the natural faith of mankind in the divine revelation, and in the relations of the Creator with his creatures. If the spiritualistic school refused from its very origin to admit these facts, drawn from cosmogony and from man's history, into the sphere of its labors; if it limited psychology to its peculiar scientific object--the study of the human soul--I am far from making such refusal matter of reproach: for the Spiritualists did thereby nothing but what they were entitled and called upon to do. But they have fallen into a twofold error. While observing and describing psychological facts, they did not perceive nor accept all that they imported: they saw in the intelligent man the work and the trace of God; but they did not see what was implied in that man besides--that is, revelation as well as creation. They did not leave pure psychology to demand of kindred sciences, such as cosmology and history, whether their results accorded or did not accord with the results that they had deduced from psychology. {244} In short, on the one side they stopped short of the limits of the domain of psychology; and on the other, they confined themselves to it too exclusively. From this twofold error sprang another still more serious. Spiritualism gave birth to Rationalism--a transformation as unnatural as unfortunate, which has rendered the science of man and of the intellectual world still more inexact and incomplete! --------------------------------------- {245} Third Meditation. Rationalism. A man of a mind as unprejudiced as rare, one who will never be suspected of any undue bias for Christianity, M. Sainte-Beuve, avowing to me recently the high esteem with which M. Alexandre Vinet inspired him, borrowed an expression of Pascal's: "The heart has its reasons, which the reason does not comprehend." [Footnote 41] [Footnote 41: Between this phrase and that of Pascal there is a slight difference. Pascal said, "Le cœur a des raisons que la raison ne connaît point:" "The heart has reasons that the reason knows not at all." Pensées de Pascal, edition of M. Faugère, 1844, vol. ii, p. 172.] I only admit half of what is implied in this conciliatory phrase; and these are my reasons. {246} True religious faith, or, to call things by their real names, Christian faith, is founded upon instincts and upon sentiment at the same time that it is founded upon reasons. If reason do not accept the sentiments of the heart, on which side is the fault? Is the fault with the heart, that it feels them, or is it with the reason, that it does not comprehend them?