This is what we come to when we wish to go beyond the conditions imposed upon human nature. Charron first said, and after him Pascal repeated it, that whoever would become an angel becomes a beast. The remedy for all these follies is a severe theory of reason, of what it can and what it cannot do; of reason enveloped first in the exercise of the senses, than elevating itself to universal and necessary ideas, referring them to their principle, to a being infinite and at the same time real and substantial, whose existence it conceives, but whose nature it is always interdicted to penetrate and comprehend. Sentiment accompanies and vivifies the sublime intuitions of reason, but we must not confound these two orders of facts, much less smother reason in sentiment. Between a finite being like man and God, absolute and infinite substance, there is the double intermediary of that magnificent universe open to our gaze, and of those marvellous truths which reason conceives, but has not made more than the eye makes the beauties it perceives. The only means that is given us of elevating ourselves to the Being of beings, without being dazzled and bewildered, is to approach him by the aid of a divine intermediary; that is to say, to consecrate ourselves to the study and the love of truth, and, as we shall soon see, to the contemplation and reproduction of the beautiful, especially to the practice of the good. FOOTNOTES: [71] See the preceding lectures. [72] See the _Phaedrus_ and the _Banquet_, vol. vii. of our translation. [73] We shall not be accused of perverting the holy Scriptures by these analogies, for we give them only as analogies, and St. Augustine and Bossuet are full of such. [74] See part ii., _The Beautiful_, lecture 6, and part iii., lecture 13, on the _Morals of Sentiment_. See also our _Pascal_, preface of the last edition, p. 8, etc., vol. i. of the 4th Series. [75] See the admirable work of Bossuet, _Instruction sur les etats d'Oraison_. [76] Lecture 4.