Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/110

 failed through uncertainty about facts, through ignorance of the rôle played by hitherto unobserved imponderables in Nature, through his inaptitude for investigating the different sides of a triple-faced science. Magnetism has more applications; in Mesmer’s hands it was, as regards its prospects, what principle is to effect. But, if the inventor was lacking in genius, it is sad for human reason and for France to have to state that a contemporary science of the societies, cultivated equally by Egypt and Chaldea, by Greece and India, experienced in Paris in the middle of the eighteenth century the fate that truth had met with in the person of Galileo in the sixteenth century, and that magnetism was scouted by the united attacks of religious people and materialistic philosophers, alike alarmed. Magnetism, Christ’s favorite science and one of the divine powers remitted to the apostles, seemed to have been no more foreseen by the Church than by the disciples of Jean-Jacques, Voltaire, Locke and Condillac. The Encyclopedia and the clergy could not reconcile themselves to this old human power which seemed so new. The miracles of the Convulsionaries, hushed up by the Church and the indifference of scholars, in spite of the valuable pamphlets of the Councillor Carré de Montgeron, were the first summons to make experiments with the human fluids which give the power to oppose interior forces sufficiently to annul the suffering caused by exterior agents. But it was necessary to recognize the existence of intangible, invisible and imponderable