Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

Nor had Lambert omitted the yet more recent adventure of an English girl who was passionately attached to a sailor, and set out from London to seek him. She found him, without a guide, making her way alone in the North American wilderness, reaching him just in time to save his life.

Louis had found confirmatory evidence in the mysteries of the ancients, in the acts of the martyrs--in which glorious instances may be found of the triumph of human will, in the demonology of the Middle Ages, in criminal trials and medical researches; always selecting the real fact, the probable phenomenon, with admirable sagacity.

All this rich collection of scientific anecdotes, culled from so many books, most of them worthy of credit, served no doubt to wrap parcels in; and this work, which was curious, to say the least of it, as the outcome of a most extraordinary memory, was doomed to destruction.

Among the various cases which added to the value of Lambert's _Treatise_ was an incident that had taken place in his own family, of which he had told me before he wrote his essay. This fact, bearing on the post-existence of the inner man, if I may be allowed to coin a new word for a phenomenon hitherto nameless, struck me so forcibly that I have never forgotten it. His father and mother were being forced into a lawsuit, of which the loss would leave them with a stain on their good name, the only thing they had in the world. Hence their anxiety was very great when the question first arose as to whether they should yield to the plaintiff's unjust demands, or should defend themselves against him. The matter came under discussion one autumn evening, before a turf fire in the room used by the tanner and his wife. Two or three relations were invited to this family council, and among others Louis' maternal great-grandfather, an old laborer, much bent, but with a venerable and dignified countenance, bright eyes, and a bald, yellow head, on which grew a few locks of thin, white hair. Like the Obi of the Negroes, or the Sagamore of the Indian savages, he was a sort of oracle, consulted on important occasions. His land was tilled by his grandchildren, who fed and served him; he predicted rain and fine weather, and told them when to mow the hay and gather the crops. The barometric exactitude of his forecasts was quite famous, and added to the confidence and respect he inspired. For whole days he would sit immovable in his armchair. This state of rapt meditation often came upon him since his wife's death; he had been attached to her in the truest and most faithful affection.

This discussion was held in his presence, but he did not seem to give much heed to it.

"My children," said he, when he was asked for his opinion, "this is too serious a matter for me to decide on alone. I must go and consult my wife."

The old man rose, took his stick, and went out, to the great astonishment of the others, who thought him daft. He presently came back and said:

"I did not have to go so far as the graveyard; your mother came to meet me; I found her by the brook. She tells me that you will find some receipts in the hands of a notary at Blois, which will enable you to gain your suit."

The words were spoken in a firm tone; the old man's demeanor and countenance showed that such an apparition was habitual with him. In fact, the disputed receipts were found, and the lawsuit was not attempted.

This event, under his father's roof and to his own knowledge, when Louis was nine years old, contributed largely to his belief in Swedenborg's miraculous visions, for in the course of that philosopher's life he repeatedly gave proof of the power of sight developed in his Inner Being. As he grew older, and as his intelligence was developed, Lambert was naturally led to seek in the laws of nature for the causes of the miracle which, in his childhood, had captivated his attention. What name can be given to the chance which brought within his ken so many facts and books bearing on such phenomena, and made him the principal subject and actor in such marvelous manifestations of mind?

If Lambert had no other title to fame than the fact of his having formulated, in his sixteenth year, such a psychological dictum as this:--"The events which bear witness to the action of the human race, and are the outcome of its intellect, have causes by which they are preconceived, as our actions are accomplished in our minds before they are reproduced by the outer man; presentiments or predictions are the perception of these causes"--I think we may deplore in him a genius equal to Pascal, Lavoisier, or Laplace. His chimerical notions about angels perhaps overruled his work too long; but was it not in trying to make gold that the alchemists unconsciously created chemistry? At the same time, Lambert, at a later period, studied comparative anatomy, physics, geometry, and other sciences bearing on his discoveries, and this was undoubtedly with the purpose of collecting facts and submitting them to analysis--the only torch that can guide us through the dark places of the most inscrutable work of nature. He had too much good sense to dwell among the clouds of theories which can all be expressed in a few words. In our day, is not the simplest demonstration based on facts more highly esteemed than the most specious system though defended by more or less ingenious inductions? But as I did not know him at the period of his life when his cogitations were, no doubt, the most productive of results, I can only conjecture that the bent of his work must have been from that of his first efforts of thought.

It is easy to see where his _Treatise on the Will_ was faulty. Though gifted already with the powers which characterize superior men, he was but a boy. His brain, though endowed with a great faculty for abstractions, was still full of the delightful beliefs that hover around youth. Thus his conception, while at some points it touched the ripest fruits of his genius, still, by many more, clung to the smaller elements of its germs. To certain readers, lovers of poetry, what he chiefly lacked must have been a certain vein of interest.

