You obtain none but dead substances, from which you have driven the unknown force that holds in check the decomposition of all things here below, and of which cohesion, attraction, vibration, and polarity are but phenomena.
Life is the thought of substances; bodies are only the means of fixing life and holding it to its way.

If bodies were beings living of themselves they would be Cause itself, and could not die.
"When a man discovers the results of the general movement, which is shared by all creations according to their faculty of absorption, you proclaim him mighty in science, as though genius consisted in explaining a thing that is! Genius ought to cast its eyes beyond effects.

Your men of science would laugh if you said to them: 'There exist such positive relations between two human beings, one of whom may be here, and the other in Java, that they can at the same instant feel the same sensation, and be conscious of so doing; they can question each other and reply without mistake'; and yet there are mineral substances which exhibit sympathies as far off from each other as those of which I speak.
You believe in the power of the electricity which you find in the magnet and you deny that which emanates from the soul! According to you, the moon, whose influence upon the tides you think fixed, has none whatever upon the winds, nor upon navigation, nor upon men; she moves the sea, but she must not affect the sick folk; she has undeniable relations with one half of humanity, and nothing at all to do with the other half.
These are your vaunted certainties! "Let us go a step further.

You believe in physics.

But your physics begin, like the Catholic religion, with an _act of faith_.