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158 despised his profession. He was an architect, but his desire was to write scientiﬁc works, showing that physiology is the base of all the so-called psychical phenomena. All the acts which men call virtuous or vicious were, he considered, made inevitable by the state of the organs and the disposition of the nervous system. Nothing made him want to laugh so much as the pretentions of cold-blooded women who make a merit of their chastity; and he was amazed, after so much scientific data, at the way in which men went on considering the explosions of the organism as voluntary or involuntary. The influence of conscience on human conduct seemed to him null. He had demonstrated this to one of his friends, a master in an ecclesiastical school, by means of a grandfather clock which stood in his study. "What you call conscience, "he said, "is the weight that works the striking apparatus. But I can take off that weight and the clock will go on making the hours without striking them. "This friend had confessed that his own very real chastity was entirely involuntary: women roused no desire in him. He had once made the experiment and had obtained, after the