a jumble of physiological
and moral common-places, made up of ill-digested reading and words
strung together haphazard,[3106] of gratuitous and incoherent
suppositions in which the doctrines of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, coupled together, end in empty phraseology. "Soul and Body
are distinct substances with no essential relationship, being connected
together solely through the nervous fluid;" this fluid is not gelatinous
for the spirits by which it is renewed contains no gelatin; the soul,
excited by this, excites that; hence the place assigned to it "in the
brain."--His "Optics"[3107] is the reverse of the great truth already
discovered by Newton more than a century before, and since confirmed by
more than another century of experiment and calculation. On "Heat"
and "Electricity" he merely puts forth feeble hypotheses and literary
generalizations; one day, driven to the wall, he inserts a needle in a
resin to make this a conductor, in which piece of scientific trickery
he is caught by the physicist Charles.[3108] He is not even qualified to
comprehend the great discoverers of his age, Laplace, Monge, Lavoisier,
or Fourcroy; on the contrary, he libels them in the style of a low
rebellious subordinate, who, without the shadow of a claim, aims to take
the place of legitimate authorities. In Politics, he adopts every absurd
idea in vogue growing out of the "Contrat-Social" based on natural
right, and which he renders still more absurd by repeating as his own
the arguments advanced by those bungling socialists, who, physiologists
astray in the moral world, derive all rights from physical necessities.

"All human rights issue from physical wants[3109]... If a man has
nothing, he has a right to any surplus with which another gorges
himself. What do I say? He has a right to seize the indispensable,
and, rather than die of hunger, he may cut another's throat and eat
his throbbing flesh.... Man has a right to self-preservation, to the
property, the liberty and even the lives of his fellow creatures. To
escape oppression he has a right to repress, to bind and to massacre. He
is free to do what he pleases to ensure his own happiness."

It is plain enough what this leads to.--But, let the consequences
be what they may, whatever he writes or does, it is always in
self-admiration and always in a counter sense, being as vain-glorious
of his encyclopedic impotence as he is of his social mischievousness.
Taking his word