But his work bore the stamp of the struggle that was going on in that noble Spirit between the two great principles of Spiritualism and Materialism, round which so many a fine genius has beaten its way without ever daring to amalgamate them. Louis, at first purely Spiritualist, had been irresistibly led to recognize the Material conditions of Mind. Confounded by the facts of analysis at the moment when his heart still gazed with yearning at the clouds which floated in Swedenborg's heaven, he had not yet acquired the necessary powers to produce a coherent system, compactly cast in a piece, as it were. Hence certain inconsistencies that have left their stamp even on the sketch here given of his first attempts. Still, incomplete as his work may have been, was it not the rough copy of a science of which he would have investigated the secrets at a later time, have secured the foundations, have examined, deduced, and connected the logical sequence?

Six months after the confiscation of the _Treatise on the Will_ I left school. Our parting was unexpected. My mother, alarmed by a feverish attack which for some months I had been unable to shake off, while my inactive life induced symptoms of _coma_, carried me off at four or five hours' notice. The announcement of my departure reduced Lambert to dreadful dejection.

"Shall I ever seen you again?" said he in his gentle voice, as he clasped me in his arms. "You will live," he went on, "but I shall die. If I can, I will come back to you."

Only the young can utter such words with the accent of conviction that gives them the impressiveness of prophecy, of a pledge, leaving a terror of its fulfilment. For a long time indeed I vaguely looked for the promised apparition. Even now there are days of depression, of doubt, alarm, and loneliness, when I am forced to repel the intrusion of that sad parting, though it was not fated to be the last.

When I crossed the yard by which we left, Lambert was at one of the refectory windows to see me pass. By my request my mother obtained leave for him to dine with us at the inn, and in the evening I escorted him back to the fatal gate of the college. No lover and his mistress ever shed more tears at parting.

"Well, good-bye; I shall be left alone in this desert!" said he, pointing to the playground where two hundred boys were disporting themselves and shouting. "When I come back half dead with fatigue from my long excursions through the fields of thought, on whose heart can I rest? I could tell you everything in a look. Who will understand me now?--Good-bye! I could wish I had never met you; I should not know all I am losing."

"And what is to become of me?" said I. "Is not my position a dreadful one? _I_ have nothing here to uphold me!" and I slapped my forehead.

He shook his head with a gentle gesture, gracious and sad, and we parted.

At that time Louis Lambert was about five feet five inches in height; he grew no more. His countenance, which was full of expression, revealed his sweet nature. Divine patience, developed by harsh usage, and the constant concentration needed for his meditative life, had bereft his eyes of the audacious pride which is so attractive in some faces, and which had so shocked our masters. Peaceful mildness gave charm to his face, an exquisite serenity that was never marred by a tinge of irony or satire; for his natural kindliness tempered his conscious strength and superiority. He had pretty hands, very slender, and almost always moist. His frame was a marvel, a model for a sculptor; but our iron-gray uniform, with gilt buttons and knee-breeches, gave us such an ungainly appearance that Lambert's fine proportions and firm muscles could only be appreciated in the bath. When we swam in our pool in the Loire, Louis was conspicuous by the whiteness of his skin, which was unlike the different shades of our schoolfellows' bodies mottled by the cold, or blue from the water. Gracefully formed, elegant in his attitudes, delicate in hue, never shivering after his bath, perhaps because he avoided the shade and always ran into the sunshine, Louis was like one of those cautious blossoms that close their petals to the blast and refuse to open unless to a clear sky. He ate little, and drank water only; either by instinct or by choice he was averse to any exertion that made a demand on his strength; his movements were few and simple, like those of Orientals or of savages, with whom gravity seems a condition of nature.

As a rule, he disliked everything that resembled any special care for his person. He commonly sat with his head a little inclined to the left, and so constantly rested his elbows on the table, that the sleeves of his coats were soon in holes.

To this slight picture of the outer man I must add a sketch of his moral qualities, for I believe I can now judge him impartially.

Though naturally religious, Louis did not accept the minute practices of the Roman ritual; his ideas were more intimately in sympathy with Saint Theresa and Fenelon, and several Fathers and certain Saints, who, in our day, would be regarded as heresiarchs or atheists. He was rigidly calm during the services. His own prayers went up in gusts, in aspirations, without any regular formality; in all things he gave himself up to nature, and would not pray, any more than he would think, at any fixed hour. In chapel he was equally apt to think of God or to meditate on some problem of philosophy.

To him Jesus Christ was the most perfect type of his system. _Et Verbum caro factum est_ seemed a sublime statement intended to express the traditional formula of the Will, the Word, and the Act made visible. Christ's unconsciousness of His Death--having so perfected His inner Being by divine works, that one day the invisible form of it appeared to His disciples--and the other Mysteries of the Gospels, the magnetic cures wrought by Christ, and the gift of tongues, all to him confirmed his doctrine. I remember once hearing him say on this subject, that the greatest work that could be written nowadays was a History of the Primitive Church. And he never rose to such poetic heights as when, in the evening, as we conversed, he would enter on an inquiry into miracles, worked by the power of Will during that great age of faith. He discerned the strongest evidence of his theory in most of the martyrdoms endured during the first century of our era, which he spoke of as _the great era of the Mind_.

"Do not the phenomena observed in almost every instance of the torments so heroically endured by the early Christians for the establishment of the faith, amply prove that Material force will never prevail against the force of Ideas or the Will of man?" he would say. "From this effect, produced by the Will of all, each man may draw conclusions in favor of his own."

