phenomena which certain ideas bring to light in the human organization
by their keen and penetrating action. A man may be put to death by a
thought. Such is the moral of those heartrending scenes, when in _The
Brigands_ the poet shows a young man, with the aid of certain ideas,
making such powerful assaults on the heart of an old man, that he ends
by causing the latter's death. The time is not far distant when
science will be able to observe the complicated mechanism of our
thoughts and to apprehend the transmission of our feelings. Some
developer of the occult sciences will prove that our intellectual
organization constitutes nothing more than a kind of interior man, who
projects himself with less violence than the exterior man, and that
the struggle which may take place between two such powers as these,
although invisible to our feeble eyes, is not a less mortal struggle
than that in which our external man compels us to engage.

But these considerations belong to a different department of study
from that in which we are now engaged; these subjects we intend to
deal with in a future publication; some of our friends are already
acquainted with one of the most important,--that, namely, entitled
"THE PATHOLOGY OF SOCIAL LIFE, _or Meditations mathematical, physical,
chemical and transcendental on the manifestations of thought, taken
under all the forms which are produced by the state of society,
whether by living, marriage, conduct, veterinary medicine, or by
speech and action, etc._," in which all these great questions are
fully discussed. The aim of this brief metaphysical observation is
only to remind you that the higher classes of society reason too well
to admit of their being attacked by any other than intellectual arms.

Although it is true that tender and delicate souls are found enveloped
in a body of metallic hardness, at the same time there are souls of