there are pageants in which all the material splendors that man arrays co-operate. nations of slaves and divers have searched the sands of ocean and the bowels of earth for the pearls and diamonds which adorn the spectators. transmitted as heirlooms from generation to generation, these treasures have shone on consecrated brows and could be the most faithful of historians had they speech. they know the joys and sorrows of the great and those of the small. everywhere do they go; they are worn with pride at festivals, carried in despair to usurers, borne off in triumph amid blood and pillage, enshrined in masterpieces conceived by art for their protection. none, except the pearl of cleopatra, has been lost. the great and the fortunate assemble to witness the coronation of some king, whose trappings are the work of men’s hands, but the purple of whose raiment is less glorious than that of the flowers of the field. these festivals, splendid in light, bathed in music which the hand of man creates, aye, all the triumphs of that hand are subdued by a thought, crushed by a sentiment. the mind can illumine in a man and round a man a light more vivid, can open his ear to more melodious harmonies, can seat him on clouds of shining constellations and teach him to question them. the heart can do still greater things. man may come into the presence of one sole being and find in a single word, a single look, an influence so weighty to bear, of so luminous a light, so penetrating a sound, that he succumbs and kneels before it. the most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us. a single secret of science is a realm of wonders to the man of learning. do the trumpets of power, the jewels of wealth, the music of joy, or a vast concourse of people attend his mental festival? no, he finds his glory in some dim retreat where, perchance, a pallid suffering man whispers a single word into his ear; that word, like a torch lighted in a mine, reveals to him a science. all human ideas, arrayed in every attractive form which mystery can invent surrounded a blind man seated in a wayside ditch. three worlds, the natural, the spiritual, the divine, with all their spheres, opened their portals to a florentine exile; he walked attended by the happy and the unhappy; by those who prayed and those who moaned; by angels and by souls in hell. when the sent of god, who knew and could accomplish all things, appeared to three of his disciples it was at eventide, at the common table of the humblest of inns; and then and there the light broke forth, shattering material forms, illuminating the spiritual faculties, so that they saw him in his glory, and the earth lay at their feet like a cast-off sandal.
monsieur becker, wilfrid, and minna were all under the influence of fear as they took their way to meet the extraordinary being whom each desired to question. to them, in their several ways, the swedish castle had grown to mean some gigantic representation, some spectacle like those whose colors and masses are skilfully and harmoniously marshalled by the poets, and whose personages, imaginary actors to men, are real to those who begin to penetrate the spiritual world. on the tiers of this coliseum monsieur becker seated the gray legions of doubt, the stern ideas, the specious formulas of dispute. he convoked the various antagonistic worlds of philosophy and religion, and they all appeared, in the guise of a fleshless shape, like that in which art embodies time — an old man bearing in one hand a scythe, in the other a broken globe, the human universe.
wilfrid had bidden to the scene his earliest illusions and his latest hopes, human destiny and its conflicts, religion and its conquering powers.
minna saw heaven confusedly by glimpses; love raised a curtain wrought with mysterious images, and the melodious sounds which met her ear redoubled her curiosity.
to all three, therefore, this evening was to be what that other evening had been for the pilgrims to emmaus, what a vision was to dante, an inspiration to homer — to them, three aspects of the world revealed, veils rent away, doubts dissipated, darkness illumined. humanity in all its moods expecting light could not be better represented than here by this young girl, this man in the vigor of his age, and these old men, of whom one was learned enough to doubt, the other ignorant enough to believe. never was any scene more simple in appearance, nor more portentous in reality.
when they entered the room, ushered in by old david, they found seraphita standing by a table on which were served the various dishes which compose a “tea”; a form of collation which in the north takes the place of wine and its pleasures — reserved more exclusively for southern climes. certainly nothing proclaimed in her, or in him, a being with the strange power of appearing under two distinct forms; nothing about her betrayed the manifold powers which she wielded. like a careful housewife attending to the comfort of her guests, she ordered david to put more wood into the stove.
“good evening, my neighbors,” she said. “dear monsieur becker, you do right to come; you see me living for the last time, perhaps. this winter has killed me. will you sit there?” she said to wilfrid. “and you, minna, here?” pointing to a chair beside her. “i see you have brought your embroidery. did you invent that stitch? the design is very pretty. for whom is it — your father, or monsieur?” she added, turning to wilfrid. “surely we ought to give him, before we part, a remembrance of the daughters of norway.”
“did you suffer much yesterday?” asked wilfrid.
“it was nothing,” she answered; “the suffering gladdened me; it was necessary, to enable me to leave this life.”
“then death does not alarm you?” said monsieur becker, smiling, for he did not think her ill.
“no, dear pastor; there are two ways of dying: to some, death is victory, to others, defeat.”
“do you think that you have conquered?” asked minna.
“i do not know,” she said, “perhaps i have only taken a step in the path.”
the lustrous splendor of her brow grew dim, her eyes were veiled beneath slow-dropping lids; a simple movement which affected the prying guests and kept them silent. monsieur becker was the first to recover courage.
“dear child,” he said, “you are truth itself, and you are ever kind. i would ask of you to-night something other than the dainties of your tea-table. if we may believe certain persons, you know amazing things; if this be true, would it not be charitable in you to solve a few of our doubts?”
“ah!” she said smiling, “i walk on the clouds. i visit the depths of the fiord; the sea is my steed and i bridle it; i know where the singing flower grows, and the talking light descends, and fragrant colors shine! i wear the seal of solomon; i am a fairy; i cast my orders to the wind which, like an abject slave, fulfils them; my eyes can pierce the earth and behold its treasures; for lo! am i not the virgin to whom the pearls dart from their ocean depths and —”
“— who led me safely to the summit of the falberg?” said minna, interrupting her.
