10. Another consideration ought to have moderated their zeal to be thought inventors, which is that they have said nothing concerning God, the human mind, thought, ideas, the liberty of freewill, which may not be read in all the works of the philosophers who flourished before, or even in the beginning of, the eighteenth century. Open the text-books of the schools, and you will find many things which they would have us believe to be important discoveries. The great philosophers gloried in knowing what they had before learned when children. The philosophical tradition of sound ideas was not interrupted during the past century. In many parts of Europe schools existed which taught them with scrupulous fidelity. And besides human schools, there was that of the God-Man, the Church of Jesus Christ, which, among its supernatural dogmas, preserved even natural truths, notwithstanding the senseless efforts which have been made to obliterate them. 11. To what, then, are the invention and restoration reduced? Invention there is not, either with respect to God, to the human mind, or to morality, for nothing true has been said of them which had not already been said. Restoration, properly so called, there is not; for what does not perish cannot be restored. The truth exists; and has been known and revered during the whole six thousand years it has refused to bow the knee to Baal. Let not deserters say, when they turn and come back to the truth that they have restored it, but that they have recovered it; not that they give, but that they receive it; not that they enlighten the world, but that they are blind, and that it is the goodness of Providence which opens their eyes to the light. CHAPTER II. IMPORTANCE AND ANOMALY OF THE QUESTIONS ON THE IDEA OF THE INFINITE. 12. The examination of the idea of the infinite is of the highest importance, not only because we meet it in various sciences, the exact sciences among others, but because it is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish God from creatures. A finite God would be no God; an infinite creature would not be a creature.