The profound affection which thus bound M. Berthelot and myself
together was unquestionably of a very rare and singular kind. It
so happened that we were both of an essentially objective nature; a
nature, that is to say, perfectly free from the narrow whirlwind which
converts most consciences into an egotistical gulf like the conical
cavity of the formica-leo. Accustomed each to pay very little
attention to himself, we paid very little attention to one another.
Our friendship consisted in what we mutually learnt, in a sort of
common fermentation which a remarkable conformity of intellectual
organization produced in us in regard to the same objects. Anything
which we had both seen in the same light seemed to us a certainty.
When we first became acquainted, I still retained a tender attachment
for Christianity. Berthelot also inherited from his father a remnant
of Christian belief. A few months sufficed to relegate these vestiges
of faith to that part of our souls reserved for memory. The statement
that everything in the world is of the same colour, that there is no
special supernatural or momentary revelation, impressed itself upon
our minds as unanswerable. The scientific purview of a universe in
which there is no appreciable trace of any free will superior to that
of man became, from the first months of 1846, the immovable anchor
from which we never shifted. We shall never move from this position
until we shall have encountered in nature some one specially
intentional fact having its cause outside the free will of man or the
spontaneous action of the animal.
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