soul? They say that it is a matter, which has sensation: but who has given it this sensation? It is a material soul, that is to say, it is composed of a matter which gives sensation to matter. They cannot get out of this circle.

Listen to one kind of beasts reasoning upon another: their soul is a spiritual

Extend the same judgment to the dog who has lost his master, who has sought him everywhere with grievous cries, and who enters the house agitated and rest-being, which dies with the body; but less, goes upstairs and down, from room to room, and at last finds in the closet the master whom he loves, and testifies his joy by the gentleness of his cries, by his leaps, and his caresses.

Some barbarians seize this dog, who so prodigiously excels man in friendship, they nail him to a table, and dissect him living, to show the mezarien veins. You discover in him all the same organs of sentiment which are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the springs of sentiment in this animal that he should not feel? Has he nerves, and is he incapable of suffering? Do not suppose this impertinent contradiction in nature.

what proof have you of it? What idea have you of this spiritual being, which has sentiment, memory, and its share of ideas and combinations, but which can never tell what made a child of six years old? On what ground do you imagine that this being, which is not corporeal, perishes with the body? The greatest beasts are those who have suggested that this soul is neither body nor spirit-an excellent system! We can only understand by spirit something unknown, which is not body. Thus the system of these gentlemen amounts to this, that the soul of beasts is a substance which is neither body, nor something which is not body. Whence can proceed so many contra

men have of examining what a thing is before they know whether it exists. They call the speech the effect of a breath of mind, the soul of a sigh. What is the soul? It is a name which I have given to this valve which rises and falls, which lets the air in, relieves itself, and sends it through a pipe when I move the lungs.

But the masters of this school ask,dictory errors? from the custom which what is the soul of beasts? I do not understand this question. A tree has the faculty of receiving in its fibres the sap which circulates, of evolving its buds, its leaves, and its fruits. You will ask me what is the soul of this tree? It has received these gifts. The animal has received those of sentiment, memory, and a certain number of ideas. Who has bestowed these gifts, who has given these faculties? He who has made the herb of the field to grow, and who makes the earth gravitate towards the sun.

The souls of beasts are substantial forms, says Aristotle; and after Aristotle, the Arabian school; and after the Arabian school, the Angelical school; and after the Angelical school, the Sorbonne ; and after the Sorbonne, every one in the world.

The souls of beasts are material, exelaim other philosophers. These have not been more fortunate than the former. They are in vain asked what is a material

There is not, then, a soul distinct from the machine. But what moves the lungs of animals? I have already said, the power that moves the stars. The philosopher who said, "Deus est anima brutorum," God is the soul of the brutes, was right; but he should have gone much further.

BEAUTIFUL (THE).

SINCE We have quoted Plato on love, why should we not quote him on "The Beautiful," since beauty causes love. It is curious to know how a Greek spoke of the beautiful more than two thousand years since.

yawn. Oh, oh! said he, the To Kalon is not the same with the English as with the French. He concluded, after many reflections, that "The Beautiful" is often merely relative, as that which is decent at Japan, is indecent at Rome: and that which is the fashion at Paris, is not so at Pekin; and he was thereby spared the trouble of composing a long treatise on the Beautiful.

"The man initiated into the sacred mysteries, when he sees a beautiful face accompanied by a divine form, a something more than mortal, feels a secret emotion, and I know not what respectful fear. He regards this figure as a divinity. . . . When the influence of beauty enters into his soul by his eyes, he burns; the wings of his soul are bedewed; they lose the hardness which retains their germs, and liquify themselves; these germs, swelling There are actions which the whole beneath the roots of its wings, they ex-world consider fine. A challenge passed pand from every part of the soul (for the between two of Cæsar's officers, mortal soul had wings formerly)" &c. &c. enemies, not to shed each other's blood behind a thicket by tierce and quarte, as among us, but to decide which of them would best defend the camp of the Romans, about to be attacked by the Barbarians. One of the two, after having repulsed the enemy, was near falling; the other flew to his assistance, saved his life, and gained the victory.

