"But do you write down the things he says?" I asked.
"Why should I?" said she.
I was silent; human knowledge was indeed as nothing in this woman's eyes.
"At those times, when he talked a little," she added, "I think I have recorded some of his phrases, but I left it off; I did not understand him then."
I asked her for them by a look; she understood me. This is what I have been able to preserve from oblivion.
I
Everything here on earth is produced by an ethereal substance which is the common element of various phenomena, known inaccurately as electricity, heat, light, the galvanic fluid, the magnetic fluid, and so forth. The universal distribution of this substance, under various forms, constitutes what is commonly known as Matter.
II
The brain is the alembic to which the Animal conveys what each of its organizations, in proportion to the strength of that vessel, can absorb of that Substance, which returns it transformed into Will.
The Will is a fluid inherent in every creature endowed with motion. Hence the innumerable forms assumed by the Animal, the results of its combinations with that Substance. The Animal's instincts are the product of the coercion of the environment in which it develops. Hence its variety.