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
whethe r 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
'he name of a woman who was dear to him to a s-lrl charac-
184 LOUIS LAMBERT
terized by her self-devotion; but this is not all I have bor-
rowed 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 pres-
ent 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 inonths 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 specula-
tions 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 auswere.d the pur-
pose 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.
LOUIS LAMBERT 185
^ew ideas require new words, or a new and expanded use
of old words, extended and defined in their meaning. Thus
Lambert, to set fortli 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 quintessen-
tial 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 Voli-
tion and the Idea were the two products. Volition, he
thought, was the Idea evolved from the abstract state to a con-
crete 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 organiza-
tion, 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;
m 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" w^as 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 singu-
larity naturally struck his delicately alert imagination. His
mother, a fragile, nervous woman, all sensitiveness and affec-
tion, was one of those beings created to represent womanhood
in all the perfection of her attributes, but relegated by a
186 LOUIS LAMBERT
mistaken fate to too low a place in the social scale. Wholly
loving, and consequent!}^ wholly suffering, she died young,
having thrown all her energies into her motherly love. Lam-
bert, 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 ap-
plication of this fact which had amused the child, a fact be-
yond dispute, of which there is ample evidence in many in-
stances, 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 phe-
nomena of the Will, a matter generated within us, and spon-
taneously 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 in-
comprehensible 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, grant-
ing that the function of the skin is purely protective, ab-
sorbent, excretive, and tactile, the circulation of the blood
and all its mechanism would not correspond with the tran-
substantiation 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
LOUIS LAMBERT 18t
Df organs whose conditions require investigation in every
manifestation ?
Having set forth these principles, he proposed to .class the
phenomena of hnman 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 desig-
nated 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 consti-
tutes 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 otir 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 ascer-
tained 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 every-
thing 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 fol-
lowed a multitude of logical explanation as to those results
of our twofold nature which appear the strangest, and a
188 LOUIS LAMBERT
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 poetrv, 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 Lamibert 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, be-
tween faith and doubt, how could men help accounting for the
mysteries of our nature otherwise than by divine interposi-
tion ? 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 in-
tellect, 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, integu-
ment, 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 argiimenta-
LOUIS LAMBERT 189
tive — quacks perhaps, but enthusiasts in brain at least, if not
in heart — recognizing- some isohited examples of such phe-
nomena, 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 com-
pletely unknown.
But from these errors of the learned, and from the ecclesi-
astical trials under which fell so many martyrs to their own
powers, startling evidence was derived of the prodigious fac-
ulties at the command of the Being of Action, which, accord-
ing to Lambert, can abstract itself completely from the Being
of Eeaction, bursting its envelope, and piercing walls by its
potent vision; a phenomenon known to the Hindoos, as mis-
sionaries tell us, by the name of ToTceiad; or again, by an-
other 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 repre-
sent man in his purest essence, whose life, imperishable per-
haps, 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 pos-
sessed, those gifted 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, pun-
190 LOUIS LAMBERT
islied 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 every-
thing is buried. But the antipathies that arise from the in-
version of affinities have, very happily, been recorded when
developed in 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 Due 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 an-
tipathies 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 un-
known.
This fragment of Lambert's mvestigations, which I remem-
ber from among his essays, will throw a light on the method
on which he worked. I need not emphasize the obvious con-
nection between this theory and the collateral sciences pro-
jected by Gall and Lavater; they were its natural corollary;
LOUIS LAMBERT 191
and every more or less scientific brain will discern -the rami-
fications by which it is inevitably connected with the phreno-
logical observations of one and the speculations on physiog-
nomy 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 writ-
ings-r— which are few and brief.
A simple and logical inference from these principles led
him to perceive that the will might be accumulated by a
contractile effort of the inner man, and then, by another
effort, projected, or even imparted, to material objects. Thus,
the whole force of a man must have the property of reacting
on other men, and of infusing into them an essence foreign
to their own, if they could not protect themselves against
such an aggression. The evidence of this theorem of the
science of humanity is, of course, very multifarious ; but there
is nothing to establish it beyond question. We have only the
notorious disaster of Marius and his harangue to the Cim-
brian commanded to kill him, or the august injunction of a
mother to the Lion of Florence, in historic proof of instances
of such lightning flashes of mind. To Lambert, then. Will
and Thought were living forces; and he spoke of them in
such a way as to impress his belief on the hearer. To him
these two forces were, in a way, visible, tangible. Thought
was slow or alert, heavy or nimble, light or dark ; he ascribed
to it all the attributes of an active agent, and thought of it
as rising, resting, waking, expanding, growing old, shrink-
ing, becoming atrophied, or resuscitating; he described its
life, and specified all its actions by the strangest words in
nur language, speaking of its spontaneity, its strength, and
all its qualities with a kind of intuition which enabled him;
to recognize all the manifestations of its substantial existence.'
