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1Pourquoi ces différences dues à la distillation plus ou moins heureuse de la lumière en l’homme ? Ces grandes masses humaines souffrantes, plus ou moins actives, plus ou moins nourries, plus ou moins éclairées, constituent des difficultés à résoudre, et qui crient contre Dieu. Pourquoi dans l’extrême joie voulons-nous toujours quitter la terre, pourquoi l’envie de s’élever qui a saisi, qui saisira toute créature ? Le mouvement est une grande âme dont l’alliance avec la matière est tout aussi difficile à expliquer que l’est la production de la pensée en l’homme. Aujourd’hui la science est une, il est impossible de toucher à la politique sans s’occuper de morale, et la morale tient à toutes les questions scientifiques. Il me semble que nous sommes à la veille d’une grande bataille humaine ; les forces sont là ; seulement je ne vois pas de général. »
225 novembre. « Croyez-moi, mon oncle, il est difficile de renoncer sans douleur à la vie qui nous est propre, je retourne à Blois avec un affreux saisissement de cœur. J’y mourrai en emportant des vérités utiles. Aucun intérêt personnel ne dégrade mes regrets. La gloire est-elle quelque chose à qui croit pouvoir aller dans une sphère supérieure ? Je ne suis pris d’aucun amour pour les deux syllabes Lam et bert : prononcées avec vénération ou avec insouciance sur ma tombe, elles ne changeront rien à ma destinée ultérieure. Je me sens fort, énergique, et pourrais devenir une puissance ; je sens en moi une vie si lumineuse qu’elle pourrait animer un monde, et je suis enfermé dans une sorte de minéral, comme y sont peut-être effectivement les couleurs que vous admirez au col des oiseaux de la presqu’île indienne. Il faudrait embrasser tout ce monde, l’étreindre pour le refaire ; mais ceux qui l’ont ainsi étreint et refondu n’ont-ils pas commencé par être un rouage de la machine ? moi, je serais broyé. À Mahomet le sabre, à Jésus la croix, à moi la mort obscure ; demain à Blois, et quelques jours après dans un cercueil. Savez-vous pourquoi ? Je suis revenu à Swedenborg, après avoir fait d’immenses études sur les religions et m’être démontré, par la lecture de tous les ouvrages que la patiente Allemagne, l’Angleterre et la France ont publiés depuis soixante ans, la profonde vérité des aperçus de ma jeunesse sur la Bible. Évidemment, Swedenborg résume toutes les religions, ou plutôt la seule religion de l’Humanité.
3Si les cultes ont eu des formes infinies, ni leur sens ni leur construction métaphysique n’ont jamais varié. Enfin l’homme n’a jamais eu qu’une religion. Le Sivaïsme, le Vichnouvisme et le Brahmaïsme, les trois premiers cultes humains, nés au Thibet, dans la vallée de l’Indus et sur les vastes plaines du Gange, ont fini, quelques mille ans avant Jésus-Christ, leurs guerres, par l’adoption de la Trimourti hindoue. De ce dogme sortent, en Perse, le Magisme ; en Égypte, les religions africaines et le Mosaïsme ; puis le Cabirisme et le Polythéisme gréco-romain. Pendant que ces irradiations de la Trimourti adaptent les mythes de l’Asie aux imaginations de chaque pays où elles arrivent conduites par des sages que les hommes transforment en demi-dieux, Mithra, Bacchus, Hermès, Hercule, etc., Bouddha, le célèbre réformateur des trois religions primitives s’élève dans l’Inde et y fonde son Église, qui compte encore aujourd’hui deux cent millions de fidèles de plus que le Christianisme, et où sont venues se tremper les vastes volontés de Christ et de Confucius. Le Christianisme lève sa bannière. Plus tard, Mahomet fond le Mosaïsme et le Christianisme, la Bible et l’Évangile en un livre, le Coran, où il les approprie au génie des Arabes. Enfin Swedenborg reprend au Magisme, au Brahmaïsme, au Bouddhisme et au Mysticisme chrétien ce que ces quatre grandes religions ont de commun, de réel, de divin, et rend à leur doctrine une raison pour ainsi dire mathématique. Pour qui se jette dans ces fleuves religieux dont tous les fondateurs ne sont pas connus, Zoroastre, Moïse, Bouddha, Confucius, Jésus-Christ, Swedenborg ont les mêmes principes, et se proposent la même fin.
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
1“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 [, here in a 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— ‘“*T am going away; you are staying. ‘Take up my ideas and develop them.’ ‘“*T 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 erying aloud: ‘Show us a way in which we may walk and find no pitfalls in our way!’
2‘“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 re \ ¥ LOUIS LAMBERT 2638 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 unexplained 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 distin264 BALZAC’S WORKS guished 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?
3‘‘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 foreed 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. LOUIS LAMBERT 265
Our translation, period-faithful. Citable as our translation, never as the source.
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