Without insisting further on the merits or demerits of particular volumes, if we glance at the series as a whole we shall find it to be an unexampled achievement. It is more self-contained than "La Comédie Humaine," in writing which Balzac really had no definite plan. As M. Chaumié, French Minister of Public Instruction, has said: "In Zola's work one finds all society ... with the _milieux_ in which it displays its activity, the men composing it, the passions which stir and sway them, their vices, sorrows, and miseries, the sufferings too of the disinherited,--the whole forming so striking and so true a picture that after contemplating it those with the poorest like those with the keenest sight must realise the necessity of remedying those sufferings, contending against those vices, and assuaging those sorrows.... Thus, what might have been only an admirable literary achievement, an inestimable document on a period, an ever-living picture of a given time ... acquires greater grandeur, is insured of yet loftier glory, by the generous spirit which inspired it."[11] [Illustration: Maître Labori] Further, though it has been suggested here that some exaggeration and some flaws may appear in the psychology of certain individual characters, the series as a whole responds to Taine's definition of literature as "a living psychology." As M. Paul Bourget has said: "Zola regarded the novel as a kind of hypothetical experiment, attempted on positive bases, the first condition for success being that the bases should be accurate and the hypothesis logical. When the hour of justice strikes for that unwearying toiler people will recognise what immense preliminary toil and study lay beneath each of his books. They will also discern his unwavering purpose to inquire fully into the condition of contemporary France, to carry his inquiry as far as possible in order to set the social problem completely and accurately before one. His right to depict all reality (_la réalité totale_), which is that of every sociologist, even of every historian, will not be disputed then."