However, after all this pride came the turn of humility, and humility of the very lowest. This deified science, borne down in its hour of triumph by too heavy a weight, had necessarily been recognised as powerless to go beyond the order of relations, and radically incapable of telling us the origin, end, and basis of things. It analysed the conditions of phenomena, but was ill-suited ever to grasp any real cause, or any deep essence. Further, it became the Unknowable, before which the human mind could only halt in despair. And in this way destitution arose out of ambition itself, since thought, after trusting too exclusively to its geometrical strength, was compelled at the end of its effort to confess itself beaten when confronted with the only questions to which no man may ever be indifferent. This double attitude is no longer that of the contemporary generation. The prestige of illusion has vanished. In the religion of science we see now nothing but idolatry. The haughty affirmation of yesterday appears today, not as expressing a positive fact or a result duly established, but as bringing forward a thesis of perilous and unconscious metaphysics. Let us go even further. If true intelligence is mental expansion and aptitude for understanding widely different things, each in its originality, to the same degree, we must say that the claim to reduce reality to one only of its modes, to know it in one only of its forms, is an unintelligent claim. That is, in brief formula, the verdict of the present generation. Not, of course, that it in any way misconceives or disdains the true value of science, whether as an instrument of action for the conquest of nature, or as intelligible language, allowing us to know our whereabouts in things and "talk" them. It is aware that in all circumstances positive methods have their evidence to produce, and that, where they pronounce within the limits of their power, nothing can stand against their verdict. But it considers first of all that science was conceived of late under much too stiff and narrow a form, under the obsession of too abstract a mathematical ideal which corresponds to one aspect of reality only, and that the shallowest. And it considers afterwards that science, even when broadened and made flexible, being concerned only with what is, with fact and datum, remains radically powerless to solve the problem of human life. Nowhere does science penetrate to the very depth of things, and there is nothing in the world but "things."