But now to touch upon the radical and permanent error of Rationalism. It regards all things as accessible to the researches and to the methods of human science. When Spiritualism has recognized and proclaimed the essential and necessary facts which constitute the intellectual and moral being by it styled man, it halts abruptly; it hesitates also to recognize and proclaim the mysterious facts in that sanctuary the very door of which it has reached; it does not resign itself to adore what lies behind the vail; it is inconsequent and timid, although respectful and modest. {266} Rationalism, on the contrary, is presumptuous and audacious; its ambition is to see clearly, to touch what is in the center of the sanctuary, as it sees and touches what is on its outside. Its pretension is that it may study and know, by its ordinary processes, as well the invisible world, its Sovereign and its laws, as the visible world in which man is now placed; and it wars upon Christianity because Christianity admits no such pretension. But Christianity here encounters another adversary, Positivism. Positivism arrests its progress, saying: "I do not know, nobody knows, if an invisible world be or be not a really existing thing. It is a mere loss of time to think of it, for nothing can be known about it with certainty. All religion, all metaphysics, are chimerical and vain sciences; there is no science but the science of the physical world, of its facts and of its laws!" --------------------------------------- {267} Fourth Meditation. Positivism. I seek no quarrel with words, even when they provoke it. Positivism is a word, in language a barbarism, in philosophy a presumption. Unlike Geology, Ideology, Theology, Physics, it qualifies a doctrine, not by its object, but by its supposed merit. All science pretends to positiveness--that is, to be founded upon fact and truth. But "Positivism" alone arrogates to itself this quality. It is an arrogance, in my opinion, radically unjustifiable.