On the whole, modern philosophy is the codification of an acquired infirmity: the intellectual atrophy of man marked by the "fall" entails a hypertrophy of practical intelligence, whence in the final analysis the explosion of the physical sciences and the appearance of pseudo-sciences such as psychology and sociology.(1)

1. In the nineteenth century, the desire to reconcile faith and reason, or the religious spirit and science, appeared in the form of occultism: a hybrid phenomenon that despite its phantasmagoria had some merits, if only by its opposition to materialism and to confessional superficiality.