July 14th. Fete of the Republic.  I walked through the streets, and the crackers and flags amused me like a child.  Still it is very foolish to be merry on a fixed date, by a Government decree.  The populace is an imbecile flock of sheep, now steadily patient, and now in ferocious revolt.  Say to it:  “Amuse yourself,” and it amuses itself.  Say to it:  “Go and fight with your neighbor,” and it goes and fights.  Say to it:  “Vote for the Emperor,” and it votes for the Emperor, and then say to it:  “Vote for the Republic,” and it votes for the Republic.

Those who direct it are also stupid; but instead of obeying men they obey principles, which can only be stupid, sterile, and false, for the very reason that they are principles, that is to say, ideas which are considered as certain and unchangeable, in this world where one is certain of nothing, since light is an illusion and noise is an illusion.

July 16th. I saw some things yesterday that troubled me very much.

I was dining at my cousin’s Madame Sable, whose husband is colonel of the 76th Chasseurs at Limoges.  There were two young women there, one of whom had married a medical man, Dr. Parent, who devotes himself a great deal to nervous diseases and the extraordinary manifestations to which at this moment experiments in hypnotism and suggestion give rise.

He related to us at some length, the enormous results obtained by English scientists and the doctors of the medical school at Nancy, and the facts which he adduced appeared to me so strange, that I declared that I was altogether incredulous.

“We are,” he declared, “on the point of discovering one of the most important secrets of nature, I mean to say, one of its most important secrets on this earth, for there are certainly some which are of a different kind of importance up in the stars, yonder.  Ever since man has thought, since he has been able to express and write down his thoughts, he has felt himself close to a mystery which is impenetrable to his coarse and imperfect senses, and he endeavors to supplement the want of power of his organs by the efforts of his intellect.  As long as that intellect still remained in its elementary stage, this intercourse with invisible spirits assumed forms which were commonplace though terrifying.  Thence sprang the popular belief in the supernatural, the legends of wandering spirits, of fairies, of gnomes, ghosts, I might even say the legend of God, for our conceptions of the workman-creator, from whatever religion they may have come down to us, are certainly the most mediocre, the stupidest and the most unacceptable inventions that ever sprang from the frightened brain of any human creatures.  Nothing is truer than what Voltaire says:  ’God made man in His own image, but man has certainly paid Him back again.’

“But for rather more than a century, men seem to have had a presentiment of something new.  Mesmer and some others have put us on an unexpected track, and especially within the last two or three years, we have arrived at really surprising results.”