“thou! thou too!” exclaimed the strange being, with a luminous glance at the young girl which filled her soul with trouble. “had i not the faculty of reading through your foreheads the desires which have brought you here, should i be what you think i am?” she said, encircling all three with her controlling glance, to david’s great satisfaction. the old man rubbed his hands with pleasure as he left the room.
“ah!” she resumed after a pause, “you have come, all of you, with the curiosity of children. you, my poor monsieur becker, have asked yourself how it was possible that a girl of seventeen should know even a single one of those secrets which men of science seek with their noses to the earth — instead of raising their eyes to heaven. were i to tell you how and at what point the plant merges into the animal you would begin to doubt your doubts. you have plotted to question me; you will admit that?”
“yes, dear seraphita,” answered wilfrid; “but the desire is a natural one to men, is it not?”
“you will bore this dear child with such topics,” she said, passing her hand lightly over minna’s hair with a caressing gesture.
the young girl raised her eyes and seemed as though she longed to lose herself in him.
“speech is the endowment of us all,” resumed the mysterious creature, gravely. “woe to him who keeps silence, even in a desert, believing that no one hears him; all voices speak and all ears listen here below. speech moves the universe. monsieur becker, i desire to say nothing unnecessarily. i know the difficulties that beset your mind; would you not think it a miracle if i were now to lay bare the past history of your consciousness? well, the miracle shall be accomplished. you have never admitted to yourself the full extent of your doubts. i alone, immovable in my faith, i can show it to you; i can terrify you with yourself.
“you stand on the darkest side of doubt. you do not believe in god — although you know it not — and all things here below are secondary to him who rejects the first principle of things. let us leave aside the fruitless discussions of false philosophy. the spiritualist generations made as many and as vain efforts to deny matter as the materialist generations have made to deny spirit. why such discussions? does not man himself offer irrefragable proof of both systems? do we not find in him material things and spiritual things? none but a madman can refuse to see in the human body a fragment of matter; your natural sciences, when they decompose it, find little difference between its elements and those of other animals. on the other hand, the idea produced in man by the comparison of many objects has never seemed to any one to belong to the domain of matter. as to this, i offer no opinion. i am now concerned with your doubts, not with my certainties. to you, as to the majority of thinkers, the relations between things, the reality of which is proved to you by your sensations and which you possess the faculty to discover, do not seem material. the natural universe of things and beings ends, in man, with the spiritual universe of similarities or differences which he perceives among the innumerable forms of nature — relations so multiplied as to seem infinite; for if, up to the present time, no one has been able to enumerate the separate terrestrial creations, who can reckon their correlations? is not the fraction which you know, in relation to their totality, what a single number is to infinity? here, then, you fall into a perception of the infinite which undoubtedly obliges you to conceive of a purely spiritual world.
“thus man himself offers sufficient proof of the two orders — matter and spirit. in him culminates a visible finite universe; in him begins a universe invisible and infinite — two worlds unknown to each other. have the pebbles of the fiord a perception of their combined being? have they a consciousness of the colors they present to the eye of man? do they hear the music of the waves that lap them? let us therefore spring over and not attempt to sound the abysmal depths presented to our minds in the union of a material universe and a spiritual universe — a creation visible, ponderable, tangible, terminating in a creation invisible, imponderable, intangible; completely dissimilar, separated by the void, yet united by indisputable bonds and meeting in a being who derives equally from the one and from the other! let us mingle in one world these two worlds, absolutely irreconcilable to your philosophies, but conjoined by fact. however abstract man may suppose the relation which binds two things together, the line of junction is perceptible. how? where? we are not now in search of the vanishing point where matter subtilizes. if such were the question, i cannot see why he who has, by physical relations, studded with stars at immeasurable distances the heavens which veil him, may not have created solid substances, nor why you deny him the faculty of giving a body to thought.
“thus your invisible moral universe and your visible physical universe are one and the same matter. we will not separate properties from substances, nor objects from effects. all that exists, all that presses upon us and overwhelms us from above or from below, before us or in us, all that which our eyes and our minds perceive, all these named and unnamed things compose — in order to fit the problem of creation to the measure of your logic — a block of finite matter; but were it infinite, god would still not be its master. now, reasoning with your views, dear pastor, no matter in what way god the infinite is concerned with this block of finite matter, he cannot exist and retain the attributes with which man invests him. seek him in facts, and he is not; spiritually and materially, you have made god impossible. listen to the word of human reason forced to its ultimate conclusions.
“in bringing god face to face with the great whole, we see that only two states are possible between them — either god and matter are contemporaneous, or god existed alone before matter. were reason — the light that has guided the human race from the dawn of its existence — accumulated in one brain, even that mighty brain could not invent a third mode of being without suppressing both matter and god. let human philosophies pile mountain upon mountain of words and of ideas, let religions accumulate images and beliefs, revelations and mysteries, you must face at last this terrible dilemma and choose between the two propositions which compose it; you have no option, and one as much as the other leads human reason to doubt.
“the problem thus established, what signifies spirit or matter? why trouble about the march of the worlds in one direction or in another, since the being who guides them is shown to be an absurdity? why continue to ask whether man is approaching heaven or receding from it, whether creation is rising towards spirit or descending towards matter, if the questioned universe gives no reply? what signifies theogonies and their armies, theologies and their dogmas, since whichever side of the problem is man’s choice, his god exists not? let us for a moment take up the first proposition, and suppose god contemporaneous with matter. is subjection to the action or the co-existence of an alien substance consistent with being god at all? in such a system, would not god become a secondary agent compelled to organize matter? if so, who compelled him? between his material gross companion and himself, who was the arbiter? who paid the wages of the six days’ labor imputed to the great designer? has any determining force been found which was neither god nor matter? god being regarded as the manufacturer of the machinery of the worlds, is it not as ridiculous to call him god as to call the slave who turns the grindstone a roman citizen? besides, another difficulty, as insoluble to this supreme human reason as it is to god, presents itself.
