Manon Phlipon did not change her religious feelings or devout practices during this period. She was living a religious life of peculiar intensity, all the time that she was deep in the examination of doctrines. The one was for her an affair of the heart, the other of the head. Her letters to Sophie, after the question of doubt had once been broached between them, are filled, now with philosophical analyses of dogma, now with glowing piety, now with severe rules of conduct. It was some time after she took to reasoning before the subject came up. Sophie’s own faith was troubled and she pictured her state to her friend. Manon, touched by this confidence, greater than her own had been, freely portrayed afterwards her own mental and spiritual condition. From these letters we find that she reached, very early in her study, certain conclusions which she never abandoned, and upon these as a basis erected a system which satisfied her heart and mind and which regulated her conduct. When she first wrote Sophie she was so convinced of the existence of God for “philosophical reasons” that she declared the authority of the world could not upset her. With this went the immortality of the soul. These two dogmas were enough to satisfy her heart and imagination. She did not need them to be upright, she said, but she did to be happy. She did right because she had convinced herself that it was to her own and to her neighbor’s interest. She was happy because she had a reasonable basis for goodness and nobility, and because she believed in God and in immortality. On this foundation further study became an inspiration. “My sentiments have gained an energy, a warmth, a range,” she wrote to Sophie after reading Raynal’s _Philosophical History_, “that the exhortations of priests have never given them—the General Good is my idol, because it must be the result and the reasonable end of everything. Virtue pleases me, inflames my imagination because it is good for me, useful to others, and beautiful in itself. I cherish life because I feel the value of it. I use it to the best advantage possible. I love all that breathes, I hate nothing but evil, and still I pity the guilty. With a conduct conformed to these ideas, I live happy and tranquil, and I shall finish my career in peace and with the greatest confidence in a God whom I dare believe to be better than I have been taught.” She had her fundamentals, but she had not by any means finished her investigations. Each system she examined, fascinated her. In turn she was Jansenist, stoic, deist, materialist, idealist. “The same thing happens to me sometimes,” she wrote Sophie, “that happened to the prince who went to the Court to hear the pleas,—the last lawyer who spoke always seemed to him to be right.” “I am continually in doubt, and I sleep there peacefully as the Americans in their hammocks. This state is best suited to our situation and to the little we know.”