The intellect impregnated by science, and multiplied by time, it appeared to him must triumph necessarily over all the resistance of matter; must lay bare all the creative powers of nature, and renew the face of creation.

He had made of this system a line of politics, whose first idea was to adore the future and abhor the past.

He had the cool fanaticism of logic, and the reflective anger of conviction.

A pupil of Voltaire, D'Alembert, and Helvetius, he, like Bailly, was of that intermediate generation by which philosophy was embodied with the Revolution.

More ambitious than Bailly, he had not his impassibility.