Science is perpetually becoming. If at times it closes to piety dear and familiar prospects, it necessarily and constantly opens new ones. If it takes away its crutches, it gives it wings. The contemplation of the harmony of the worlds which moves us religiously is, it seems to me, worth more to modern thought than the fatidical oracle, or the cry of the crow that frightened the good old woman of Rome. The more science progresses the more it puts into things the order and harmony of thought. It can only create a Cosmos more and more intelligible and, consequently, susceptible of an increasingly religious interpretation.
At the same time as science instituted its severest methods, it radically transformed its primary notion of Nature. This was conceived by the Cartesian Rationalism as a finished and coherent whole, a system of identical movements and phenomena which were produced by virtue of the same springs acting in the same circle (the vortices of Descartes). The familiar image under which they loved to represent it was that of a watch, constructed and wound up by the divine artificer once for all. Now, we see this dogma of the immutability of Nature going to join the other dogmas of the past. The theory of the ascensional evolution of beings, which renders miracle useless, shows Nature to us in the course of constant transformation and perpetual travail. Nothing in it is stable or final. Everything is preparatory to something else; each form of life is the preface to a higher form. What then is the hidden mystery which ferments in the bosom of this painful nature and endeavours to expand?
"The more cannot issue from the less," said the schoolmen, and no doubt in abstract logic they were right. But reality smiles at logic. It shows us everywhere the triumph of the opposite maxim. Perfection is at the beginning of nothing. Cosmic evolution proceeds always from that which is poorer to that which is richer, from the simple to the complex, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from dead matter to living matter, from physical to mental life. At each stage Nature surpasses itself by a mysterious creation that resembles a true miracle in relation to an inferior stage. What then shall we conclude from these observations except that in Nature there is a hidden force, an incommensurable "potential energy," an ever open, never exhausted fount of apparitions at once magnificent and unexpected? How can such a universe escape the teleological interpretation of religious faith? For the moment, science may accord nothing more to piety; but piety has no need to ask more from it; for it has already in this way found safeguarded the three things which the old notion of miracle guaranteed to it: the real and active presence of God, the answer to prayer, and liberty to hope.