Note 29 — FREDERIC THE GREAT’S EULOGY ON JULIEN OFFRAY DE LA METTRIE.

We must think that the men who were the most highly organized, those on whom nature had lavished her richest gifts, taught the others. They could not have heard a new sound for instance, nor experienced new sensations, nor been struck by all the varied and beautiful objects that compose the ravishing spectacle of nature without finding themselves in the state of mind of the deaf man of Chartres, whose experience was first related by the great Fontenelle,29 when, at forty years, he heard for the first time, the astonishing sound of bells.