upon nature for the first time.  I heard with surprise the buzzing of the flies, the song of the birds, and that mysterious and confused noise of the living creation which involuntarily celebrates its Author.  Ineffable concert, to which man alone has the sublime privilege of adding the accents of gratitude!  Who is the author of this brilliant mechanism?  I exclaimed in the transport which animated me.  Who is He that, opening his creative hand, let fly the first swallow into the air?  It is He who gave commandment to these trees to come forth from the ground, and to lift their branches toward the sky!”

Here is a charming page, and containing, though apparently trivial in style, a good and sound philosophy.  Let us translate this delightful description into the heavier language of science.

The intellect is one of the things with which we are best acquainted; logic is the science of thought, and logic is perhaps, among all the sciences, the one best settled on its bases.  The intellect discovers itself to us in the exercise of our activity.  We pursue an object, we combine the means for attaining it, and it is the intellect which operates this combination.  What happens if we compare the results of our activity with the results of the power manifested in the world?  When we consider in their vast ensemble the means of which nature disposes, when we remark the infinite number of the relations of things, the marvellous harmony of which universal life is the produce, we are dazzled by the splendor of a wisdom which surpasses our own as much as boundless space surpasses the imperceptible spot which we occupy upon the earth.  Think of this:  the science of nature is so vast that the least of its departments suffices to absorb one human lifetime.  All our sciences are only in their very beginning; they are spelling out the first lines of an immense book.  The elements of the universe are numberless; and yet, notwithstanding, all hangs together; all things are linked one to another in the closest connection.  The savants therefore find themselves in a strange embarrassment.  They are obliged to circumscribe more and more the field of their researches, on pain of losing themselves in an endless study; and, on the other hand, in proportion as science advances, the mutual relation of all its branches becomes so manifest that it is ever more and more clearly seen that, in order to know any one thing thoroughly, it would be necessary to know all.  It needs not that we seek very high or very far away for occasions of astonishment:  the least of the objects which nature presents to our view contains abysses of wisdom.