Recently added books

Louis Lambert

Creator: Balzac, Honoré de, 1799-1850
Translator: -
Contributor: -
Editor: -


Brand new books:


spoke. He would say, "That man does not dwell in heaven," where any one else would have said, "We are not made on the same pattern." Every clever man has his own quirks of speech. The broader his genius, the more conspicuous are the singularities which constitute the various degrees of eccentricity. In the country an eccentric man is at once set down as half mad. Hence Monsieur Lefebvre's first sentences left me doubtful of my schoolmate's insanity. I listened to the old man, but I criticised his statements. The most serious symptom had supervened a day or two before the marriage. Louis had had some well-marked attacks of catalepsy. He had once remained motionless for fifty-nine hours, his eyes staring, neither speaking nor eating; a purely nervous affection, to which persons under the influence of violent passion are liable; a rare malady, but perfectly well known to the medical faculty. What was really extraordinary was that Louis should not have had several previous attacks, since his habits of rapt thought and the character of his mind would predispose him to them. But his temperament, physical and mental, was so admirably balanced, that it had no doubt been able to resist the demands on his strength. The excitement to which he had been wound up by the anticipation of acute physical enjoyment, enhanced by a chaste life and a highly-strung soul, had no doubt led to these attacks, of which the results are as little known
The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 4 of 4

THE ANTI-SLAVERY EXAMINER Part 4 of 4 By The American Anti-Slavery Society 1839 No. 12. Chattel Principle The Abhorrence of Jesus Christ and the Apostles; Or No Refuge for American Slavery in the New Testament. On the Condition of the Free People of Color in the United States. No. 13. Can Abolitionists Vote or Take Office Under the United States Constitution? Address to the Friends of Constitutional Liberty, on the Violation by the United States House of Representatives
as the cause. The letters that have by chance escaped destruction show very plainly a transition from pure idealism to the most intense sensualism. Time was when Lambert and I had admired this phenomenon of the human mind, in which he saw the fortuitous separation of our two natures, and the signs of a total removal of the inner man, using its unknown faculties under the operation of an unknown cause. This disorder, a mystery as deep as that of sleep, was connected with the scheme of evidence which Lambert had set forth in his _Treatise on the Will_. And when Monsieur Lefebvre spoke to me of Louis' first attack, I suddenly remembered a conversation we had had on the subject after reading a medical book. "Deep meditation and rapt ecstasy are perhaps the undeveloped germs of catalepsy," he said in conclusion. On the occasion when he so concisely formulated this idea, he had been trying to link mental phenomena together by a series of results, following the processes of the intellect step by step, from their beginnings as those simple, purely animal impulses of instinct, which are all-sufficient to many human beings, particularly to those men whose energies are wholly spent in mere mechanical labor; then, going on to the aggregation of ideas and rising to comparison, reflection, meditation, and finally ecstasy and catalepsy. Lambert, of course, in