few minutes' reflection, Louis said to me:
"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 faculty in the
spirit with effects resembling those of locomotion in 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 I am awake? I see
no half-way mean between the two propositions.
"But if we go further into details: either 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. "If 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 I have been thinking out for
a very long time. At last, then, I 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 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 marvelous, 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!
"I 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? Yes; 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."
He remained pensive, almost sad. Perhaps he saw the dreams of his youth
as swaddling clothes that he must soon shake off.
"Sight and hearing are, no doubt, the sheaths for a very marvelous
instrument," said he, laughing at his own figure of speech.
Always when he was talking to me of Heaven and Hell, he was wont to
treat of Nature as being master; but now, as he pronounced these last
words, big with prescience, he seemed to soar more boldly than ever
above the landscape, and his forehead seemed ready to burst with the
afflatus of genius. His powers--mental powers we must call them till
some new term is found--seemed to flash from the organs intended to
express them. His eyes shot out thoughts; his uplifted hand, his silent
but tremulous lips were eloquent; his burning glance was radiant; at
last his head, as though too heavy, or exhausted by too eager a flight,
fell on his breast. This boy--this giant--bent his head, took my hand
and clasped it in his own, which was damp, so fevered was he for the
search for truth; then, after a pause, he said:
"I shall be famous!--And you, too," he added after a pause. "We will
both study the Chemistry of the Will."
Noble soul! I recognized his superiority, though he took great care
never to make me feel it. He shared with me all the treasures of his
mind, and regarded me as instrumental in his discoveries, leaving me the
credit of my insignificant contributions. He was always as gracious as
a woman in love; he had all the bashful feeling, the delicacy of soul
which make life happy and pleasant to endure.
On the following day he began writing what he called a _Treatise on the
Will_; his subsequent reflections led to many changes in its plan and
method; but the incident of that day was certainly the germ of the work,
just as the electric shock always felt by Mesmer at the approach of
a particular manservant was the starting-point of his discoveries in
magnetism, a science till then interred under the mysteries of Isis, of
Delphi, of the cave of Trophonius, and rediscovered by that prodigious
genius, close on Lavater, and the precursor of Gall.
Lambert's ideas, suddenly illuminated by this flash of light, assumed
vaster proportions; he disentangled certain truths from his many
acquisitions and brought them into order; then, like a founder, he cast
the model of his work. At the end of six months' indefatigable labor,
Lambert's writings excited the curiosity of our companions, and became
the object of cruel practical jokes which led to a fatal issue.
One day one of the masters, who was bent on seeing the manuscripts,
enlisted the aid of our tyrants, and came to seize, by force, a box that
contained the precious papers. Lambert and I defended it with incredible
courage. The trunk was locked, our aggressors could not open it, but
they tried to smash it in the struggle, a stroke of malignity at which
we shrieked with rage. Some of the boys, with a sense of justice, or
struck perhaps by our heroic defence, advised the attacking party to
leave us in peace, crushing us with insulting contempt. But suddenly,
brought to the spot by the noise of a battle, Father Haugoult roughly
intervened, inquiring as to the cause of the fight. Our enemies had
interrupted us in writing our impositions, and the class-master came to
protect his slaves. The foe, in self-defence, betrayed the existence of
the manuscript. The dreadful Haugoult insisted on our giving up the box;
if we should resist, he would have it broken open. Lambert gave him the
key; the master took out the papers, glanced through them, and said, as
he confiscated them:
"And it is for such rubbish as this that you neglect your lessons!"
Large tears fell from Lambert's eyes, wrung from him as much by a
sense of his offended moral superiority as by the gratuitous insult and
betrayal that he had suffered. We gave the accusers a glance of stern
reproach: had they not delivered us over to the common enemy? If the
common law of school entitled them to thrash us, did it not require them
to keep silence as to our misdeeds?
In a moment they were no doubt ashamed of their baseness.
Father Haugoult probably sold the _Treatise on the Will_ to a local
grocer, unconscious of the scientific treasure, of which the germs thus
fell into unworthy hands.
Six months later I left the school, and I do not know whether Lambert
ever recommenced his labors. Our parting threw him into a mood of the
darkest melancholy.
It was in memory of the disaster that befell Louis' book that, in the
tale which comes first in these _Etudes_, I adopted the title invented
by Lambert for a work of fiction, and gave the name of a woman who was
dear to him to a girl characterized by her self-devotion; but this is
not all I have borrowed from him: his character and occupations were of
great value to me in writing that book, and the subject arose from
some reminiscences of our youthful meditations. This present volume is
intended as a modest monument, a broken column, to commemorate the life
of the man who bequeathed to me all he had to leave--his thoughts.
