ABSTRACT
Religions, like science and like laws, are preceded by a lengthy confused period during which magic keeps enclosed the seeds of the most disparate developments. Science is younger than religion, and no one believes that it ought to disappear. Ernest Renan believed that certain privileged peoples had each brought a cornerstone to modern civilization, and he was disposed to distill the initiatives in a very rigorous way. The legislative activity of parliaments has greatly contributed to diminishing respect for law. The Greek work of science, rationality, experimental civilization—devoid of charlatanism, without revelations, based on reason and liberty—will continue without end. The human mind would have been able to reveal itself less exacting than it had been among the Greeks, by not demanding a total rationality analogous to that which the rigorous constructions of the Hellenic temples introduced into geometry, and which passed into all science.
