The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES totalized reality to which science cannot bear witness, but which the very existence of the details seems to force her to recognize and to admit. Science submits the reasons of persons and things to the universal mathematical reason ; faith seeks, or rather supposes, an intelligent and absolute reason for (and above) mathematics themselves. Science demonstrates justice by justness; faith gives an absolute justness to justice, in subordinating it to Providence. One sees here all that faith borrows from science, and all that science, in its turn, owes to faith. Without faith, science is circumscribed by an absolute doubt, and finds itself eternally penned within the risky em- piricism of a reasoning scepticism; without science, faith constructs its hypotheses at random, and can only blindly prejudge the causes of the effects of which she is ignorant. The great chain which reunites science and faith is analogy. Science is obliged to respect a belief whose hypotheses are analogous to demonstrated truths. Faith, which attributes everything to God, is obliged to admit science as being a natural revelation which, by the partial manifestation of the laws of eternal reason, gives a scale of proportion to all the aspirations and to all the excursions of the soul into the domain of the unknown. It is, then, faith alone that can give a solution to the mysteries of science; and in return, it is science alone that demonstrates the necessity of the mysteries of faith. Outside the union and the concourse of these two living forces of the intelligence, there is for science nothing but H2 99