Such are the materials out of which chiefly a philosophical theory ought to be built, in order to represent the state of knowledge to which the nineteenth century has brought us. Without going into other important questions of philosophical architectonic, we can readily foresee what sort of a metaphysics would appropriately be constructed from those conceptions. Like some of the most ancient and some of the most recent speculations it would be a Cosmogonic Philosophy. It would suppose that in the beginning,—infinitely remote,—there was a chaos of unpersonalised feeling, which being without connection or regularity would properly be without existence. This feeling, sporting here and there in pure arbitrariness, would have started the germ of a generalising tendency. Its other sportings would be evanescent, but this would have a growing virtue. Thus, the tendency to habit would be started; and from this with the other principles of evolution all the regularities of the universe would be evolved. At any time, however, an element of pure chance survives and will remain until the world becomes an absolutely perfect, rational, and symmetrical system, in which mind is at last crystallised in the infinitely distant future.
That idea has been worked out by me with elaboration. It accounts for the main features of the universe as we know it,—the characters of time, space, matter, force, gravitation, electricity, etc. It predicts many more things which new observations can alone bring to the test. May some future student go over this ground again, and have the leisure to give his results to the world.
ILLUSTRATIVE STUDIES IN CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY.
"LA BÊTE HUMAINE" AND CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY.
If I had to be the judge of M. Zola I could be only a very partial judge. To me the books of Zola are, with those of Dostoyewski and Tolstoï, the only ones which have struck a fresh tone in the literary monotony of this quarter of a century, in which it is said the political levelling and the general abasement of character extend even to the republic of letters. Thus I am partial to Zola, for, as the chief of a school which pushes the science of psychiatry far into the field of psychology and of sociology, I find in Zola an ally the more valuable that he has not been sought and that he reigns in a very different empire. To the scientific charlatans who deny, as does M. Colajanni, the importance and the gravity of alcoholism, its associations with crime and degeneracy, "L'Assommoir" is perhaps the best of refutations. "Germinal" and "La Fortune des Rougon" give us the demonstration of that cruelty which is born for the crowd and in the crowd, and both prove the influence that criminals and lunatics have in rebellions. Zola is the only one of the Latin race who endeavors to introduce the scientific method into literary work.