these things are the most serious realities in the world, and undoubtedly more important than any other thing, little attempt is made by humanity to unravel or classify them.  I cannot here enter into the details of these instructions, which indeed would be unintelligible, but they showed me at first what I had not at all apprehended, namely the proportionate importance and unimportance of all the passions and emotions which regulate our relations with other souls.  These discourses were given at regular intervals, and much of our time was spent in discussing together or working out in solitude the details of psychological problems, which we did with the exactness of chemical analysis.

What I soon came to understand was that the whole of psychology is ruled by the most exact and immutable laws, in which there is nothing fortuitous or abnormal, and that the exact course of an emotion can be predicted with perfect certainty if only all the data are known.

One of the most striking parts of these discourses was the fact that they were accompanied by illustrations.  I will describe the first of these which I saw.  The lecturer stopped for an instant and held up his hand.  In the middle of one of the side-walls of the room was a great shallow arched recess.  In this recess there suddenly appeared a scene, not as though it were cast by a lantern on the wall, but as if the wall were broken down, and showed a room beyond.

In the room, a comfortably furnished apartment, there sat two people, a husband and wife, middle-aged people, who were engaged in a miserable dispute about some very trivial matter.  The wife was shrill and provocative, the husband curt and contemptuous.  They were obviously not really concerned about the subject they were discussing—­it only formed a ground for disagreeable personalities.  Presently the man went out, saying harshly that it was very pleasant to come back from his work, day after day, to these scenes; to which the woman fiercely retorted that it was all his own fault; and when he was gone, she sat for a time mechanically knitting, with the tears trickling down her cheeks, and every now and then glancing at the door.  After which, with great secrecy, she helped herself to some spirits which she took from a cupboard.

The scene was one of the most vulgar and debasing that can be described or imagined; and it was curious to watch the expressions on the faces of my companions.  They wore the air of trained doctors or nurses, watching some disagreeable symptoms, with a sort of trained and serene compassion, neither shocked nor grieved.  Then the situation was discussed and analysed, and various suggestions were made which were dealt with by the lecturer, in a way which showed me that there was much for us to master and to understand.