short, the EVOLUTION of his mind. The history of his mind is
in his letters; there it must be sought.

"Proudhon, whoever addresses him, is always ready; he quits the
page of the book on which he is at work to answer you with the
same pen, and that without losing patience, without getting
confused, without sparing or complaining of his ink; he is a
public man, devoted to the propagation of his idea by all
methods, and the best method, with him, is always the present
one, the latest one. His very handwriting, bold, uniform,
legible, even in the most tiresome passages, betrays no haste, no
hurry to finish. Each line is accurate: nothing is left to
chance; the punctuation, very correct and a little emphatic and
decided, indicates with precision and delicate distinction all
the links in the chain of his argument. He is devoted entirely
to you, to his business and yours, while writing to you, and
never to anything else. All the letters of his which I have seen
are serious: not one is commonplace.

"But at the same time he is not at all artistic or affected; he
does not CONSTRUCT his letters, he does not revise them, he
spends no time in reading them over; we have a first draught,
excellent and clear, a jet from the fountain-head, but that is
all. The new arguments, which he discovers in support of his
ideas and which opposition suggests to him, are an agreeable
surprise, and shed a light which we should vainly search for even
in his works. His correspondence differs essentially from his
books, in that it gives you no uneasiness; it places you in the
very heart of the man, explains him to you, and leaves you with
an impression of moral esteem and almost of intellectual