of showing off my originality and providing great results, for I cannot make up my mind to treat a subject already well done by others."-- Consequently, when he tries to originate he merely imitates, or commits mistakes.

His treatise on "Man" is a jumble of physiological and moral common-places, made up of ill-digested reading and words strung together haphazard,[3106] of gratuitous and incoherent suppositions in which the doctrines of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, coupled together, end in empty phraseology.

"Soul and Body are distinct substances with no essential relationship, being connected together solely through the nervous fluid;" this fluid is not gelatinous for the spirits by which it is renewed contains no gelatin; the soul, excited by this, excites that; hence the place assigned to it "in the brain."-- His "Optics"[3107] is the reverse of the great truth already discovered by Newton more than a century before, and since confirmed by more than another century of experiment and calculation.

On "Heat" and "Electricity" he merely puts forth feeble hypotheses and literary generalizations; one day, driven to the wall, he inserts a needle in a resin to make this a conductor, in which piece of scientific trickery he is caught by the physicist Charles.[3108] He is not even qualified to comprehend the great discoverers of his age, Laplace, Monge, Lavoisier, or Fourcroy; on the contrary, he libels them in the style of a low rebellious subordinate, who, without the shadow of a claim, aims to take the place of legitimate authorities.

In Politics, he adopts every absurd idea in vogue growing out of the "Contrat-Social" based on natural right, and which he renders still more absurd by repeating as his own the arguments advanced by those bungling socialists, who, physiologists astray in the moral world, derive all rights from physical necessities.
"All human rights issue from physical wants[3109]...