great mainspring, that he brought scientific processes to bear in the history of the heart, the art of employing figures, of decomposing, of deducing, that he was the first to point out fundamental causes such as nationalities, climates, and temperaments, in short, that he treated sentiments as they should be treated, that is to say, as a naturalist and physicist, by making classifications and estimating forces.  On account of all this he was pronounced dry and eccentric and allowed to live in isolation, composing novels, books of travel and taking notes, for which he counted upon, and has obtained, about a dozen or so of readers.  And yet his works are those in which we of the present day may find the most satisfactory efforts that have been made to clear the road I have just striven to describe.  Nobody has taught one better how to observe with one’s own eyes, first, to regard humanity around us and life as it is, and next, old and authentic documents, how to read more than merely the black and white of the page, how to detect under old print and the scrawl of the text the veritable sentiment and the train of thought, the mental state in which the words were penned.  In his writings, as in those of Sainte Beuve and in those of the German critics the reader will find how much is to be derived from a literary document, if this document is rich and we know how to interpret it, we will find in the psychology of a particular soul, often that of an age, and sometimes that of a race.  In this respect, a great poem, a good novel, the confessions of a superior man, are more instructive than a mass of historians and histories, I would give fifty volumes of charters and a hundred diplomatic files for the memoirs of Cellini, the epistles of Saint Paul, the table talk of Luther, or the comedies of Aristophanes.  Herein lies the value of literary productions.  They are instructive because they are beautiful, their usefulness increases with their perfection and if they provide us with documents, it is because they are monuments.  The more visible a book renders sentiments the more literary it is, for it is the special office of literature to take note of sentiments.  The more important the sentiments noted in a book the higher its rank in literature, for it is by representing what sort of a life a nation or an epoch leads, that a writer rallies to himself the sympathies of a nation or of an epoch.  Hence, among the documents which bring before our eyes the sentiments of preceding generations, a literature, and especially a great literature, is incomparably the best.  It resembles those admirable instruments of remarkable sensitiveness which physicists make use of to detect and measure the most profound and delicate changes that occur in a human body.  There is nothing approaching this in constitutions or religions; the articles of a code or of a catechism do no more than depict mind in gross and without finesse; if there are any documents which show life and spirit in politics and in creeds, they are the eloquent discourses of the pulpit and the tribune, memoirs and personal confessions, all belonging to literature, so that, outside of itself, literature embodies whatever is good elsewhere.  It is mainly in studying literatures that we are able to produce moral history, and arrive at some knowledge of the psychological laws on which events depend.