rble of the statue
makes the flesh of the man, and conversely. Reduce a block of marble to
impalpable powder; mix this powder with humus, or vegetable earth; knead
them well together; water the mixture; let it rot for a year, two
years--time does not count. In this you sow the plant, the plant
nourishes the man, and hence the passage from marble to tissue.

"Do you see this egg? With that you overturn all the schools of theology
and all the temples of the earth. It is an insensible mass before the
germ is introduced into it; and, after the germ is introduced, there is
still an insensible mass, for the germ itself is only an inert fluid.
How does this mass pass to another organisation, to life, to
sensibility? By heat. What will produce heat? Movement. What will be the
successive effects of movement? First, an oscillating point, a thread
that extends, the flesh, the beak, and so forth."

Then follows the application of the same ideas to the reproduction of
man--a region whither it is not convenient to follow the physiological
inquirer. The result as to the formation of the organic substance in man
is as unflinching as the materialism of Buechner.

But doctor, cries Mdlle. Lespinasse, what becomes of vice and
virtue? Virtue, that word so holy in all languages, that idea so
sacred among all nations?

BORDEU. We must transform it into beneficence, and its opposite
into the idea of maleficence. A man is happily or unhappily born;
people are irresistibly drawn on by the general torrent that
conducts one to glory, the other to ignominy.

MDLLE. LESPINASSE. And self-esteem, and shame, and remorse?

BORDEU. Proclivities, founded on the ignorance or the vanity of a
being who imputes to himself the merit or the demerit of a
necessary instant.

MDLLE. LESPINASSE. And rewards and punishments?

BORDEU. Means of correcting the modifiable being that we call bad,
and encouraging the other that we call good.[215]

[215] _Oeuv._, ii. 176.

The third dialogue we must leave. The fact that German books are written
for a public of specialists allows Dr. Rosenkranz to criticise these
dialogues with a freedom equal to Diderot's own, and his criticism is as
full as usual of candour, patience, and weight. An English writer must
be content to pass on, and his contentment may well be considerable, for
the subject is perhaps that on which, above all others, it is mo