“if we carry the problem higher, shall we not be like the hindus, who put the world upon a tortoise, the tortoise on an elephant, and do not know on what the feet of their elephant may rest? this supreme will, issuing from the contest between god and matter, this god, this more than god, can he have existed throughout eternity without willing what he afterwards willed — admitting that eternity can be divided into two eras. no matter where god is, what becomes of his intuitive intelligence if he did not know his ultimate thought? which, then, is the true eternity — the created eternity or the uncreated? but if god throughout all time did will the world such as it is, this new necessity, which harmonizes with the idea of sovereign intelligence, implies the co-eternity of matter. whether matter be co-eternal by a divine will necessarily accordant with itself from the beginning, or whether matter be co-eternal of its own being, the power of god, which must be absolute, perishes if his will is circumscribed; for in that case god would find within him a determining force which would control him. can he be god if he can no more separate himself from his creation in a past eternity than in the coming eternity?
“this face of the problem is insoluble in its cause. let us now inquire into its effects. if a god compelled to have created the world from all eternity seems inexplicable, he is quite as unintelligible in perpetual cohesion with his work. god, constrained to live eternally united to his creation is held down to his first position as workman. can you conceive of a god who shall be neither independent of nor dependent on his work? could he destroy that work without challenging himself? ask yourself, and decide! whether he destroys it some day, or whether he never destroys it, either way is fatal to the attributes without which god cannot exist. is the world an experiment? is it a perishable form to which destruction must come? if it is, is not god inconsistent and impotent? inconsistent, because he ought to have seen the result before the attempt — moreover why should he delay to destroy that which he is to destroy? — impotent, for how else could he have created an imperfect man?
“if an imperfect creation contradicts the faculties which man attributes to god we are forced back upon the question, is creation perfect? the idea is in harmony with that of a god supremely intelligent who could make no mistakes; but then, what means the degradation of his work, and its regeneration? moreover, a perfect world is, necessarily, indestructible; its forms would not perish, it could neither advance nor recede, it would revolve in the everlasting circumference from which it would never issue. in that case god would be dependent on his work; it would be co-eternal with him; and so we fall back into one of the propositions most antagonistic to god. if the world is imperfect, it can progress; if perfect, it is stationary. on the other hand, if it be impossible to admit of a progressive god ignorant through a past eternity of the results of his creative work, can there be a stationary god? would not that imply the triumph of matter? would it not be the greatest of all negations? under the first hypothesis god perishes through weakness; under the second through the force of his inertia.
“therefore, to all sincere minds the supposition that matter, in the conception and execution of the worlds, is contemporaneous with god, is to deny god. forced to choose, in order to govern the nations, between the two alternatives of the problem, whole generations have preferred this solution of it. hence the doctrine of the two principles of magianism, brought from asia and adopted in europe under the form of satan warring with the eternal father. but this religious formula and the innumerable aspects of divinity that have sprung from it are surely crimes against the majesty divine. what other term can we apply to the belief which sets up as a rival to god a personification of evil, striving eternally against the omnipotent mind without the possibility of ultimate triumph? your statics declare that two forces thus pitted against each other are reciprocally rendered null.
“do you turn back, therefore, to the other side of the problem, and say that god pre-existed, original, alone?
“i will not go over the preceding arguments (which here return in full force) as to the severance of eternity into two parts; nor the questions raised by the progression or the immobility of the worlds; let us look only at the difficulties inherent to this second theory. if god pre-existed alone, the world must have emanated from him; matter was therefore drawn from his essence; consequently matter in itself is non-existent; all forms are veils to cover the divine spirit. if this be so, the world is eternal, and also it must be god. is not this proposition even more fatal than the former to the attributes conferred on god by human reason? how can the actual condition of matter be explained if we suppose it to issue from the bosom of god and to be ever united with him? is it possible to believe that the all-powerful, supremely good in his essence and in his faculties, has engendered things dissimilar to himself. must he not in all things and through all things be like unto himself? can there be in god certain evil parts of which at some future day he may rid himself? — a conjecture less offensive and absurd than terrible, for the reason that it drags back into him the two principles which the preceding theory proved to be inadmissible. god must be one; he cannot be divided without renouncing the most important condition of his existence. it is therefore impossible to admit of a fraction of god which yet is not god. this hypothesis seemed so criminal to the roman church that she has made the omnipresence of god in the least particles of the eucharist an article of faith.
“but how then can we imagine an omnipotent mind which does not triumph? how associate it unless in triumph with nature? but nature is not triumphant; she seeks, combines, remodels, dies, and is born again; she is even more convulsed when creating than when all was fusion; nature suffers, groans, is ignorant, degenerates, does evil; deceives herself, annihilates herself, disappears, and begins again. if god is associated with nature, how can we explain the inoperative indifference of the divine principle? wherefore death? how came it that evil, king of the earth, was born of a god supremely good in his essence and in his faculties, who can produce nothing that is not made in his own image?
“but if, from this relentless conclusion which leads at once to absurdity, we pass to details, what end are we to assign to the world? if all is god, all is reciprocally cause and effect; all is one as god is one, and we can perceive neither points of likeness nor points of difference. can the real end be a rotation of matter which subtilizes and disappears? in whatever sense it were done, would not this mechanical trick of matter issuing from god and returning to god seem a sort of child’s play? why should god make himself gross with matter? under which form is he most god? which has the ascendant, matter or spirit, when neither can in any way do wrong? who can comprehend the deity engaged in this perpetual business, by which he divides himself into two natures, one of which knows nothing, while the other knows all? can you conceive of god amusing himself in the form of man, laughing at his own efforts, dying friday, to be born again sunday, and continuing this play from age to age, knowing the end from all eternity, and telling nothing to himself, the creature, of what he the creator, does? the god of the preceding hypothesis, a god so nugatory by the very power of his inertia, seems the more possible of the two if we are compelled to choose between the impossibilities with which this god, so dull a jester, fusillades himself when two sections of humanity argue face to face, weapons in hand.
