340 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
the hyperbole. After friendship, love ; after love, paternity ; after 
paternity, ambition. After the circle, the ellipse ; after the ellipse, 
the parabola ; after the parabola, the hyperbole. 
The hyperbole is the curve of ambition ; the fourth conic section 
symbolizes the fourth affection. Admire the determined persist- 
ance of the ardent asymptote pursuing the hyperbole in headlong 
eagerness : it approaches, it always approaches the aim it desires 
to attain, but never attains it. Who does not recognize in this ex- 
pressive image the aspiration of the human soul impelled toward 
the infinite by an all powerful force, always approaching and never 
attaining it, happily never. This perpetual aspiration is evidently 
poetry, it is art, always dreaming a type of the perfect ideal, which 
still evades its grasp, yet still grows more beautiful also, and al- 
ways recalls you more passionately to itself. The beautiful, spring 
of attraction ; the ideal, utopia of to-day, but truth of to-morrov) ; 
arty or poetry, powers of incarnating the ideal, of predicting and 
of anticipating time ! 
God is my witness that it is the want of space and not the want 
of good-will that prevents me from lodging here a complete the- 
ory of passional aesthetics that would distance those of Goethe 
and the Abb6 Batteux, as far as the locomotive goes ahead of the 
one horse chaise. 
I may possibly be deceived, but I have the idea that a young 
person of moderate intelligence who should have been present at 
a lesson well given on the ellipse and its analogies, would easily 
recover from her prejudices against geometry. I equally conceive 
that the name of geometrician would very soon lose its present 
odium. 
If passional analogy has contrived to adorn with flowers the 
table of Pythagoras and the square of the hypotenuse, where will 
it not sow them ? I believe no public establishment in Paris pos- 
eesses a hall vast enough to contain the crowds of both sexes that 
■would be drawn by the mere announcement of a course of passion- 
al chemistry, physics, or astronomy. I am not ambitious ; I have 
made deputies, and I refused- to be one, under pretext that I did 
not pay the poll tax. I ask only Lamartine’s gift of speech, with 
the right of opening a course on passional botany. They would 
