nt, in human form, of the _idea_ expressed in the
world-old belief in a perfected being; whose perfection was complete when
the two halves of the _one_ should have found each other.

The inference is very generally made that Balzac believed in and sought to
express the idea of a bi-sexual individual--a _personality_ who is complete
in himself or herself _as a person_; one in which the intuitive, feminine
principle and the reasoning, masculine principle had become perfectly
balanced--in short, an androgynous human.

This idea is apparently further substantiated by the fact that Seraphita
was loved by Minna, a beautiful young girl to whom Seraphita was always
Seraphitus, an ideal lover; and by Wilfrid, to whom Seraphita represented
his ideal of feminine loveliness, both in mind and body; a young girl
possessing marvelous, almost miraculous, wisdom, but yet a woman with
human passions and human virtues--his ideal of wifehood and motherhood.

But whatever the idea that Balzac intended to convey, whether, as is
generally believed, Seraphita was an androgynous being, or whether she
symbolized the perfection of soul-union, our contention is that this union
is not a creation of the imagination, but the accomplishment of the plan of
creation--the final goal of earthly pilgrimage; the raison d'etre of love
itself.

One argument against the idea that Seraphita was intended to illustrate an
androgynous being, rather than a perfected human, who had her spiritual
mate, is found in the words in which she refused to marry Wilfrid, although
Balzac makes it plainly evident that she was attracted to Wilfrid with a
degree of sense-attraction, due to the fact that she was still living
within the environment of the physical, and therefore subject to the
illusions of the mortal, even while her spiritual consciousness was so
fully developed as to enable her to perceive and realize the difference
between an attraction that was based largely upon sense, and that which was
of the soul.

Wilfrid says to her:

"Have you no soul that you are not seduced by the prospect of consoling a
great man, who will sacrifice all to live with you in a little house by the
border of a lake?"

"But," answers Seraphita, "I am loved with a love without bounds."

And when Wilfrid with insane anger and jealousy asked who it was whom
Seraphita loved and who loved her, she answered "God."

At another time, when Minna, to whom she had often spoken in veiled terms