I soon learned to love this charming and talented old man. If I am
destined to attain old age, I should wish to grow old like him. There
was but one thing grieved me as I looked at him,--it was to see him
advancing towards death, without believing in Immortality. The natural
sciences that he had so deeply studied had accustomed his mind to trust
exclusively to the evidence of his senses. Nothing existed for him that
was not palpable; what could not be calculated contained no element of
certitude in his eyes; matter and figures composed his universe;
numbers were his god; the phenomena of Nature were his revelations,
Nature herself his Bible and his gospel; his virtue was instinct, not
seeing that numbers, phenomena, Nature, and virtue are but hieroglyphs
inscribed on the veil of the temple, whose unanimous meaning is--Deity.
Sublime but stubborn minds, who wonderfully ascend the steps of
science, one by one,--but will never pass the last, which leads to God.