If Lambert had no other title to fame than the fact of his having
formulated, in his sixteenth year, such a psychological dictum as
this:--"The events which bear witness to the action of the human race,
and are the outcome of its intellect, have causes by which they are
preconceived, as our actions are accomplished in our minds before they
are reproduced by the outer man; presentiments or predictions are the
perception of these causes"--I think we may deplore in him a genius
equal to Pascal, Lavoisier, or Laplace. His chimerical notions about
angels perhaps overruled his work too long; but was it not in trying to
make gold that the alchemists unconsciously created chemistry? At the
same time, Lambert, at a later period, studied comparative anatomy,
physics, geometry, and other sciences bearing on his discoveries, and
this was undoubtedly with the purpose of collecting facts and submitting
them to analysis--the only torch that can guide us through the dark
places of the most inscrutable work of nature. He had too much good
sense to dwell among the clouds of theories which can all be expressed
in a few words. In our day, is not the simplest demonstration based on
facts more highly esteemed than the most specious system though defended
by more or less ingenious inductions? But as I did not know him at
the period of his life when his cogitations were, no doubt, the most
productive of results, I can only conjecture that the bent of his work
must have been from that of his first efforts of thought.

It is easy to see where his _Treatise on the Will_ was faulty. Though
gifted already with the powers which characterize superior men, he
was but a boy. His brain, though endowed with a great faculty for
abstractions, was still full of the delightful beliefs that hover around
youth. Thus his conception, while at some points it touched the ripest
fruits of his genius, still, by many more, clung to the smaller elements
of its germs. To certain readers, lovers of poetry, what he chiefly
lacked must have been a certain vein of interest.

But his work bore the stamp of the struggle that was going on in that
noble Spirit between the two great principles of Spiritualism and
Materialism, round which so many a fine genius has beaten its way
without ever daring to amalgamate them. Louis, at first purely
Spiritualist, had been irresistibly led to recognize the Material
conditions of Mind. Confounded by the facts of analysis at the moment
whe