I am willing to believe that nothing is finer than this discourse of the divine Plato; but it does not give us very clear ideas of the nature of the beautiful.

Ask a toad what is beauty-the great beauty To Kalon; he will answer that it is the female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, her large flat mouth, her yellow belly, and brown back. Ask a negro of Guinea: beauty is to him a black oily skin, sunken eyes, and a flat nose.

Ask the Devil: he will tell you that the beautiful consists in a pair of horns, four claws, and a tail. Then consult the philosophers: they will answer you with jargon; they must have something conformable to the archetype of the essence of the beautiful,-to the To Kalon.

he.

A friend devotes himself to death for his friend, a son for his father. The Algonquin, the French, the Chinese, will mutually say that all this is very beautiful, that such actions give them pleasure, and that they admire them.

They will say the same of great moral maxims; of that of Zoroaster: "If in doubt that an action be just, desist ;" of that of Confucius: "Forget injuries; never forget benefits."

The negro, with round eyes and flattened nose, who would not give the ladies of our court the name of beautiful, would give it without hesitation to these actions, and these maxims. The wicked man, even, recognises the beauty of the virtues which he cannot imitate. The

I was once attending a tragedy near a philosopher. How beautiful that is, said What do you find beautiful? asked I. It is, said he, that the author has attained his object. The next day he took his medicine, which did him some good. It has attained its object, cried I to him; it is a beautiful medicine. He compre-beautiful, which only strikes the senses, hended that it could not be said that a medicine is beautiful; and that to apply to anything the epithet beautiful, it must cause admiration and pleasure. He allowed that the tragedy had inspired him with these two sentiments, and that it was the To Kalon, the beautiful.

We made a journey to England. The same piece was played, and, although ably translated, it made all the spectators

the imagination, and what is called the spirit, is then often uncertain; the beauty which strikes the heart is not. You will find a number of people who will tell you they have found nothing. beautiful in three-fourths of the Iliad; but nobody will deny that the devotion of Codrus for his people was fine, supposing it was true.

Brother Attinet, a Jesuit, a native of

chants and artificers of all sorts; one keeps a coffee-house, another a tavern ; one takes the profession of a thief, another that of the officer who pursues him. The emperor and all the ladies of the court come to buy stuffs, the false merchants cheat them as much as they can; they tell them that it is shameful to dispute so much about the price, and that they are poor customers. Their majesties reply, that the merchants are knaves; the latter are angry, and affect to depart; they are appeased; the emperor buys all, and makes lotteries of it for all his court. Further on are spectacles of all sorts."

When brother Attinet came from China to Versailles, he found it small and dull. The Germans, who were delighted to stroll about its groves, were astonished that brother Attinet was so difficult. This is another reason which determines me not to write a treatise on the Beautiful.

"This country-house," says he, in one of his letters to M. Dupont, "is larger than the town of Dijon. It is divided into a thousand habitations on one line: each one has its courts, its parterres, its gardens, and its waters; the front of each is ornamented with gold varnish and paintings. In the vast enclosures of the park, hills have been raised by hand from twenty to sixty feet high. The vallies are watered by an infinite number of canals, which run a considerable distance to join and form lakes and seas. We float on these seas in boats varnished and gilt, from twelve to thirteen fathoms long and four wide. These barks have magnificent saloons, and the borders of the canals are covered with houses, all in different tastes. Every house has its gardens and cascades. You go from one valley to another by alleys, alternately ornamented with pavilions and grottoes. valiies are alike; the largest of all is surrounded by a colonnade, behind which are gilded buildings. All the apartments of these houses correspond in magnificence with the outside. All the canals have bridges at stated distances; these I have been charmed to find, that the bridges are bordered with balustrades of swarms which turn out of the hive are white marble sculptured in basso-relievo. much milder than our sons when they "In the middle of the great sea is leave college. The young bees, then, raised a rock, and on this rock is a square sting no one; or at least but rarely and pavilion, in which are more than an hun-in extraordinary cases. They suffer themdred apartments. From this square pavilion there is a view of all the palaces, all the houses, and all the gardens of this immense enclosure, and there are more than four hundred of them.

