These scientific men, Berthelot and Bernard, with whom Renan was on terms of friendship, had a large influence in the formation of his thought, after he had quitted the seminary and the Church. As a young man Renan possessed the positive spirit in a marked degree, and did not fail to disclose his enthusiasm for “Science” and for the scientific method. His book _L’Avenir de la Science_, which we have already noted, was written when he was only twenty-five, and under the immediate influence of the events of 1848, particularly the socialist spirit of Saint-Simon and the “organising” attitude of Auguste Comte. It did not, however, see publication until 1890, when the Empire had produced a pessimistic temper in him, later accentuated by the Commune and the Prussian War. The dominant note of the whole work is the touching and almost pathetic belief in Science, which leads the young writer to an optimism both in thought and in politics. “Science” constitutes for him the all-in-all. Although he had just previously abandoned the seminary, his priestly style remained with him to such a degree that even his treatment of science is characterised by a mixture of the unction of the _curé_ and the subtilty of the dialectician. Levites were still to be necessary to the people of Israel, but they were to be the priests of the most High, whose name, according to Renan, was “Science.”
His ardour for Science is not confined to this one book: it runs through all his writings. Prospero, a character who personifies rational thought in _L’Eau de Jouvence_, one of Renan’s _Drames philosophiques_, expresses an ardent love for science continually. In his preface to _Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse_ we find Renan upon the same theme. Quaintly enough he not only praises the objectivity which is characteristic of the scientific point of view, but seems to delight in its abstraction. The superiority of modern science consists, he claims, in this very abstraction. But he is aware that the very indefatigability with which we fathom nature removes us, in a sense, further from her. He recognises how science leads away from the immediacy of vital and close contact with nature herself. “This is, however, as it should be,” asserts Renan, “and let no one fear to prosecute his researches, for out of this merciless dissection comes life.” He does not stay to assure us, or to enlighten us, as to how that life can be infused into the abstract facts which have resulted from the process of dissection. Fruitful and suggestive as many of his pages are, they fail to approach the concrete difficulties which this passage mentions.