Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/111

fluids, three negations which the science of that time insisted upon considering as a definition of space. In modern philosophy, space does not exist. Ten feet of space and the world would crumble to pieces! According to materialists particularly, the world is full, everything is connected, everything is linked together and everything is contrived. “The world,” said Diderot, “as the result of chance, is more explicable than God. The multiplicity of causes and the measureless number of rays that chance implies explains the creation. Given the Eneid and all the characters necessary to its composition, and given the time and the space, by means of tossing up the letters, I should arrive at the combination of the Eneid.” Those wretched men, who deified anything rather than acknowledge God, also shrank before the infinite divisibility of matter that the nature of imponderable forces admits of. Locke and Condillac then delayed for fifty years the immense progress that the natural sciences now make under the idea of unity due to the great Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Several upright men, without any system, convinced by facts conscientiously considered, persisted in Mesmer’s doctrine, which recognized in man the existence of a penetrating influence, leading from man to man, worked by the will, healing by the abundance of fluid, the exercise of which constituted a duel between two wills, between an evil to be cured and the will to cure it. The phenomena of somnambulism, barely surmised by Mesmer, were due to Messieurs de Puységur and Deleuze;