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<pre>

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Amiel's Journal, by Henri-Frédéric Amiel

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Title: Amiel's Journal

Author: Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Commentator: Mrs. Humphrey Ward

Translator: Mrs. Humphrey Ward


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</pre>

    <div style="height: 8em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h1>
      AMIEL&rsquo;S JOURNAL
    </h1>
    <h2>
      By Henri-Frédéric Amiel
    </h2>
    <p>
      <br />
    </p>
    <h4>
      The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel <br /> <br /> <br /> Translated,
      With an Introduction and Notes by Mrs. Humphrey Ward
    </h4>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      <b>CONTENTS</b>
    </p>
    <p class="toc">
      <a href="#link2H_PREF"> PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. </a>
    </p>
    <p class="toc">
      <a href="#link2H_PREF2"> PREFACE. </a>
    </p>
    <p class="toc">
      <a href="#link2H_INTR"> INTRODUCTION </a>
    </p>
    <p>
      <br />
    </p>
    <p class="toc">
      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> <b>AMIEL&rsquo;S JOURNAL.</b> </a>
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_PREF" id="link2H_PREF"> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
    </h2>
    <p>
      In this second edition of the English translation of Amiel&rsquo;s &ldquo;Journal
      Intime,&rdquo; I have inserted a good many new passages, taken from the last
      French edition (<i>Cinquiéme édition, revue et augmentée</i>.) But I have
      not translated all the fresh material to be found in that edition nor have
      I omitted certain sections of the Journal which in these two recent
      volumes have been omitted by their French editors. It would be of no
      interest to give my reasons for these variations at length. They depend
      upon certain differences between the English and the French public, which
      are more readily felt than explained. Some of the passages which I have
      left untranslated seemed to me to overweight the introspective side of the
      Journal, already so full&mdash;to overweight it, at any rate, for English
      readers. Others which I have retained, though they often relate to local
      names and books, more or less unfamiliar to the general public, yet seemed
      to me valuable as supplying some of that surrounding detail, that setting,
      which helps one to understand a life. Besides, we English are in many ways
      more akin to Protestant and Puritan Geneva than the French readers to whom
      the original Journal primarily addresses itself, and some of the entries I
      have kept have probably, by the nature of things, more savor for us than
      for them.
    </p>
    <h3>
      M. A. W.
    </h3>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_PREF2" id="link2H_PREF2"> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      PREFACE.
    </h2>
    <p>
      This translation of Amiel&rsquo;s &ldquo;Journal Intime&rdquo; is primarily addressed to
      those whose knowledge of French, while it may be sufficient to carry them
      with more or less complete understanding through a novel or a newspaper,
      is yet not enough to allow them to understand and appreciate a book
      containing subtle and complicated forms of expression. I believe there are
      many such to be found among the reading public, and among those who would
      naturally take a strong interest in such a life and mind as Amiel&rsquo;s, were
      it not for the barrier of language. It is, at any rate, in the hope that a
      certain number of additional readers may be thereby attracted to the
      &ldquo;Journal Intime&rdquo; that this translation of it has been undertaken.
    </p>
    <p>
      The difficulties of the translation have been sometimes considerable,
      owing, first of all, to those elliptical modes of speech which a man
      naturally employs when he is writing for himself and not for the public,
      but which a translator at all events is bound in some degree to expand.
      Every here and there Amiel expresses himself in a kind of shorthand,
      perfectly intelligible to a Frenchman, but for which an English
      equivalent, at once terse and clear, is hard to find. Another difficulty
      has been his constant use of a technical philosophical language, which,
      according to his French critics, is not French&mdash;even philosophical
      French&mdash;but German. Very often it has been impossible to give any
      other than a literal rendering of such passages, if the thought of the
      original was to be preserved; but in those cases where a choice was open
      to me, I have preferred the more literary to the more technical
      expression; and I have been encouraged to do so by the fact that Amiel,
      when he came to prepare for publication a certain number of &ldquo;Pensées,&rdquo;
       extracted from the Journal, and printed at the end of a volume of poems
      published in 1853, frequently softened his phrases, so that sentences
      which survive in the Journal in a more technical form are to be found in a
      more literary form in the &ldquo;Grains de Mil.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      In two or three cases&mdash;not more, I think&mdash;I have allowed myself
      to transpose a sentence bodily, and in a few instances I have added some
      explanatory words to the text, which wherever the addition was of any
      importance, are indicated by square brackets.
