bility_.

"Thermometer," I cried, "there is an excellent word, strikingly correct.
But have I not, in pronouncing it, simply and naturally characterized
the role that I am striving to define?

"Thermometer of the sensibility! Is not that the solution of the
enigma? Thermometer; yes, that is it! That is the very expression to
give to my researches, an expression without which nothing could be
explained. That, indeed, answers to everything, and makes the
difficulties against which my reason struggled disappear."

The shoulder is, in fact, precisely the thermometer of passion as well
as of sensibility; it is the measure of their vehemence; it determines
their degree of heat and intensity. However, it does not specify their
nature, and it is certainly in an analogous sense that the instrument
known by the name of thermometer marks the degrees of heat and cold
without specifying the nature of the weather--a specification belonging
to another instrument, the complement of the thermometer--the barometer.
The parallel is absolute, perfect.

Let us examine this point:

The shoulder, in rising, is not called upon to teach us whether the
source of the heat or vehemence which mark it, arise from love or hate.
This specification does not lie within its province; it belongs entirely
to the face, which is to the shoulder what the barometer is to the
thermometer. And it is thus that the shoulder and the face enter into
harmonious relations to complete the passional sense which they have to
determine mutually and by distinct paths.

Now, the shoulder is limited, in its proper domain, to proving, first,
that the emotion expressed by the face _is_ or _is not_ true. Then,
afterward, to marking, with mathematical rigor, the degree of intensity
to which that emotion rises.

After having finished the formulation of this principle I exultingly
exclaimed:

"God be praised! I now possess the semeiotics of the shoulder, and
thereby I hold the criterion of the passional or sensitive powers--a
criterion outside of which no truth can be demonstrated in the sphere of
sentiment or feeling."

Thus, a word suggested by chance became my Archimedean lever. The word,
like a flash of light, flooded my mind with radiance which suddenly
revealed to me the numerous and fertile applications of a principle
hitherto unknown. Yes, I henceforth possessed an aesthetic principle of
the utmost value, the consequences of which, I could readily see, were
as