The treatise, of which we give the translation hereafter, is taken from the last work of Claude de Saint Martin, entitled "The crocodile" or the war of the Good and the Evil.

It was printed in the year VII of the French Republic, that is to say, in 1800 at Paris. It has never been printed again (written in 1939), and consequently is extremely rare.

We cannot give the entire work here, but the Treatise of the Signs constitutes, by itself, one of the most important works, from the initiatic point of view, and will contribute, without doubt, to give to the reader a different and rapid view of the art of knowing oneself.....

We shall have the occasion of presenting in this Review (The Force of Truth) some documents concerning Martinism, which was, in the past, one of the most exalted forms of the traditional Initiation.

The Treatise of the Signs is given under the form of an answer to a question brought forth by the institute, and thus conceived: 

"What is the influence of the signs upon the formation of ideas?" 

TREATISE OF THE SIGNS

OF THE NATURE OF THE SIGNS

If natural objects have external properties, such as colours, odours, forms, dimensions, they also have internal properties which we can enjoy only at the expense of their envelopes and only by disclosing what is hidden in them, such as the sulphurs of minerals, the savours, the essential salts and the vegetal juices which we cannot reach without this condition.

All that is external in creatures, we can consider as being the sign and the clue of their internal properties, and the thing signified will be its internal properties.

Every day, the wise nature bestows upon us in profusion, in the external properties of the creatures, its diverse signs which accompany all of its productions, in order to enable us to have an apprehension and fore-knowledge of what may be useful for us and of what may be detrimental.

It may be said, therefore, that as sign in general is the representation of the indication of a thing separated or concealed for us, whether this thing be naturally inherent to the sign, as the juice is to the fruit which appears to me; or whether this thing is only bound accidentally, as the idea that one wants to impart to me is to any sign whatever. It may be said also that it is susceptible to cause us a sensation or an idea, may be looked upon as a sign, since nothing can be communicated to our senses and to our intelligence, but by external properties that we are obliged to penetrate or to analyse to arrive at the internal properties which are enclosed therein.

Thus there is nothing of what is sensible that is not, with regard to us, in the order of the signs, since there is nothing of what is sensible that could not occasion us a sensation or an idea, according as we are more or less open to the sensibility and to the intelligence, and since there is nothing either among the sensible things of which we could not use as signs, to transmit our ideas to our fellowmen.

The law of the accidental or conventional signs, must be the same as that of the natural signs, although the essence and the form which are variable in the first, be determined and fixed in the second. Therefore these conventional signs must be include two distinct things, as it is observed in the natural signs. Of these is the sense or idea of which we want the sign to be an organ; the other is the sign itself whatever it may be; for it only depends on us to take even a natural object to avail ourselves of a conventional sign, as we see it in the symbolic and hieroglyphical writing; only then this natural object takes a new character in our hands. It is no longer the particular properties which it enjoyed that we want to make known, it is those that we lend to it.

This power that we have to impose at our liking the sense and an idea to whatever objects, is one of the eminent rights of man; it is exercised especially from man to man. For if there is also a commerce of signs among several classes of animals, it is an interchange of signs servile and limited; as their cries of appeal, their manner of warning each other in case of danger, their ruses and their precautions which are always the same, etc ... and they have not, as man, the faculty to create signs for themselves, not the ability to vary the signification of them.

We cannot either exercise this right completely but towards beings endowed with intelligence; for the portion that we make use of with a few species of animals is very much limited: and as the animals that we train remain always passive with regard to us, they do nothing but answer to the little that we ask of them. They would never have provoked us of themselves in this restricted order where we confine ourselves with them; and still would provoke us in the kind of this distinguished dealing in which we can alternatively stimulate our likes, and be stimulated by them by means of our signs.

Because when some very famous men wanted to plead the cause of the animals, and have claimed that their deprivation in this manner depended on their organisation only, and that if they were otherwise formed they would show no difference with us, all they have said by that is in the last analysis, that if man were a beast, he would not be man; and that if a beast were a man, it would not be a beast. 

After all, this commerce of signs is indispensible for us, seeing that our individuality keeping us all apart the one from the other, we would remain always strangers, although in the presence of each other, and we would have no communication together, unless it was in the order of things which would proceed simply from our animality; and to be sure the languages are included in the ranks of these indispensible signs. 

Bit if this sublime right that we have to create signs for ourselves and to vary the form and the sense of them, shows us how high our privileges may rise, it does not go as far as to blind us upon what they are lacking. We all yearn perfect ideas and we likewise long after perfect signs which represent them. Would this desire be an indication that these perfect ideas and would these perfect signs be possible: that even, unless it is wanted to make us run after a chimera, we could not deny their existence though we do not have them at our disposal; that thus our conventional and imperfect signs would be only like means, subsidiary and of industry, with which we would try our best to dispense with more real and more positive signs of which we would be deprived? Questions which I do not want to resolve alone, and upon which I invoke the reflection of the reader.

The Institute itself presents nothing contrary to the affirmative, by the observations that accompany its programme. Thus I shall admit, without reluctance, with it that a man, separated from his fellows would still need some signs to combine his ideas, and that according to a certain sense, the existence of primary ideas, and the most sensible supposed the existence of the signs.  

But before considering this avowal as a triumph, the institute should scrutinize the whole series of possible signs, for although sensations are signs, it might happen that all signs may not be sensations, especially in taking this word in the sense of our gross notions, as we shall observe further.  

Besides as to signs of a subsidiary nature and those of industry, one should take to reconcile in this manner, our pretension with our means, and notice for the class of imperfect and limited ideas that we go through daily, it is possible that the limited and industrial signs that we use are sufficient and that without going out of these limits, and in applying there all our emulations and all our ingenuity, we should reap from it some fruits which satisfy, provided we remembered that in that measure, our needs, our means and our results are only an approximation. 

