You, my dear master, with your universal comprehension of natures, with your facility in disentangling the line which unites the temperament and the medium of ideas, you would have seen in Count André a very definite and significant case. And for what had I prepared my locked notebook if not to collect documents of this kind upon human nature? And was there not here everything new in the person of this officer, so single and so simple, who manifested a mode of thought evidently identical with his mode of being, breathing, moving, smoking and eating? Ah! I see too well that my philosophy was not as blood in my veins, as marrow in my bones, for this discourse and the convictions it expressed, instead of pleasing me by this rare encounter of logic, only enlarged the wound of antipathy which had been already opened, I knew not where, in my self-love perhaps, for I was weak and frail in the presence of the strong--surely in my inmost sensibility. None of the count’s ideas had the least value in my eyes. They were for me pure foolishness, and instead of despising this foolishness, as I should have despised it in any other case, I began to hate it in his mouth. A soldier’s profession? I considered it so wretched, because of its brutal associations and the time lost, that I was glad that I was the son of a widow that I might escape the barbarity of the barracks and the miseries of its discipline. The hatred of Germany? I had tried to destroy it in myself, as the worst of prejudices, from disgust of the imbecile comrades whom I saw exalt it into an ignorant patriotism, and also from admiration for the people to whom psychology owes Kant and Schopenhauer, Lotze and Fechner, Helmholz and Wundt. Political faith? I professed an equal disdain for the gross hypotheses which, under the name of legitism, republicanism, Cæsarism, pretended to govern a country _a priori_. I dreamed with the author of the “Dialogues Philosophiques,” of an oligarchy of savants, a despotism of psychologists and economists, of physiologists and historians. Practical life? This was a diminished life for me, who saw in the external world only a field of experiences in which an enfranchised soul ventures with prudence, just far enough to collect emotions. Finally this contempt for falsehood which the count professed struck me as an affront, at the same time that his absolute confidence in my morality, based upon a false impression of me, embarrassed me, chilled me, hurt me.