My father had endowed me with a premature curiosity of mind. As he was not there to direct me toward the world of positive knowledge, this curiosity fell back upon myself. The mind is a living creature, and as with all other creatures, every power is accompanied by a want. It would be necessary to reverse the old proverb and say: To be able is to wish. A faculty in us always leads to the wish to exercise it. Mental hereditary and my early education made an intellectual being of me before my time. I continued to be such a being, but all my intellect was applied to my own emotions. I became an absolute egoist with an extraordinary energy of disdain with regard to everyone else. These traits of my character appeared later under the influence of the crises of ideas though which I have passed and of which I owe you the history. § II. THE MEDIUM OF IDEAS. The diverse influences which I have just rather abstractly summarized, but in terms which you will understand, my dear master, had first this unexpected result, to make of me a very pious child, between my eleventh and my fifteenth year. If I had been placed in the college as a boarder, I should have grown like my comrades whom I have since studied and for whom there has never been a religious crisis. At the period of which I am writing, and which marked the definite advent of the democratic party in France, a great wave of free thought rolled from Paris into all the provinces; but I was the son of a very devout woman, and I was subjected to all the observances of religion. I find a proof of what I have told you of my precocious taste for analysis in the fact that unlike all my young companions, I was delighted with the confessional. I can say that, during the four years of the mystic crisis of youth, from 1876 to 1880, the great events of my life were these long séances in the narrow wooden box in the church Des Minimes, which was our parish church, where I went every fortnight to kneel down and speak in a low voice, with a beating heart, of what was passing within me. The approach of my first communion marked the birth of this feeling for the confessional, mixed with contradictory elements. I believed, consequently, my little sins appeared to me to be veritable crimes, and to confess them made me ashamed. I repented, and I had the certainty that I rose pardoned, with the delight of a conscience washed from every stain. I was an imaginative and nervous child, and there was for me in the scenery of the sacrament, in the cold silence of the church, in the odor of vault and incense which filled it, in the stammering of my own voice saying, “My father,” and in the whispering of the priest responding, “my son,” from behind the grating, a poetry of mystery which I felt without understanding.