I need say nothing of his views on poetry or history, nor of his judgment on the masterpieces of our language. There would be little interest in the record of opinions now almost universally held, though at that time, from the lips of a boy, they might seem remarkable. Louis was capable of the highest flights. To give a notion of his talents in a few words, he could have written _Zadig_ as wittily as Voltaire; he could have thought out the dialogue between Sylla and Eucrates as powerfully as Montesquieu. His rectitude of character made him desire above all else in a work that it should bear the stamp of utility; at the same time, his refined taste demanded novelty of thought as well as of form. One of his most remarkable literary observations, which will serve as a clue to all the others, and show the lucidity of his judgment, is this, which has ever dwelt in my memory, "The Apocalypse is written ecstasy." He regarded the Bible as a part of the traditional history of the antediluvian nations which had taken for its share the new humanity. He thought that the mythology of the Greeks was borrowed both from the Hebrew Scriptures and from the sacred Books of India, adapted after their own fashion by the beauty-loving Hellenes.

"It is impossible," said he, "to doubt the priority of the Asiatic Scriptures; they are earlier than our sacred books. The man who is candid enough to admit this historical fact sees the whole world expand before him. Was it not on the Asiatic highland that the few men took refuge who were able to escape the catastrophe that ruined our globe--if, indeed men had existed before that cataclysm or shock? A serious query, the answer to which lies at the bottom of the sea. The anthropogony of the Bible is merely a genealogy of a swarm escaping from the human hive which settled on the mountainous slopes of Thibet between the summits of the Himalaya and the Caucasus.

"The character of the primitive ideas of that horde called by its lawgiver the people of God, no doubt to secure its unity, and perhaps also to induce it to maintain his laws and his system of government --for the Books of Moses are a religious, political, and civil code --that character bears the authority of terror; convulsions of nature are interpreted with stupendous power as a vengeance from on high. In fact, since this wandering tribe knew none of the ease enjoyed by a community settled in a patriarchal home, their sorrows as pilgrims inspired them with none but gloomy poems, majestic but blood-stained. In the Hindoos, on the contrary, the spectacle of the rapid recoveries of the natural world, and the prodigious effects of sunshine, which they were the first to recognize, gave rise to happy images of blissful love, to the worship of Fire and of the endless personifications of reproductive force. These fine fancies are lacking in the Book of the Hebrews. A constant need of self-preservation amid all the dangers and the lands they traversed to reach the Promised Land engendered their exclusive race-feeling and their hatred of all other nations.

"These three Scriptures are the archives of an engulfed world. Therein lies the secret of the extraordinary splendor of those languages and their myths. A grand human history lies beneath those names of men and places, and those fables which charm us so irresistibly, we know not why. Perhaps it is because we find in them the native air of renewed humanity."

Thus, to him, this threefold literature included all the thoughts of man. Not a book could be written, in his opinion, of which the subject might not there be discerned in its germ. This view shows how learnedly he had pursued his early studies of the Bible, and how far they had led him. Hovering, as it were, over the heads of society, and knowing it solely from books, he could judge it coldly.

"The law," said he, "never puts a check on the enterprises of the rich and great, but crushes the poor, who, on the contrary, need protection."

His kind heart did not therefore allow him to sympathize in political ideas; his system led rather to the passive obedience of which Jesus set the example. During the last hours of my life at Vendome, Louis had ceased to feel the spur to glory; he had, in a way, had an abstract enjoyment of fame; and having opened it, as the ancient priests of sacrifice sought to read the future in the hearts of men, he had found nothing in the entrails of his chimera. Scorning a sentiment so wholly personal: "Glory," said he, "is but beatified egoism."

Here, perhaps, before taking leave of this exceptional boyhood, I may pronounce judgment on it by a rapid glance.

A short time before our separation, Lambert said to me:

"Apart from the general laws which I have formulated--and this, perhaps, will be my glory--laws which must be those of the human organism, the life of man is Movement determined in each individual by the pressure of some inscrutable influence--by the brain, the heart, or the sinews. All the innumerable modes of human existence result from the proportions in which these three generating forces are more or less intimately combined with the substances they assimilate in the environment they live in."

He stopped short, struck his forehead, and exclaimed: "How strange! In every great man whose portrait I have remarked, the neck is short. Perhaps nature requires that in them the heart should be nearer to the brain!"

Then he went on:

"From that, a sum-total of action takes its rise which constitutes social life. The man of sinew contributes action or strength; the man of brain, genius; the man of heart, faith. But," he added sadly, "faith sees only the clouds of the sanctuary; the Angel alone has light."

So, according to his own definitions, Lambert was all brain and all heart. It seems to me that his intellectual life was divided into three marked phases.

