f M. Pinault;
my conscience was at rest, and I even got to think that the contempt
for scholasticism and reason, so stoutly professed by the mystics, was
not devoid of heresy, and of the worst of all heresies in the eyes of
the Company of St. Sulpice, viz., the _Fideism_ of M. de Lamennais.

Thus I gave myself over without scruple to my love for study, living
in complete solitude during' two whole years. I did not once come to
Paris, readily as leaves were granted. I never joined in any games,
passing the recreation hours on a seat in the grounds, and trying to
keep myself warm by wearing two or three overcoats. The heads of the
college, better advised than I was, told me how bad it was for a lad
of my age to take no exercise. I had scarcely done growing before I
began to stoop. But my passion for study was too strong for me, and
I gave way to it all the more readily because I believed it to be a
wholesome one. I was blind to all else, but how could I suppose that
the ardour for thought which I heard praised in Malebranche and so
many other saintly and illustrious men was blameworthy in me, and
was fated to bring about a result which I should have repudiated with
indignation if it had been foreshadowed to me.

The character of the philosophy taught in the seminary was the Latin
divinity of the schools--not in the outlandish and childish form which
it assumed in the thirteenth century, but in the mitigated Cartesian
form which was generally adopted for ecclesiastical education in the
eighteenth century, and set out in the three volumes known by the name
of _Philosophic de Lyon_. This name was given to it because the book
formed part of a complete course of ecclesiastical study, drawn up a
hundred years ago by order of M. de Montazet, the Jansenist Archbishop
of Lyons. The theological part of the work, tainted with heresy,
is now forgotten; but the philosophical part, imbued with a very
commendable spirit of rationalism, remained, as recently as 1840, the
basis of philosophical teaching in the seminaries, much to the disgust
of the neo-Catholic school, which regarded the book as dangerous and
absurd. It cannot be denied, however, that the problems were cleverly
put, and the whole of these syllogistical dialectics formed an
excellent course of training. I owe my lucidity of mind, more
especially what skill I possess in dividing my subject (which is
an art of capital importance, one of the conditions of the art of
writing