al acts he called Reaction.

When I subsequently read the observations made by Bichat on the duality
of our external senses, I was really bewildered by my recollections,
recognizing the startling coincidences between the views of that
celebrated physiologist and those of Louis Lambert. They both died
young, and they had with equal steps arrived at the same strange truths.
Nature has in every case been pleased to give a twofold purpose to the
various apparatus that constitute her creatures; and the twofold action
of the human organism, which is now ascertained beyond dispute, proves
by a mass of evidence in daily life how true were Lambert's deductions
as to Action and Reaction.

The inner Being, the Being of Action--the word he used to designate an
unknown specialization--the mysterious nexus of fibrils to which we owe
the inadequately investigated powers of thought and will--in short, the
nameless entity which sees, acts, foresees the end, and accomplishes
everything before expressing itself in any physical phenomenon--must,
in conformity with its nature, be free from the physical conditions by
which the external Being of Reaction, the visible man, is fettered in
its manifestation. From this followed a multitude of logical explanation
as to those results of our twofold nature which appear the strangest,
and a rectification of various systems in which truth and falsehood are
mingled.

Certain men, having had a glimpse of some phenomena of the natural
working of the Being of Action, were, like Swedenborg, carried away
above this world by their ardent soul, thirsting for poetry, and filled
with the Divine Spirit. Thus, in their ignorance of the causes and their
admiration of the facts, they pleased their fancy by regarding that
inner man as divine, and constructing a mystical universe. Hence we have
angels! A lovely illusion which Lambert would never abandon, cherishing
it even when the sword of his logic was cutting off their dazzling
wings.

"Heaven," he would say, "must, after all, be the survival of our
perfected faculties, and hell the void into which our unperfected
faculties are cast away."

But how, then, in the ages when the understanding had preserved the
religious and spiritualist impressions, which prevailed from the time
of Christ till that of Descartes, between faith and doubt, how could men
help accounting for the mysteries of our nature otherwise than by divine
interposition? Of whom but of God Himse