noble Spirit between the two great principles of Spiritualism and
Materialism, round which so many a fine genius has beaten its way
without ever daring to amalgamate them. Louis, at first purely
Spiritualist, had been irresistibly led to recognize the Material
conditions of Mind. Confounded by the facts of analysis at the moment
when his heart still gazed with yearning at the clouds which floated
in Swedenborg's heaven, he had not yet acquired the necessary powers
to produce a coherent system, compactly cast in a piece, as it were.
Hence certain inconsistencies that have left their stamp even on the
sketch here given of his first attempts. Still, incomplete as his work
may have been, was it not the rough copy of a science of which he
would have investigated the secrets at a later time, have secured the
foundations, have examined, deduced, and connected the logical
sequence?



Six months after the confiscation of the _Treatise on the Will_ I left
school. Our parting was unexpected. My mother, alarmed by a feverish
attack which for some months I had been unable to shake off, while my
inactive life induced symptoms of _coma_, carried me off at four or
five hours' notice. The announcement of my departure reduced Lambert
to dreadful dejection.

"Shall I ever seen you again?" said he in his gentle voice, as he
clasped me in his arms. "You will live," he went on, "but I shall die.
If I can, I will come back to you."

Only the young can utter such words with the accent of conviction that
gives them the impressiveness of prophecy, of a pledge, leaving a