It would be difficult more entirely to deform, difficult to show greater ignorance of man's general history. That which M. Comte regards as three successive states in the history of the human race is only the complex and permanent condition of humanity, agitated by movements swaying in different directions, according as it meets with the successes or encounters the reverses, the hopes, or the fears to which different nations and generations are subject. That theological conceptions and metaphysical meditations are only transitory facts, "which," according to the expression of M. Comte, "will have henceforth only an historical existence," is an assertion no more true of such facts than of those that the study of physics supplies. These different yearnings of the mind, and their different labors, are the very essence--the indestructible and indivisible essence--of human nature. {302} At no time and in no country have men more ceased, or will they more cease, to pray to God, and to strive to comprehend him, than they will cease to study the physical world, and to make it subserve their interests. Nations and generations of individuals, in different ages, have advanced more or less in one or other of these careers of intellectual activity; and so they will continue to advance. Religious faith, metaphysical meditation, and scientific inquiry have their alternations of enthusiasm and of languor, of glory and of sterility; they appear and they prosper, sometimes separately, sometimes simultaneously. If India plunged herself deep among the symbols of mythology and amid the void of Pantheism, Greece cultivated with like success the metaphysical and the natural sciences--Aristotle was the contemporary of Plato. Where other nations fluctuated variously between theological conceptions, metaphysical abstractions, and scientific studies, the Hebrew people continued, in the theological state, Monotheists. {303} In the sixteenth century, when the spirit of free inquiry and of independence was awakened, and made its influence felt far and wide, Christian faith, at the same time, was resuscitated and confirmed; and the eighteenth century founded at once the political liberty of Protestant England and the philosophical and literary glory of Catholic France. The human mind has, according to time and place, its favorite labors and its favorite impulses; but it subsists always one and entire; it never renounces any one of its grand hopes or of its grand operations; and those men strangely mutilate and debase it who represent the mind as having, during ages, lost itself in the vain effort to attain a knowledge of God and of its own nature, and who condemn it henceforth to take up its quarters in the science of matter--of its forces--of its laws. {304}