ense of the word, a spiritual father for me. His advice is ever in my
thoughts, and I have him to thank for having kept clear in my style
of writing from certain very ungainly defects which I should not have
discovered for myself. It was through him that I made the acquaintance
of the Scheffer family, whom I have to thank for a companion who has
always assorted herself so harmoniously to my somewhat contracted
conditions of life that I am at times tempted, when I reflect upon so
many fortunate coincidences, to believe in predestination.

According to my philosophy, which regards the world in its entirety as
full of a divine afflation, there is no place for individual will in
the government of the universe. Individual Providence, in the sense
formerly attached to it, has never been proved by any unmistakable
fact. But for this, I should assuredly be thankful to yield to a
combination of circumstances in which a mind, less subjugated than
my own by general reasoning, would detect the traces of the special
protection of benevolent deities. The play of chances which brings
up a ternion or a quaternion is nothing compared to what has been
required to prevent the combination of which I am reaping the fruits
from being disturbed. If my origin had been less lowly in the eyes
of the world, I should not have entered or persevered upon that royal
road of the intellectual life to which my early training for the
priesthood attached me. The displacement of a single atom would have
broken the chain of fortuitous facts which, in the remote district
of Brittany, was preparing me for a privileged life; which brought
me from Brittany to Paris; which, when I was in Paris, took me to the
establishment of all others where the best and most solid education
was to be had; which, when I left the seminary, saved me from two or
three mistakes which would have been the ruin of me; which, when I was
on my travels, extricated me from certain dangers that, according to
the doctrine of chances, would have been fatal to me; which, to cite
one special instance, brought Dr. Suquet over from America to rescue
me from the jaws of death which were yawning to swallow me up.
The only conclusion I would fain draw from all this is that the
unconscious effort towards what is good and true in the universe has
its throw of the dice through the intermediary of each one of us.
There is no combination but what comes up, quaternions like any other.
We may disarrange t