reason, to serve alone as a guide to the human soul, and to put itself in direct communication with God, without the intermediary of the visible world, and without the still surer intermediary of intelligence and truth. But it is time to pass to another kind of mysticism, more singular, more learned, more refined, and quite as unreasonable, although it presents itself in the very name of reason. We have seen[76] that reason, if one of the principles which govern it be destroyed, cannot lay hold of truth, not even absolute truths of the intellectual and moral order; it refers all universal, necessary, absolute truths, to the being that alone can explain them, because in him alone are necessary and absolute existence, immutability, and infinity. God is the substance of uncreated truths, as he is the cause of created existences. Necessary truths find in God their natural subject. If God has not arbitrarily made them,--which is not in accordance with their essence and his,--he constitutes them, inasmuch as they are himself. His intelligence possesses them as the manifestations of itself. As long as our intelligence has not referred them to the divine intelligence, they are to it an effect without cause, a phenomenon without substance. It refers them, then, to their cause and their substance. And in that it obeys an imperative need, a fixed principle of reason. Mysticism breaks in some sort the ladder that elevates us to infinite substance: it regards this substance alone, independently[77] of the truth that manifests it, and it imagines itself to possess also the pure absolute, pure unity, being in itself. The advantage which mysticism here seeks, is to give to thought an object wherein there is no mixture, no division, no multiplicity, wherein every sensible and human element has entirely disappeared. But in order to obtain this advantage, it must pay the cost of it. It is a very simple means of freeing theodicea from every shade of anthropomorphism; it is reducing God to an abstraction, to the abstraction of being in itself. Being in itself, it is true, is free from all division, but upon the condition that it have no attribute, no quality, and even that it be deprived of knowledge and intelligence; for intelligence, if elevated as it might be, always supposes the distinction between the intelligent subject and the intelligible object. A God from whom absolute unity excludes intelligence, is the God of the mystic philosophy. How could the school of Alexandria, how could Plotinus, its founder,[78] in the midst of the lights of the Greek and Latin civilization, have arrived at such a strange notion of the Divinity? By the abuse of Platonism, by the corruption of the best and severest method, that of Socrates and Plato.