ABSTRACT
According to Balzac, magical powers of penetration are not given to persons whose intelligence is dissipated in a thousand and one activities. The idea of concentration is perpetually recurring in the mind of this author, so that in the matter of occult powers, too, he feels the necessity of having one very definite aim. Second sight is not the exclusive prerogative of sorcerers and wise women. Balzac was puzzled by his own intuitive faculty. He must often have contemplated his work with astonishment, as something incomprehensible, which had forced him to the philosophical outlook of a mystic whom de Maistre's Catholicism no longer sufficed. During all the years of his creative activity, Balzac never resumed study and experiment, was never again an observer of actual life. He seldom returned to that world which lay outside the world of his own creation.