“however absurd this outcome of the second problem may seem, it was adopted by half the human race in the sunny lands where smiling mythologies were created. those amorous nations were consistent; with them all was god, even fear and its dastardy, even crime and its bacchanals. if we accept pantheism — the religion of many a great human genius — who shall say where the greater reason lies? is it with the savage, free in the desert, clothed in his nudity, listening to the sun, talking to the sea, sublime and always true in his deeds whatever they may be; or shall we find it in civilized man, who derives his chief enjoyments through lies; who wrings nature and all her resources to put a musket on his shoulder; who employs his intellect to hasten the hour of his death and to create diseases out of pleasures? when the rake of pestilence and the ploughshare of war and the demon of desolation have passed over a corner of the globe and obliterated all things, who will be found to have the greater reason — the nubian savage or the patrician of thebes? your doubts descend the scale, they go from heights to depths, they embrace all, the end as well as the means.
“but if the physical world seems inexplicable, the moral world presents still stronger arguments against god. where, then, is progress? if all things are indeed moving toward perfection why do we die young? why do not nations perpetuate themselves? the world having issued from god and being contained in god can it be stationary? do we live once, or do we live always? if we live once, hurried onward by the march of the great-whole, a knowledge of which has not been given to us, let us act as we please. if we are eternal, let things take their course. is the created being guilty if he exists at the instant of the transitions? if he sins at the moment of a great transformation will he be punished for it after being its victim? what becomes of the divine goodness if we are not transferred to the regions of the blest — should any such exist? what becomes of god’s prescience if he is ignorant of the results of the trials to which he subjects us? what is this alternative offered to man by all religions — either to boil in some eternal cauldron or to walk in white robes, a palm in his hand and a halo round his head? can it be that this pagan invention is the final word of god? where is the generous soul who does not feel that the calculating virtue which seeks the eternity of pleasure offered by all religions to whoever fulfils at stray moments certain fanciful and often unnatural conditions, is unworthy of man and of god? is it not a mockery to give to man impetuous senses and forbid him to satisfy them? besides, what mean these ascetic objections if good and evil are equally abolished? does evil exist? if substance in all its forms is god, then evil is god. the faculty of reasoning as well as the faculty of feeling having been given to man to use, nothing can be more excusable in him than to seek to know the meaning of human suffering and the prospects of the future.
“if these rigid and rigorous arguments lead to such conclusions confusion must reign. the world would have no fixedness; nothing would advance, nothing would pause, all would change, nothing would be destroyed, all would reappear after self-renovation; for if your mind does not clearly demonstrate to you an end, it is equally impossible to demonstrate the destruction of the smallest particle of matter; matter can transform but not annihilate itself.
“though blind force may provide arguments for the atheist, intelligent force is inexplicable; for if it emanates from god, why should it meet with obstacles? ought not its triumph to be immediate? where is god? if the living cannot perceive him, can the dead find him? crumble, ye idolatries and ye religions! fall, feeble keystones of all social arches, powerless to retard the decay, the death, the oblivion that have overtaken all nations however firmly founded! fall, morality and justice! our crimes are purely relative; they are divine effects whose causes we are not allowed to know. all is god. either we are god or god is not! — child of a century whose every year has laid upon your brow, old man, the ice of its unbelief, here, here is the summing up of your lifetime of thought, of your science and your reflections! dear monsieur becker, you have laid your head upon the pillow of doubt, because it is the easiest of solutions; acting in this respect with the majority of mankind, who say in their hearts: ‘let us think no more of these problems, since god has not vouchsafed to grant us the algebraic demonstrations that could solve them, while he has given us so many other ways to get from earth to heaven.’
“tell me, dear pastor, are not these your secret thoughts? have i evaded the point of any? nay, rather, have i not clearly stated all? first, in the dogma of two principles — an antagonism in which god perishes for the reason that being all-powerful he chose to combat. secondly, in the absurd pantheism where, all being god, god exists no longer. these two sources, from which have flowed all the religions for whose triumph earth has toiled and prayed, are equally pernicious. behold in them the double-bladed axe with which you decapitate the white old man whom you enthrone among your painted clouds! and now, to me the axe, i wield it!”
monsieur becker and wilfrid gazed at the young girl with something like terror.
“to believe,” continued seraphita, in her woman’s voice, for the man had finished speaking, “to believe is a gift. to believe is to feel. to believe in god we must feel god. this feeling is a possession slowly acquired by the human being, just as other astonishing powers which you admire in great men, warriors, artists, scholars, those who know and those who act, are acquired. thought, that budget of the relations which you perceive among created things, is an intellectual language which can be learned, is it not? belief, the budget of celestial truths, is also a language as superior to thought as thought is to instinct. this language also can be learned. the believer answers with a single cry, a single gesture; faith puts within his hand a flaming sword with which he pierces and illumines all. the seer attains to heaven and descends not. but there are beings who believe and see, who know and will, who love and pray and wait. submissive, yet aspiring to the kingdom of light, they have neither the aloofness of the believer nor the silence of the seer; they listen and reply. to them the doubt of the twilight ages is not a murderous weapon, but a divining rod; they accept the contest under every form; they train their tongues to every language; they are never angered, though they groan; the acrimony of the aggressor is not in them, but rather the softness and tenuity of light, which penetrates and warms and illumines. to their eyes doubt is neither an impiety, nor a blasphemy, nor a crime, but a transition through which men return upon their steps in the darkness, or advance into the light. this being so, dear pastor, let us reason together.
