It is well known that our religion admits the possibility and reality of a true cognition of God, even in this life. The sacred text tells us that we may know God by his works; that the invisible things of God are manifested to us by his visible creatures; that the heavens narrate his glory, and the firmament announces the works of his hands; that they who have thus known God are inexcusable, because they have not glorified him as they ought; but this same religion teaches us that the Blessed, in the life to come, will know him in a very different manner, will see him as he is, face to face. It was Christianity then that marked the difference between intuitive and discursive cognitions, between the cognition by which the understanding, proceeding from effects to their cause, and uniting in it the ideas of wisdom, omnipotence, goodness, holiness, and infinite perfection, rises to God; and the cognition in which the mind does not need to advance, drawing its conclusions by aid of discursion, from various conceptions, in order to force from them an idea of God, in which the Infinite Being will offer himself clearly to the eyes of the mind, not in a conception elaborated by reason, nor under the sublime mysteries of faith, but such as he is, in himself, as an object given immediately to the perceptive faculty, not as an object discovered by the force of discursion, or presented under august shadows. And here we find another proof of the great profoundness hidden under the dogmas of the Christian religion. This distinction is to be met with in the catechism, and yet who would have suspected that religion had taught us a doctrine so important to ideological science? If the child be asked, who is God, he replies by enumerating his perfections, and showing thereby that he knows him. If you ask this same child, to what end man has been created, he will answer, to _see_ God, etc. Here again is the distinction between discursive cognition, or by conceptions, and intuitive cognitions; with the former one is said, simply to _know_, with the latter to _see_. CHAPTER XII. THE SENSISM OF KANT.