    </p>
    <p>
      My warmest thanks are due to my friend and critic, M. Edmond Scherer, from
      whose valuable and interesting study, prefixed to the French Journal, as
      well as from certain materials in his possession which he has very kindly
      allowed me to make use of, I have drawn by far the greater part of the
      biographical material embodied in the Introduction. M. Scherer has also
      given me help and advice through the whole process of translation&mdash;advice
      which his scholarly knowledge of English has made especially worth having.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the translation of the more technical philosophical passages I have
      been greatly helped by another friend, Mr. Bernard Bosanquet, Fellow of
      University College, Oxford, the translator of Lotze, of whose care and
      pains in the matter I cherish a grateful remembrance.
    </p>
    <p>
      But with all the help that has been so freely given me, not only by these
      friends but by others, I confide the little book to the public with many a
      misgiving! May it at least win a few more friends and readers here and
      there for one who lived alone, and died sadly persuaded that his life had
      been a barren mistake; whereas, all the while&mdash;such is the irony of
      things&mdash;he had been in reality working out the mission assigned him
      in the spiritual economy, and faithfully obeying the secret mandate which
      had impressed itself upon his youthful consciousness: &ldquo;<i>Let the living
      live; and you, gather together your thoughts, leave behind you a legacy of
      feeling and ideas; you will be most useful so</i>.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <h3>
      MARY A. WARD.
    </h3>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_INTR" id="link2H_INTR"> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      INTRODUCTION
    </h2>
    <p>
      It was in the last days of December, 1882, that the first volume of Henri
      Frédéric Amiel&rsquo;s &ldquo;Journal Intime&rdquo; was published at Geneva. The book, of
      which the general literary world knew nothing prior to its appearance,
      contained a long and remarkable Introduction from the pen of M. Edmond
      Scherer, the well-known French critic, who had been for many years one of
      Amiel&rsquo;s most valued friends, and it was prefaced also by a little <i>Avertissement</i>,
      in which the &ldquo;Editors&rdquo;&mdash;that is to say, the Genevese friends to whom
      the care and publication of the Journal had been in the first instance
      entrusted&mdash;described in a few reserved and sober words the genesis
      and objects of the publication. Some thousands of sheets of Journal,
      covering a period of more than thirty years, had come into the hands of
      Amiel&rsquo;s literary heirs. &ldquo;They were written,&rdquo; said the <i>Avertissement</i>,
      &ldquo;with several ends in view. Amiel recorded in them his various
      occupations, and the incidents of each day. He preserved in them his
      psychological observations, and the impressions produced on him by books.
      But his Journal was, above all, the confidant of his most private and
      intimate thoughts; a means whereby the thinker became conscious of his own
      inner life; a safe shelter wherein his questionings of fate and the
      future, the voice of grief, of self-examination and confession, the soul&rsquo;s
      cry for inward peace, might make themselves freely heard.
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;... In the directions concerning his papers which he left behind him,
      Amiel expressed the wish that his literary executors should publish those
      parts of the Journal which might seem to them to possess either interest
      as thought or value as experience. The publication of this volume is the
      fulfillment of this desire. The reader will find in it, <i>not a volume of
      Memoirs</i>, but the confidences of a solitary thinker, the meditations of
      a philosopher for whom the things of the soul were the sovereign realities
      of existence.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Thus modestly announced, the little volume made its quiet <i>début</i>. It
      contained nothing, or almost nothing, of ordinary biographical material.
