M. Cousin fascinated us, but Pierre Leroux, with his tone of profound conviction and his thorough appreciation of the great problems awaiting solution, exercised a still more potent influence, and we did not see the shortcomings of his studies and the sophistry of his mind.  My customary course of reading was Pascal, Malebranche, Euler, Locke, Leibnitz, Descartes, Reid, and Dugald Stewart.  In the way of religious books, my preferences were for Bossuet’s Sermons and the Elevations sur les Mysttres.  I was very familiar, too, with Francois de Sales, both by continually hearing extracts from his works read in the seminary, and especially through the charming work which Pierre le Camus has written about him.  With regard to the more mystical works, such as St. Theresa, Marie d’Agreda, Ignatius de Loyola, and M. Olier, I never read them.  M. Gosselin, as I have said, dissuaded me from doing so.  The Lives of the Saints, written in an overwrought strain, were also very distasteful to him, and Fenelon was his rule and his limit.  Many of the early saints excited his strongest prejudices because of their disregard of cleanliness, their scant education, and their lack of common sense.

My keen predilection for philosophy did not blind me as to the inevitable nature of its results.  I soon lost all confidence in the abstract metaphysics which are put forward as being a science apart from all others, and as being capable of solving alone the highest problems of humanity.  Positive science then appeared to me to be the only source of truth.  In after years I felt quite irritated at the idea of Auguste Comte being dignified with the title of a great man for having expressed in bad French what all scientific minds had seen for the last two hundred years as clearly as he had done.  The scientific spirit was the fundamental principle in my disposition.  M. Pinault would have been the master for me if he had not in some strange way striven to disguise and distort the best traits in his talent.  I understood him better than he would have wished, and, in spite of himself.  I had received a rather advanced education in mathematics from my first teachers in Brittany.  Mathematics and physical induction have always been my strong point, the only stones in the edifice which have never shifted their ground and which are always serviceable.  M. Pinault taught me enough of general natural history and physiology to give me an insight into the laws of existence.  I realised the insufficiency of what is called spiritualism; the Cartesian proofs of the existence of a soul distinct from the body always struck me as being very inadequate, and thus I became an idealist and not a spiritualist in the ordinary acceptation of the term.  An endless fieri, a ceaseless metamorphosis seemed to me to be the law of the world.  Nature presented herself to me as a whole in which creation of itself has no place, and in which therefore, everything undergoes