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

“But to you, as to most thoughtful men, the relations which you have the faculty of discerning between things, of which the real existence is made certain to you through your senses, do not, I suppose, seem material. The natural Universe, then, of things and beings meets in man with the supernatural Universe of likeness or difference which he can discern between the innumerable forms in nature— relations so various that they seem to be infinite; for if, till the present day, no one has been able to enumerate the created things of this earth only, what man can ever enumerate their relations to each other? Is not the small fraction with which you are familiar, in regard to = grand total, as a unit to the infinite?

‘‘Hence here you find yourself already made aware of the existence of the infinite, and this necessarily leads you to conceive of a purely spiritual sphere. Hence, too, man is in himself sufficient evidence of these two modes of life: Matter and Spirit. In him ends a finite, visible universe; in him begins an infinite and invisible universe—two worlds that do not know each other. Have the pebbles of the fiord any cognizance of their relative shapes, are they conscious of the colors seen in them by the eye of man, do they hear the music of the ripples that dance over them? Let us then leap the gulf we cannot fathom, the unthinkable union of a material with a spiritual universe, the concept of a visible, ponderable, tangible creation, conterminous with an invisible, imponderable, intangible creation; absolutely dissimilar, separated by a void, united by indisputable points of contact, and meeting in a being who belongs to both! Let us, I say, mingle in one world these two worlds, which, in your philosophy, can never coalesce, and which, in fact, do coalesce.

p. 112

“However abstract man may call it, the relation which binds two things together must stamp its mark. Where? On what? We have not now to inquire to what degree of rarity matter may be reduced. If that were indeed the question, I do not see why He who has linked the stars together at immeasurable distances by physical laws, to veil His face withal, should not have created substances that could think, nor why you will not allow that He should have given thought a body.

‘‘To you, then, your invisible, moral, or mental universe, and your visible, physical universe, constitute one and the same matter. We will not divide bodies from their properties, nor objects from their relations. _Everything that exists, that weighs upon and overwhelms us from above and beneath us, before us or within us; all that our eyes or our minds apprehend, all that is named or nameless, must, to reduce the problem of Creation to the standard of your logic, be a finite mass of matter; if it were infinite, God could not be its master. Thus, according to you, dear Pastor, by whatever scheme you propose to introduce God, who is infinite, into this finite mass of matter, God could no longer exist with such attributes as are ascribed to Him by man. If we seek Him through facts, He is not; if we seek Him through reason, still He is not; both spiritually and materially God is impossible. Let us hearken to the word of human reason driven to its utmost conseg ences.