Under the impulsion, from his earliest years, of a precocious activity, due, no doubt, to some malady--or to some special perfection--of organism, his powers were concentrated on the functions of the inner senses and a superabundant flow of nerve-fluid. As a man of ideas, he craved to satisfy the thirst of his brain, to assimilate every idea. Hence his reading; and from his reading, the reflections that gave him the power of reducing things to their simplest expression, and of absorbing them to study them in their essence. Thus, the advantages of this splendid stage, acquired by other men only after long study, were achieved by Lambert during his bodily childhood: a happy childhood, colored by the studious joys of a born poet.

The point which most thinkers reach at last was to him the starting-point, whence his brain was to set out one day in search of new worlds of knowledge. Though as yet he knew it not, he had made for himself the most exacting life possible, and the most insatiably greedy. Merely to live, was he not compelled to be perpetually casting nutriment into the gulf he had opened in himself? Like some beings who dwell in the grosser world, might not he die of inanition for want of feeding abnormal and disappointed cravings? Was not this a sort of debauchery of the intellect which might lead to spontaneous combustion, like that of bodies saturated with alcohol?

I had seen nothing of this first phase of his brain-development; it is only now, at a later day, that I can thus give an account of its prodigious fruit and results. Lambert was now thirteen.

I was so fortunate as to witness the first stage of the second period. Lambert was cast into all the miseries of school-life--and that, perhaps, was his salvation--it absorbed the superabundance of his thoughts. After passing from concrete ideas to their purest expression, from words to their ideal import, and from that import to principles, after reducing everything to the abstract, to enable him to live he yearned for yet other intellectual creations. Quelled by the woes of school and the critical development of his physical constitution, he became thoughtful, dreamed of feeling, and caught a glimpse of new sciences--positively masses of ideas. Checked in his career, and not yet strong enough to contemplate the higher spheres, he contemplated his inmost self. I then perceived in him the struggle of the Mind reacting on itself, and trying to detect the secrets of its own nature, like a physician who watches the course of his own disease.

At this stage of weakness and strength, of childish grace and superhuman powers, Louis Lambert is the creature who, more than any other, gave me a poetical and truthful image of the being we call an angel, always excepting one woman whose name, whose features, whose identity, and whose life I would fain hide from all the world, so as to be sole master of the secret of her existence, and to bury it in the depths of my heart.

The third phase I was not destined to see. It began when Lambert and I were parted, for he did not leave college till he was eighteen, in the summer of 1815. He had at that time lost his father and mother about six months before. Finding no member of his family with whom his soul could sympathize, expansive still, but, since our parting, thrown back on himself, he made his home with his uncle, who was also his guardian, and who, having been turned out of his benefice as a priest who had taken the oaths, had come to settle at Blois. There Louis lived for some time; but consumed ere long by the desire to finish his incomplete studies, he came to Paris to see Madame de Stael, and to drink of science at its highest fount. The old priest, being very fond of his nephew, left Louis free to spend his whole little inheritance in his three years' stay in Paris, though he lived very poorly. This fortune consisted of but a few thousand francs.

Lambert returned to Blois at the beginning of 1820, driven from Paris by the sufferings to which the impecunious are exposed there. He must often have been a victim to the secret storms, the terrible rage of mind by which artists are tossed to judge from the only fact his uncle recollected, and the only letter he preserved of all those which Louis Lambert wrote to him at that time, perhaps because it was the last and the longest.

To begin with the story. Louis one evening was at the Theatre-Francais, seated on a bench in the upper gallery, near to one of the pillars which, in those days, divided off the third row of boxes. On rising between the acts, he saw a young woman who had just come into the box next him. The sight of this lady, who was young, pretty, well dressed, in a low bodice no doubt, and escorted by a man for whom her face beamed with all the charms of love, produced such a terrible effect on Lambert's soul and senses, that he was obliged to leave the theatre. If he had not been controlled by some remaining glimmer of reason, which was not wholly extinguished by this first fever of burning passion, he might perhaps have yielded to the most irresistible desire that came over him to kill the young man on whom the lady's looks beamed. Was not this a reversion, in the heart of the Paris world, to the savage passion that regards women as its prey, an effect of animal instinct combining with the almost luminous flashes of a soul crushed under the weight of thought? In short, was it not the prick of the penknife so vividly imagined by the boy, felt by the man as the thunderbolt of his most vital craving--for love?

And now, here is the letter that depicts the state of his mind as it was struck by the spectacle of Parisian civilization. His feelings, perpetually wounded no doubt in that whirlpool of self-interest, must always have suffered there; he probably had no friend to comfort him, no enemy to give tone to this life. Compelled to live in himself alone, having no one to share his subtle raptures, he may have hoped to solve the problem of his destiny by a life of ecstasy, adopting an almost vegetative attitude, like an anchorite of the early Church, and abdicating the empire of the intellectual world.

This letter seems to hint at such a scheme, which is a temptation to all lofty souls at periods of social reform. But is not this purpose, in some cases, the result of a vocation? Do not some of them endeavor to concentrate their powers by long silence, so as to emerge fully capable of governing the world by word or by deed? Louis must, assuredly, have found much bitterness in his intercourse with men, or have striven hard with Society in terrible irony, without extracting anything from it, before uttering so strident a cry, and expressing, poor fellow, the desire which satiety of power and of all earthly things has led even monarchs to indulge!

