Before going further it may be convenient to estimate the strength and weakness of this famous dilemma, and to inquire how we may escape from it. The traditional theology succumbs to it. But this only proves that that theology needs reforming. Let us place ourselves at a different point of view, and examine for a moment the idea of perfection which serves as the premise to Strauss's reasoning. When he speaks of the total or plenary perfection which cannot be found in the first link of an historical chain, he doubtless means a quantitative perfection--that is to say, a complete collection of virtues, merits, and faculties the numerical addition of which makes the notion entire. Now, from this point of view, Strauss's observation is incontestable. Neither the perfection of science comprising all scientific discoveries, nor the perfection of civilisation embracing all the progress and all the forms of human life, are ever found or could be found at the beginning or at any given moment in the course of history. One individual, however great, could not exhaust the life or labour of the species so as to render evolution useless. But have you noticed that this idea of perfection is contradictory, and therefore chimerical? Under the category of quantity or of extension there could be no real perfection either for the individual or for the species. No sooner is anything that can be counted or measured conceived than the mind instantly conceives something greater. There is no such thing as perfect number. Here therefore it is needful to make an essential distinction. We must distinguish between the quantity and the quality, or rather, the intensity, of being. Now, between the degrees of both these things there is not the slightest relation, nor consequently any common measure. And that which is true in the one becomes false in the other. Take a cubic metre of stone, multiply it by a thousand or a million, you will still have the same stone--that is to say, there is not more true reality in a million cubic metres of stone than there is in one. But let a bit of moss spring up in a fissure in that stone; in that bit of living moss there is more being, or, if you will, being of a higher quality than that of a whole mass of rocks. Still, do not forget that it needed a germ to produce it, and that this germ was a sort of positive perfection in relation to all inorganic matter, whose last end is life. This is why we may boldly say that evolution is not the cause of anything; that no development ever gives more than what is hidden in the new germ which engenders it; that a hundred thousand imbeciles do not make a man of genius, and that if man descended from a monkey all the monkeys in creation put together do not make up one human consciousness. From this synthetic point of view, it will no longer seem contradictory, but natural, and in full accordance with the analogies of history, that we should meet in the person of the Founder of Christianity that perfect relation to God, that perfection of piety which every Christian still experiences within himself, and which he declares he has drawn from communion with Him.