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Louis Lambert by Honoré de Balzac
page 64 of 145 (44%)
preconceived, as our actions are accomplished in our minds before they
are reproduced by the outer man; presentiments or predictions are the
perception of these causes"--I think we may deplore in him a genius
equal to Pascal, Lavoisier, or Laplace. His chimerical notions about
angels perhaps overruled his work too long; but was it not in trying
to make gold that the alchemists unconsciously created chemistry? At
the same time, Lambert, at a later period, studied comparative
anatomy, physics, geometry, and other sciences bearing on his
discoveries, and this was undoubtedly with the purpose of collecting
facts and submitting them to analysis--the only torch that can guide
us through the dark places of the most inscrutable work of nature. He
had too much good sense to dwell among the clouds of theories which
can all be expressed in a few words. In our day, is not the simplest
demonstration based on facts more highly esteemed than the most
specious system though defended by more or less ingenious inductions?
But as I did not know him at the period of his life when his
cogitations were, no doubt, the most productive of results, I can only
conjecture that the bent of his work must have been from that of his
first efforts of thought.

It is easy to see where his _Treatise on the Will_ was faulty. Though
gifted already with the powers which characterize superior men, he was
but a boy. His brain, though endowed with a great faculty for
abstractions, was still full of the delightful beliefs that hover
around youth. Thus his conception, while at some points it touched the
ripest fruits of his genius, still, by many more, clung to the smaller
elements of its germs. To certain readers, lovers of poetry, what he
chiefly lacked must have been a certain vein of interest.

But his work bore the stamp of the struggle that was going on in that
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