minimum; but this minimum sufficed for him, precisely because of the
philosophical insight which he possessed to so high a degree. To this
meagre number of positive faculties furnished by observation, he
applied an analysis so intuitive that he discovered, behind the small
facts amassed by him in no unusual quantity, the profound forces, the
generative influences, so to speak.

He himself describes--once more in connection with Daniel d'Arthez
--the method pursued in this analytical and generalizing work. He
calls it a "retrospective penetration." Probably he lays hold of the
elements of experience and casts them into a seeming retort of
reveries. Thanks to an alchemy somewhat analogous to that of Cuvier,
he was enabled to reconstruct an entire temperament from the smallest
detail, and an entire class from a single individual; but that which
guided him in his work of reconstruction was always and everywhere the
habitual process of philosophers: the quest and investigation of
causes.

It is due to this analysis that this dreamer has defined almost all
the great principles of the psychological changes incident to our
time. He saw clearly, while democracy was establishing itself with us
on the ruins of the ancient regime, the novelty of the sentiments
which these transfers from class to class were certain to produce. He
fathomed every complication of heart and mind in the modern woman by
an intuition of the laws which control her development. He divined the
transformation in the lives of artists, keeping pace with the change
in the national situation; and to this day the picture he has drawn of
journalism in _Lost Illusions_ ("A Distinguished Provincial at Paris")
remains strictly true. It seems to me that this same power of locating
causes, which has brought about such a wealth of ideas in his work,