THE MANUAL

OF

XÉFOLIUS.

BOOK ONE.

I asked myself one day: By what path did you arrive at thinking as you think? What are the events, the pleasures, the pains that have MODIFIED YOUR SENTIMENT original: "sentiment" — in the 18th-century context, this refers to a combination of moral intuition and internal conviction, rather than just emotion & determined your opinion? Then I regretted not having kept an exact journal of my principal observations and the consequences that flowed from them, because I would see today through how many ERRORS MAN MUST PASS TO ARRIVE AT THE TRUTH which he is compelled to seek until he has found it.

This collection of my thoughts would perhaps prevail over all the books of the philosophers philosophes: the intellectual figures of the Enlightenment who applied reason to study society, nature, and the soul that I have ever read, and in which one finds at every