small a quantity, he swoons, he sinks to the earth. This igneous matter
diminishes in his old age--it totally dissipates at his death. It would
not be unreasonable to suppose, that what physicians call the nervous
fluid, which so promptly gives notice to the brain of all that happens
to the body, is nothing more than electric matter; that the various
proportions of this matter diffused through his system, is the cause of
that great diversity to be discovered in the human being, and in the
faculties he possesses.

If the intellectual faculties of man, or his moral qualities, be
examined according to the principles here laid down, the conviction must
be complete that they are to be attributed to material causes, which
have an influence more or less marked, either transitory or durable,
over his peculiar organization. But where does he derive this
organization, except it be from the parents from whom he receives the
elements of a machine necessarily analogous to their own? From whence
does he derive the greater or less quantity of igneous matter, or
vivifying heat, that decides upon, that gives the tone to his mental
qualities? It is from the mother who bore him in her womb, who has
communicated to him a portion of that fire with which she was herself
animated, which circulated through her veins with her blood;--it is from
the aliments that have nourished him,--it is from the climate he
inhabits,--it is from the atmosphere that surrounds: all these causes
have an influence over his fluids, over his solids, and decide on his
natural dispositions. In examining these dispositions, from whence his
faculties depend, it will ever be found, that they are _corporeal_, that
they are _material_.

The most prominent of these dispositions in man, is that physical
sensibility from which flows all his intellectual or moral qualities. To