His pride was like that of Lucifer: it was not relative but absolute; he contemplated himself with a terrible satisfaction. Thence his disdain for all the miserable trifles which gratify the self-love of inferior men. The pride of seeming comes when the pride of being is not absolute.
Whence then came the gigantic pride of the old Jew?
Rabbi Ben-Ha-Zelah was the most learned man of his time.
He had carried his investigations far beyond those of the most scientific men of the age; he was well versed in physics, mechanics, dynamics, arithmetic, music, astronomy, medicine, surgery, and botany; but the science he most loved, was that which, at first known under the name of alchemy, was destined to become the greatest science of modern times--chemistry.
He passed night after night shut up in his laboratory, as he had formerly done at Cordova, seeking to penetrate one after the other all the mysteries of nature. There, bending over his glowing furnaces, surrounded with retorts and crucibles of strange shapes, filled with metals in a state of fusion, by all sorts of instruments and alembics, old Ben-Ha-Zelah interrogated matter and demanded the mystery of its essence; he pursued it from form to form, he tore it with red-hot pincers; he melted it in the glowing fires of his furnaces; he made it solid only to reduce it again to a liquid state, decomposing it a hundred times in a hundred different ways. He tortured it, as does the lawyer the prisoner at the bar, that he may wring from him his most hidden secrets.
Matter, thus pursued by the indefatigable alchemist, had revealed more than one of its mysterious laws, which he had made useful in the practice of his profession, so that he was considered in Cairo little less than a demi-god. However, in his labors he sought not the good of his fellow-men, but the barren satisfaction of the passion which was consuming him, the pride of knowledge; he sought to penetrate the secrets of the most high God. The promise of the tempter to our first parents; Eritis sicut dei, scientes, "You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil," had penetrated his soul; and he desired to plant in his garden that fatal tree to which the first-born of our race stretched out their guilty hands. Like his ancestor Jacob, he wrestled with Jehovah.
One can readily understand that the old man, absorbed in this gigantic struggle, was dead to all vanity, so far as men were concerned. He had reached such dizzy heights that he had almost lost sight of them. To him they were like the brute beasts which crossed his path; he believed them to be of an inferior nature to him, who had been gifted with such vast genius--such indefatigable industry. His high thoughts were not for such miserable pigmies.
Sometimes seating himself in dreamy mood in his garden, at the foot of a grand old cedar, his favorite seat, and taking in his hand a pebble, a blade of grass or a flower he was plunged in profound meditation.
What makes this "a body" thought he. This "body" is brown, heavy, hard, square, or has many other properties which come under my notice. But it is evident that neither the color, weight, cohesion, nor form constitute its essence. They are its manner of beings--not its being. If I modify it, destroy it even, it will still [{697}] be the same body, and I shall, after all, have only attacked its manner of being; the essence which heretofore has always escaped me--the soul of the body, if I may say so--will have suffered no change. It is as if I were suddenly to become hunchback, lame, idiotic--I would still be the same man. I must discover the substance quod sub stat; in the first place, what causes this to be; in the second place, what constitutes it a body; and finally, what makes it this particular body which I hold in my hand and not another.
The problem was formidable; it was the mystery of the omnipotence of the God who created the world, and nevertheless this unknown Prometheus shrank not from the task, and flattered himself he could wring from created matter the secrets of its Creator.