e character of his mind
would predispose him to them. But his temperament, physical and mental,
was so admirably balanced, that it had no doubt been able to resist the
demands on his strength. The excitement to which he had been wound up by
the anticipation of acute physical enjoyment, enhanced by a chaste life
and a highly-strung soul, had no doubt led to these attacks, of which
the results are as little known as the cause.

The letters that have by chance escaped destruction show very plainly a
transition from pure idealism to the most intense sensualism.

Time was when Lambert and I had admired this phenomenon of the human
mind, in which he saw the fortuitous separation of our two natures,
and the signs of a total removal of the inner man, using its unknown
faculties under the operation of an unknown cause. This disorder, a
mystery as deep as that of sleep, was connected with the scheme of
evidence which Lambert had set forth in his _Treatise on the Will_. And
when Monsieur Lefebvre spoke to me of Louis' first attack, I suddenly
remembered a conversation we had had on the subject after reading a
medical book.

"Deep meditation and rapt ecstasy are perhaps the undeveloped germs of
catalepsy," he said in conclusion.

On the occasion when he so concisely formulated this idea, he had
been trying to link mental phenomena together by a series of results,
following the processes of the intellect step by step, from their
beginnings as those simple, purely animal impulses of instinct, which
are all-sufficient to many human beings, particularly to those men whose
energies are wholly spent in mere mechanical labor; then, going on
to the aggregation of ideas and rising to comparison, reflection,
meditation, and finally ecstasy and catalepsy. Lambert, of course, in
the artlessness of youth, imagined that he had laid down the lines of a
great work when he thus built up a scale of the various degrees of man's
mental powers.

I remember that, by one of those chances which seems like
predestination, we got hold of a great Martyrology, in which the most
curious narratives are given of the total abeyance of physical life
which a man can attain to under the paroxysms of the inner life. By
reflecting on the effects of fanaticism, Lambert was led to believe
that the collected ideas to which we give the name of feelings may very
possibly be the material outcome of some fluid which is generated in all
men, more or less abundantly, acc