the theologians call the PHILOSOPHICAL
SIN, or the SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST--a sin which will not damn you,
proletaires, nor me either.

In short, "L'Esquisse," judged as a system, and divested of all which
its author borrows from previous systems, is a commonplace work, whose
method consists in constantly explaining the known by the unknown, and
in giving entites for abstractions, and tautologies for proofs. Its
whole theodicy is a work not of genius but of imagination, a patching up
of neo-Platonic ideas. The psychological portion amounts to nothing,
M. Lamennais openly ridiculing labors of this character, without which,
however, metaphysics is impossible. The book, which treats of logic
and its methods, is weak, vague, and shallow. Finally, we find in the
physical and physiological speculations which M. Lamennais deduces
from his trinitarian cosmogony grave errors, the preconceived design of
accommodating facts to theory, and the substitution in almost every case
of hypothesis for reality. The third volume on industry and art is the
most interesting to read, and the best. It is true that M. Lamennais
can boast of nothing but his style. As a philosopher, he has added not a
single idea to those which existed before him.

Why, then, this excessive mediocrity of M. Lamennais considered as
a thinker, a mediocrity which disclosed itself at the time of the
publication of the "Essai sur l'Indifference!"? It is because (remember
this well, proletaires!) Nature makes no man truly complete, and because
the development of certain faculties almost always excludes an equal
development of the opposite faculties; it is because M. Lamennais
is preeminently a poet, a man of feeling and sentiment. Look at his
style,--exuberant, sonorous, picturesque, vehement, full of exaggeration
and invective,--and hold it for certain that no man possessed of such
a style was ever a true metaphysician. This wealth of expression and
illustration, which everybody admires, becomes in M Lamennais the
incurable cause of his philosophical impotence. His flow of language,
and his sensitive nature misleading his imagination, he thinks that
he is reasoning when he is only repeating himself, and readily takes a
description for a logical deduction. Hence his horror of positive ideas,
his feeble powers of analysis, his pronounced taste for indefinite
analogies, verbal abstractions, hypothetical generalities, in short, all
sorts of entites.

Further, the en