_Stupidity._--The doubling of personality, the amnesia and the misoneism so common among men of science, are the key to the innumerable stupidities which intrude into their writings: _quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus_. Flaubert made a very curious collection of these, and called it the “_Dossier de la sottise humaine_.” Here are some examples: “The wealth of a country depends on its general prosperity” (Louis Napoleon). “She did not know Latin, but understood it very well” (Victor Hugo, in _Les Misérables_). “Wherever they are, fleas throw themselves against white colours. This instinct has been given them in order that we may catch them more easily.... The melon has been divided into slices by nature in order that it may be eaten _en famille_; the pumpkin, being larger, may be eaten with neighbours” (Bernardin de Saint Pierre in _Harmonie de la Nature_). “It is the business of bishops, nobles, and the great officers of the State to be the depositaries and the guardians of the conservative virtues, to teach nations what is good and what is evil, what is true and what is false, in the moral and spiritual world. Others have no right to reason on these matters. They may amuse themselves with the natural sciences. What have they to complain of?” (De Maistre in _Soirées de St. Petersbourg, 8e Entretien_, p. 131). “When one has crossed the bounds there are no limits left” (Ponsard). “I have often heard the blindness of the council of Francis I. deplored in repelling Christopher Columbus, when he proposed his expedition to the Indies” (Montesquieu, in _Esprit des Lois_, liv., xxi., chap. xxii. Francis I. ascended the throne in 1515; Columbus died in 1506). “Bonaparte was a great gainer of battles, but beyond that the least general is more skilful than he.... It has been believed that he perfected the art of war, and it is certain that he made it retrograde towards the childhood of art” (Chateaubriand, _Les Buonaparte et les Bourbons_). “Voltaire is nowhere as a philosopher, without authority as a critic and historian, out of date as a man of science” (Dupanloup, _Haute Éducation intellectuelle_). “Grocery is respectable. It is a branch of commerce. The army is more respectable still, because it is an institution, the aim of which is order. Grocery is useful, the army is necessary” (Jules Noriac in _Les Nouvelles_). Let us recall Pascal, at one time more incredulous than Pyrrho, at another, writing like a Father of the Church; or Voltaire, believing sometimes in destiny, which “causes the growth and the ruin of States”;[65] sometimes in fatality which “governs the affairs of the world”;[66] sometimes in Providence.[67] _Hyperæsthesia._--If we seek, with the aid of autobiographies, the differences which separate a man of genius from an ordinary man, we find that they consist in very great part in an exquisite, and sometimes perverted, sensibility.