LXXIV.
I soon learned to love this charming and talented old man. If I am destined to attain old age, I should wish to grow old like him. There was but one thing grieved me as I looked at him,—it was to see him advancing towards death, without believing in Immortality. The natural sciences that he had so deeply studied had accustomed his mind to trust exclusively to the evidence of his senses. Nothing existed for him that was not palpable; what could not be calculated contained no element of certitude in his eyes; matter and figures composed his universe; numbers were his god; the phenomena of Nature were his revelations, Nature herself his Bible and his gospel; his virtue was instinct, not seeing that numbers, phenomena, Nature, and virtue are but hieroglyphs inscribed on the veil of the temple, whose unanimous meaning is—Deity. Sublime but stubborn minds, who wonderfully ascend the steps of science, one by one,—but will never pass the last, which leads to God.