inform a magistrate, that he ought to enquire into the truth by all the means that scrupulous anxiety can suggest; he should know, that, called to decide on the life and the honour of men, his understanding and his heart, ought to be enlisted in the cause of humanity, and that there are not any limits opposed to bound his duty; then, without failing in any of the enquiries ordained by the laws, he would force himself to go still further, that no evidence proper to make an impression on a reasonable man might be rejected, at the same time, that none might have so decisive a force, that the examination of circumstances would ever appear useless; the judges then would make use of that sagacity, which seems to discern instinctively; they would not then disdain to read even the looks of the accuser and the accused, and they would not believe it a matter of indifference to observe with attention, all those emotions of nature, where sometimes truth is painted with so much energy; then, in short, innocence would be under the protection of something as pure as itself, the scrupulous conscience of a judge. We have never, perhaps, sufficiently considered how much a methodical order, when we confine ourselves too servilely to it, contracts the bounds of the mind; it becomes then like a foot-path traced between two banks, which prevents our discovering what is not in a strait line. The strict observance of method diverts us also from consulting that light, sometimes so lively, of which the soul only is the focus; for in subjecting us to a positive course of things always regular, and in making us find pleasure in a determined path, which offers continual repose to our thoughts, it incapacitates for thinking that delicate perception of natural sentiments, which has nothing fixed or circumscribed, but whose free flight often makes us approach to truth, as by a kind of instinct or inspiration. I should stray too far from my subject, if I extended these reflections, and I hasten to connect them with the subject of this chapter, in repeating again, that if the laws are insufficient, even in those decisions submitted to their authority, and if the they have absolute need of the aid of religion, whenever they impose on their private expounders duties a little complicated; they would be still less able to supply the habitual and daily influence of that motive, the most powerful of all, and the only one at the same time, of which the action will be sufficiently penetrating to follow us in the mazes of our conduct, and in the labyrinth of our thoughts.