In that boyish effort Lambert had enshrined the ideas of a man. Ten
years later, when I met some learned men who were devoting serious
attention to the phenomena that had struck us and that Lambert had so
marvelously analyzed, I understood the value of his work, then already
forgotten as childish. I at once spent several months in recalling the
principal theories discovered by my poor schoolmate. Having collected my
reminiscences, I can boldly state that, by 1812, he had proved, divined,
and set forth in his Treatise several important facts of which, as
he had declared, evidence was certain to come sooner or later. His
philosophical speculations ought undoubtedly to gain him recognition as
one of the great thinkers who have appeared at wide intervals among men,
to reveal to them the bare skeleton of some science to come, of which
the roots spread slowly, but which, in due time, bring forth fair fruit
in the intellectual sphere. Thus a humble artisan, Bernard Palissy,
searching the soil to find minerals for glazing pottery, proclaimed,
in the sixteenth century, with the infallible intuition of genius,
geological facts which it is now the glory of Cuvier and Buffon to have
demonstrated.
I can, I believe, give some idea of Lambert's Treatise by stating the
chief propositions on which it was based; but, in spite of myself, I
shall strip them of the ideas in which they were clothed, and which were
indeed their indispensable accompaniment. I started on a different path,
and only made use of those of his researches which answered the purpose
of my scheme. I know not, therefore, whether as his disciple I can
faithfully expound his views, having assimilated them in the first
instance so as to color them with my own.
New ideas require new words, or a new and expanded use of old words,
extended and defined in their meaning. Thus Lambert, to set forth the
basis of his system, had adopted certain common words that answered to
his notions. The word Will he used to connote the medium in which the
mind moves, or to use a less abstract expression, the mass of power by
which man can reproduce, outside himself, the actions constituting his
external life. Volition--a word due to Locke--expressed the act by which
a man exerts his will. The word Mind, or Thought, which he regarded as
the quintessential product of the Will, also represented the medium in
which the ideas originate to which thought gives substance. The Idea, a
name common to every creation of the brain, constituted the act by which
man uses his mind. Thus the Will and the Mind were the two generating
forces; the Volition and the Idea were the two products. Volition, he
thought, was the Idea evolved from the abstract state to a concrete
state, from its generative fluid to a solid expression, so to speak, if
such words may be taken to formulate notions so difficult of definition.
According to him, the Mind and Ideas are the motion and the outcome
of our inner organization, just as the Will and Volition are of our
external activity.
He gave the Will precedence over the Mind.
"You must will before you can think," he said. "Many beings live in
a condition of Willing without ever attaining to the condition of
Thinking. In the North, life is long; in the South, it is shorter; but
in the North we see torpor, in the South a constant excitability of the
Will, up to the point where from an excess of cold or of heat the organs
are almost nullified."
The use of the word "medium" was suggested to him by an observation he
had made in his childhood, though, to be sure, he had no suspicion then
of its importance, but its singularity naturally struck his delicately
alert imagination. His mother, a fragile, nervous woman, all
sensitiveness and affection, was one of those beings created to
represent womanhood in all the perfection of her attributes, but
relegated by a mistaken fate to too low a place in the social scale.
Wholly loving, and consequently wholly suffering, she died young, having
thrown all her energies into her motherly love. Lambert, a child of six,
lying, but not always sleeping, in a cot by his mother's bed, saw the
electric sparks from her hair when she combed it. The man of fifteen
made scientific application of this fact which had amused the child, a
fact beyond dispute, of which there is ample evidence in many
instances, especially of women who by a sad fatality are doomed to let
unappreciated feelings evaporate in the air, or some superabundant power
run to waste.
In support of his definitions, Lambert propounded a variety of problems
to be solved, challenges flung out to science, though he proposed to
seek the solution for himself. He inquired, for instance, whether the
element that constitutes electricity does not enter as a base into the
specific fluid whence our Ideas and Volitions proceed? Whether the
hair, which loses its color, turns white, falls out, or disappears, in
proportion to the decay or crystallization of our thoughts, may not be
in fact a capillary system, either absorbent or diffusive, and wholly
electrical? Whether the fluid phenomena of the Will, a matter generated
within us, and spontaneously reacting under the impress of conditions
as yet unobserved, were at all more extraordinary than those of the
invisible and intangible fluid produced by a voltaic pile, and applied
to the nervous system of a dead man? Whether the formation of Ideas and
their constant diffusion was less incomprehensible than evaporation of
the atoms, imperceptible indeed, but so violent in their effects, that
are given off from a grain of musk without any loss of weight. Whether,
granting that the function of the skin is purely protective, absorbent,
excretive, and tactile, the circulation of the blood and all its
mechanism would not correspond with the transsubstantiation of our Will,
as the circulation of the nerve fluid corresponds to that of the Mind?
