“A jealous young man murders a young girl to prevent her marrying another. This young man has been in correspondence with a philosopher whose works he studies. It is the philosopher who is guilty. And I am a materialist forsooth, I who have proved the nonexistence of matter!”
He shrugged his shoulders, then a new image crossed his memory, the image of Marius Dumoulin, the young substitute at the College of France, the man whom he most detested in the world. He saw, as if they were there before his eyes, some of the formulæ so dear to this defender of spiritualism: “Fatal doctrines. Intellectual poison distilled from pens which one would like to believe are unconscious. Scandalous exposure of a psychology of corruption.” “Yes,” said Adrien Sixte to himself with bitterness, “if some one does not catch up this chance which makes an assassin of one of my pupils, it will not be he! Psychology will have done it all.”
It is proper to state that, Dumoulin had, on the appearance of the “Anatomy of the Will,” pointed out a grave error. Adrien Sixte had based one of his most ingenious chapters upon a so-called discovery of a German physician which was proved to be incorrect. Perhaps Dumoulin dwelt on this inadvertence of the great analyst with a severity of irony far too disrespectful.
M. Sixte, who rarely noticed criticisms, had replied to this one. While confessing the error, he proved without any trouble, that this point of detail did not affect the thesis as a whole. But he cherished an unpardonable rancor against the spiritualist.
“It is as if I heard him!” thought Sixte. “What he may say of my books is nothing but psychology? Psychology! This is the science on which depends the future of our beloved France.”
As we see, the philosopher, like all other systematics, had reached the point where he made his doctrines the pivot of the universe. He reasoned about like this: Given a historic fact, what is the chief cause of it? The general condition of mind. This condition is derived from the current ideas. The French Revolution, for example, proceeded entirely from a false conception of man which springs from the Cartesian philosophy and from the “Discourse on Method.”
He concluded that to modify the march of events, it was necessary to modify the received notions upon the human mind, and to install in their place some precise notions whence would result a new education and politics. So in his indignation against Dumoulin he sincerely believed that he was indignant at an obstacle to the public good.
He had some unpleasant moments while thus figuring to himself this detested adversary, taking as a text the death of Mlle. de Jussat for a vigorous sortie against the modern science of the mind.
“Shall I have to answer him again?” asked Sixte, who already was sure of the attack of his rival, such power have the passions to consider real that which they only imagine. “Yes,” he insisted, and then aloud, “I will reply in my best manner!”
He was by this time behind the apsis of Notre Dame and he stopped to survey the architecture of the cathedral. This ancient edifice symbolized to him the complex character of the German intellect which he contrasted in thought with the simplicity of the Hellenic mind, reproduced for him in a photograph of the Parthenon, which he had often contemplated in the Library of Nancy. The remembrance of Germany changed the current of his thoughts for a moment. He recalled, almost unconsciously, Hegel, then the doctrine of the identity of contrarieties, then the theory of evolution which grew out of it. This last idea, joined itself to those which had already agitated him, and resuming his walk, he began to argue against the anticipated objections of Dumoulin in the case of young Greslon.