This silence of history indicates, I think, that the truths of which we seek the commencement have been revealed to man in prehistoric days. I do not feel that I know positively concerning the first human beings who appeared on the earth; I picture them like soft wax ready to receive a definite form from the hand which created them. These first comers who knew nothing, never having had any training, and possessing only their five senses to aid them in arriving at knowledge, were infinitely better placed than I am to embrace truth, since I should have to disentangle myself from a vast mass of ideas which disfigure the natural simplicity of my soul; I should have to forget, even the truths which I believed myself to possess, and to transform myself into white plastic blank wax, with no impress whatsoever, and to wait until my Creator traced the image He wished; this is now not possible. I should not be now here if I could have been contemporaneous with my ancestors, and I had been permitted to follow in the steps of their pilgrimage, this would have pleased me well. I perceive my friends are uneasy--“Take care,” they say, “an _Idée fixe_ is dangerous.” But is it quite certain that an _Idée fixe_ is always harmful? Have they never seen a man wandering in a forest without any fixed determination to quit it? Is it credible that our first parents had no fixed idea of discovering the import towards themselves, of the vast world in which they had been placed, knowing nothing of the reason of their position? Equally ignorant of the reason why the sun, the moon, fire, hurricanes, storms, thunder, rivers, mountains existed, always above and around them. The whole of nature itself required to be interrogated. In what way could this settled determination have harmed them? It is true that they are all dead, but determination did not kill them. And their _Idée fixe_ must have been very tenacious and powerful for this thirst for knowledge to have descended with their blood into our own veins; their wish to gain information is reproduced in us; this is the legacy that our fathers have left us, and the singular feature of the legacy is that unlike others, of which the parts are subdivided and diminished, this in its entirety has passed down to each of the milliards and milliards of inheritors.