It should be observed afterwards that, if with these elements of approximation, we would form for ourselves some perfect ideas and some perfect signs, it is probable that it would be an enterprise beyond our forces, because the variable can never be produce the fixed; it should be observed at last, that in the art of ideas, the word of formation is perhaps less just, and surely less modest, than that of development, because if in our relations with our fellowmen, we did not find in them a proper germ to receive the fecundation, finally a base analogous to the idea that we want to give them to understand, never could we form in them the least trace of it. 

That is why those who have wanted to consider man as a clean sweep (table rase) have been perhaps in too great a hurry, they could, it seems to me, have been satisfied to regard him as razed table() but the roots of which still remain and are only waiting fo r the suitable reaction to sprout. This middle term could have been reconciled, long ago, the ancient system which pretends that we have innate ideas, and the modern system that pretends the contrary, because both of these systems run into extremes. 

Indeed, if the complete ideas were inborn, we would not be obliged to undergo, as we do, the imperious law of time, and by the indispensable slowness of the improvement of our intelligence; and if, from another side, the germ of the idea was not sown or did not sow itself in us, it would be in vain that we would go through this imperious law of time and by the slowness of education, since neither the one or the other would produce more effect upon us that upon the oyster. 

Besides, with a little more attention, Locke the famous adversary of the innate principles, would not have said so lightly in the first chapter in his first book: If these truths were innate, what necessity should there be to propose to have them accepted?

It is very true that if an acorn were an oak, we should not need to sow it and to cultivate it to have it manifest the majestic tree which issues from it: but if, because it is not an oak, one would pretend that the germ or the faculty to produce this oak by culture, is not in the acorn, it is an established fact then that one would uphold an error, fully demonstrated by the fact.  

Thus man is like the earth, in which the germ of any seeds cannot be created, but, in which they can all be developed, because they find in it some analogous properties. Thus all ideas whatsoever are destined to pass through the earth of man to receive there kind of culture. Thus the signs which, in general, must be the result of the different germs of the beings, and the manifestation of their properties, whether material or sensible or intellectual, form principally the commerce of man, because he is the soil suitable to produce them, to select them, to understand them and to propagate them. 

OF THE SOURCE OF THE SIGNS, OF THE DIFFERENCE
CLASSES OF THE SIGNS. MISTAKE UPON THIS OBJECT

In spite of the references of union and the relations of activity which the simple elements have between themselves, as also the natural objects which belong to the mineral and vegetal classes, they cannot be regarded, strictly, as being signs, the ones towards the others, although they have always this title with respect to us, and that because they do not communicate with themselves, in their respective commerce, either sensations or ideas.

In reality, when a cloud announces to us the approaching storm, wind, hail or rain; when the metallic and vegetal substances, act and produce their effects according to their law, these different classes of beings are not aware of what they announce, neither do they notice what they put into action. The animal class often feels a part of these results as a consequence of its correspondences with all that is elemental and is embodied like itself; but it limits itself to be passively bound to a part of these phenomena, and the animal class itself; since we have that right of being able to use, as we like, all these things in our signs. 

Moreover, all these natural objects have each an ostensible and indicative character which renders them to us, easy, to know; because everything in them is, so to say, in the open, because their constitutive and characteristic principles, unfold in a clear, regular and constant manner; because the mode of their development is of but one species for each principle; that they are brought about in the same circle where their individual principle is fixed, and that they need not come out of it to accomplish their law; finally because their principles of life and of activity, have, in some way, but one uniform interval to go through in order to come from their source to the term, provided that their mutual operations limit themselves to manifest only forms and qualities.   

Also, is there no question to made upon all these inferior classes, only to the natural objects themselves which compose them, since they do not cease to offer themselves sensibly to us with all the clearness and the simplicity of which they are susceptible; and the human intelligence that would know how to study them in this frank and manifest (open) state in which they show themselves, would receive more light, than in going to ask for the key of it from some systematic doctrines of which the ones pretend that they have none, and of which the others pretend that it is impossible to discover it. 

Besides, in order that the mutual commerce of the signs exists relatively to us, we must not only find how to have our senses understand, as we have said before, but we must have in us a germ of desire which would be as the radical motive power of the idea that we intend to express; it is only after these two considerations are compiled with that the sign can be born. 

A man desires to have a garment to protect him from the the inconvenience of the cold; to this desire, when it is converted into a resolution, succeeds the idea or the project of the garment; afterwards the garment arrives, and procures to him who has desired it, all the enjoyment that he anticipated. 

In this example we see that the idea, the plan of the garment, is the sign or the expression of the desire that this man has to be clothed; and that the garment is the sign of the idea and of the plan that he has conceived in the consequence of the desire. We see here that the primitive source of all kinds of signs, is the desire; we see here that the signs take different characters, in passing from the order of the idea to the order of the senses; that they must change likewise in re-passing from the order of the senses to the order of the idea; and that at last it may be found that in these operations an infinity of combinations exist, where the intelligent order and the animal and sensible order play alternatively or conjointly their part, and which will multiply or will simplify themselves, in consideration of complicated or simple examples that one will want to choose.

In fact, when some exterior signs, either natural or accidental, come to act upon us and react according to their class and according to the nature of our senses, the sensible impressions that they occasion, uncover for us a new region, where the senses and the thought are enveloped and sealed under the same stamp, as the alloy and the gold are enclosed in the same crucible. 

So the results that these sensible impressions offer us at first, are much more obscure and more concentrated than those that we notice in the two kingdoms mineral and vegetal. They have a march less uniform and more uncertain, until the diverse combined sources to which they belong have taken each their post and their rank. One must let all the terms of these different quantities set themselves in order to discern and to reassemble their values. 

That is why ....   ^[1]