No two

"When the emperor gives a fète, all these buildings are illuminated in an instant, and from every house there are fire-works.

"This is not all at the end of what they call the sea is a great fair, held by the emperor's officers. Vessels come from the great sea to arrive at this fair. The courtiers disguise themselves as mer

BEES.

THE bees may be regarded as superior to the human race in this, that from their own substance they produce another which is useful; while, of all our secretions, there is not one good for anything; nay, there is not one which does not render mankind disagreeable.

selves to be carried quietly, in the bare hand, to the hive which is destined for them. But no sooner have they learned, in their new habitation, to know their interests, than they become like us, and make war. I have seen very peaceable bees go for six months to labour in a neighbouring meadow covered with flowers which secreted them. When the mowers came, they rushed furiously from their hive upon those who were about to steal their property, and put them to flight.

We find in the Proverbs attributed to

Solomon, that "there are four things, the least upon earth, but which are wiser than the wise men :-the ants, a little people, who lay up food during the harvest; the hares, a weak people, who lie on stones; the grasshoppers, who have no kings, and who journey in flocks; and the lizards, which work with their hands, and dwell in the palaces of kings." I know not how Solomon forgot the bees, whose instinct seems very superior to that of hares, which do not lie on stone; or of lizards, with whose genius I am not acquainted. Moreover, I shall always prefer a bee to a grashopper.

society turns every vice to account; but
it is not true that these vices are necessary
to the well-being of the world. Very
good remedies may be made from poi-
sons, but poisons do not contribute to the
support
of life. By thus reducing the
Fable of the Bees to its just value, it
might be made a work of moral utility.

BEGGAR-MENDICANT.

EVERY Country where begging, where mendicity, is a profession, is ill governed. Beggary, as I have elsewhere said, is a vermin that clings to opulence. Yes; but let it be shaken off; let the hospitals be for sickness and age alone, and let the shops be for the young and vigorous.

The bees have, in all ages, furnished the poet with descriptions, comparisons, allegories, and fables. Mandeville's ceThe following is an extract from a serlebrated "Fable of the Bees" made a mon composed by a preacher ten years great noise in England. Here is a shortago, for the parish of St. Leu and St.

sketch of it:

Once the bees, in worldly things,
Had a happy government;

And their labourers and their kings
Made them wealthy and content;
But some greedy drones at last
Found their way into their hive;
Those, in idleness to thrive,
Told the bees they ought to fast.
Sermons were their only labours;
Work they preached unto their neighbours.
In their language they would say,
"You shall surely go to heaven,
When to us you've freely given
Wax and honey all away."-
Foolishly the bees believed,
Till by famine undeceived;
When their mis'ry was complete,
All the strange delusion vanished!
Now the drones are killed or banished,
And the bees again may eat.

Mandeville goes much further; he asserts that bees cannot live at their ease in a great and powerful hive, without many vices. "No kingdom, no state (says he) can flourish without vices. Take away the vanity of ladies of quality, and there will be no more fine manufactures of silk, no more employment for men and women in a thousand different branches; a great part of the nation will be reduced to beggary. Take away the avarice of our merchants, and the fleets of England will be annihilated. Deprive artists of envy, and emulation will cease; we shall sink back into primitive rudeness and ignorance."

It is quite true that a well governed {

Giles, which is the parish of the beggars and the convulsionaries :

Pauperes evangelicantur-the Gospel is preached to the poor.

