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

p. 230

Having set forth these principles, he proposed to class the phenomena of human life in two series of distinct results, demanding, with the ardent insistency of conviction, a special analysis for each. In fact, having observed in almost every type of created thing two separate motions, he assumed, nay, he asserted, their existence in our human nature, and designated this vital antithesis Action and Reaction.

‘‘A desire,’’ he said, ‘‘is a fact completely accomplished in our will before it is accomplished externally.”’

Hence the sum-total of our Volitions and our Ideas constitutes Action, and the sum-total of our external acts he called Reaction. ‘

When I subsequently read the observations made by Bichat on the duality of our external senses, I was really bewildered by my recollections, recognizing the startling coincidences between the views of that celebrated physiologist and those of Louis Lambert. They both died too young, and they had with equal steps arrived at the same strange truths. Nature has in every case been pleased to give a twofold purpose to the various apparatus that constitute her creatures; and the twofold action of the human organism, which is now ascertained beyond dispute, proves ' by a mass of evidence in daily life how true were Lambert’s deductions as to Action and Reaction.

The inner Being, the Being of Action—the word he used to designate an unknown specialization—the mysterious nexus of fibrils to which we owe the inadequately investigated powers of thought and will—in short, the nameless entity which sees, acts, foresees the end, and accomplishes everything before expressing itself in any physical phenomenon—must, in conformity with its nature,

? a p/np. 231 be free from the physical conditions by which the external _ Being of Reaction, the visible man, is fettered in its manifestation. From this followed a multitude of logical expla-. nation as to those results of our twofold nature which appear _ the strangest, and a rectification of various systems in which truth and falsehood are mingled.

Certain men, having had a glimpse of some phenomena of the natural working of the Being of Action, were, like Swedenborg, carried away above this world by their ardent soul, thirsting for poetry, and filled with the Divine Spirit. Thus, in their ignorance of the causes and their admiration of the facts, they pleased their fancy by regarding that inner man as divine, and constructing a mystical universe. Hence we have angels! A lovely Hiusion which Lambert would never abandon, cherishing it even when the sword of his logic was cutting off their dazzling wings.

‘“‘Heaven,’”’ he would say, ‘‘must, after all, be the survival of our perfected faculties, and hell the void into which our unperfected faculties are cast away.”’

But how, then, in the ages when the understanding had preserved the religious and spiritualist impressions, which prevailed from the time of Christ till that of Descartes, between faith and doubt, how could meu help avcountiug for the mysteries of our nature otherwise than by divine interposition? Of whom but of God Himseif could sages demand an account of an invisible creature so actively and so reactively sensitive, gifted with faculties so extensive, so improvable by use, and so poweriul under certain occult influences, that they could sometimes see it annihilate, by some phenomenon of sight-or movement, space in its two manifestations—Time and Distance—of which the former is the space of the intellect, the latter is physical

Dae BALZAC’S WORKS

space? Sometimes they found it reconstructing the past, either by the power of retrospective vision, or by the mystery of a palingenesis not unlike the power a man might have of detecting, in the form, integument and embryo in a seed, the flowers of the past, and the numberless variations of their color, scent, and shape; and sometimes, again, it could be seen vaguely foreseeing the future, either by its appreliension of final causes, or by some phenomenon of physical pre-sentiment.