      M. Scherer&rsquo;s Introduction supplied such facts as were absolutely necessary
      to the understanding of Amiel&rsquo;s intellectual history, but nothing more.
      Everything of a local or private character that could be excluded was
      excluded. The object of the editors in their choice of passages for
      publication was declared to be simply &ldquo;the reproduction of the moral and
      intellectual physiognomy of their friend,&rdquo; while M. Scherer expressly
      disclaimed any biographical intentions, and limited his Introduction as
      far as possible to &ldquo;a study of the character and thought of Amiel.&rdquo; The
      contents of the volume, then, were purely literary and philosophical; its
      prevailing tone was a tone of introspection, and the public which can
      admit the claims and overlook the inherent defects of introspective
      literature has always been a small one. The writer of the Journal had been
      during his lifetime wholly unknown to the general European public. In
      Geneva itself he had been commonly regarded as a man who had signally
      disappointed the hopes and expectations of his friends, whose reserve and
      indecision of character had in many respects spoiled his life, and
      alienated the society around him; while his professional lectures were
      generally pronounced dry and unattractive, and the few volumes of poems
      which represented almost his only contributions to literature had nowhere
      met with any real cordiality of reception. Those concerned, therefore, in
      the publication of the first volume of the Journal can hardly have had
      much expectation of a wide success. Geneva is not a favorable
      starting-point for a French book, and it may well have seemed that not
      even the support of M. Scherer&rsquo;s name would be likely to carry the volume
      beyond a small local circle.
    </p>
    <p>
      But &ldquo;wisdom is justified of her children!&rdquo; It is now nearly three years
      since the first volume of the &ldquo;Journal Intime&rdquo; appeared; the impression
      made by it was deepened and extended by the publication of the second
      volume in 1884; and it is now not too much to say that this remarkable
      record of a life has made its way to what promises to be a permanent place
      in literature. Among those who think and read it is beginning to be
      generally recognized that another book has been added to the books which
      live&mdash;not to those, perhaps, which live in the public view, much
      discussed, much praised, the objects of feeling and of struggle, but to
      those in which a germ of permanent life has been deposited silently,
      almost secretly, which compel no homage and excite no rivalry, and which
      owe the place that the world half-unconsciously yields to them to nothing
      but that indestructible sympathy of man with man, that eternal answering
      of feeling to feeling, which is one of the great principles, perhaps the
      greatest principle, at the root of literature. M. Scherer naturally was
      the first among the recognized guides of opinion to attempt the placing of
      his friend&rsquo;s Journal. &ldquo;The man who, during his lifetime, was incapable of
      giving us any deliberate or conscious work worthy of his powers, has now
      left us, after his death, a book which will not die. For the secret of
      Amiel&rsquo;s malady is sublime, and the expression of it wonderful.&rdquo; So ran one
      of the last paragraphs of the Introduction, and one may see in the
      sentences another instance of that courage, that reasoned rashness, which
      distinguishes the good from the mediocre critic. For it is as true now as
      it was in the days when La Bruyère rated the critics of his time for their
      incapacity to praise, and praise at once, that &ldquo;the surest test of a man&rsquo;s
      critical power is his judgment of contemporaries.&rdquo; M. Renan, I think, with
      that exquisite literary sense of his, was the next among the authorities
      to mention Amiel&rsquo;s name with the emphasis it deserved. He quoted a passage
      from the Journal in his Preface to the &ldquo;Souvenirs d&rsquo;Enfance et de
      Jeunesse,&rdquo; describing it as the saying &ldquo;<i>d&rsquo;un penseur distingué, M.