"My dear brethren the beggars, what is meant by the word Gospel? It signifies good news. It is, then, good news that I come to tell you; and what is it? It is, that if you are idlers, you will die on a dunghill. Know that there have been idle kings, so at least we are told, and they at last had not where to lay their heads. If you work, you will be as happy as other

men.

"The preachers at St. Eustache and St. Roche may deliver to the rich very fine sermons in a flowery style, which procure for the auditors a light slumber with an easy digestion, and for the orator a thousand crowns; but I address those whom hunger keeps awake. Work for your bread, I say; for the Scripture says, that he who does not work deserves not to eat. Our brother in adversity, Job, who was for some time in your condition, says that man is born to labour as the bird is to fly. Look at this immense city; every one is busy; the judges rise at four in the morning to administer justice to you, and send you to the galleys when

your idleness has caused you to thieve rather awkwardly.

"The king works; he attends his council every day; and he has made campaigns. Perhaps you will say, he is none the richer. Granted; but that is not his fault. The financiers know, better? than you or do, that not one-half his revenue ever enters his coffers. He has been obliged to sell his plate, in order to defend us against our enemies. We should aid him in our turn. The Friend of Man (l'Ami des Hommes) allows him only seventy-five millions per annum. Another friend all at once gives him seven hundred and forty. But of all these Job's comforters, not one will advance him a single crown. It is necessary to invent a thousand ingenious ways of drawing this crown from our pockets, which, before it reaches his own, is diminished by at least one-half.

"Work, then, my dear brethren; act for yourselves, for I forewarn you, that if you do not take care of yourselves, no one will take care of you; you will be treated as the king has been in several grave remonstrances; people will say, God help you.'

"We will go into the provinces, you will answer; we shall be fed by the lords of the land, by the farmers, by the curates. Do not flatter yourselves, my dear brethren, that you shall eat at their tables: they have for the most part enough to do to feed themselves, notwithstanding the "Method of rapidly getting Rich by Agriculture," and fifty other works of the same kind, published every day at Paris, for the use of the people in the country, with cultivating of which the authors never had anything to do.

"I behold among you young men of some talent, who say that they will make verses, that they will write pamphlets, like Chisiac, Nonotte, or Patouillet; that they will work for the "Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques," that they will write sheets for Fréron, funeral orations for bishops, songs for the comic opera. Any of these would at least be an occupation. When a man

is writing for the " Année Littéraire," he is not robbing on the highway, he is only robbing his creditors. But do better, my dear brethren in Jesus Christ-my dear beggars, who, by passing your lives in asking charity, run the risk of the galleys: do better; enter one of the four mendicant orders: you will then be not only rich, but honoured also."

BEKKER,

"THE WORLD BEWITCHED," THE DEVIL, THE BOOK OF ENOCH, AND SORCERERS.

THIS Balthazar Bekker, a very good man, a great enemy of the everlasting hell and the devil, and a still greater of precision, made a great deal of noise in his time by his great book, "The World Bewitched."

One Jacques-George de Chaufepied, a pretended continuator of Bayle, assures us that Bekker learned Greek at Gascoigne. Niceron has good reasons for believing that it was at Franeker. This historical point has occasioned much doubt and trouble at court.

The fact is, that in the time of Bekker, a minister of the Holy Gospel, (as they say in Holland), the devil was still in prodigious credit among divines of all sorts, in the middle of the seventeenth century, in spite of the good spirits which were beginning to enlighten the world. Witchcraft, possessions, and everything else attached to that fine divinity, were in vogue throughout Europe, and frequently had fatal results.

A century had scarcely elapsed since King James_himself-called by Henry IV. Muster James-that great enemy of the Roman communion and the papal power, had published his Demonology, (what a book for a king !) and in his Demonology had admitted sorceries, incubuses, and succubuses, and acknowledged the power of the devil, and of the pope, who, according to him, had just as good a right to drive Satan from the bodies of the possessed as any other priest. And we, miserable Frenchmen, who boast of