The Best Works of Balzac - Оноре де Бальзак

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instincts—at all more explicable than the effects of the mind? Is

       not the motion given to the worlds enough to prove God's

       existence, without our plunging into absurd speculations suggested

       by pride? And if we pass, after our trials, from a perishable

       state of being to a higher existence, is not that enough for a

       creature that is distinguished from other creatures only by more

       perfect instincts? If in moral philosophy there is not a single

       principle which does not lead to the absurd, or cannot be

       disproved by evidence, is it not high time that we should set to

       work to seek such dogmas as are written in the innermost nature of

       things? Must we not reverse philosophical science?

       "We trouble ourselves very little about the supposed void that

       must have pre-existed for us, and we try to fathom the supposed

       void that lies before us. We make God responsible for the future,

       but we do not expect Him to account for the past. And yet it is

       quite as desirable to know whether we have any roots in the past

       as to discover whether we are inseparable from the future.

       "We have been Deists or Atheists in one direction only.

       "Is the world eternal? Was the world created? We can conceive of

       no middle term between these two propositions; one, then, is true

       and the other false! Take your choice. Whichever it may be, God,

       as our reason depicts Him, must be deposed, and that amounts to

       denial. The world is eternal: then, beyond question, God has had

       it forced upon Him. The world was created: then God is an

       impossibility. How could He have subsisted through an eternity,

       not knowing that He would presently want to create the world? How

       could He have failed to foresee all the results?

       "Whence did He derive the essence of creation? Evidently from

       Himself. If, then, the world proceeds from God, how can you

       account for evil? That Evil should proceed from Good is absurd. If

       evil does not exist, what do you make of social life and its laws?

       On all hands we find a precipice! On every side a gulf in which

       reason is lost! Then social science must be altogether

       reconstructed.

       "Listen to me, uncle; until some splendid genius shall have taken

       account of the obvious inequality of intellects and the general

       sense of humanity, the word God will be constantly arraigned, and

       Society will rest on shifting sands. The secret of the various

       moral zones through which man passes will be discovered by the

       analysis of the animal type as a whole. That animal type has

       hitherto been studied with reference only to its differences, not

       to its similitudes; in its organic manifestations, not in its

       faculties. Animal faculties are perfected in direct transmission,

       in obedience to laws which remain to be discovered. These

       faculties correspond to the forces which express them, and those

       forces are essentially material and divisible.

       "Material faculties! Reflect on this juxtaposition of words. Is

       not this a problem as insoluble as that of the first communication

       of motion to matter—an unsounded gulf of which the difficulties

       were transposed rather than removed by Newton's system? Again, the

       universal assimilation of light by everything that exists on earth

       demands a new study of our globe. The same animal differs in the

       tropics of India and in the North. Under the angular or the

       vertical incidence of the sun's rays nature is developed the same,

       but not the same; identical in its principles, but totally

       dissimilar in its outcome. The phenomenon that amazes our eyes in

       the zoological world when we compare the butterflies of Brazil

       with those of Europe, is even more startling in the world of Mind.

       A particular facial angle, a certain amount of brain convolutions,

       are indispensable to produce Columbus, Raphael, Napoleon, Laplace,

       or Beethoven; the sunless valley produces the cretin—draw your

       own conclusions. Why such differences, due to the more or less

       ample diffusion of light to men? The masses of suffering humanity,

       more or less active, fed, and enlightened, are a difficulty to be

       accounted for, crying out against God.

       "Why in great joy do we always want to quit the earth? whence

       comes the longing to rise which every creature has known or will

       know? Motion is a great soul, and its alliance with matter is just

       as difficult to account for as the origin of thought in man. In

       these days science is one; it is impossible to touch politics

       independent of moral questions, and these are bound up with

       scientific questions. It seems to me that we are on the eve of a

       great human struggle; the forces are there; only I do not see the

       General.

      "November 25.

      "Believe me, dear uncle, it is hard to give up the life that is in

       us without a pang. I am returning to Blois with a heavy grip at my

       heart; I shall die then, taking with me some useful truths. No

       personal interest debases my regrets. Is earthly fame a guerdon to

       those who believe that they will mount to a higher sphere?

       "I am by no means in love with the two syllables Lam and bert; whether spoken with respect or with contempt over my grave, they can make no change in my ultimate destiny. I feel myself strong and energetic; I might become a power; I feel in myself a life so luminous that it might enlighten a world, and yet I am shut up in a sort of mineral, as perhaps indeed are the colors you admire on the neck of an Indian bird. I should need to embrace the whole world, to clasp and re-create it; but those who have done this, who have thus embraced and remoulded it began—did they not?—by being a wheel in the machine. I can only be crushed. Mahomet had the sword; Jesus had the cross; I shall die unknown. I shall be at Blois for a day, and then in my coffin. "Do you know why I have come back to Swedenborg after vast studies of all religions, and after proving to myself, by reading all the works published within the last sixty years by the patient English, by Germany, and by France, how deeply true were my youthful views about the Bible? Swedenborg undoubtedly epitomizes all the religions—or rather the one religion—of humanity. Though forms of worship are infinitely various, neither their true meaning nor their metaphysical interpretation has ever varied. In short, man has, and has had, but one religion. "Sivaism, Vishnuism, and Brahmanism, the three primitive creeds, originating as they did in Thibet, in the valley of the Indus, and on the vast

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