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astounding convictions, of which the living source is in itself.

In fine, the testimony of intellect is a vision of the order of earthly things; the testimony of the soul is a revelation of the invisible world, of eternity and God.

CHAPTER XXVII.

OF THE DANGER OF SEPARATING THE FACULTIES OF

THE SOUL.

"La vertu d'un homme ne doit pas se mesurer sur ses efforts, mais sur ce qu'il fait d'ordinaire."

PASCAL.

WE may conclude, from all that has preceded, that the faculties of the intellect, and the faculties of the soul, should be developed simultaneously, and, so to speak, by the same impulse: to separate them is to destroy the man.

But a still greater peril is that of dividing the faculties of the soul; that is to say, of isolating the one from the others. The soul is a whole, a sun which has its rays: when divided by the prism, the rays of the sun permit us to see only particular colours, but when united they constitute light.

For instance, separate in your mind the sentiment of the grand and beautiful, and the sentiment of infinity from the other faculties of the soul which illuminate them; the former, isolated from reason and conscience, will go to expand itself in an endless licence, or in a measureless ambition the latter will light up funereal piles, lay waste the

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world, or concentrate its desires in money-bags. Thus, Lovelace, St. Dominick, Richelieu, Bonaparte, Harpagon, represent all the excesses of the sentiment of the beautiful and of infinity, isolated from the moral sentiment, from reason and conscience. In these powerful but incomplete organisations, I see merely a wandering ray of the soul, which lends its energy to earthly passions.

The faculties of the soul, when separately developed, are like the luminous rays which, in the experiment of Fresnel, meet, are extinguished, and produce darkness!

CHAPTER XXVIII.

OF THE SOUL OF NATIONS.

"Tant il est à craindre en fortifiant les liens d'une société de forcer ceux de la nature."

BERNARDIN DE SAINT-PIERKE.

"Le triomphe de la lumière a toujours été favorable à la grandeur et à l'amélioration de l'espèce humaine."

MADAME DE STAEL.

Of all human infirmities the saddest is the slumber of the soul. How many men pass by on the earth without its ever awaking!

The multitude which bears the toil of the day, and whose whole faculties are concentrated in this one thought-work and food.

The red, blue, green, or orange coloured automata, who march at the sound of the drum, place themselves in rank, fight without anger, and kill without hatred or

remorse.

The man who goes to bed at night, rises in the morning,

dresses, transacts business, breakfasts, dines, and digests, without any other thought.

Here is animal intelligence-matter in motion.

I should like to know exactly the number of the ideas of this crowd which every morning goes forth from its houses, fills the streets, encumbers the public squares, rolls on, hurries itself, and silently disappears in the first hours of the night.

A mass with a hundred thousand heads, which, interrogated without reference to its passions, expresses only the most noble sentiments, the purest taste, the most generous inclinations, which admires Socrates and curses Anytus ; but of which, by a singular contrast, each member taken separately,- -a sort of animal with a human face,-seems to have eyes in order not to see, ears not to hear, an intellect not to think; and with all this, a soul engulfed in

matter.

I ask myself why so few truths have penetrated into the conscience, I do not say of a barbarous, but of a civilized people?

Why the entire mass of the human race, with some exceptions, lives enchained in its routines, as if it were reduced to instinct?

To these facts history responds by the most astonishing of phenomena. On this globe, the soul of which slumbers, I see sages appear here and there, like torches, the light of which awakens nations.

And the nations receive each the thoughts of a man or of a God-Moses, Confucius, Boudah, Mahomet, Socrates, Jesus Christ a thinking head: a moral head of the human race.

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They reign over the earth, which they have partitioned among them, in giving a soul to each people. This influence is so general, that one would be inclined to take it

for a law of nature. The moral thoughts of genius become as the instinct of nations, and nations become great in proportion to the genius of their legislator. Hence the prodigies performed by Sparta, Athens, and Rome.

The soul of their great men lived in the crowd, so that the crowd taken in the mass felt all the sentiments of a great man.

In the middle ages, and even up to our own times, an immense corporation cast its nets over the civilised world; it was no longer a great man, it was the Church, which was the soul of the West.

The ideas of Brahma and of Mahomet continued to circumscribe the East.

All the legislations, all the ancient theocracies, being dead, the human race lived only through these three souls.

Hostile souls, which divided the people, fettered their intelligence, and fanaticised them in the prejudices and the crimes of a conventional morality.

At the present day, the social transfiguration is being effected: ideas are multiplied, and nations become more intelligent; but in proportion as the number of their ideas increases, they detach themselves from religious and paternal traditions; faith leaves them, and the soul of their legislators abandons them.

A terrible revolution! the greatest which has yet agitated this world, for it tends to give the people up to the madness of their intellect; but it likewise tends to destroy their isolation, by destroying the religious authorities which separate them. In its powerful march it must some day unite the nations, these scattered limbs of the human race, and give to them all a single moral code, taken from the laws of nature—and a single soul, drawn from the very bosom of God.

This revolution has already began in Europe, where

there will shortly be only a single people, divided into different states, kingdoms, or republics, which will all tend towards the same liberty, beneath the general law of the Gospel.

CHAPTER XXIX.

PROGRESS.

“Le problème pour la presse comme pour la société entière est ceci : désarmer la médiocrité, ses passions jalouses et ses haines antisociales, en laissant au talent son libre essor pour arriver au faite, et dire comme Jean XXII. en se redressant: Me voici, c'est moi qui régnerai sur vous.'

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SALVANDY.

"Si je vous parle fortement n'en soyez pas étonné, c'est que la vérité est libre et forte."

FENELON, Lettre à Louis XIV.

THERE is a book, the pages of which are printed in all languages, the living picture of the world, in which the most lofty thoughts, the most serious questions, political, religious, of glory and liberty, of peace, war, finances, or justice, are discussed freely and impartially, and are delivered fresh with the interest of the day, to the knowledge of the grand jury of nations.

Ephemeral pages, works without end, which every evening sees die, and every morning sees revive, always richer, always more powerful, adding the thought of to-day to the thought of yesterday, expanding intellects, awakening the masses, and perpetually calling to them-forward, forward!

Pass your eyes over these sheets, still wet from the press; you are at Constantinople, at Ispahan, at Moscow,

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