Louis Lambert — Honoré de Balzac, trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley

“if the landscape did not come to me—which it is absurd to imagine—I must have come here. If I was here while I was asleep in my cubicle, does not that constitute a complete severance of my body and my inner being? Does it not prove some inscrutable locomotive iaculty in the spirit with effects resembling those of locomotion inp. 222 the body? Well, then, if my spirit and my body can be severed during sleep, why should I not insist on their separating in the same way while | am awake? I see no half-way mean between the two propositions.

‘‘But if we go further into details: Hither the facts are due to the action of a faculty which brings out a second being to whom my body is merely a husk, since I was in my cell, and yet I saw the landscape—and this upsets many systems; or the facts took place either in some nerve centre, of which the name is yet to be discovered, where our feelings dwell and move; or else in the cerebral centre, where ideas are formed. This last hypothesis gives rise to some strange questions. I walked, I saw, I heard. Motion is inconceivable but in-space, sound acts only at certain angles or on surfaces, color is caused only by light. — If, in the dark, with my eyes shut, I saw, in myself, colored objects; if I heard sounds in the most perfect silence and without the conditions requisite for the production of sound; if without stirring I traversed wide tracts of space, there must be inner faculties independent of the external laws of physics. Material nature must be penetrable by the spirit.

‘‘ How is it that men have hitherto given so little thought to the phenomena of sleep, which seem to prove that man has a double life? May there not be a new science lying beneath them ?’’ he added, striking his brow with his hand. “Tf not the elements of a science, at any rate the revelation of stupendous powers in man; at least they prove a frequent severance of our two natures, the fact | have been thinking out for a very long time. At last, then, [ have hit on evidence to show the superiority that distinguishes our latent senses from our corporeal senses! Homo duplex!

‘‘And yet,’’ he went on, after a pause, with a doubtful miep. 223 shrug, ‘‘perhaps we have not two natures; perhaps we are merely gifted with personal and perfectible qualities, of which the development within us produces certain unobserved phenomena of activity, penetration, and vision. In our love of the marvellous, a passion begotten of our pride, we have translated these effects into poetical inventions, because we did not understand them. It is so convenient to deify the incomprehensible! .

‘“‘T should, I own, lament over the loss of my illusions. I so much wished to believe in our twofold nature and in Swedenborg’s angels. Must this new science destroy them? Yess for the study of our unknown properties involves us in a science that appears to be materialistic, for the Spirit uses, divides, and animates the Substance; but it does not destroy it.”’