And perhaps, too, he went back to solitude to carry out some great work that was floating inchoate in his brain. We would gladly believe it as we read this fragment of his thoughts, betraying the struggle of his soul at the time when youth was ending and the terrible power of production was coming into being, to which we might have owed the works of the man.

This letter connects itself with the adventure at the theatre. The incident and the letter throw light on each other, body and soul were tuned to the same pitch. This tempest of doubts and asseverations, of clouds and of lightnings that flash before the thunder, ending by a starved yearning for heavenly illumination, throws such a light on the third phase of his education as enables us to understand it perfectly. As we read these lines, written at chance moments, taken up when the vicissitudes of life in Paris allowed, may we not fancy that we see an oak at that stage of its growth when its inner expansion bursts the tender green bark, covering it with wrinkles and cracks, when its majestic stature is in preparation--if indeed the lightnings of heaven and the axe of man shall spare it?

This letter, then, will close, alike for the poet and the philosopher, this portentous childhood and unappreciated youth. It finishes off the outline of this nature in its germ. Philosophers will regret the foliage frost-nipped in the bud; but they will, perhaps, find the flowers expanding in regions far above the highest places of the earth.

"PARIS, September-October 1819.

"DEAR UNCLE,--I shall soon be leaving this part of the world,
where I could never bear to live. I find no one here who likes
what I like, who works at my work, or is amazed at what amazes me.
Thrown back on myself, I eat my heart out in misery. My long and
patient study of Society here has brought me to melancholy
conclusions, in which doubt predominates.

"Here, money is the mainspring of everything. Money is
indispensable, even for going without money. But though that dross
is necessary to any one who wishes to think in peace, I have not
courage enough to make it the sole motive power of my thoughts. To
make a fortune, I must take up a profession; in two words, I must,
by acquiring some privilege of position or of self-advertisement,
either legal or ingeniously contrived, purchase the right of
taking day by day out of somebody else's purse a certain sum
which, by the end of the year, would amount to a small capital;
and this, in twenty years, would hardly secure an income of four
or five thousand francs to a man who deals honestly. An advocate,
a notary, a merchant, any recognized professional, has earned a
living for his later days in the course of fifteen or sixteen
years after ending his apprenticeship.

"But I have never felt fit for work of this kind. I prefer thought
to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity. I
am absolutely devoid of the constant attention indispensable to
the making of a fortune. Any mercantile venture, any need for
using other people's money would bring me to grief, and I should
be ruined. Though I have nothing, at least at the moment, I owe
nothing. The man who gives his life to the achievement of great
things in the sphere of intellect, needs very little; still,
though twenty sous a day would be enough, I do not possess that
small income for my laborious idleness. When I wish to cogitate,
want drives me out of the sanctuary where my mind has its being.
What is to become of me?

"I am not frightened at poverty. If it were not that beggars are
imprisoned, branded, scorned, I would beg, to enable me to solve
at my leisure the problems that haunt me. Still, this sublime
resignation, by which I might emancipate my mind, through
abstracting it from the body, would not serve my end. I should
still need money to devote myself to certain experiments. But for
that, I would accept the outward indigence of a sage possessed of
both heaven and heart. A man need only never stoop, to remain
lofty in poverty. He who struggles and endures, while marching on
to a glorious end, presents a noble spectacle; but who can have
the strength to fight here? We can climb cliffs, but it is
unendurable to remain for ever tramping the mud. Everything here
checks the flight of the spirit that strives towards the future.

"I should not be afraid of myself in a desert cave; I am afraid of
myself here. In the desert I should be alone with myself,
undisturbed; here man has a thousand wants which drag him down.
You go out walking, absorbed in dreams; the voice of the beggar
asking an alms brings you back to this world of hunger and thirst.
You need money only to take a walk. Your organs of sense,
perpetually wearied by trifles, never get any rest. The poet's
sensitive nerves are perpetually shocked, and what ought to be his
glory becomes his torment; his imagination is his cruelest enemy.
The injured workman, the poor mother in childbed, the prostitute
who has fallen ill, the foundling, the infirm and aged--even vice
and crime here find a refuge and charity; but the world is
merciless to the inventor, to the man who thinks. Here everything
must show an immediate and practical result. Fruitless attempts
are mocked at, though they may lead to the greatest discoveries;
the deep and untiring study that demands long concentrations of
every faculty is not valued here. The State might pay talent as it
pays the bayonet; but it is afraid of being taken in by mere
cleverness, as if genius could be counterfeited for any length of
time.

"Ah, my dear uncle, when monastic solitude was destroyed, uprooted
from its home at the foot of mountains, under green and silent
shade, asylums ought to have been provided for those suffering
souls who, by an idea, promote the progress of nations or prepare
some new and fruitful development of science.

"September 20th.

