In man this primordial substance is transformed into psychic energy, or will. The special attribute of this will is thought, whose organs are the five senses which, in reality, are but differentiations of one sense, vision. Vision expresses itself through the mysterious phenomenon of the Word. Everything in the universe is indicative of an hierarchical order. Over and above the three realms of nature is the world of ideas.
Ideas are living creatures, active and activating, like flowers. This world of ideas may be divided into three spheres: instinct, abstraction and specialism. The majority of men are prisoners of instinct; a small number attain to the level of abstraction, with the emergence of which society may be said to begin. It is from this level that laws, the arts and all social creations emerge.
Specialism is the gift of intuition which permits man to see the inner as well as the outer in all its ramifications. (The perfection of the inner eye gives rise to the gift of Specialism.) The human genius is a type functioning in a realm between abstraction and intuition. Intuition, consequently, is the most satisfactory and adequate form, the highest form of knowing. To know is to see.
There is at bottom only one science, and all the imperfect forms of knowledge are nothing but a confused vision! This “superior science,” which Louis Lambert proclaims, is what Balzac styles “le magisme,” a term not to be confused with magic or Magianism. (Already, in 1847, Balzac was dreaming of the establishment by the Sorbonne of a new school of “occult philosophy,” under the name of Anthropology. This dream was subsequently to be realized, under the name of Anthroposophy, by Rudolf Steiner.)
In the fragments of Louis Lambert’s “system,” recorded by his faithful companion, Mademoiselle de Villenoix, which come as a sort of appendix to the story, these ideas are put down in the form of aphoristic notes.
In apologizing for the cryptic, fragmentary quality of these speculations, Balzac says: “I ought perhaps to have made a separate book of these fragments of thought, intelligible only to certain spirits who have been accustomed to lean over the edge of abysses in the hope of seeing to the bottom.
The life of that mighty brain, which split up on every side, like a too vast empire, would have been set forth in the narrative of this man’s visions—a being incomplete for lack of force or of weakness; but I preferred to give an account of my own impressions rather than to compose a more or less poetical romance.”
As a matter of fact, earlier in the book, Balzac gives us the clue to the terminology employed in the Aphorisms. “New ideas,” he says, “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 and 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 two generating forces; the Volition and the Idea were the two products. . . .
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.
To Louis Lambert, Will and Thought were living forces, as Balzac says. “The elements of Will and Mind,” says Louis Lambert, “may perhaps be found; but there will always remain beyond apprehension the x against which I once used to struggle. That x is the Word, the Logos. . . .
From your bed to the frontiers of the universe there are but two steps: Will and Faith. . . . Facts are nothing; they do not subsist; all that lives of us is the Idea.” He points out that Jesus possessed the gift of Specialism. “He saw each fact in its root and in its results, in the past whence it had its rise, and in the future where it would grow and spread. . . .”
According to Balzac, Louis Lambert had too much good sense to dwell among the clouds of theories. “He had sought for proofs of his theories in the history of great men, whose lives, as set forth by-their biographers, supply very curious particulars as to the operation of the understanding.” The description of Louis which he gives at the time of their parting is altogether that of a man preparing to lead the life of an initiate.
“He ate little and drank water only; either by instinct or by choice he was averse to any exertion that made a demand on his strength; his movements were few and simple, like those of Orientals or of savages, with whom gravity seems a condition of nature. Though naturally religious, Louis did not accept the minute practices of the Roman ritual; his ideas were more intimately in sympathy with Saint Theresa and Fénelon, and several Fathers and certain Saints who, in our day, would be regarded as heresiarchs or atheists. . . .
To him Jesus Christ was the most perfect type of his system. Et Verbum caro factum est seemed a sublime statement intended to express the traditional formula of the Will, the Word and the Act made visible.
Christ’s consciousness of His Death—having so perfected His inner Being by divine works, that one day the invisible form of it appeared to His disciples—and the other Mysteries of the Gospels, the magnetic cures wrought by Christ, and the gift of tongues, all to him confirmed his doctrine. . . .
He discerned the strongest evidence of his theory in most of the martyrdoms endured during the first century of our era, which he spoke of as the great era of the Mind.”
There is one more passage, in this connection, which seems to me worthy of attention. After referring to Louis Lambert’s study of the laws of Mind and Will, and their correlations, Balzac says: “Louis Lambert had accounted for a multitude of phenomena which, till then, had been regarded with reason as incomprehensible.
Thus wizards, men possessed, 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 marvellous 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 triumph of energy, will and faith in man, the existence of magic and the evidences of the miraculous, the relation of God to man through Desire, the notion of hierarchies in every realm of life, as well as the belief in transmutation, all these manifestations of the spiritual attributes of man, Balzac has summed up in the story of his own life, or rather of the most important years of his life, the period of germination. The period, in other words, when the terrible powers of production were coming into being.
In the Rue Cassini, where he wrote so many of his great works, Balzac is reported to have said to George Sand: “Literature! but my dear lady, literature doesn’t exist! There is life, of which politics and art are part. I am a man who’s alive, that’s all . . . a man living his life, nothing more.”
Whereupon he proceeded to forfeit his life through the bondage of work. He wanted to be great (“man must be great or not be at all,” are his words), and he was great, but he died a failure.
Perhaps the best justification of his failure is the one he makes himself somewhere. “The man of genius,” he said, “is one who can invariably convert his thoughts into deeds. But the truly outstanding genius does not unremittingly allow this evolution to take place; if he did, he would be the equal of God.”
At the best, it is a poor excuse. Balzac, like Beethoven, seemingly gave the maximum that a man can give, but it was not enough, not for a Balzac! I am not thinking of the forty books he is said to have left unfinished at his death, but of the life he left unlived, of the vision he failed to live by.
His life, which is the very symbol of Work, epitomizes the futility of Western life, with its emphasis on doing rather than being; it epitomizes the sterility of even the highest efforts when characterized, as they are in our world, by the divorce between action and belief.
If Louis Lambert’s life may be regarded as a typical example of the crucifixion of genius by the society in which he was born, Balzac’s own life may be regarded as a typical example of the immolation exacted of our superior types
