Fernand Papillon

“ We would only ask it to be observed how great an influence light has on the system of the intellectual functions. The soul finds in it the least deceiving of the consolations it seeks for the eternal sadness of our destiny—the bitter melancholy of life. Thought, fettered and dumb in a dark place, springs into freedom and spirit at evening, in a room brilliant with light. We cannot shun the sad moods caused by gloomy and rainy weather, nor resist the impulse of joy given by the spectacle of a brilliant day. ”

“ A strong will is in itself a power. Even though it were not so easy a thing as it is, to prevail over the blind forces of Nature, simply by the overmastering power of a resolute and sagacious will, there would still exist abundant grounds for believing that man has the power of modifying and amending his own conduct; that he is not the plaything of inflexible Destiny; and that he may not give way, without resistance or remorse, to his evil instincts. Let us believe in heredity, in so far as it may be made a means of improvement and of free perfectionment. ”

“ The mind of man may put forth its power in laboring in harmony with reason, yet discover genuine truths in a sphere as far above that of laboratories and manufactures as their sphere is above the region of the coarsest arts. In a word, there is a temple of light that unfolds its portals to the soul neither through calculation nor through experiment, which the soul nevertheless enters with authority and confidence, so long as it holds the consciousness of its sovereign prerogatives. ”

“ When will science, instead of the arrogant indifference it assumes in presence of philosophy, admit the fertility beyond estimate of the latter? It may be that the hour of this reconciliation, so much to be longed for, is less remote than many suppose; at least, every day brings us nearer to it. The spirit of Descartes cannot fail to arouse before long some genius mighty enough to revive among us a taste and respect for thought in all the departments of scientific activity. ”

“ That power in action, whatever it be, takes to itself all the forces of Nature, but it links them, coordinates them, and, fixing them into special conditions, compels their service to the purposes of life. Gravitation, heat, light, electricity, all these forces are maintained within living beings—only they are there disguised under a new phenomenal unity, just as the oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus, that make up a nerve-cell, vanish in it into a new unity of substance, without ceasing to exist in it as distinct chemical elements. ”

“ Sauvage describes nostalgia by four words—morositas, pervigilio, anorexia, asthenia—which signify sadness, sleeplessness, want of appetite, and exhaustion. The patient very early loses his cheerfulness and vigor, and courts in solitude a surrender to the fixed idea that haunts him, the thought of his country. He dwells in charmed repetition upon the memories connected with the places where his early life was spent, and paints them with a world of dreams in which his imagination shuts itself so obstinately that nothing can call him away from it. ”

“ A first exclusively analytical view of the world has led us to a first undeniable certainty, the existence of a principle of energy and motion. A second view of the universe, exclusively synthetic, leads us, as we have seen, to another certainty, which is the existence of a principle of differentiation and harmony. This principle is what is called spirit. Thus spirit is not substance, but it is the law of substance; it is not force, but it is the revealer of force. It is not life, but it makes life exist. It is not thought, but it is the consciousness of thought. ”

“ We must train ourselves to understand that what we see is nothing in comparison with what we do not see. The whole force, the whole spring, of the most complex movements, the most magnificent phenomena of Nature, and the most subtle operations of life, thought included, proceed from the infinite commingling of an infinity of series of invisible and unextended principles, whose activities ascend in the scale of perfection from simple power of movement up to supreme reason. ”

“ To hedge one's self within what can be computed, weighed, and demonstrated, to trust such evidence only, and bar one's self inside the prison of the senses, to hush or scorn the suggestions of the spirit, our only true light, because it is a spark of the flame that vivifies all—this is, deny it or not, the condition and the subject state of materialism. Only reason can conceive the fixity, the generality, and the universality of relations, and all savants admit that the destiny of science is to establish laws possessing these three characteristics ”

“ If we had, to give us knowledge, only the dull and ignorant passivity of our senses, there would be no reality for us; but the wise activity of the soul can not merely assert the reality of outward objects, for a reason similar to that which makes it assert its own existence—it can still further argue, from its various modes of affection, to a corresponding variety of external forces. It moves in harmony with the world, rather than in harmony with the senses. ”

“ It helps us to understand the divine honors given to the star of day among the earliest civilized nations, and the pathetic terror those child-like races suffered when, at evening, they saw the crimson globe, that was the source for them of all power and all splendor, slowly disappear in the horizon. That pious idolatry, far from being a mere utterance of gratitude for the wealth of fertility scattered by the sun over earth, was a homage, too, to the comforting source of brightness and joy, revealing the natural affinity between man and light. ”

“ The inorganic powers of Nature are as essential to life as lines and colors are in the composition of the painter's picture. What would the picture be without the painter's soul and labor? The picture is his peculiar work: the physico-chemical forces are the lines and colors of that homogeneous and harmonious composition, which is life. In it they would want meaning or power, if they did not in it, by the operation of a mysterious artist, undergo a transformation which raises them to a dignity not theirs before, and assigns their place in the supreme harmony. ”

“ This is not the place to unfold that attractive and hardly-opened chapter of æsthetics—to demonstrate the relation between the atmosphere and art, by interrogating the climates of the globe and the great masters of all ages, not following a system of empirical analogies and far-fetched suggestions, but led by strict physiology and rigid optic laws. A charming picture would unfold in tracing the countless and changeful aspects of the sky, and all the caprices of light and air in their influence over the moral and physical nature of painters, poets, and musicians. ”

