I found in the first of these three works, the “Psychology of God,” a definite alleviation of the religious anguish in which I had continued to live, in spite of temptation and of doubts. Certainly, objections to the dogmas had not been lacking, as I had read so many books which manifested the most audacious irreligion, and I had been drawn toward skepticism, as I have told you, because I found in it the double character of intellectual superiority and of sentimental novelty. I had felt, among other influences, that of the author of the “Life of Jesus.” The exquisite magic of his style, the sovereign grace of his dilettanteism, the languorous poetry of his pious impiety had affected me deeply, but it was not for nothing that I was the son of a geometrician, and I had not been satisfied with what there was of uncertainty, of shadow in this incomparable artist. It was the mathematical rigor of your book which at once took possession of my mind. You demonstrated with irresistible dialectics, that any hypothesis upon the first cause is nonsense, even the idea of this first cause is an absurdity, nevertheless this nonsense and this absurdity are as necessary to our mind as is the illusion to our eyes of a sun turning around the earth, although we know that the sun is immovable and that the earth itself is in motion. The all-powerful ingenuity of this reasoning charmed my intellect, which docilely yielded to your vision of the lucid and rational world. I perceived the universe as it is, pouring out without beginning, and without end, the tide of inexhaustible phenomena. The care which you have taken to found all your arguments upon facts taken from science corresponded too well with the teaching of my father not to have subdued me. I read your pages over and over again, summarized them, commented upon them, applied them with the ardor of a neophyte, in order to assimilate all the substance. The intellectual pride which I had felt from my childhood became exalted in the young man who learned from you the renunciations of the sweetest, of the most comforting topics. Ah! how shall I tell you of the fervor of an initiation which was like a first love in the delights of its enthusiasm? I felt it a physical joy to overthrow, with your books in my hand, the entire edifice of beliefs in which I had grown up. Yes, this was the masculine felicity which Lucretius has celebrated, that of the liberating negation, and not the cowardly melancholy of a Jouffroy.