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This was secretly yet violently discussed by the Directory, the Council of the Elders, and of the Five Hundred. One day, at a dinner given to a few friends by the Abbe Sieyes, one of the members of the Directory, the abbe, Cabanis, and Joseph Bonaparte, were conversing together, standing on the side of the drawing-room, near the chimney.
"Who? Everybody," he said impatiently. "You are a materialist, aren't you?" "Eh! My dear soul, I have outlived all that nonsense." "But you must remember the definition of Cabanis: 'Man is a digestive tube. I imagine now...." "I spit on him." "What? On Cabanis? All right. But you can't ignore the importance of a good digestion.
I brought them back with me from America, for then they were my only friends. 'Can you find Cabanis? said Lord Cadurcis. Herbert looked about. It is in this neighbourhood, I imagine, he said. Cadurcis endeavoured to assist him. 'What is this? he said; 'Plato! 'I should like to read Plato at Athens, said Herbert. 'My ambition now does not soar beyond such elegant fortune.
"Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib, und Gesang Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang," and when he advised a young scholar perplexed with fore-ordination and free-will, to get well drunk. "The nerves," says Cabanis, "they are the man." My neighbor, a jolly farmer, in the tavern bar-room, thinks that the use of money is sure and speedy spending.
The Queen regretted him, and was astonished at her own regret; but she had hoped that he who had possessed adroitness and weight enough to throw everything into confusion would have been able by the same means to repair the mischief he had caused. Much has been said respecting the cause of Mirabeau's death. M. Cabanis, his friend and physician, denied that he was poisoned.
Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy and Volney close up the seventeenth century, but just about this time the "Critique of Pure Reason," a work which is the bed-rock of modern metaphysics, makes its appearance. According to its teachings there are no realities in the world. The struggle is passed in England. In France all are dull, drowsy. In Germany all are hungry for the food that satisfies unbelievers.
Leroy even believed that Descartes had dissembled his real opinion. Descartes protested. At the end of the eighteenth century Cabanis perfected Cartesian materialism in a work entitled: Rapport du physic et du moral de l'homme. Cartesian materialism exists in France even to this day. It had its great success in mechanical natural science, with which Romanticism will least of all be reproached.
He recognised the interpretation of history as the key to human development, and this principle controlled subsequent speculations on Progress in France. Cabanis, the physician, was Condorcet's literary executor, and a no less ardent believer in human perfectibility.
Sieges, Cabanis, Garron Coulon, Lecouteul, Canteleu, Lenoin Laroche, Volney, Gregoire, Emmery, Joucourt, Boissy d'Anglas, Fouche, and Roederer form another class, some of them regicides, others assassins and plunderers, but all intriguers whose machinations date from the beginning of the Revolution. They are all men of parts, of more or less knowledge, and of great presumption.
Cabanis knew three men who, in the vigour of age, had suddenly became impotent, although in other respects they were in good health, much engaged in business, and had but little reason to be affected by the loss of pleasures in which they indulged but very rarely and with great moderation, yet their character became gloomy and irascible, and their mental powers appeared to diminish daily.
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