of unswerving honesty, whose opinions were in harmony with those of the moderate universitarian school, at that time so decried by the clergy.  He had a great liking for the Scottish philosophers, and gave me Thomas Reid to study.  He steadied my thoughts very much, and by the aid of his authority and that of M. Gosselin, I was enabled to put away the exaggerations of M. Pinault; my conscience was at rest, and I even got to think that the contempt for scholasticism and reason, so stoutly professed by the mystics, was not devoid of heresy, and of the worst of all heresies in the eyes of the Company of St. Sulpice, viz., the Fideism of M. de Lamennais.

Thus I gave myself over without scruple to my love for study, living in complete solitude during’ two whole years.  I did not once come to Paris, readily as leaves were granted.  I never joined in any games, passing the recreation hours on a seat in the grounds, and trying to keep myself warm by wearing two or three overcoats.  The heads of the college, better advised than I was, told me how bad it was for a lad of my age to take no exercise.  I had scarcely done growing before I began to stoop.  But my passion for study was too strong for me, and I gave way to it all the more readily because I believed it to be a wholesome one.  I was blind to all else, but how could I suppose that the ardour for thought which I heard praised in Malebranche and so many other saintly and illustrious men was blameworthy in me, and was fated to bring about a result which I should have repudiated with indignation if it had been foreshadowed to me.

The character of the philosophy taught in the seminary was the Latin divinity of the schools—­not in the outlandish and childish form which it assumed in the thirteenth century, but in the mitigated Cartesian form which was generally adopted for ecclesiastical education in the eighteenth century, and set out in the three volumes known by the name of Philosophic de Lyon.  This name was given to it because the book formed part of a complete course of ecclesiastical study, drawn up a hundred years ago by order of M. de Montazet, the Jansenist Archbishop of Lyons.  The theological part of the work, tainted with heresy, is now forgotten; but the philosophical part, imbued with a very commendable spirit of rationalism, remained, as recently as 1840, the basis of philosophical teaching in the seminaries, much to the disgust of the neo-Catholic school, which regarded the book as dangerous and absurd.  It cannot be denied, however, that the problems were cleverly put, and the whole of these syllogistical dialectics formed an excellent course of training.  I owe my lucidity of mind, more especially what skill I possess in dividing my subject (which is an art of capital importance, one of the conditions of the art of writing), to my divinity training, and in particular to geometry, which is the truest application of the syllogistical method.  M. Manier mixed up with