      Amiel de Genève</i>.&rdquo; Since then M. Renan has devoted two curious articles
      to the completed Journal in the <i>Journal des Desbats</i>. The first
      object of these reviews, no doubt, was not so much the critical
      appreciation of Amiel as the development of certain paradoxes which have
      been haunting various corners of M. Renan&rsquo;s mind for several years past,
      and to which it is to be hoped he has now given expression with sufficient
      emphasis and <i>brusquerie</i> to satisfy even his passion for
      intellectual adventure. Still, the rank of the book was fully recognized,
      and the first article especially contained some remarkable criticisms, to
      which we shall find occasion to recur. &ldquo;In these two volumes of <i>pensées</i>,&rdquo;
       said M. Renan, &ldquo;without any sacrifice of truth to artistic effect, we have
      both the perfect mirror of a modern mind of the best type, matured by the
      best modern culture, and also a striking picture of the sufferings which
      beset the sterility of genius. These two volumes may certainly be reckoned
      among the most interesting philosophical writings which have appeared of
      late years.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      M. Caro&rsquo;s article on the first volume of the Journal, in the <i>Revue des
      Deux Mondes</i> for February, 1883, may perhaps count as the first
      introduction of the book to the general cultivated public. He gave a
      careful analysis of the first half of the Journal&mdash;resumed eighteen
      months later in the same periodical on the appearance of the second volume&mdash;and,
      while protesting against what he conceived to be the general tendency and
      effect of Amiel&rsquo;s mental story, he showed himself fully conscious of the
      rare and delicate qualities of the new writer. &ldquo;<i>La rêverie a réussi à
      notre auteur</i>,&rdquo; he says, a little reluctantly&mdash;for M. Caro has his
      doubts as to the legitimacy of <i>rêverie</i>; &ldquo;<i>Il en aufait une
      oeuvure qui restera</i>.&rdquo; The same final judgment, accompanied by a very
      different series of comments, was pronounced on the Journal a year later
      by M. Paul Bourget, a young and rising writer, whose article is perhaps
      chiefly interesting as showing the kind of effect produced by Amiel&rsquo;s
      thought on minds of a type essentially alien from his own. There is a
      leaven of something positive and austere, of something which, for want of
      a better name, one calls Puritanism, in Amiel, which escapes the author of
      &ldquo;Une Cruelle Enigme.&rdquo; But whether he has understood Amiel or no, M.
      Bourget is fully alive to the mark which the Journal is likely to make
      among modern records of mental history. He, too, insists that the book is
      already famous and will remain so; in the first place, because of its
      inexorable realism and sincerity; in the second, because it is the most
      perfect example available of a certain variety of the modern mind.
    </p>
    <p>
      Among ourselves, although the Journal has attracted the attention of all
      who keep a vigilant eye on the progress of foreign literature, and
      although one or two appreciative articles have appeared on it in the
      magazines, the book has still to become generally known. One remarkable
      English testimony to it, however, must be quoted. Six months after the
      publication of the first volume, the late Mark Pattison, who since then
      has himself bequeathed to literature a strange and memorable fragment of
      autobiography, addressed a letter to M. Scherer as the editor of the
      &ldquo;Journal Intime,&rdquo; which M. Scherer has since published, nearly a year
      after the death of the writer. The words have a strong and melancholy
      interest for all who knew Mark Pattison; and they certainly deserve a
      place in any attempt to estimate the impression already made on
      contemporary thought by the &ldquo;Journal Intime.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;I wish to convey to you, sir,&rdquo; writes the rector of Lincoln, &ldquo;the thanks
      of one at least of the public for giving the light to this precious record
      of a unique experience. I say unique, but I can vouch that there is in
      existence at least one other soul which has lived through the same
      struggles, mental and moral, as Amiel. In your pathetic description of the
      <i>volonté qui voudrait vouloir, mais impuissante à se fournir à elle-même
      des motifs</i>&mdash;of the repugnance for all action&mdash;the soul
      petrified by the sentiment of the infinite, in all this I recognize
      myself. <i>Celui qui a déchiffré le secret de la vie finie, qui en a lu le
      mot, est sorti du monde des vivants, il est mort de fait</i>. I can feel
      forcibly the truth of this, as it applies to myself!
