"Our civilisation is not very deep, Monsieur," he said. "There is always a large inert mass of humanity untouched by the movement of thought. From them we may expect a new religion, a new morality. We have denied and disproved, as you say, so many things, that at last we shall come to the sole reality. We have rendered man's personality vague and mysterious, until it seems scarcely to exist except as a point of development; we must seek deeper for his reality. And in any case, Monsieur, you overrate the value of reason. In my charming walk through life I had sufficient experience to learn that man is not entirely a creature of reason. There are few people without a conscience. The fault of this age is not so much that it is scientific, as that it is mechanical and removed from the contemplation of Nature." "I have sometimes thought," said Leo, "that the principal hope for religion lies in the fact that the lower classes do not think." "It is true," said Renan; "religion is some hidden consciousness working toward unknown ends. Mankind is not entirely reasonable; it has a conscience. We can no more say that this conscience is an artificial product of society, than we can say that reason is an artificial product also. The curiosity which is so amusing a feature of the intelligence of cats and monkeys is an earlier stage of the scientific curiosity; and, on the other hand, animals have shown gratitude to their masters, and thus the rudiments of virtue. Man, in recognising his conscience, has developed the abstract virtues of justice, of pity, of unselfishness; it does not affect the main question that his choice between virtue and vice should not be entirely free, nor that the distinction between them should not be always clear. We do not reproach science because it has not yet shown us what course our sun and its train of planets are taking in their journey toward a star in Hercules, nor because it has been unable, by its study of the rapidity and direction of other solar systems, to give to them an approximate fixity in connection with ourselves, to draw what would really be a map of the heavens.