This hymn to science, of which each of your pages is a strophe, I listened to with a delight as much more intense as the faculty of analysis, the principal reason of my piety, had found, thanks to you, another way to exercise itself than at the confessional, and that your two great treatises had enlightened me as to my inner being, at the same time that your “Psychology of God” enlightened me in regard to the external universe, with a light which, even to-day, is my last, my inextinguishable beacon in the midst of the tempest. How you explained to me all the incoherences of my youth! This moral solitude in which I had suffered so much with my mother, with the Abbé Martel, with my comrades, with everyone, even Emile--I now understood. Have you not demonstrated, in your “Theory of the Passions,” that we are powerless to get away from Self, and that all relation between two beings reposes, like everything else, upon illusion? Tour “Anatomy of the Will” revealed to me the necessary motives, the inevitable logic of the yielding to the temptations of the senses for which I had suffered remorse so severe. The complications with which I reproached myself as a lack of frankness, you showed to be the very law of existence imposed by heredity. I found also, that, in searching the romancers and poets of the century for culpable and morbid conditions of soul, I had, without suspecting it, followed the inborn vocation of psychologist. Have you not written: “All souls must be considered by the psychologist as experiences instituted by nature. Among these experiences, some are useful to society and are called virtues; others are injurious and are called vices or crimes. These last are however, the more significant, and there would lack an essential element to the science of the mind, if Nero, for example, or some Italian tyrant of the fifteenth century had not existed?” On those warm summer days, I walked out, with one of these books in my pocket, and, when alone in the country, I read some of these sentences and became absorbed in meditation on their meaning. I applied to the country which surrounded me the philosophical interpretation of what we agree to call evil. Without doubt the eruptions which had raised the chain of the Domes, at whose feet I wandered, had devastated with burning lava the neighboring plain and destroyed living beings, but they had produced this magnificence of scenery which charmed me, when my eyes contemplated the graceful group of the Pariou, the Puy de Dôme and all the line of these noble mountains. The road was verdant with euphorbias in bloom, whose stems I broke to see the milk-white poison exuding from them. But these poisonous plants nourished the beautiful tithymal caterpillar, green with dark spots, from which a butterfly would be born, a sphinx with colored wings of the finest tint.