"The love of study brought me hither, as you know. I have met
really learned men, amazing for the most part; but the lack of
unity in scientific work almost nullifies their efforts. There is
no Head of instruction or of scientific research. At the Museum a
professor argues to prove that another in the Rue Saint-Jacques
talks nonsense. The lecturer at the College of Medicine abuses him
of the College de France. When I first arrived, I went to hear an
old Academician who taught five hundred youths that Corneille was
a haughty and powerful genius; Racine, elegiac and graceful;
Moliere, inimitable; Voltaire, supremely witty; Bossuet and
Pascal, incomparable in argument. A professor of philosophy may
make a name by explaining how Plato is Platonic. Another
discourses on the history of words, without troubling himself
about ideas. One explains Aeschylus, another tells you that
communes were communes, and neither more nor less. These original
and brilliant discoveries, diluted to last several hours,
constitute the higher education which is to lead to giant strides
in human knowledge.

"If the Government could have an idea, I should suspect it of
being afraid of any real superiority, which, once roused, might
bring Society under the yoke of an intelligent rule. Then nations
would go too far and too fast; so professors are appointed to
produce simpletons. How else can we account for a scheme devoid of
method or any notion of the future?

"The _Institut_ might be the central government of the moral and
intellectual world; but it has been ruined lately by its
subdivision into separate academies. So human science marches on,
without a guide, without a system, and floats haphazard with no
road traced out.

"This vagueness and uncertainty prevails in politics as well as in
science. In the order of nature means are simple, the end is grand
and marvelous; here in science as in government, the means are
stupendous, the end is mean. The force which in nature proceeds at
an equal pace, and of which the sum is constantly being added to
itself--the A + A from which everything is produced--is
destructive in society. Politics, at the present time, place human
forces in antagonism to neutralize each other, instead of
combining them to promote their action to some definite end.

"Looking at Europe alone, from Caesar to Constantine, from the
puny Constantine to the great Attila, from the Huns to
Charlemagne, from Charlemagne to Leo X., from Leo X., to Philip
II., from Philip II. to Louis XIV.; from Venice to England, from
England to Napoleon, from Napoleon to England, I see no fixed
purpose in politics; its constant agitation has led to no
progress.

"Nations leave witnesses to their greatness in monuments, and to
their happiness in the welfare of individuals. Are modern
monuments as fine as those of the ancients? I doubt it. The arts,
which are the direct outcome of the individual, the products of
genius or of handicraft, have not advanced much. The pleasures of
Lucullus were as good as those of Samuel Bernard, of Beaujon, or
of the King of Bavaria. And then human longevity has diminished.

"Thus, to those who will be candid, man is still the same; might
is his only law, and success his only wisdom.

"Jesus Christ, Mahomet, and Luther only lent a different hue to
the arena in which youthful nations disport themselves.

"No development of politics has hindered civilization, with its
riches, its manners, its alliance of the strong against the weak,
its ideas, and its delights, from moving from Memphis to Tyre,
from Tyre to Baalbek, from Tadmor to Carthage, from Carthage to
Rome, from Rome to Constantinople, from Constantinople to Venice,
from Venice to Spain, from Spain to England--while no trace is
left of Memphis, of Tyre, of Carthage, of Rome, of Venice, or
Madrid. The soul of those great bodies has fled. Not one of them
has preserved itself from destruction, nor formulated this axiom:
When the effect produced ceases to be in a ratio to its cause,
disorganization follows.

"The most subtle genius can discover no common bond between great
social facts. No political theory has ever lasted. Governments
pass away, as men do, without handing down any lesson, and no
system gives birth to a system better than that which came before
it. What can we say about politics when a Government directly
referred to God perished in India and Egypt; when the rule of the
Sword and of the Tiara are past; when Monarchy is dying; when the
Government of the People has never been alive; when no scheme of
intellectual power as applied to material interests has ever
proved durable, and everything at this day remains to be done all
over again, as it has been at every period when man has turned to
cry out, 'I am in torment!'

"The code, which is considered Napoleon's greatest achievement, is
the most Draconian work I know of. Territorial subdivision carried
out to the uttermost, and its principle confirmed by the equal
division of property generally, must result in the degeneracy of
the nation and the death of the Arts and Sciences. The land, too
much broken up, is cultivated only with cereals and small crops;
the forests, and consequently the rivers, are disappearing; oxen
and horses are no longer bred. Means are lacking both for attack
and for resistance. If we should be invaded, the people must be
crushed; it has lost its mainspring--its leaders. This is the
history of deserts!

"Thus the science of politics has no definite principles, and it
can have no fixity; it is the spirit of the hour, the perpetual
application of strength proportioned to the necessities of the
moment. The man who should foresee two centuries ahead would die
on the place of execution, loaded with the imprecations of the
mob, or else--which seems worse--would be lashed with the myriad
whips of ridicule. Nations are but individuals, neither wiser nor
stronger than man, and their destinies are identical. If we
reflect on man, is not that to consider mankind?

"By studying the spectacle of society perpetually storm-tossed in
its foundations as well as in its results, in its causes as well
as in its actions, while philanthropy is but a splendid mistake,
and progress is vanity, I have been confirmed in this truth: Life
is within and not without us; to rise above men, to govern them,
is only the part of an aggrandized school-master; and those men
who are capable of rising to the level whence they can enjoy a
view of the world should not look at their own feet.

