"Ah, no!—ah, no! The indestructible thing is being. This body which is there before me—yours, doctor—prevents me from knowing your real self, and is, so to speak, only a garment, or rather a mask."
Vaucorbeil believed he was mad.
"Good evening. Take care of your mask."
Pécuchet did not stop. He procured an introduction to the Hegelian philosophy, and wished to explain it to Bouvard.
"All that is rational is real. There is not even any reality save the idea. The laws of the mind are laws of the universe; the reason of man is identical with that of God."
Bouvard pretended to understand.
"Therefore the absolute is, at the same time, the subject and the object, the unity whereby all differences come to be settled. Thus, things that are contradictory are reconciled. The shadow permits the light; heat and cold intermingled produce temperature. Organism maintains itself only by the destruction of organism; everywhere there is a principle that disunites, a principle that connects."
They were on the hillock, and the curé was walking past the gateway with his breviary in his hand.
Pécuchet asked him to come in, as he desired to finish the explanation of Hegel, and to get some notion of what the curé would say about it.
The man of the cassock sat down beside them, and Pécuchet broached the question of Christianity.