But courage still!  Although these formulae but imperfectly define law, the facts suffice to establish them.  They (facts) show the certain action and, as stated heretofore, the uneludable nature of these formulae.

But the discovery of Delsarte is the application to aesthetics of a natural law, proven and established by science.  This law is that which governs the system of man’s organism.  Its present application is justified by a series of scientifically cooerdinated facts.  Delsarte rests upon the principle that man is the object of art.  Thus the artist should aim to manifest human nature in its three modalities, in its three phases which the master named life, soul and mind.  In other words, the beings physical, moral and mental.

These three expressions figure in the work of Pierre Leroux (De l’Humanite) in the following equivalent terms:  sensation, sentiment, knowledge. But Leroux applied to ethics this law of human organism, whereas Delsarte derived from it the law of aesthetics.  When two minds of this stamp are thus led, each in his own way, to the same source of analogous principles differently applied, is it not a proof that they have stated truth?  And in this case it is more than presumable that the two men of whom I speak had never worked together.  Delsarte was a philosopher in spite of himself.  With Pierre Leroux art was only an element contingent upon a system which he elaborated.

Was Delsarte led to his classification of man’s nature by the doctrine of the three persons in the Trinity combined in unity?  Was he, by his observations upon the human triplicity, led on to consider their infinite development in the divine personalities?  I know not, nor is it of importance in considering the system.

Leroux affirmed a relation between the unity of man and the universality of his pantheism; both relying at the outset upon an idea at once religious and philosophical.  But the research of Leroux was philosophically inclined, while that of Delsarte was of a character more especially religious.

Is it necessary to urge that you accept this obviously primitive classification of the human faculties?  Who, that shall have considered a moment to convince himself, can doubt this truth,—­that our sensations, our sentiments, our understanding, are the principal elements of our life, and that all that we are able to know of ourselves is made known to us by them directly, or by the result of their combinations?  This consideration will soon lead us to the rational development of the theory of Delsarte.  For the present, it suffices to receive these principles as they have been presented to us, and to admit that art could not go far astray while following a clue leading from a law invincible, and guiding to a science as positive as that of the astronomer, derived from the law of attraction, or that of the chemist, depending upon the law of affinities.  Here need be no confusion.  The science is positive.  The mystery of the natural law implies a hypothesis,—­even were the proposition negative.