belief,—spend years, your best years, in the occupation,—and at length, when your eyes are dim, and your brain hot, and your hands unsteady, then reckon what you have gained. See if you cannot count on your fingers the certainties you have reached; reflect which of them you doubted yesterday, which you may disbelieve to-morrow; or rather, make haste—assume at random some essential _credenda_,—write down your inevitable postulates, enumerate your necessary axioms, toil on, toil on, spin your spider’s web, adore your own soul, or if ye prefer it, choose some German nostrum; try an intellectual intuition, or the pure reason, or the intelligible ideas, or the mesmeric clairvoyance, and when so, or somehow, you have attained your results, try them on mankind. Don’t go out into the byeways and hedges; it is unnecessary. Ring a bell, call in the servants, give them a course of lectures, cite Aristotle, review Descartes, panegyrise Plato, and see if the bonne will understand you. It is you that say _Vox populi, vox Dei_. You see the people reject you. Or, suppose you succeed,—what you call succeeding. Your books are read; for three weeks or even a season you are the idol of the _salons_. Your hard words are on the lips of women; then a change comes—a new actress appears at the Théâtre Français or the Opéra; her charms eclipse your theories; or a great catastrophe occurs; political liberty, it is said, is annihilated. _Il faut se faire mouchard_, is the observation of scoffers. Anyhow you are forgotten. Fifty years may be the gestation of a philosophy, not three its life. Before long, before you go to your grave, your six disciples leave you for some newer master, or to set up for themselves. The poorest priest in the remotest region of the Basses-Alpes has more power over men’s souls than human cultivation. His ill-mouthed masses move women’s souls—can you? Ye scoff at Jupiter, yet he at least was believed in, you never have been. Idol for idol, the _de_throned is better than the _un_throned. No, if you would reason, if you would teach, if you would speculate,—come to us. We have our premises ready; years upon years before you were born, intellects whom the best of you delight to magnify, toiled to systematise the creed of ages. Years upon years after you are dead, better heads than yours will find new matter there to define, to divide, to arrange. Consider the hundred volumes of Aquinas. Which of you desire a higher life than that;—to deduce, to subtilise, discriminate, systematise, and decide the highest truth, and to be believed? Yet such was his luck, his enjoyment. He was what you would be. No, no, _credite, credite_. Ours is the life of speculation. The cloister is the home for the student. Philosophy is stationary, Catholicism progressive. _You_ call.