His face seemed to his wife at this moment more transfigured under the fires of genius than she had ever seen it under the fires of love; and she wept as she listened to him.

“I have combined chlorine and nitrogen; I have decomposed many substances hitherto considered simple; I have discovered new metals.  Why!” he continued, noticing that his wife wept, “I have even decomposed tears.  Tears contain a little phosphate of lime, chloride of sodium, mucin, and water.”

He went on speaking, without observing the spasm of pain that contracted Josephine’s features; he was again astride of Science, which bore him with outspread wings far away from material existence.

“This analysis, my dear,” he went on, “is one of the most convincing proofs of the theory of the Absolute.  All life involves combustion.  According to the greater or the lesser activity of the fire on its hearth is life more or less enduring.  In like manner, the destruction of mineral bodies is indefinitely retarded, because in their case combustion is nominal, latent, or imperceptible.  In like manner, again, vegetables, which are constantly revived by combinations producing dampness, live indefinitely; in fact, we still possess certain vegetables which existed before the period of the last cataclysm.  But each time that nature has perfected an organism and then, for some unknown reason, has introduced into it sensation, instinct, or intelligence (three marked stages of the organic system), these three agencies necessitate a combustion whose activity is in direct proportion to the result obtained.  Man, who represents the highest point of intelligence, and who offers us the only organism by which we arrive at a power that is semi-creative—­namely, thought—­is, among all zoological creations, the one in which combustion is found in its most intense degree; whose powerful effects may in fact be seen to some extent in the phosphates, sulphates, and carbonates which a man’s body reveals to our analysis.  May not these substances be traces left within him of the passage of the electric fluid which is the principle of all fertilization?  Would not electricity manifest itself by a greater variety of compounds in him than in any other animal?  Should not he have faculties above those of all other created beings for the purpose of absorbing fuller portions of the Absolute principle? and may he not assimilate that principle so as to produce, in some more perfect mechanism, his force and his ideas?  I think so.  Man is a retort.  In my judgment, the brain of an idiot contains too little phosphorous or other product of electro-magnetism, that of a madman too much; the brain of an ordinary man has but little, while that of a man of genius is saturated to its due degree.  The man constantly in love, the street-porter, the dancer, the large eater, are the ones who disperse the force resulting from their electrical apparatus.  Consequently, our feelings—­”