What, in fact, is oratorical art?  It is the means of expressing the phenomena of the soul by the play of the organs.  It is the sum total of rules and laws resulting from the reciprocal action of mind and body.  Thus man must be considered in his sensitive, intellectual and moral state, with the play of the organs corresponding to these states.  Our teaching has, then, for its basis the science of the soul ministered to by the organs.  This is why we present the fixed, invariable rules which have their sanction in philosophy.  This can be rendered plain by an exposition of our method.

The art of oratory, we repeat, is expressing mental phenomena by the play of the physical organs.  It is the translation, the plastic form, the language of human nature.  But man, the image of God, presents himself to us in three phases:  the sensitive, intellectual and moral.  Man feels, thinks and loves.  He is en rapport with the physical world, with the spiritual world, and with God.  He fulfils his course by the light of the senses, the reason, or the light of grace.

We call life the sensitive state, mind the intellectual state, and soul the moral state.  Neither of these three terms can be separated from the two others.  They interpenetrate, interlace, correspond with and embrace each other.  Thus mind supposes soul and life.  Soul is at the same time mind and life.  In fine, life is inherent in mind and soul.  Thus these three primitive moods of the soul are distinguished by nine perfectly adequate terms.  The soul being the form of the body, the body is made in the image of the soul.  The human body contains three organisms to translate the triple form of the soul.

The phonetic machinery, the voice, sound, inflections, are living language.  The child, as yet devoid of intelligence and sentiment, conveys his emotions through cries and moans.

The myologic or muscular machinery, or gesture, is the language of sentiment and emotion.  When the child recognizes its mother, it begins to smile.

The buccal machinery, or articulate speech, is the language of the mind.

Man, neither by voice nor gesture, can express two opposite ideas on the same subject; this necessarily involves a resort to speech.  Human language is composed of gesture, speech and singing.  The ancient melodrama owed its excellence to a union of these three languages.

Each of these organisms takes the eccentric, concentric, or normal form, according to the different moods of the soul which it is called to translate.

In the sensitive state, the soul lives outside itself; it has relations with the exterior world.  In the intellectual state, the soul turns back upon itself, and the organism obeys this movement.  Then ensues a contraction in all the agents of the organism.  This is the concentric state.  In the moral or mystic state, the soul, enraptured with God, enjoys perfect tranquility and blessedness.  All breathes peace, quietude, serenity.  This is the normal state,—­the most perfect, elevated and sublime expression of which the organism is capable.