"
"No, no, you shall have another to-morrow."
So saying he carried off this possible proof, shut himself up in his
study, looked for Saint Savinien and found, as the somnambulist had
told him, a little red dot at the 19th of October; he also saw another
before his own saint's day, Saint Denis, and a third before Saint
John, the abbe's patron. This little dot, no larger than a pin's head,
had been seen by the sleeping woman in spite of distance and other
obstacles! The old man thought till evening of these events, more
momentous for him than for others. He was forced to yield to evidence.
A strong wall, as it were, crumbled within him; for his life had
rested on two bases,--indifference in matters of religion and a firm
disbelief in magnetism. When it was proved to him that the senses
--faculties purely physical, organs, the effects of which could be
explained--attained to some of the attributes of the infinite,
magnetism upset, or at least it seemed to him to upset, the powerful
arguments of Spinoza. The finite and the infinite, two incompatible
elements according to that remarkable man, were here united, the one
in the other.
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