but if so, prayer expires in meditation, in ecstasy, in a monotonous rocking of the cradle of thought to the rhythm of the phenomenal world, and religion becomes a religion of monism. But this religion does not spring in any proper sense from the notion of infinity, it, so to speak, hooks on to it rather; it is another example of man’s need, if not to personify, at least to individualize and to unify the infinite—so great is man’s need to project his individuality by main force, if need be, into the world! One is bent on endowing this great material body that one calls nature with some sort of a soul, one is bent on conceiving it in some fashion or other on the model of the human organism; and is not that, too, a species of anthropomorphism? [Sidenote: The conception of infinity a scientific discovery.] It is only later that human thought, carried away upon an endless voyage of discovery analogous to the migration of a primitive people, after having traversed the length of visible space and leaped the bound of its own intellectual horizon, attains the presence of the unfathomable ocean of the infinite. The infinite is for the human mind such a discovery as the ocean was for peoples who had wandered to its shores from the mountains and the plains. Just as for the newborn child the different planes of vision are indistinct and equally near; just as it is by the sense of touch that one learns little by little to recognize the depth of space and to acquire the conception of distance; just as, so to speak, it is with one’s own hand that one opens the horizon before one; in the same way to the uncultivated intelligence everything seems finite and limited; and it is only by moving forward that it perceives the breadth and depth of its domain. It is only to a mind upon the march that the great perspective of the infinite is thrown open. At bottom this conception of infinity is less due to any direct experience of mere things than to a sense of one’s own personal activity, to a belief in the perpetual progress open to human thought; action, as somebody has said,[17] is the real infinite or at least what appears as such. In this sense it may be admitted that there is in every human thought some vague presentiment of infinity, for there is a consciousness of a fund of activity which will not be exhausted in any given act nor in any given thought; to be conscious that one lives is thus in some sort to be conscious that one is infinite: illusion or reality, this notion forms a part of all our thoughts, turns up in every proposition of science; but it does not produce science, it is, on the contrary, born of it; it does not produce religion, which is the science of primitive ages, but descends from it. The conception of infinity in many respects resembles the ignorance of Socrates, the refined ignorance which was really in disguise the last development of intelligence. One of the antiscientific traits of existing religions is