investigations, which I remember from among
his essays, will throw a light on the method on which he worked. I
need not emphasize the obvious connection between this theory and the
collateral sciences projected by Gall and Lavater; they were its natural
corollary; and every more or less scientific brain will discern the
ramifications by which it is inevitably connected with the phrenological
observations of one and the speculations on physiognomy of the other.

Mesmer's discovery, so important, though as yet so little appreciated,
was also embodied in a single section of this treatise, though Louis did
not know the Swiss doctor's writings--which are few and brief.

A simple and logical inference from these principles led him to perceive
that the will might be accumulated by a contractile effort of the
inner man, and then, by another effort, projected, or even imparted, to
material objects. Thus the whole force of a man must have the property
of reacting on other men, and of infusing into them an essence foreign
to their own, if they could not protect themselves against such an
aggression. The evidence of this theorem of the science of humanity
is, of course, very multifarious; but there is nothing to establish it
beyond question. We have only the notorious disaster of Marius and his
harangue to the Cimbrian commanded to kill him, or the august injunction
of a mother to the Lion of Florence, in historic proof of instances of
such lightning flashes of mind. To Lambert, then, Will and Thought were
_living forces_; and he spoke of them in such a way as to impress his
belief on the hearer. To him these two forces were, in a way, visible,
tangible. Thought was slow or alert, heavy or nimble, light or dark; he
ascribed to it all the attributes of an active agent, and thought of it
as rising, resting, waking, expanding, growing old, shrinking, becoming
atrophied, or resuscitating; he described its life, and specified all
its actions by the strangest words in our language, speaking of
its spontaneity, its strength, and all its qualities with a kind of
intuition which enabled him to recognize all the manifestations of its
substantial existence.

"Often," said he, "in the midst of quiet and silence, when our inner
faculties are dormant, when a sort of darkness reigns within us, and
we are lost in the contemplation of things outside us, an idea suddenly
flies forth, and rushes with the swiftness of lightning across the
infinite