Well! there are a certain
number of organs which are vitiated by their lack, by their
constitution, others which are vitiated by an excess of afflux.
People, who, like Cuvier and Voltaire, have exercised their organs
early, have rendered them so powerful that no excess can affect them;
whereas those who keep to certain portions of the ideal encephalos,
which we represent as the laboratory of thought--the poets, who leave
deduction and analysis inactive and exploit the heart and imagination
exclusively--may become mad. In short, there would be a fine
experiment to make. I have thought of it for twenty years. This would
be to reconstitute the brain of an idiot, to demonstrate whether a
thinking apparatus can be created by developing its rudiments. Only by
building up a brain shall we know how one is demolished."
The beginning of the new year did not bring back his former zeal for
labour. Much of his time he frittered away in adding to his
collections. Here he picked up a portrait of Queen Marie Leczinska by
a pupil of Coypel, there, a Flemish lustre for which he paid four
hundred and fifty francs. Eve reproached him with his idleness,
presumably because he was too frequently at the house of Madame de
Girardin.
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