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;It is not, however, with the view of thrusting my egotism upon you that I
      have ventured upon addressing you. As I cannot suppose that so peculiar a
      psychological revelation will enjoy a wide popularity, I think it a duty
      to the editor to assure him that there are persons in the world whose
      souls respond, in the depths of their inmost nature, to the cry of anguish
      which makes itself heard in the pages of these remarkable confessions.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      So much for the place which the Journal&mdash;the fruit of so many years
      of painful thought and disappointed effort; seems to be at last securing
      for its author among those contemporaries who in his lifetime knew nothing
      of him. It is a natural consequence of the success of the book that the
      more it penetrates, the greater desire there is to know something more
      than its original editors and M. Scherer have yet told us about the
      personal history of the man who wrote it&mdash;about his education, his
      habits, and his friends. Perhaps some day this wish may find its
      satisfaction. It is an innocent one, and the public may even be said to
      have a kind of right to know as much as can be told it of the
      personalities which move and stir it. At present the biographical material
      available is extremely scanty, and if it were not for the kindness of M.
      Scherer, who has allowed the present writer access to certain manuscript
      material in his possession, even the sketch which follows, vague and
      imperfect as it necessarily is, would have been impossible.
    </p>
    <p>
      [Footnote: Four or five articles on the subject of Amiel&rsquo;s life have been
      contributed to the <i>Révue Internationale</i> by Mdlle. Berthe Vadier
      during the passage of the present book through the press. My knowledge of
      them, however, came too late to enable me to make use of them for the
      purposes of the present introduction.]
    </p>
    <p>
      Henri Frédéric Amiel was born at Geneva in September, 1821. He belonged to
      one of the emigrant families, of which a more or less steady supply had
      enriched the little republic during the three centuries following the
      Reformation. Amiel&rsquo;s ancestors, like those of Sismondi, left Languedoc for
      Geneva after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. His father must have
      been a youth at the time when Geneva passed into the power of the French
      republic, and would seem to have married and settled in the halcyon days
      following the restoration of Genevese independence in 1814. Amiel was born
      when the prosperity of Geneva was at its height, when the little state was
      administered by men of European reputation, and Genevese society had power
      to attract distinguished visitors and admirers from all parts. The veteran
      Bonstetten, who had been the friend of Gray and the associate of Voltaire,
      was still talking and enjoying life in his <i>appartement</i> overlooking
      the woods of La Bâtie. Rossi and Sismondi were busy lecturing to the
      Genevese youth, or taking part in Genevese legislation; an active
      scientific group, headed by the Pictets, De la Rive, and the botanist
      Auguste-Pyrame de Candolle, kept the country abreast of European thought
      and speculation, while the mixed nationality of the place&mdash;the
      blending in it of French keenness with Protestant enthusiasms and
      Protestant solidity&mdash;was beginning to find inimitable and
      characteristic expression in the stories of Töpffer. The country was
      governed by an aristocracy, which was not so much an aristocracy of birth
      as one of merit and intellect, and the moderate constitutional ideas which
      represented the Liberalism of the post-Waterloo period were nowhere more
      warmly embraced or more intelligently carried out than in Geneva.
    </p>
    <p>
      During the years, however, which immediately followed Amiel&rsquo;s birth, some
      signs of decadence began to be visible in this brilliant Genevese society.
      The generation which had waited for, prepared, and controlled, the
      Restoration of 1814, was falling into the background, and the younger
      generation, with all its respectability, wanted energy, above all, wanted
      leaders. The revolutionary forces in the state, which had made themselves
      violently felt during the civil turmoils of the period preceding the
      assembly of the French States General, and had afterward produced the
      miniature Terror which forced Sismondi into exile, had been for awhile
      laid to sleep by the events of 1814. But the slumber was a short one at
      Geneva as elsewhere, and when Rossi quitted the republic for France in
      1833, he did so with a mind full of misgivings as to the political future
      of the little state which had given him&mdash;an exile and a Catholic&mdash;so
      generous a welcome in 1819. The ideas of 1830 were shaking the fabric and
      disturbing the equilibrium of the Swiss Confederation as a whole, and of
      many of the cantons composing it. Geneva was still apparently tranquil
      while her neighbors were disturbed, but no one looking back on the history
      of the republic, and able to measure the strength of the Radical force in
      Europe after the fall of Charles X., could have felt much doubt but that a
      few more years would bring Geneva also into the whirlpool of political
      change.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the same year&mdash;1833&mdash;that M. Rossi had left Geneva, Henri
      Frédéric Amiel, at twelve years old, was left orphaned of both his
      parents. They had died comparatively young&mdash;his mother was only just
      over thirty, and his father cannot have been much older. On the death of
      the mother the little family was broken up, the boy passing into the care
      of one relative, his two sisters into that of another. Certain notes in M.
