of an unknown species.--In a like situation, at table in the evening, he has never heard men conversing together: he has not gathered in the thousand bits of information which a young growing mind derives from general conversation: * about careers in life, competition, business, money, the domestic fireside and expenses; * about the cost of living which should always depend on income; * about the gain which nearly always indicates the current rates of labor and of the social subjection one undergoes; * about the pressing, powerful, personal interests which are soon to seize him by the collar and perhaps by the throat; * about the constant effort required the incessant calculation, the daily struggle which, in modern society, makes up the life of an ordinary man. All means of obtaining knowledge have been denied him, the contact with living and diverse men, the images which the sensations of his eyes and ears might have stamped on his brain. These images constitute the sole materials of a correct, healthy conception; through them, spontaneously and gradually, without too many deceptions or shocks, he might have figured social life to himself, such as it is, its conditions, difficulties, and its opportunities: he has neither the sentiment of it nor even a premonition. In all matters, that which we call common sense is never but an involuntary latent summary, the lasting, substantial and salutary depot left in our minds after many direct impressions. With reference to social life, he has been deprived of all these direct impressions and the precious depot has never been formed in him.--e He has scarcely ever conversed with his professors; their talk with him has been about impersonal and abstract matters, languages, literature and mathematics. He has spoken but little with his teachers, except to contest an injunction or grumble aloud against reproof. Of real conversation, the acquisition and exchange of ideas, he has enjoyed none, except with his comrades: if, like him, all are internes, they can communicate to each other only their ignorance. If day-scholars are admitted, they are active smugglers or willing agents who bring into the house and circulate forbidden books and obscene journals, along with the filthy provocative and foul atmosphere of the streets.--Now, with excitement of this kind or in this manner, the brains of these captives, as puberty comes on and deliverance draws near, work actively and we know in what sense[6359] and in what counter-sense, how remote from observable and positive truth, how their imagination pictures society, man and woman, under what simple and coarse appearances, with what inadequacy and presumption, what appetites of liberated serfs and juvenile barbarians, how, as concerns women, their precocious and turbid dreams first become brutal and cynical,[6360] how, as concerns men, their unballasted and precipitous thought easily becomes chimerical