“you do not believe in god? why? god, to your thinking, is incomprehensible, inexplicable. agreed. i will not reply that to comprehend god in his entirety would be to be god; nor will i tell you that you deny what seems to you inexplicable so as to give me the right to affirm that which to me is believable. there is, for you, one evident fact, which lies within yourself. in you, matter has ended in intelligence; can you therefore think that human intelligence will end in darkness, doubt, and nothingness? god may seem to you incomprehensible and inexplicable, but you must admit him to be, in all things purely physical, a splendid and consistent workman. why should his craft stop short at man, his most finished creation?
“if that question is not convincing, at least it compels meditation. happily, although you deny god, you are obliged, in order to establish your doubts, to admit those double-bladed facts, which kill your arguments as much as your arguments kill god. we have also admitted that matter and spirit are two creations which do not comprehend each other; that the spiritual world is formed of infinite relations to which the finite material world has given rise; that if no one on earth is able to identify himself by the power of his spirit with the great-whole of terrestrial creations, still less is he able to rise to the knowledge of the relations which the spirit perceives between these creations.
“we might end the argument here in one word, by denying you the faculty of comprehending god, just as you deny to the pebbles of the fiord the faculties of counting and of seeing each other. how do you know that the stones themselves do not deny the existence of man, though man makes use of them to build his houses? there is one fact that appals you — the infinite; if you feel it within, why will you not admit its consequences? can the finite have a perfect knowledge of the infinite? if you cannot perceive those relations which, according to your own admission, are infinite, how can you grasp a sense of the far-off end to which they are converging? order, the revelation of which is one of your needs, being infinite, can your limited reason apprehend it? do not ask why man does not comprehend that which he is able to perceive, for he is equally able to perceive that which he does not comprehend. if i prove to you that your mind ignores that which lies within its compass, will you grant that it is impossible for it to conceive whatever is beyond it? this being so, am i not justified in saying to you: ‘one of the two propositions under which god is annihilated before the tribunal of our reason must be true, the other is false. inasmuch as creation exists, you feel the necessity of an end, and that end should be good, should it not? now, if matter terminates in man by intelligence, why are you not satisfied to believe that the end of human intelligence is the light of the higher spheres, where alone an intuition of that god who seems so insoluble a problem is obtained? the species which are beneath you have no conception of the universe, and you have; why should there not be other species above you more intelligent than your own? man ought to be better informed than he is about himself before he spends his strength in measuring god. before attacking the stars that light us, and the higher certainties, ought he not to understand the certainties which are actually about him?’
“but no! to the negations of doubt i ought rather to reply by negations. therefore i ask you whether there is anything here below so evident that i can put faith in it? i will show you in a moment that you believe firmly in things which act, and yet are not beings; in things which engender thought, and yet are not spirits; in living abstractions which the understanding cannot grasp in any shape, which are in fact nowhere, but which you perceive everywhere; which have, and can have, on name, but which, nevertheless, you have named; and which, like the god of flesh upon whom you figure to yourself, remain inexplicable, incomprehensible, and absurd. i shall also ask you why, after admitting the existence of these incomprehensible things, you reserve your doubts for god?
“you believe, for instance, in number — a base on which you have built the edifice of sciences which you call ‘exact.’ without number, what would become of mathematics? well, what mysterious being endowed with the faculty of living forever could utter, and what language would be compact to word the number which contains the infinite numbers whose existence is revealed to you by thought? ask it of the loftiest human genius; he might ponder it for a thousand years and what would be his answer? you know neither where number begins, nor where it pauses, nor where it ends. here you call it time, there you call it space. nothing exists except by number. without it, all would be one and the same substance; for number alone differentiates and qualifies substance. number is to your spirit what it is to matter, an incomprehensible agent. will you make a deity of it? is it a being? is it a breath emanating from god to organize the material universe where nothing obtains form except by the divinity which is an effect of number? the least as well as the greatest of creations are distinguishable from each other by quantities, qualities, dimensions, forces — all attributes created by number. the infinitude of numbers is a fact proved to your soul, but of which no material proof can be given. the mathematician himself tells you that the infinite of numbers exists, but cannot be proved.
“god, dear pastor, is a number endowed with motion — felt, but not seen, the believer will tell you. like the unit, he begins number, with which he has nothing in common. the existence of number depends on the unit, which without being a number engenders number. god, dear pastor is a glorious unit who has nothing in common with his creations but who, nevertheless, engenders them. will you not therefore agree with me that you are just as ignorant of where number begins and ends as you are of where created eternity begins and ends?
“why, then, if you believe in number, do you deny god? is not creation interposed between the infinite of unorganized substances and the infinite of the divine spheres, just as the unit stands between the cipher of the fractions you have lately named decimals, and the infinite of numbers which you call wholes? man alone on earth comprehends number, that first step of the peristyle which leads to god, and yet his reason stumbles on it! what! you can neither measure nor grasp the first abstraction which god delivers to you, and yet you try to subject his ends to your own tape-line! suppose that i plunge you into the abyss of motion, the force that organizes number. if i tell you that the universe is naught else than number and motion, you would see at once that we speak two different languages. i understand them both; you understand neither.
“suppose i add that motion and number are engendered by the word, namely the supreme reason of seers and prophets who in the olden time heard the breath of god beneath which saul fell to the earth. that word, you scoff at it, you men, although you well know that all visible works, societies, monuments, deeds, passions, proceed from the breath of your own feeble word, and that without that word you would resemble the african gorilla, the nearest approach to man, the negro. you believe firmly in number and in motion, a force and a result both inexplicable, incomprehensible, to the existence of which i may apply the logical dilemma which, as we have seen, prevents you from believing in god. powerful reasoner that you are, you do not need that i should prove to you that the infinite must everywhere be like unto itself, and that, necessarily, it is one. god alone is infinite, for surely there cannot be two infinities, two ones. if, to make use of human terms, anything demonstrated to you here below seems to you infinite, be sure that within it you will find some one aspect of god. but to continue.
