You have built yourself a hut in the Infinite of numbers, you have adorned it with hieroglyphics scientifically arranged and painted, and you cry out, 'All is here!' "Let us pass from pure, unmingled Number to corporate Number.

Your geometry establishes that a straight line is the shortest way from one point to another, but your astronomy proves that God has proceeded by curves.

Here, then, we find two truths equally proved by the same science,--one by the testimony of your senses reinforced by the telescope, the other by the testimony of your mind; and yet the one contradicts the other.

Man, liable to err, affirms one, and the Maker of the worlds, whom, so far, you have not detected in error, contradicts it.

Who shall decide between rectalinear and curvilinear geometry?
between the theory of the straight line and that of the curve?
If, in His vast work, the mysterious Artificer, who knows how to reach His ends miraculously fast, never employs a straight line except to cut off an angle and so obtain a curve, neither does man himself always rely upon it.