"November 4th.

"I am no doubt occupied with weighty thoughts, I am on the way to
certain discoveries, an invincible power bears me toward a
luminary which shone at an early age on the darkness of my moral
life; but what name can I give to the power that ties my hands and
shuts my mouth, and drags me in a direction opposite to my
vocation? I must leave Paris, bid farewell to the books in the
libraries, those noble centres of illumination, those kindly and
always accessible sages, and the younger geniuses with whom I
sympathize. Who is it that drives me away? Chance or Providence?

"The two ideas represented by those words are irreconcilable. If
Chance does not exist, we must admit fatalism, that is to say, the
compulsory co-ordination of things under the rule of a general
plan. Why then do we rebel? If man is not free, what becomes of
the scaffolding of his moral sense? Or, if he can control his
destiny, if by his own freewill he can interfere with the
execution of the general plan, what becomes of God?

"Why did I come here? If I examine myself, I find the answer: I
find in myself axioms that need developing. But why then have I
such vast faculties without being suffered to use them? If my
suffering could serve as an example, I could understand it; but
no, I suffer unknown.

"This is perhaps as much the act of Providence as the fate of the
flower that dies unseen in the heart of the virgin forest, where
no one can enjoy its perfume or admire its splendor. Just as that
blossom vainly sheds its fragrance to the solitude, so do I, here
in the garret, give birth to ideas that no one can grasp.

"Yesterday evening I sat eating bread and grapes in front of my
window with a young doctor named Meyraux. We talked as men do whom
misfortune has joined in brotherhood, and I said to him:

"'I am going away; you are staying. Take up my ideas and develop
them.'

"'I cannot!' said he, with bitter regret: 'my feeble health
cannot stand so much work, and I shall die young of my struggle
with penury.'

"We looked up at the sky and grasped hands. We first met at the
Comparative Anatomy course, and in the galleries of the Museum,
attracted thither by the same study--the unity of geological
structure. In him this was the presentiment of genius sent to open
a new path in the fallows of intellect; in me it was a deduction
from a general system.

"My point is to ascertain the real relation that may exist between
God and man. Is not this a need of the age? Without the highest
assurance, it is impossible to put bit and bridle on the social
factions that have been let loose by the spirit of scepticism and
discussion, and which are now crying aloud: 'Show us a way in
which we may walk and find no pitfalls in our way!'

"You will wonder what comparative anatomy has to do with a
question of such importance to the future of society. Must we not
attain to the conviction that man is the end of all earthly means
before we ask whether he too is not the means to some end? If man
is bound up with everything, is there not something above him with
which he again is bound up? If he is the end-all of the explained
transmutations that lead up to him, must he not be also the link
between the visible and invisible creations?

"The activity of the universe is not absurd; it must tend to an
end, and that end is surely not a social body constituted as ours
is! There is a fearful gulf between us and heaven. In our present
existence we can neither be always happy nor always in torment;
must there not be some tremendous change to bring about Paradise
and Hell, two images without which God cannot exist to the mind of
the vulgar? I know that a compromise was made by the invention of
the Soul; but it is repugnant to me to make God answerable for
human baseness, for our disenchantments, our aversions, our
degeneracy.

"Again, how can we recognize as divine the principle within us
which can be overthrown by a few glasses of rum? How conceive of
immaterial faculties which matter can conquer, and whose exercise
is suspended by a grain of opium? How imagine that we shall be
able to feel when we are bereft of the vehicles of sensation? Why
must God perish if matter can be proved to think? Is the vitality
of matter in its innumerable manifestations--the effect of its
instincts--at all more explicable than the effects of the mind? Is
not the motion given to the worlds enough to prove God's
existence, without our plunging into absurd speculations suggested
by pride? And if we pass, after our trials, from a perishable
state of being to a higher existence, is not that enough for a
creature that is distinguished from other creatures only by more
perfect instincts? If in moral philosophy there is not a single
principle which does not lead to the absurd, or cannot be
disproved by evidence, is it not high time that we should set to
work to seek such dogmas as are written in the innermost nature of
things? Must we not reverse philosophical science?

"We trouble ourselves very little about the supposed void that
must have pre-existed for us, and we try to fathom the supposed
void that lies before us. We make God responsible for the future,
but we do not expect Him to account for the past. And yet it is
quite as desirable to know whether we have any roots in the past
as to discover whether we are inseparable from the future.

"We have been Deists or Atheists in one direction only.

"Is the world eternal? Was the world created? We can conceive of
no middle term between these two propositions; one, then, is true
and the other false! Take your choice. Whichever it may be, God,
as our reason depicts Him, must be deposed, and that amounts to
denial. The world is eternal: then, beyond question, God has had
it forced upon Him. The world was created: then God is an
impossibility. How could He have subsisted through an eternity,
not knowing that He would presently want to create the world? How
could He have failed to foresee all the results?

"Whence did He derive the essence of creation? Evidently from
Himself. If, then, the world proceeds from God, how can you
account for evil? That Evil should proceed from Good is absurd. If
evil does not exist, what do you make of social life and its laws?
On all hands we find a precipice! On every side a gulf in which
reason is lost! Then social science must be altogether
reconstructed.

