science were educated to a degree of elevation which the loftiest knowledge could not attain by itself. I have been able to study this rare moral beauty, by seeing its operation in circumstances so difficult, so diverse, and so oft-repeated, without ever belying itself or losing its freshness and purity, or temporizing with circumstances, which with others would have sanctified the conceptions made so often in daily life; that here I would trace the genealogy of these moral ideas which were the healthy atmosphere my soul breathed while it was unfolding its powers at the domestic hearth.
"I firmly believe in the transmission of moral aptitude through the organization. I believe in the infusion of the spirit of one man, into the spirit of another, by means of speech and example. Those perverse mortals who rule nations, infect the atmosphere with the breath of their souls, and reproduce their own vices and defects. There are nations who reveal the characters of those who rule over them in all their acts; and the moral life of cultivated and free nations, their monuments and their instruction, preserve the maxims of great master-minds, and would not have arrived at their actual degree of perfection, if a particle of the spirit of Christ, for example, had not been introduced by teaching and preaching into each one of them, improving their moral natures. I wished to know then who had educated my mother, and from her conversation, from citations of the sayings of others, and from her general reminiscences, I have made out almost the whole history of a man of God, whose memory lives in San Juan, and whose doctrine is perpetuated more or less pure in the hearts of our mothers.
"I am suspicious that this holy man knew his eighteenth century, its Rosseau, its Feijoo,[1] and its philosophers as
- ↑ Feijoo, whose real name was Benedict Jerom, was a Spanish Benedic-
