From a similar motive this man, who was so gentle that he had not given three commands to his servant in fifteen years, systematically forbade himself all charity. On this point he agreed with Spinoza who has written in the fourth book of the Ethics: “Pity, for a wise man who lives according to reason, is bad and useless.” This Saint Lais, as he might have been called as justly as the venerable Emile Littré, hated in Christianity the excessive fondness for humanity. He gave these two reasons for it: first that the hypothesis of a Heavenly Father and of eternal happiness had developed to excess the distaste for the real and had diminished the power to accept the laws of nature; second, in establishing the social order upon love, that is, upon sensibility, this religion had opened the way to all the caprices of the most personal doctrines. He did not suspect that his faithful servant had sewed consecrated medals into all his vests, and his indifference with regard to the external world was so complete that he went without meat on Fridays and on other days prescribed by the Church, without perceiving this effort on the part of the old maid to assure the salvation of a master of whom she sometimes said, repeating unconsciously a celebrated saying: “The good God would not be the good God, if he had the heart to damn him.” These years of continuous labor in this hermitage of the Rue Guy de la Brosse had produced, beside the “Anatomy of the Will,” a “Theory of the Passions,” in three volumes, whose publication would have been still more scandalous than that of the “Psychology of God,” if the extreme liberty of the press for ten years had not accustomed readers to audacities of description which the mild, technical ferocity of a savant could not equal. In these two books is found, precisely stated, the doctrine of M. Sixte which it is necessary to take up again here, in some of its general features, for the intelligent understanding of the drama to which this short biography serves as prologue. With the critical school sprung from Kant, the author of these three treatises admits that the mind is powerless to know causes and substances, and that it ought only to co-ordinate phenomena. With the English psychologists, he admits that one group among these phenomena, those which are classed under the name of soul, may be the object of scientific knowledge, on condition of their being studied after a scientific method. Up to this point, as we all see, there is nothing in these theories which distinguishes them from those which Messrs. Taine, Ribot and their disciples have developed in their principal works.