“you have appropriated to yourself a place in the infinite of number; you have fitted it to your own proportions by creating (if indeed you did create) arithmetic, the basis on which all things rest, even your societies. just as number — the only thing in which your self-styled atheists believe — organized physical creations, so arithmetic, in the employ of number, organized the moral world. this numeration must be absolute, like all else that is true in itself; but it is purely relative, it does not exist absolutely, and no proof can be given of its reality. in the first place, though numeration is able to take account of organized substances, it is powerless in relation to unorganized forces, the ones being finite and the others infinite. the man who can conceive the infinite by his intelligence cannot deal with it in its entirety; if he could, he would be god. your numeration, applying to things finite and not to the infinite, is therefore true in relation to the details which you are able to perceive, and false in relation to the whole, which you are unable to perceive. though nature is like unto herself in the organizing force or in her principles which are infinite, she is not so in her finite effects. thus you will never find in nature two objects identically alike. in the natural order two and two never make four; to do so, four exactly similar units must be had, and you know how impossible it is to find two leaves alike on the same tree, or two trees alike of the same species. this axiom of your numeration, false in visible nature, is equally false in the invisible universe of your abstractions, where the same variance takes place in your ideas, which are the things of the visible world extended by means of their relations; so that the variations here are even more marked than elsewhere. in fact, all being relative to the temperament, strength, habits, and customs of individuals, who never resemble each other, the smallest objects take the color of personal feelings. for instance, man has been able to create units and to give an equal weight and value to bits of gold. well, take the ducat of the rich man and the ducat of the poor man to a money-changer and they are rated exactly equal, but to the mind of the thinker one is of greater importance than the other; one represents a month of comfort, the other an ephemeral caprice. two and two, therefore, only make four through a false conception.
“again: fraction does not exist in nature, where what you call a fragment is a finished whole. does it not often happen (have you not many proofs of it?) that the hundredth part of a substance is stronger than what you term the whole of it? if fraction does not exist in the natural order, still less shall we find it in the moral order, where ideas and sentiments may be as varied as the species of the vegetable kingdom and yet be always whole. the theory of fractions is therefore another signal instance of the servility of your mind.
“thus number, with its infinite minuteness and its infinite expansion, is a power whose weakest side is known to you, but whose real import escapes your perception. you have built yourself a hut in the infinite of numbers, you have adorned it with hieroglyphics scientifically arranged and painted, and you cry out, ‘all is here!’
“let us pass from pure, unmingled number to corporate number. your geometry establishes that a straight line is the shortest way from one point to another, but your astronomy proves that god has proceeded by curves. here, then, we find two truths equally proved by the same science — one by the testimony of your senses reinforced by the telescope, the other by the testimony of your mind; and yet the one contradicts the other. man, liable to err, affirms one, and the maker of the worlds, whom, so far, you have not detected in error, contradicts it. who shall decide between rectalinear and curvilinear geometry? between the theory of the straight line and that of the curve? if, in his vast work, the mysterious artificer, who knows how to reach his ends miraculously fast, never employs a straight line except to cut off an angle and so obtain a curve, neither does man himself always rely upon it. the bullet which he aims direct proceeds by a curve, and when you wish to strike a certain point in space, you impel your bombshell along its cruel parabola. none of your men of science have drawn from this fact the simple deduction that the curve is the law of the material worlds and the straight line that of the spiritual worlds; one is the theory of finite creations, the other the theory of the infinite. man, who alone in the world has a knowledge of the infinite, can alone know the straight line; he alone has the sense of verticality placed in a special organ. a fondness for the creations of the curve would seem to be in certain men an indication of the impurity of their nature still conjoined to the material substances which engender us; and the love of great souls for the straight line seems to show in them an intuition of heaven. between these two lines there is a gulf fixed like that between the finite and the infinite, between matter and spirit, between man and the idea, between motion and the object moved, between the creature and god. ask love the divine to grant you his wings and you can cross that gulf. beyond it begins the revelation of the word.
“no part of those things which you call material is without its own meaning; lines are the boundaries of solid parts and imply a force of action which you suppress in your formulas — thus rendering those formulas false in relation to substances taken as a whole. hence the constant destruction of the monuments of human labor, which you supply, unknown to yourselves, with acting properties. nature has substances; your science combines only their appearances. at every step nature gives the lie to all your laws. can you find a single one that is not disproved by a fact? your static laws are at the mercy of a thousand accidents; a fluid can overthrow a solid mountain and prove that the heaviest substances may be lifted by one that is imponderable.
“your laws on acoustics and optics are defied by the sounds which you hear within yourselves in sleep, and by the light of an electric sun whose rays often overcome you. you know no more how light makes itself seen within you, than you know the simple and natural process which changes it on the throats of tropic birds to rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and opals, or keeps it gray and brown on the breasts of the same birds under the cloudy skies of europe, or whitens it here in the bosom of our polar nature. you know not how to decide whether color is a faculty with which all substances are endowed, or an effect produced by an effluence of light. you admit the saltness of the sea without being able to prove that the water is salt at its greatest depth. you recognize the existence of various substances which span what you think to be the void — substances which are not tangible under any of the forms assumed by matter, although they put themselves in harmony with matter in spite of every obstacle.
“all this being so, you believe in the results of chemistry, although that science still knows no way of gauging the changes produced by the flux and reflux of substances which come and go across your crystals and your instruments on the impalpable filaments of heat or light conducted and projected by the affinities of metal or vitrified flint. you obtain none but dead substances, from which you have driven the unknown force that holds in check the decomposition of all things here below, and of which cohesion, attraction, vibration, and polarity are but phenomena. life is the thought of substances; bodies are only the means of fixing life and holding it to its way. if bodies were beings living of themselves they would be cause itself, and could not die.
