In allusion to the study which Cauchy had made
of the mechanistic theory of the reflection of light, Pere Gratry threw
out the suggestion that one on the greatest intellectual joys of the
great geometrician in the future life would be to penetrate into the
secret of light. To which Cauchy replied that it did not appear to him
to be possible to know more about this than he himself already knew,
neither could he conceive how the most perfect intelligence could arrive
at a clearer comprehension of the mystery of reflection than that
manifested in his own explanation of it, seeing that he had furnished a
mechanistic theory of the phenomenon. "His piety," Brunhes adds, "did
not extend to a belief that God Himself could have created anything
different or anything better."
From this narrative two points of interest emerge. The first is the idea
expressed in it as to what contemplation, intellectual love, or beatific
vision, may mean for men of a superior order of intelligence, men whose
ruling passion is knowledge; and the second is the implicit faith shown
in the mechanistic explanation of the world.
This mechanistic tendency of the intellect coheres with the well-known
formula, "Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is
transformed"--a formula by means of which it has been sought to
interpret the ambiguous principle of the conservation of energy,
forgetting that practically, for us, for men, energy is utilizable
energy, and that this is continually being lost, dissipated by the
diffusion of heat, and degraded, its tendency being to arrive at a
dead-level and homogeneity.
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