Mysticism begins by suppressing in man reason, or, at least, it subordinates and sacrifices reason to sentiment. Listen to mysticism: it says that by the heart alone is man in relation with God. All that is great, beautiful, infinite, eternal, love alone reveals to us. Reason is only a lying faculty. Because it may err, and does err, it is said that it always errs. Reason is confounded with every thing that it is not. The errors of the senses, and of reasoning, the illusions of the imagination, even the extravagances of passion, which sometimes give rise to those of mind, every thing is laid to the charge of reason. Its imperfections are triumphed over, its miseries are complacently exhibited; the most audacious dogmatical system--since it aspires to put man and God in immediate communication--borrows against reason all the arms of skepticism. Mysticism goes farther: it attacks liberty itself; it orders liberty to renounce itself, in order to identify itself by love with him from whom the infinite separates us. The ideal of virtue is no longer the courageous perseverance of the good man, who, in struggling against temptation and suffering, makes life holy; it is no longer the free and enlightened devotion of a loving soul; it is the entire and blind abandonment of ourselves, of our will, of our being, in a barren contemplation of thought, in a prayer without utterance, and almost without consciousness. The source of mysticism is in that incomplete view of human nature, which knows not how to discern in it what therein is most profound, which betakes itself to what is therein most striking, most seizing, and, consequently, also most seizable. We have already said that reason is not noisy, and often is not heard, whilst its echo of sentiment loudly resounds. In this compound phenomenon, it is natural that the most apparent element should cover and dim the most obscure. Moreover, what relations, what deceptive resemblances between these two faculties! Without doubt, in their development, they manifestly differ; when reason becomes reasoning, one easily distinguishes its heavy movement from the flight of sentiment; but spontaneous reason is almost confounded with sentiment,--there is the same rapidity, the same obscurity. Add that they pursue the same object, and almost always go together. It is not, then, astonishing that they should be confounded.