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

‘Thus most of your scientific axioms, though true in relation to man, are false in relation to the Whole. Science is one, and you have divided it. To know the true sense of the laws of phenomena, would it not be necessary to know the correlations existing between the phenomena and the laws of the whole? ‘There is in all things an appearance, a presentment, which strikes your sense; behind this presentment there is a soul moving—the body, and the faculty. Where are the relations which hold things together studied or taught? Nowhere. Have you, then, no absolute finalSERAPHITA 133 ity? Your best ascertained theses rest on an analysis of the forms of matter, while the spirit is constantly neglected. “There is a supreme science of which some men—too late—get a glimpse, though they dare not own it. These men perceive the necessity for considering all bodies, not merely from the point of view of their mathematical properties, but also from that of their whole relations and occult affinities.

“The greatest of you ali discerned, toward the end of his hfe, that all things were at the same time cause and _ effect reciprocally; that the visible worlds were co-ordinated to each other and captive to invisible spheres. He groaned over having tried to establish absolute principles. When counting his worlds, like grains of sand scattered throughout the ether, he explained their connection by the laws of planetary and molecular attraction. You hailed that man.— Well, and [I tell you that he died in despair. Assuming that the centrifugal and centripetal forces, which he invented to account for the universe, were absolutely equal, the universe would stand still, and he insisted on motion, though in an undefined direction; but assuming the forces to be unequal, the worlds must at once fall into confasion. Thus his laws were not final; there was another problem still higher than that of attraction, on which his spurious glory was founded. The pull of the stars against each - other, and the centripetal tendency of their individual motion, did not hinder him from seeking the branch from which the whole cluster was hanging. Unhappy man; the more he extended space, the heavier was his load. He told you that every part was in equilibrium; but whither was the whole bound?

‘‘He contemplated the space, infinite in the eyes of men,

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that is filled with the groups of worlds, of which a small number are registered by our telescopes, while its immensity is proved by the rapidity of light. This sublime contemplation gave him a conception of the infinitude of worlds, planted in space like flowers in a meadow, which are born like infants, grow like men, die like old men, which live by assimilating from their atmosphere the substances proper to nourish them, which have a centre and principle of life, which protect themselves from each other by an intervening space, which constitute a grand whole, that has its own life, its own destination.

‘‘At this prospect the man trembled. He knew that life is produced by the union of the Thing with its first Principle; that death, or inertia—or gravitation—is caused by a rupture between the Thing and the motion proper to it; and he thus foresaw the crash of worlds, in ruins if God should withhold His Word. Then he set to work to seek the traces of that Word in the Apocalypse. You all thought him mad. Know this: he strove to earn forgiveness for his genius.