But in the midst of these high considerations, let us carefully guard ourselves against two opposite errors, from which men of fine genius have not always known how to preserve themselves,--against the error of making the reason of man purely individual, and against the error of confounding it with truth and the divine reason.[70] If the reason of man is purely individual because it is in the individual, it can comprehend nothing that is not individual, nothing that transcends the limits wherein it is confined. Not only is it unable to elevate itself to any universal and necessary truth, not only is it unable to have any idea of it, even any suspicion of it, as one blind from his birth can have no suspicion that a sun exists; but there is no power, not even that of God, that by any means could make penetrate the reason of man any truth of that order absolutely repugnant to its nature; since, for this end, it would not be sufficient for God to lighten our mind; it would be necessary to change it, to add to it another faculty. Neither, on the other hand, must we, with Malebranche, make the reason of man to such a degree impersonal that it takes the place of truth which is its object, and of God who is its principle. It is truth that to us is absolutely impersonal, and not reason. Reason is in man, yet it comes from God. Hence it is individual and finite, whilst its root is in the infinite; it is personal by its relation to the person in which it resides, and must also possess I know not what character of universality, of necessity even, in order to be capable of conceiving universal and necessary truths; hence it seems, by turns, according to the point of view from which it is regarded, pitiable and sublime. Truth is in some sort lent to human reason, but it belongs to a totally different reason, to wit, that supreme, eternal, uncreated reason, which is God himself. The truth in us is nothing else than our object; in God, it is one of his attributes, as well as justice, holiness, mercy, as we shall subsequently see. God exists; and so far as he exists, he thinks, and his thoughts are truths, eternal as himself, which are reflected in the laws of the universe, which the reason of man has received the power to attain. Truth is the offspring, the utterance, I was about to say, the eternal word of God, if it is permitted philosophy to borrow this divine language from that holy religion which teaches us to worship God in spirit and in truth. Of old, the theory of Ideas, which manifest God to men, and remind them of him, had given to Plato the surname of the precursor; on account of that theory of Ideas he was dear to St. Augustine, and is invoked by Bossuet. It is by this same theory, wisely interpreted, and purified by the light of our age, that the new philosophy is attached to the tradition of great philosophies, and to that of Christianity.