“when a man discovers the results of the general movement, which is shared by all creations according to their faculty of absorption, you proclaim him mighty in science, as though genius consisted in explaining a thing that is! genius ought to cast its eyes beyond effects. your men of science would laugh if you said to them: ‘there exist such positive relations between two human beings, one of whom may be here, and the other in java, that they can at the same instant feel the same sensation, and be conscious of so doing; they can question each other and reply without mistake’; and yet there are mineral substances which exhibit sympathies as far off from each other as those of which i speak. you believe in the power of the electricity which you find in the magnet and you deny that which emanates from the soul! according to you, the moon, whose influence upon the tides you think fixed, has none whatever upon the winds, nor upon navigation, nor upon men; she moves the sea, but she must not affect the sick folk; she has undeniable relations with one half of humanity, and nothing at all to do with the other half. these are your vaunted certainties!
“let us go a step further. you believe in physics. but your physics begin, like the catholic religion, with an act of faith. do they not pre-suppose some external force distinct from substance to which it communicates motion? you see its effects, but what is it? where is it? what is the essence of its nature, its life? has it any limits? — and yet, you deny god!
“thus, the majority of your scientific axioms, true to their relation to man, are false in relation to the great whole. science is one, but you have divided it. to know the real meaning of the laws of phenomena must we not know the correlations which exist between phenomena and the law of the whole? there is, in all things, an appearance which strikes your senses; under that appearance stirs a soul; a body is there and a faculty is there. where do you teach the study of the relations which bind things to each other? nowhere. consequently you have nothing positive. your strongest certainties rest upon the analysis of material forms whose essence you persistently ignore.
“there is a higher knowledge of which, too late, some men obtain a glimpse, though they dare not avow it. such men comprehend the necessity of considering substances not merely in their mathematical properties but also in their entirety, in their occult relations and affinities. the greatest man among you divined, in his latter days, that all was reciprocally cause and effect; that the visible worlds were co-ordinated among themselves and subject to worlds invisible. he groaned at the recollection of having tried to establish fixed precepts. counting up his worlds, like grape-seeds scattered through ether, he had explained their coherence by the laws of planetary and molecular attraction. you bowed before that man of science — well! i tell you that he died in despair. by supposing that the centrifugal and centripetal forces, which he had invented to explain to himself the universe, were equal, he stopped the universe; yet he admitted motion in an indeterminate sense; but supposing those forces unequal, then utter confusion of the planetary system ensued. his laws therefore were not absolute; some higher problem existed than the principle on which his false glory rested. the connection of the stars with one another and the centripetal action of their internal motion did not deter him from seeking the parent stalk on which his clusters hung. alas, poor man! the more he widened space the heavier his burden grew. he told you how there came to be equilibrium among the parts, but whither went the whole? his mind contemplated the vast extent, illimitable to human eyes, filled with those groups of worlds a mere fraction of which is all our telescopes can reach, but whose immensity is revealed by the rapidity of light. this sublime contemplation enabled him to perceive myriads of worlds, planted in space like flowers in a field, which are born like infants, grow like men, die as the aged die, and live by assimilating from their atmosphere the substances suitable for their nourishment — having a centre and a principal of life, guaranteeing to each other their circuits, absorbed and absorbing like plants, and forming a vast whole endowed with life and possessing a destiny.
“at that sight your man of science trembled! he knew that life is produced by the union of the thing and its principle, that death or inertia or gravity is produced by a rupture between a thing and the movement which appertains to it. then it was that he foresaw the crumbling of the worlds and their destruction if god should withdraw the breath of his word. he searched the apocalypse for the traces of that word. you thought him mad. understand him better! he was seeking pardon for the work of his genius.
“wilfrid, you have come here hoping to make me solve equations, or rise upon a rain-cloud, or plunge into the fiord and reappear a swan. if science or miracles were the end and object of humanity, moses would have bequeathed to you the law of fluxions; jesus christ would have lightened the darkness of your sciences; his apostles would have told you whence come those vast trains of gas and melted metals, attached to cores which revolve and solidify as they dart through ether, or violently enter some system and combine with a star, jostling and displacing it by the shock, or destroying it by the infiltration of their deadly gases; saint paul, instead of telling you to live in god, would have explained why food is the secret bond among all creations and the evident tie between all living species. in these days the greatest miracle of all would be the discovery of the squaring of the circle — a problem which you hold to be insoluble, but which is doubtless solved in the march of worlds by the intersection of some mathematical lines whose course is visible to the eye of spirits who have reached the higher spheres. believe me, miracles are in us, not without us. here natural facts occur which men call supernatural. god would have been strangely unjust had he confined the testimony of his power to certain generations and peoples and denied them to others. the brazen rod belongs to all. neither moses, nor jacob, nor zoroaster, nor paul, nor pythagoras, nor swedenborg, not the humblest messenger nor the loftiest prophet of the most high are greater than you are capable of being. only, there come to nations as to men certain periods when faith is theirs.
“if material sciences be the end and object of human effort, tell me, both of you, would societies — those great centres where men congregate — would they perpetually be dispersed? if civilization were the object of our species, would intelligence perish? would it continue purely individual? the grandeur of all nations that were truly great was based on exceptions; when the exception ceased their power died. if such were the end-all, prophets, seers, and messengers of god would have lent their hand to science rather than have given it to belief. surely they would have quickened your brains sooner than have touched your hearts! but no; one and all they came to lead the nations back to god; they proclaimed the sacred path in simple words that showed the way to heaven; all were wrapped in love and faith, all were inspired by that word which hovers above the inhabitants of earth, enfolding them, inspiriting them, uplifting them; none were prompted by any human interest. your great geniuses, your poets, your kings, your learned men are engulfed with their cities; while the names of these good pastors of humanity, ever blessed, have survived all cataclysms.