“ The energy and glory of life, perfect forms as well as brilliant arraying, are the distinguishing mark of the various and manifold races in tropical regions, giving this privileged world its characteristic aspect. A pure emanation from the sun, Nature here lives wild and splendid, gazing unshrinkingly, like the Alpine eagle, on the eternal and sublime source which inundates it with heat and glow. ”

“ The first savants who studied the action of galvanic electricity on dead bodies, and saw them recover motion, and even an appearance of sensation, supposed they had touched the secret of life, likening to the vital principle that other force which seems to warm again the frozen organs, and restore their springs. Slight reflection on the facts collected in the foregoing pages reveals the thorough illusiveness of such a hope. Not only is electricity far from being the whole of life, but it cannot even be regarded as one of the elements of life, or be compared, for instance, with nerve-force. ”

“ He is plunged into a comatose stupor, so that he is no longer conscious of his situation or his sufferings, and he passes insensibly from life to death, in a manner that renders it sometimes difficult to fix the exact instant at which a dying person expires. This is true, at least, in chronic maladies, and especially in those that consume the human body slowly and silently. Yet, when the hour of death comes for ardent organizations—for great artists, for instance, and they usually die young—there is a quick and sublime new burst of life in the creative genius. ”

“ Human personality, such as we see and know it, is only a coarse and complex result from those of these primitive activities which are the best and deepest thing in us. It is not that personality which is immortal––that is no more immortal than the motive force of a steam-engine is, or the electricity of a voltaic battery, although movement and electricity are of themselves indestructible. It is not that personality which can aspire to a home in the bosom of God. ”

“ Physiology is dumb as to the destiny of the soul after death; of that it teaches, and it can teach us, nothing. It is plain, and it would be childish to deny it, that any psychical or sentient manifestation, and any concrete representation of the personality, are impossible after death. The dissolution of the organism annihilates surely, and of necessity, the functions of sensation, motion, and will, which are inseparable from a certain combination of material conditions. We can feel, move, and will, only so far as we have organs for reception, transmission, and execution. ”

“ A comparison between the muscular and the nervous systems from the point of view of their connection with heat is a bold one for many reasons. Between nerve and muscle there exists this enormous difference—that the former is endowed with a spontaneity denied to the latter. Muscular fibre never contracts of its own accord; it needs a stimulus—its energy is borrowed. The nerve-cell, on the contrary, has in itself an ever-present, never-exhausted power of action, of which the energy is its peculiar property. ”

“ The quality is of so little importance to Nature, that, while following always the same laws, and constantly using the same materials, she can, by merely changing the ponderable relations of the latter, produce, by myriads of various combinations, myriads of substances which have no resemblance to each other. The strange powers of the elements and the mysterious forces concealed in matter make themselves known to us in a still more remarkable phenomenon, to which the name of isomery is given. ”

“ Night-butterflies never have the vivid tints of those that fly by day, and among the latter those of spring have clearer, brighter shades than the autumn ones. The gold-and-azure dust that adorns them harmonizes with the tones of colors in surrounding Nature. Night-birds, in the same way, have dark plumage, and the downiness of their coverings contrasts with the stiffness of those that fly by day. Shells secluded under rocks wear pale shades, compared with those that drink in the light. We have spoken above of cave-animals. ”

“ When this passion is a happy one, the coloring is brilliant and cheerful, and then life is a bright vernal season. But oftener the passion is a painful one, and the color given by it to life is dark-some. Melancholy is one of those passions which throw a gloom over a man's life. There is one form of melancholy which is plainly a variety of dementia, and which often comes under the notice of the physician. It is characterized by an incurable sadness, an irresistible love of solitude, absolute inaction, and a belief in a host of imaginary evils that are ever haunting the patient. ”

“ The ever-varying face of the sun, the fires of dawn and sunset, the opalescent play of air, the shimmer of twilight, the blue, green, shifting hues and iridescent gleams of sea or mountain—all these things find a destined answer in the inmost and unconscious ongrowings of life, as in the soul of one who looks understandingly at Nature's works. ”

“ Our true personality, our real I, that which may without illusion count on a future life, is unity released from every material bond, and all concrete alloy; it is that force, necessarily pure, which has a more or less clear consciousness of its own relations with the infinity of like unities, and which more or less draws near to them by thought and by love. It is beyond our power to conceive what will become of that unity when, quitting its prison of flesh, and soaring into the ideal ether, it will no longer have organs with which to act ”

“ The source of differentiations cannot be in energy itself; it must be in a principle apart from that energy, in a superior will and consciousness, of which we have doubtless only a dim and faulty idea, but as to which we can yet affirm that they have some analogy with the inner light which fills us, and which we shed forth from us, and which teaches us, by its mysterious contact with the outer world, the infinite order of the universe.
The danger from materialism is not, as we usually incline to think, corruption of morals by degradation of the soul. ”

“ The conceptions of matter now entertained agree not only with the boldest deductions of most splendid discoveries of contemporary science, as well as with the oldest truths and the most instinctive faiths of humanity, but also with those loftier convictions, more precious and as solid, which form our moral and religious inheritance, and the crowning prerogative of our nature. The most advanced science rejects none of the traditions and objects to none of the great and lasting sentiments of past ages. ”