A wise philosophy distinguishes[74] them without separating them. Analysis demonstrates that reason precedes, and that sentiment follows. How can we love what we are ignorant of? In order to enjoy the truth, is it not necessary to know it more or less? In order to be moved by certain ideas, is it not necessary to have possessed them in some degree? To absorb reason in sentiment is to stifle the cause in the effect. When one speaks of the light of the heart, he designates, without knowing it, that light of the spontaneous reason which discovers to us truth by a pure and immediate intuition entirely opposite to the slow and laborious processes of the reflective reason and reasoning. Sentiment by itself is a source of emotion, not of knowledge. The sole faculty of knowledge is reason. At bottom, if sentiment is different from sensation, it nevertheless pertains on all sides to general sensibility, and it is, like it, variable; it has, like it, its interruptions, its vivacity, and its lassitude, its exaltation and its short-comings. The inspirations of sentiment, then, which are essentially mobile and individual, cannot be raised to a universal and absolute rule. It is not so with reason; it is constantly the same in each one of us, the same in all men. The laws that govern its exercise constitute the common legislation of all intelligent beings. There is no intelligence that does not conceive some universal and necessary truth, and, consequently, the infinite being who is its principle. These grand objects being once known excite in the souls of all men the emotions that we have endeavored to describe. These emotions partake of the dignity of reason and the mobility of imagination and sensibility. Sentiment is the harmonious and living relation between reason and sensibility. Suppress one of the two terms, and what becomes of the relation? Mysticism pretends to elevate man directly to God, and does not see that in depriving reason of its power, it really deprives him of that which makes him know God, and puts him in a just communication with God by the intermediary of eternal and infinite truth.