“The universe for a mechanician is a machine that requires an operator; for chemistry—that fiendish employment of decomposing all things—the world is a gas endowed with the power of movement.”

The key section from Balzac's The Quest of the Absolute, wherein his two husband and wife characters, Balthazar and Josephine, debate the nature of "feelings" from the respective views, a chemist and a romanticist, respectively. [5]

See main: Balzac feelings and affinity dialogue

“Unluckily, such affinities as these are too rare, and the indications are too slight to be submitted to analysis and observation.”

“But did he epitomize all science in his own person as Hippocrates did and Galen and Aristotle? Did he guide a whole school towards new worlds? No. Though it is impossible to deny that this persistent observer of human chemistry possessed the antique science of the Mages, that is to say, knowledge of the elements in fusion, the causes of life, life antecedent to life, and what it must be in its incubation or ever it is, it must be confessed that, unfortunately, everything in him was purely personal. Isolated during his life by his egoism, that egoism is now suicidal of his glory. On his tomb there is no proclaiming statue to repeat to posterity the mysteries which genius seeks out at its own cost.”

“But perhaps Desplein's genius was answerable for his beliefs, and for that reason mortal. To him the terrestrial atmosphere was a generative envelope; he saw the earth as an egg within its shell; and not being able to determine whether the egg or the hen first was, he would not recognize either the **** or the egg. He believed neither in the antecedent animal nor the surviving spirit of man. Desplein had no doubts; he was positive. His bold and unqualified atheism was like that of many scientific men, the best men in the world, but invincible atheists—atheists such as religious people declare to be impossible. This opinion could scarcely exist otherwise in a man who was accustomed from his youth to dissect the creature above all others—before, during, and after life; to hunt through all his organs without ever finding the individual soul, which is indispensable to religious theory. When he detected a cerebral center, a nervous center, and a center for aerating the blood—the two first so perfectly complementary that in the latter years of his life he came to a conviction that the sense of hearing is not absolutely necessary for hearing, nor the sense of sight for seeing, and that the solar plexus could supply their place without any possibility of doubt—Desplein, thus finding two souls in man, confirmed his atheism by this fact, though it is no evidence against god.”

Napoleon: ‘You do not believe it, you doctors are above such weakness. Tell me, you who know so well the human body, who have probed into all its ramifications, have you ever come across the soul under your scalpel? Where is it? In which organ?’
Antommarchi: 'I hesitated to respond,'

Napoleon: 'Come now, frankly, there is not a doctor who believes in god, is not that so?'
Antommarchi: 'No, Sire, they are ensnared by the demonstration, they accept the dictum of the mathematicians.'

Napoleon: 'Eh, but the latter are generally religious.’

“The idea of Balzac’s Comedie Humaine was suggested by the biology of the early nineteenth century, just as the naturalism of Zola was suggested by the works of Claude Bernard.”

— Lawrence Henderson (1927), “The Process of Scientific Discovery” [6]

“These two stories, The Ban (L'Interdiction) and The Atheist’s Mass (La Messe de l' Athee), would, if they existed entirely by themselves, and if we knew nothing else of their author's, and nothing else about him, suffice to show any intelligent critic that genius of no ordinary kind had passed by there.”

— George Saintsbury (1896), “Preface” to The Atheist’s Mass and Other Short Stories [7]

“But did he epitomize all science in his own person as Hippocrates did and Galen and Aristotle? Did he guide a whole school towards new worlds? No. Though it is impossible to deny that this persistent observer of human chemistry possessed that antique science of the Mages, that is to say, knowledge of the elements in fusion, the causes of life, life antecedent to life, and what it must be in its incubation or ever it _is_, it must be confessed that, unfortunately, everything in him was purely personal. Isolated during his life by his egoism, that egoism is now suicidal of his glory. On his tomb there is no proclaiming statue to repeat to posterity the mysteries which genius seeks out at its own cost.”

— Honore Balzac (1836), “The Atheist’s Mass” (Ѻ), in La Human Comedy

“A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.”

— Honore Balzac (c.1841), The Social Catechism [8]