"Listen to me, uncle; until some splendid genius shall have taken
account of the obvious inequality of intellects and the general
sense of humanity, the word God will be constantly arraigned, and
Society will rest on shifting sands. The secret of the various
moral zones through which man passes will be discovered by the
analysis of the animal type as a whole. That animal type has
hitherto been studied with reference only to its differences, not
to its similitudes; in its organic manifestations, not in its
faculties. Animal faculties are perfected in direct transmission,
in obedience to laws which remain to be discovered. These
faculties correspond to the forces which express them, and those
forces are essentially material and divisible.

"Material faculties! Reflect on this juxtaposition of words. Is
not this a problem as insoluble as that of the first communication
of motion to matter--an unsounded gulf of which the difficulties
were transposed rather than removed by Newton's system? Again, the
universal assimilation of light by everything that exists on earth
demands a new study of our globe. The same animal differs in the
tropics of India and in the North. Under the angular or the
vertical incidence of the sun's rays nature is developed the same,
but not the same; identical in its principles, but totally
dissimilar in its outcome. The phenomenon that amazes our eyes in
the zoological world when we compare the butterflies of Brazil
with those of Europe, is even more startling in the world of Mind.
A particular facial angle, a certain amount of brain convolutions,
are indispensable to produce Columbus, Raphael, Napoleon, Laplace,
or Beethoven; the sunless valley produces the cretin--draw your
own conclusions. Why such differences, due to the more or less
ample diffusion of light to men? The masses of suffering humanity,
more or less active, fed, and enlightened, are a difficulty to be
accounted for, crying out against God.

"Why in great joy do we always want to quit the earth? whence
comes the longing to rise which every creature has known or will
know? Motion is a great soul, and its alliance with matter is just
as difficult to account for as the origin of thought in man. In
these days science is one; it is impossible to touch politics
independent of moral questions, and these are bound up with
scientific questions. It seems to me that we are on the eve of a
great human struggle; the forces are there; only I do not see the
General.

"November 25.

"Believe me, dear uncle, it is hard to give up the life that is in
us without a pang. I am returning to Blois with a heavy grip at my
heart; I shall die then, taking with me some useful truths. No
personal interest debases my regrets. Is earthly fame a guerdon to
those who believe that they will mount to a higher sphere?

"I am by no means in love with the two syllables _Lam_ and _bert_;
whether spoken with respect or with contempt over my grave, they
can make no change in my ultimate destiny. I feel myself strong
and energetic; I might become a power; I feel in myself a life so
luminous that it might enlighten a world, and yet I am shut up in
a sort of mineral, as perhaps indeed are the colors you admire on
the neck of an Indian bird. I should need to embrace the whole
world, to clasp and re-create it; but those who have done this,
who have thus embraced and remoulded it began--did they not?--by
being a wheel in the machine. I can only be crushed. Mahomet had
the sword; Jesus had the cross; I shall die unknown. I shall be at
Blois for a day, and then in my coffin.

"Do you know why I have come back to Swedenborg after vast studies
of all religions, and after proving to myself, by reading all the
works published within the last sixty years by the patient
English, by Germany, and by France, how deeply true were my
youthful views about the Bible? Swedenborg undoubtedly epitomizes
all the religions--or rather the one religion--of humanity. Though
forms of worship are infinitely various, neither their true
meaning nor their metaphysical interpretation has ever varied. In
short, man has, and has had, but one religion.

"Sivaism, Vishnuism, and Brahmanism, the three primitive creeds,
originating as they did in Thibet, in the valley of the Indus, and
on the vast plains of the Ganges, ended their warfare some
thousand years before the birth of Christ by adopting the Hindoo
Trimourti. The Trimourti is our Trinity. From this dogma Magianism
arose in Persia; in Egypt, the African beliefs and the Mosaic law;
the worship of the Cabiri, and the polytheism of Greece and Rome.
While by this ramification of the Trimourti the Asiatic myths
became adapted to the imaginations of various races in the lands
they reached by the agency of certain sages whom men elevated to
be demi-gods--Mithra, Bacchus, Hermes, Hercules, and the rest
--Buddha, the great reformer of the three primeval religions, lived
in India, and founded his Church there, a sect which still numbers
two hundred millions more believers than Christianity can show,
while it certainly influenced the powerful Will both of Jesus and
of Confucius.

"Then Christianity raised her standard. Subsequently Mahomet fused
Judaism and Christianity, the Bible and the Gospel, in one book,
the Koran, adapting them to the apprehension of the Arab race.
Finally, Swedenborg borrowed from Magianism, Brahmanism, Buddhism,
and Christian mysticism all the truth and divine beauty that those
four great religious books hold in common, and added to them a
doctrine, a basis of reasoning, that may be termed mathematical.

"Any man who plunges into these religious waters, of which the
sources are not all known, will find proofs that Zoroaster, Moses,
Buddha, Confucius, Jesus Christ, and Swedenborg had identical
principles and aimed at identical ends.