Finally, whether the more or less rapid affluence of these two real
substances may not be the result of a certain perfection or imperfection
of organs whose conditions require investigation in every manifestation?
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
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, 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 explanation
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 illusion 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 men
help accounting for the mysteries of our nature otherwise than by divine
interposition? Of whom but of God Himself 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 powerful 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 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 apprehension of final causes, or by some
phenomenon of physical presentiment.
Other men, less poetically religious, cold, and argumentative--quacks
perhaps, but enthusiasts in brain at least, if not in heart
--recognizing some isolated examples of such phenomena, admitted their
truth while refusing to consider them as radiating from a common centre.
Each of these was, then, bent on constructing a science out of a simple
fact. Hence arose demonology, judicial astrology, the black arts, in
short, every form of divination founded on circumstances that
were essentially transient, because they varied according to men's
temperament, and to conditions that are still completely unknown.
But from these errors of the learned, and from the ecclesiastical trials
under which fell so many martyrs to their own powers, startling evidence
was derived of the prodigious faculties at the command of the Being of
Action, which, according to Lambert, can abstract itself completely from
the Being of Reaction, bursting its envelope, and piercing walls by its
potent vision; a phenomenon known to the Hindoos, as missionaries tell
us, by the name of _Tokeiad_; or again, by another faculty, can grasp
in the brain, in spite of its closest convolutions, the ideas which are
formed or forming there, and the whole of past consciousness.
"If apparitions are not impossible," said Lambert, "they must be due
to a faculty of discerning the ideas which represent man in his purest
essence, whose life, imperishable perhaps, escapes our grosser senses,
though they may become perceptible to the inner being when it has
reached a high degree of ecstasy, or a great perfection of vision."
I know--though my remembrance is now vague--that Lambert, by following
the results of Mind and Will step by step, after he had established
their laws, accounted for a multitude of phenomena which, till then,
had been regarded with reason as incomprehensible. Thus wizards, men
possessed with second sight, and demoniacs of every degree--the victims
of the Middle Ages--became the subject of explanations so natural, that
their very simplicity often seemed to me the seal of their truth. The
marvelous gifts which the Church of Rome, jealous of all mysteries,
punished with the stake, were, in Louis' opinion, the result of certain
affinities between the constituent elements of matter and those of mind,
which proceed from the same source. The man holding a hazel rod when
he found a spring of water was guided by some antipathy or sympathy
of which he was unconscious; nothing but the eccentricity of these
phenomena could have availed to give some of them historic certainty.
Sympathies have rarely been proved; they afford a kind of pleasure which
those who are so happy as to possess them rarely speak of unless they
are abnormally singular, and even then only in the privacy of intimate
intercourse, where everything is buried. But the antipathies that arise
from the inversion of affinities have, very happily, been recorded when
developed by famous men. Thus, Bayle had hysterics when he heard water
splashing, Scaliger turned pale at the sight of water-cress, Erasmus was
thrown into a fever by the smell of fish. These three antipathies were
connected with water. The Duc d'Epernon fainted at the sight of a hare,
Tycho-Brahe at that of a fox, Henri III. at the presence of a cat, the
Marechal d'Albret at the sight of a wild hog; these antipathies
were produced by animal emanations, and often took effect at a great
distance. The Chevalier de Guise, Marie de Medici, and many other
persons have felt faint at seeing a rose even in a painting. Lord Bacon,
whether he were forewarned or no of an eclipse of the moon, always fell
into a syncope while it lasted; and his vitality, suspended while
the phenomenon lasted was restored as soon as it was over without his
feeling any further inconvenience. These effects of antipathy, all well
authenticated, and chosen from among many which history has happened
to preserve, are enough to give a clue to the sympathies which remain
unknown.
This fragment of Lambert's investigations, which I remember from among
his essays, will throw a light on the method on which he worked. I
need not emphasize the obvious connection between this theory and the
collateral sciences projected by Gall and Lavater; they were its natural
corollary; and every more or less scientific brain will discern the
ramifications by which it is inevitably connected with the phrenological
observations of one and the speculations on physiognomy of the other.
Mesmer's discovery, so important, though as yet so little appreciated,
was also embodied in a single section of this treatise, though Louis did
not know the Swiss doctor's writings--which are few and brief.