“alas! we cannot understand each other on any point. we are separated by an abyss. you are on the side of darkness, while i— i live in the light, the true light! is this the word that you ask of me? i say it with joy; it may change you. know this: there are sciences of matter and sciences of spirit. there, where you see substances, i see forces that stretch one toward another with generating power. to me, the character of bodies is the indication of their principles and the sign of their properties. those principles beget affinities which escape your knowledge, and which are linked to centres. the different species among which life is distributed are unfailing streams which correspond unfailingly among themselves. each has his own vocation. man is effect and cause. he is fed, but he feeds in turn. when you call god a creator, you dwarf him. he did not create, as you think he did, plants or animals or stars. could he proceed by a variety of means? must he not act by unity of composition? moreover, he gave forth principles to be developed, according to his universal law, at the will of the surroundings in which they were placed. hence a single substance and motion, a single plant, a single animal, but correlations everywhere. in fact, all affinities are linked together by contiguous similitudes; the life of the worlds is drawn toward the centres by famished aspiration, as you are drawn by hunger to seek food.
“to give you an example of affinities linked to similitudes (a secondary law on which the creations of your thought are based), music, that celestial art, is the working out of this principle; for is it not a complement of sounds harmonized by number? is not sound a modification of air, compressed, dilated, echoed? you know the composition of air — oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. as you cannot obtain sound from the void, it is plain that music and the human voice are the result of organized chemical substances, which put themselves in unison with the same substances prepared within you by your thought, co-ordinated by means of light, the great nourisher of your globe. have you ever meditated on the masses of nitre deposited by the snow, have you ever observed a thunderstorm and seen the plants breathing in from the air about them the metal it contains, without concluding that the sun has fused and distributed the subtle essence which nourishes all things here below? swedenborg has said, ‘the earth is a man.’
“your science, which makes you great in your own eyes, is paltry indeed beside the light which bathes a seer. cease, cease to question me; our languages are different. for a moment i have used yours to cast, if it be possible, a ray of faith into your soul; to give you, as it were, the hem of my garment and draw you up into the regions of prayer. can god abase himself to you? is it not for you to rise to him? if human reason finds the ladder of its own strength too weak to bring god down to it, is it not evident that you must find some other path to reach him? that path is in ourselves. the seer and the believer find eyes within their souls more piercing far than eyes that probe the things of earth — they see the dawn. hear this truth: your science, let it be never so exact, your meditations, however bold, your noblest lights are clouds. above, above is the sanctuary whence the true light flows.”
she sat down and remained silent; her calm face bore no sign of the agitation which orators betray after their least fervid improvisations.
wilfrid bent toward monsieur becker and said in a low voice, “who taught her that?”
“i do not know,” he answered.
“he was gentler on the falberg,” minna whispered to herself.
seraphita passed her hand across her eyes and then she said, smiling:—
“you are very thoughtful to-night, gentlemen. you treat minna and me as though we were men to whom you must talk politics or commerce; whereas we are young girls, and you ought to tell us tales while you drink your tea. that is what we do, monsieur wilfrid, in our long norwegian evenings. come, dear pastor, tell me some saga that i have not heard — that of frithiof, the chronicle that you believe and have so often promised me. tell us the story of the peasant lad who owned the ship that talked and had a soul. come! i dream of the frigate ellida, the fairy with the sails young girls should navigate!”
“since we have returned to the regions of jarvis,” said wilfrid, whose eyes were fastened on seraphita as those of a robber, lurking in the darkness, fasten on the spot where he knows the jewels lie, “tell me why you do not marry?”
“you are all born widows and widowers,” she replied; “but my marriage was arranged at my birth. i am betrothed.”
“to whom?” they cried.
“ask not my secret,” she said; “i will promise, if our father permits it, to invite you to these mysterious nuptials.”
“will they be soon?”
“i think so.”
a long silence followed these words.
“the spring has come!” said seraphita, suddenly. “the noise of the waters and the breaking of the ice begins. come, let us welcome the first spring of the new century.”
she rose, followed by wilfrid, and together they went to a window which david had opened. after the long silence of winter, the waters stirred beneath the ice and resounded through the fiord like music — for there are sounds which space refines, so that they reach the ear in waves of light and freshness.
“wilfrid, cease to nourish evil thoughts whose triumph would be hard to bear. your desires are easily read in the fire of your eyes. be kind; take one step forward in well-doing. advance beyond the love of man and sacrifice yourself completely to the happiness of her you love. obey me; i will lead you in a path where you shall obtain the distinctions which you crave, and where love is infinite indeed.”
she left him thoughtful.
“that soft creature!” he said within himself; “is she indeed the prophetess whose eyes have just flashed lightnings, whose voice has rung through worlds, whose hand has wielded the axe of doubt against our sciences? have we been dreaming? am i awake?”
“minna,” said seraphita, returning to the young girl, “the eagle swoops where the carrion lies, but the dove seeks the mountain spring beneath the peaceful greenery of the glades. the eagle soars to heaven, the dove descends from it. cease to venture into regions where thou canst find no spring of waters, no umbrageous shade. if on the falberg thou couldst not gaze into the abyss and live, keep all thy strength for him who will love thee. go, poor girl; thou knowest, i am betrothed.”
minna rose and followed seraphita to the window where wilfrid stood. all three listened to the sieg bounding out the rush of the upper waters, which brought down trees uprooted by the ice; the fiord had regained its voice; all illusions were dispelled! they rejoiced in nature as she burst her bonds and seemed to answer with sublime accord to the spirit whose breath had wakened her.
when the three guests of this mysterious being left the house, they were filled with the vague sensation which is neither sleep, nor torpor, nor astonishment, but partakes of the nature of each — a state that is neither dusk nor dawn, but which creates a thirst for light. all three were thinking.
“i begin to believe that she is indeed a spirit hidden in human form,” said monsieur becker.
wilfrid, re-entering his own apartments, calm and convinced, was unable to struggle against that influence so divinely majestic.
minna said in her heart, “why will he not let me love him!”