"Often," said he, "in the midst of quiet and silence, when
our inner faculties are dormant, when we have given ourselves
up to sweet repose, when a sort of darkness reigns within us,
and we are lost in the contemplation of things outside us,
192 LOUIS LAMBERT
an idea suddenly flies forth, and rushes with the swiftness
of lightning across the infinite space which our inner vision
allows us to perceive. This radiant idea, springing into ex-
istence like a will-o'-the-wisp, dies out never to return; an
ephemeral life, like that of babes who give their parents such
infinite joy and sorrow; a sort of still-born blossom in the
fields of the mind. Sometimes an idea, instead of springing
forcibly into life and dying unembodied, dawns gradually,
hovers in the unknown limbo of the organs where it has its
birth; exhausts us by long gestation, develops, is itself fruit-
ful, grows Qutwardly in all the grace of youth and the promis-
ing attributes of a long life; it can endure the closest inspec-
tion, invites it, and never tires the sight; the investigation
it undergoes commands the admiration we give to works
slowly elaborated. Sometimes ideas are evolved in a swarm;
one brings another ; they come linked together ; they vie with
each other; they fly in clouds, wild and headlong. Again,
they rise up pallid and misty, and perish for want of strength
or of nutrition; the vital force is lacking. Or again, on cer-
tain days, they rush down into the depths to light up that
immense obscurity ; they terrify us and leave the soul dejected.
"Ideas are a complete system within us, resembling a
natural kingdom, a sort of flora, of which the iconography
will one day be outlined by some man who will perhaps be
accounted a madman.
"Yes, within us and without, everything testifies to the
livingness of those exquisite creations, which I compare with
flowers in obedience to some unutterable revelation of their
true nature !
"Their being produced as the final cause of man is, after all,
not more amazing than the production of perfume and color
in a plant. Perfumes are ideas, perhaps !
"When we consider that the line where flesh ends and the
nail begins contains the invisible and inexplicable mystery
of the constant transformation of a fluid into horn, we must
confess that nothing is impossible in the marvelous modifica-
tions of human tissue.
LOUIS LAMBERT 103
"And are there not in our inner nature phenomena of
weight and motion comparable to those of physical nature?
Suspense, to choose an example vividly familiar to everybody,
is painful only as a result of the law in virtue of which the
weight of a body is multiplied by its velocity. The weight
of the feeling produced by suspense increases by the constant
addition of past pain to the pain of the moment.
"And then, to what, unless it be to the electric fluid, are we
to attribute the magic by which the Will enthrones itself so
imperiously in the eye to demolish obstacles at the behest of
genius, thunders in the voice, or filters, in spite of dissimula-
tion, through the human frame ? The current of that sover-
eign fluid, which, in obedience to the high pressure of thought
or of feeling, flows in a torrent or is reduced to a mere thread,
and collects to flash in lightnings, is the occult agent to
which are due the evil or the beneficent efforts of Art and
Passion — intonation of voice, whether harsh or suave, terrible,
lascivious, horrifying or seductive by turns, thrilling the
heart, the nerves, or the brain at our will ; the marvels of the
touch, the instrument of the mental transfusions of a myriad
artists, whose creative fingers are able, after passionate study,
to reproduce the forms of nature; or, again, the infinite
gradations of the eye from dull inertia to the emission of the
most terrifying gleams.
"By this system God is bereft of none of His rights. xMind,
as a form of matter, has brought me a new conviction of His
greatness."
After hearing him discourse thus, after receiving into
my soul his look like a ray of light, it was difficult not to be
dazzled by his conviction and carried away by his arguments.
The Mind appeared to me as a purely physical power, sur-
rounded by its innumerable progeny. It was a new conception
of humanity under a new form.
This brief sketch of the laws which, as Lambert main-
tained, constitute the formula of our intellect, must suffice
to give a notion of the prodigious activity of his spirit feeding
on itself. Louis had sought for proofs of his theories in
194 LOUIS LAMBERT
the history of great men, whose lives, as set forth by their
biographers, supply very curious particulars as to the opera-
tion of their understanding. His memory allowed him to
recall such facts as might serve to support his statements;
he had appended them to each chapter in the form of demon-
strations, so as to give to many of his theories an almost
mathematical certainty. The works of Cardan, a man gifted
with singular powers of insight, supplied him with valuable
â– materials. He had not forgotten that Apollonius of Tyana
had, in Asia, announced the death of the tyrant with every
detail of his execution, at the very hour Avhen it was taking
place in Eome ; nor that Plotinus, when far away from Por-
phyrins, was aware of his friend's intention to kill himself,
and flew to dissuade him ; nor the incident in the last century,
proved in the face of the most incredulous mockery ever
known — an incident most surprising to men who were accus-
tomed to regard doubt as a weapon against the fact alone,
but simple enough to believers — the fact that Alphonzo-Maria
di Liguori, Bishop of Saint- Agatha, administered consolations
to Pope Ganganelli, who saw him, heard him, and answered
him, while the Bishop himself, at a great distance from
Eome, was in a trance at home, in the chair where he com-
monly sat on his return from Mass. On recovering con^
sciousness, he saw all his attendants kneeling beside him,
believing him to be dead : "My friends," said he, "the Holy
Father is just dead." Two days later a letter confirmed the
news. The hour of the Pope's death coincided with that when
the Bishop had been restored to his natural state.
N"or had Lambert omitted the yet more recent adventure
of an English girl who was passionately attached to a sailor,
and set out from London to seek him. She found him, with-
out a guide, making her way alone in the North Americam
wilderness, reaching him just in time to save his life.
Louis had found confirmatory evidence in the mysteries
of the ancients, in the acts of the martyrs — in which glorious
instances may be found of the triumph of human will, in
the demonology of the Middle Ages, in criminal trials and
LOUIS LAMBERT 195