasons of persons and things to the
universal mathematical reason ; faith seeks, or rather supposes,
an intelligent and absolute reason for (and above) mathematics
themselves.
Science demonstrates justice by justness; faith gives an
absolute justness to justice, in subordinating it to Providence.
One sees here all that faith borrows from science, and all
that science, in its turn, owes to faith.
Without faith, science is circumscribed by an absolute
doubt, and finds itself eternally penned within the risky em-
piricism of a reasoning scepticism; without science, faith
constructs its hypotheses at random, and can only blindly
prejudge the causes of the effects of which she is ignorant.
The great chain which reunites science and faith is
analogy.
Science is obliged to respect a belief whose hypotheses are
analogous to demonstrated truths. Faith, which attributes
everything to God, is obliged to admit science as being
a natural revelation which, by the partial manifestation of
the laws of eternal reason, gives a scale of proportion to
all the aspirations and to all the excursions of the soul
into the domain of the unknown.
It is, then, faith alone that can give a solution to the
mysteries of science; and in return, it is science alone that
demonstrates the necessity of the mysteries of faith.
Outside the union and the concourse of these two living
forces of the intelligence, there is for science nothing but
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