There are in every man, at every hour, two simultaneous postulations, one towards God, the other towards Satan.

This remark is associated with Baudelaire’s mid-19th-century moral and spiritual preoccupations, shaped by Catholic imagery, the modern city’s temptations, and his fascination with sin, boredom, and divided will. In his notebooks and prose reflections (rather than in a single lyric poem), Baudelaire repeatedly frames human consciousness as a perpetual inner conflict between aspiration and degradation. The language of “postulations” reflects a quasi-philosophical register: competing impulses or “prayers” rising within a person at any moment. The thought aligns with the broader Baudelairean project—seen across his criticism and prose poems—of diagnosing modern life as spiritually unstable and ethically ambivalent.

Baudelaire casts the self as fundamentally double: at every instant, a person is pulled upward toward transcendence (“God”) and downward toward self-destruction or base appetite (“Satan”). The striking claim is simultaneity—these are not alternating moods but concurrent drives, making moral life a continuous tension rather than a settled state. “Postulations” suggests that both impulses present themselves as claims on the will, almost like rival petitions demanding assent. The line condenses Baudelaire’s modern psychology: lucidity about one’s ideals coexists with attraction to what one condemns, and the drama of ethics is internal before it becomes social or doctrinal.