In “La Recherche de l’Absolu,” the theme is continued, but viewed in a broader and more comprehensive light. In “La Peau de Chagrin,” the individual is destroyed by the force of desire. In “La Recherche de l’Absolu,” the pursuit of an idea annihilates an entire family. The first is the world of pleasure, an epoch in itself; the second is the world of science, and glitters with brilliant hypotheses. In both instances, an idea, gradually strengthened, becomes a passion and a disorganizing force. In “L’Adieu,” happiness, exalted to the highest degree, becomes a destructive agency. In “Le Réquisitionnaire”, a mother is killed by the violence of maternal affection. In “El Verdugo,” a father is slain by his son that a title may be preserved. In “Le Drame au Bord de la Mer,” a son is slain by his father that an hereditary instinct may be destroyed. In “Maître Cornélius,” avarice kills the miser. In “Le Chef d’Œuvre Inconnu,” art kills the artist. In “Gambara,” the composer is crazed by his own conceptions. In “L’Enfant Maudit,” terror is the destroyer, and the subject treated herein finds a natural and logical sequence in the “Auberge Rouge.” In “Les Proscrits,” the sentiment of religion becomes the destroyer, and in “Séraphita” the same idea is more vividly presented. “César Birotteau,” an existence untroubled by misery, is, through sudden good fortune, cut off as by a scythe. In the “Église,” the agent is incredulity, but in “Louis Lambert” is to be found the most severe deduction from the fundamental proposition in that it represents the thinker killed by thought. The destructive power of the mind and imagination, from the Neronian conflagration to the suicide of Castlereagh and Chatterton, the aphasia of Emerson, and the insanity of Tourgénieff, is too well known and too thoroughly understood to need further commentary in these pages; and in connection with this it need but be said that, while the attraction of gravity had been witnessed by countless generations, as it remained to Newton to formulate the obvious propositions of cause and effect, so in this branch of mental science, whose results have been patent since the beginning of history, a Balzac was necessary for the full elucidation of the subject, and for the proper presentation of the conclusions derived from the psycho-mental evidence of ages. After having, in the “Études de Mœurs,” described society in every aspect, and demonstrated in the “Études Philosophiques” all the underlying causes of the general results, Balzac proposed in the third and last division of the “Comédie Humaine,” namely, in the “Études Analytiques,” to examine the principles upon which the first two rest.