Talleyrand said once in the chamber of Peers, "There is somebody who has more intellect than Napoleon, more intellect than Voltaire; that somebody is the Public." I also say, there is a more profound observer than Bacon, a greater philosopher than Kant; it is mankind. Mankind is right when it distinguishes in its languages knowledge from science and from belief, science from belief and from faith. Bossuet wrote a book entitled "De la Connaissance de Dieu et de soi-même;" the idea would never have occurred to him of entitling it "De la science de Dieu et de soi-même;" it would have shocked his good sense as much as his piety. {295} The child believes the smile and the speech of its mother; in its belief there is certainly no scientific appreciation (no science) of the relations which unite it to its mother, and of the reasons which make it believe in her. Knowledge, science, belief, and faith, are facts essentially distinct, although all equally natural to the human soul; and it is impossible to confound them, to take one for the other, to annul one in favor of the other, or to attempt to reduce them to one term, without ignoring realities, and falling into enormous errors. Such has been the constant error of M. Auguste Comte, and such is the radical vice of Positivism. M. Comte ignores the natural and permanent diversity in the intellectual states through which a man may pass in his ardent pursuit of truth. He refuses here to recognize any state as legitimate and definitive except the scientific state. He regards intuitive knowledge and instinctive belief as preparatory and transitory states, states without any rational authority; as, in short, simple steps on the way to that scientific state which alone sets man in possession of the truth. {296} Positivism is thus led to extend the pretensions of science beyond its proper domain, that is, beyond the finite world, its facts and its laws; and as science finds itself incapable of observing and of defining infinity, Positivism is, perforce, reduced either to deny infinity, or to declare infinity absolutely inaccessible to the human mind, and so to pass it over in silence.