sm. Its present application is
justified by a series of scientifically cooerdinated facts. Delsarte
rests upon the principle that man is the object of art. Thus the artist
should aim to manifest _human nature_ in its three modalities, in its
three phases which the master named _life, soul_ and _mind_. In other
words, the beings _physical, moral_ and _mental_.

These three expressions figure in the work of Pierre Leroux (_De
l'Humanite_) in the following equivalent terms: _sensation, sentiment,
knowledge._ But Leroux applied to ethics this law of human organism,
whereas Delsarte derived from it the law of aesthetics. When two minds of
this stamp are thus led, each in his own way, to the same source of
analogous principles differently applied, is it not a proof that they
have stated truth? And in this case it is more than presumable that the
two men of whom I speak had never worked together. Delsarte was a
philosopher in spite of himself. With Pierre Leroux art was only an
element contingent upon a system which he elaborated.

Was Delsarte led to his classification of man's nature by the doctrine
of the three persons in the Trinity combined in unity? Was he, by his
observations upon the _human triplicity_, led on to consider their
infinite development in the divine personalities? I know not, nor is it
of importance in considering the system.

Leroux affirmed a relation between the unity of man and the universality
of his pantheism; both relying at the outset upon an idea at once
religious and philosophical. But the research of Leroux was
philosophically inclined, while that of Delsarte was of a character more
especially religious.

Is it necessary to urge that you accept this obviously primitive
classification of the human faculties? Who, that shall have considered a
moment to convince himself, can doubt this truth,--that our sensations,
our sentiments, our understanding, are the principal elements of our
life, and that all that we are able to know of ourselves is made known
to us by them directly, or by the result of their combinations? This
consideration will soon lead us to the rational development of the
theory of Delsarte. For the present, it suffices to receive these
principles as they have been presented to us, and to admit that art
could not go far astray while following a clue leading from a law
invincible, and guiding to a science as positive as that of the
astronomer, derived from the law of attraction, or