"
The results can be easily guessed: crowds came to the
lecture-rooms of the attacked professors, and the lecture-room
of Prof. See, the chief offender, was crowded to suffocation.
A siege was begun in due form. A young physician was sent by the
cardinal's party into the heterodox camp as a spy. Having heard
one lecture of Prof. See, he returned with information that
seemed to promise easy victory to the besieging party: he
brought a terrible statement--one that seemed enough to
overwhelm See, Vulpian, Duruy, and the whole hated system of
public instruction in France--the statement that See had denied
the existence of the human soul.
Cardinal Bonnechose seized the tremendous weapon at once. Rising
in his place in the Senate, he launched a most eloquent
invective against the Minister of State who could protect such
a fortress of impiety as the College of Medicine; and, as a
climax, he asserted, on the evidence of his spy fresh from Prof.
See's lecture-room, that the professor had declared, in his
lecture of the day before, that so long as he had the honour to
hold his professorship he would combat the false idea of the
existence of the soul.
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