I cannot comprehend the co-existence of the finite and the infinite; but this duality is everywhere. I observe that in the physical as in the moral world there is, in each phenomenon, a latent force, a sort of potential energy, which raises it and urges it beyond itself. Nature is perpetually becoming, that is to say, in perpetual travail. It is not true that there is nothing new under the sun, and that the future must simply repeat the past. Creation is not yet completed. "My Father worketh hitherto," said Jesus. "It doth not yet appear what we shall be." But the little that I perceive of the Divine work demonstrates to me that it is progressive, that it raises and enriches life at every step, and that this progress accounts exactly for the essential antinomies amid which my reason loses itself and my heart adores. To wish to reduce everything to unity is to turn the kingdom of life into the domain of death. For my part, I have long since renounced what is justly called "the philosophy of identity," that abstract dialectic which, throwing all things back to their point of logical departure, renders perfectly incomprehensible and superfluous the ephemeral development which they have in our consciousness and in history. The painful contradictions observed by Pascal in our moral life, and the insoluble antinomies in our thought unveiled by Kant, always seem to me to go nearer to the bottom of things than the ontological deductions of Plato, Spinoza, and Hegel. * * * * * In this book I have hardly noted any but facts that have been verified in myself and by myself. It is true that I suppose that every reflective reader is capable of finding them and tracing them out in his own personal experience. Those who are able and wishful to re-read my book in themselves, and thus verify my analyses, may perhaps draw some profit from it. Those who read me otherwise will not only lose their time and pains--they will misunderstand at every step the meaning of my phrases and the direction of my ideas. Beneath my reasonings or my images they will put other ideas and other intentions than mine, and they may afterwards, with an apparent good conscience, deduce from them the most terrible consequences.... Philosophical language lends itself to all and permits all; and the mischief of it is that it would be useless to desire to prevent these quarrels. New explanations only give rise to new misunderstandings, and simply serve to perpetuate a dispute without interest and without fruit. We can only repeat the saying of the ancient sages of Arabia: _Magna est veritas et praevalebit_. THE END