I regard with very complicated feelings, with feelings of great perplexity, the actual state of my country; its intellectual and moral state as well as its social and its political state. I have a mind full at once of confidence and of disquietude, of hope and of alarm. Whether for good or for evil, the crisis in which the civilized world is plunged is infinitely more serious than our fathers predicted it would be; more so than even we, who are already experiencing from it the most different consequences, believe it ourselves to be. Sublime truths, excellent principles, are intrinsically blended with ideas essentially false and perverse. A noble work of progress, a hideous work of destruction, are in operation simultaneously in men's opinions and in society. Humanity never so floated between heaven and the abyss. It is especially when I regard the generation now advancing, when I hear what they affirm, when I gather a hint of what they desire and hope for, it is especially then that I feel at once sympathy and anxiety. {8} Sentiments of propriety and of generosity abound in those young hearts; they reject, when once convinced of their justice, neither the ideas which they before did not admit, nor the curb to which by the inspiration of the divine law even human ambition does not refuse to submit; but by a strange and deplorable amalgam, good instincts and evil tendencies exist in them simultaneously; ideas the least reconcilable clash together, and persist in them at the same time. The Truth does not rid them of the error; a light indeed shines upon them, but out of a chaotic darkness which that light has not the power to dissipate. In the presence of this condition of men's minds, under the impulse of the sentiment which it inspires, I publish this second series of _Meditations_. {9} In touching upon the great questions at present under debate in the philosophical world, in expressing my opinion concerning Rationalism, Positivism, Pantheism, Materialism, Skepticism, I have not for a moment pretended to discuss these different systems completely and scientifically. Although I am convinced that they are no more in a condition to support any profound examination of severe reason than to stand the first regard of common sense, the object which I propose to myself is to indicate only their radical and incurable vice. This is no treatise of Metaphysics; it is only an appeal addressed to upright and independent minds; an appeal made to induce them to subject science to the test of the human conscience, and to regard with distrust systems, which, in the name of a pretended scientific truth, would, between the intellectual order and the moral order, between the thought and the life of man, destroy the harmony established by the law of God. Guizot. Val-Richer, _April_, 1866. {10} {11} Contents. Page Preface 3