“There we agree,” responded Mariette, “for monsieur is a good man, though as to religion he is a regular pagan; he has not been to mass these fifteen years.” “There are plenty who do go,” replied Carbonnet, “who are sad dogs, and lead anything but a quiet life between four and midnight--without your knowing anything about it.” This fragment of conversation perhaps shows the type of opinion which Mariette held in regard to her master; but this opinion would be unintelligible if we did not recall here the works of the philosopher, and the trend of his thought. Born in 1839 at Nancy, where his father kept a little watchmaker’s shop, and remarkable for the precocity of his intellect, Adrien Sixte left among his comrades the remembrance of a child thin and taciturn, endowed with a strength of moral resistance which always discouraged familiarity. At first he was very brilliant in his studies, then mediocre, until in the class in philosophy which then bore the name of Logic, he distinguished himself by his exceptional aptitude. His professor, struck by his metaphysical talent, wished him to prepare for the normal school examination. Adrien refused and declared beside to his father that, taking one trade with another, he preferred manual labor. “I will be a watchmaker like you,” was his sole answer to the objurgations of his father, who, like the innumerable artisans, or French merchants whose children attend college, cherished the dream that his son might be a civil officer. M. and Mme. Sixte could not reproach this son, who did not smoke, never went to the _café_, was never seen with a girl, in fine, who was their pride, and to whose wishes they resigned themselves with a broken heart. They renounced a career for him, but they would not consent to putting him to an apprenticeship, hence, the young man lived at home with no other occupation than to study as suited his fancy. He employed ten years in perfecting himself in the study of English and German philosophy, in the natural sciences and especially in the physiology of the brain and in the mathematical sciences; finally, he gave himself, as one of the great thinkers of our epoch has said of himself, that “violent inflammation of the brain,” that kind of apoplexy of positive knowledge which was the process of education of Carlyle and of Mill, of Taine and Renan, and of nearly all the masters of modern philosophy. In 1868, the son of the watchmaker of Nancy, then twenty-five years of age, published a large volume of five hundred pages entitled: “Psychology of God,” which he did not send to more than fifteen persons, but which had the unexpected fortune of causing a scandalous echo. This book, written in the solitude of the most honest thought, presented the double character of a critical analysis, keen to severity, and an ardor in negation exalted to fanaticism. Less poetic than M. Taine, incapable of writing the magnificent preface to