What I Propose.
I propose a great, a worthy subject for your study. At those oratorical sessions which are rapidly increasing under the name of conferences, sessions at which so many distinguished men take the floor, you have been told in elegant terms, often in eloquent terms, of the sciences, of their application and of their progress. You have listened to discourses upon art, its primitive purity, its supposed principles, its decadence, its renaissance, its multifarious changes; its masterpieces have been pointed out to you; they have been described to you; you have, in some degree, been made familiar with their origin. You have heard the story of the lives of the great artists. They have been shown to you in their weakness and in their strength. The times and manners amid which they lived have been painted for you in more or less imaginary colors. I propose something better than all this.
I offer you a work superior even to those sciences which have been described to you; superior to all which the genius of a Michael Angelo or a Raphael could conceive; a work in comparison with which all the magnificences of science and of art must pale. I propose that you should contemplate yourselves!
Nothing is so unfamiliar to man as himself. I will, therefore, as I have promised, show you the marvels which God himself has placed within you, in the transluminous obscurities of your being.
Now, if there be more science, more genius in the production of a violet or a worm than is revealed by all the combined powers of science and of art, how much admiration should we not feel at the sight of all the splendors which God has spread broadcast in the privileged work wherein He was pleased to reveal his own image! But a light inaccessible to the vain demonstrations of your sciences constantly removes this mysterious image from your gaze. As light eludes the eye which it illumines, if we would seize and contemplate it, we must have two things: we must have a special and a supernatural object. There must be light within you, and it must pierce the depths wherein that image dwells.
Here there is no question of the light which shines to show us the things of the natural world by which we are surrounded. Nor is it a question of the intellectual light sometimes visible to scholars. I speak of that light which is hidden from those very scholars because their eyes could not bear its lustre, a transluminous light which fills the soul with beatific visions, and of which it is said that God wraps it about Him as a mantle.
Now, three worlds, of the nature of which man partakes, are offered for our contemplation. These three worlds are: The natural, the intellectual, and the supernatural.
Three sorts of vision have been given man to initiate him into these three worlds. These different forms of vision are: Direct, inward and higher.
By means of direct vision man is made acquainted with the world of nature; by inward vision he is shown the world of science; and, lastly, by higher vision he sees the world of grace. But as there can be no vision where no light penetrates, it follows that between the three kinds of vision described and the corresponding worlds there must intervene three sorts of light, in order to produce the triple vision necessary for the knowledge of man:
Direct vision--sidereal light--natural world.
Inward vision--the light of tradition--the world of science.
Higher vision--revealed light--supernatural world.
Such are the conditions necessary for the understanding of my demonstrations.
Having prepared your eye for the vision of these three worlds which serve as the bases of art, I shall, then, reveal to you their splendors; happy if, thus, I can help to make you bless the author of so many marvels, and communicate to you those keen joys which perpetuate in the soul a fountain of youth which can never be quenched by the infirmities of the body.