      Scherer&rsquo;s possession throw a little light here and there upon a childhood
      and youth which must necessarily have been a little bare and forlorn. They
      show us a sensitive, impressionable boy, of health rather delicate than
      robust, already disposed to a more or less melancholy and dreamy view of
      life, and showing a deep interest in those religious problems and ideas in
      which the air of Geneva has been steeped since the days of Calvin. The
      religious teaching which a Genevese lad undergoes prior to his admission
      to full church membership, made a deep impression on him, and certain
      mystical elements of character, which remained strong in him to the end,
      showed themselves very early. At the college or public school of Geneva,
      and at the académie, he would seem to have done only moderately as far as
      prizes and honors were concerned. We are told, however, that he read
      enormously, and that he was, generally speaking, inclined rather to make
      friends with men older than himself than with his contemporaries. He fell
      specially under the influence of Adolphe Pictet, a brilliant philologist
      and man of letters belonging to a well-known Genevese family, and in later
      life he was able, while reviewing one of M. Pictet&rsquo;s books, to give
      grateful expression to his sense of obligation.
    </p>
    <p>
      Writing in 1856 he describes the effect produced in Geneva by M. Pictet&rsquo;s
      Lectures on Aesthetics in 1840&mdash;the first ever delivered in a town in
      which the Beautiful had been for centuries regarded as the rival and enemy
      of the True. &ldquo;He who is now writing,&rdquo; says Amiel, &ldquo;was then among M.
      Pictet&rsquo;s youngest hearers. Since then twenty experiences of the same kind
      have followed each other in his intellectual experience, yet none has
      effaced the deep impression made upon him by these lectures. Coming as
      they did at a favorable moment, and answering many a positive question and
      many a vague aspiration of youth, they exercised a decisive influence over
      his thought; they were to him an important step in that continuous
      initiation which we call life, they filled him with fresh intuitions, they
      brought near to him the horizons of his dreams. And, as always happens
      with a first-rate man, what struck him even more than the teaching was the
      teacher. So that this memory of 1840 is still dear and precious to him,
      and for this double service, which is not of the kind one forgets, the
      student of those days delights in expressing to the professor of 1840 his
      sincere and filial gratitude.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Amiel&rsquo;s first literary production, or practically his first, seems to have
      been the result partly of these lectures, and partly of a visit to Italy
      which began in November, 1841. In 1842, a year which was spent entirely in
      Italy and Sicily, he contributed three articles on M. Rio&rsquo;s book, &ldquo;L&rsquo;Art
      Chrétien,&rdquo; to the <i>Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève</i>. We see in
      them the young student conscientiously writing his first review&mdash;writing
      it at inordinate length, as young reviewers are apt to do, and treating
      the subject <i>ab ovo</i> in a grave, pontifical way, which is a little
      naïve and inexperienced indeed, but still promising, as all seriousness of
      work and purpose is promising. All that is individual in it is first of
      all the strong Christian feeling which much of it shows, and secondly, the
      tone of melancholy which already makes itself felt here and there,
      especially in one rather remarkable passage. As to the Christian feeling,
      we find M. Rio described as belonging to &ldquo;that noble school of men who are
      striving to rekindle the dead beliefs of France, to rescue Frenchmen from
      the camp of materialistic or pantheistic ideas, and rally them round that
      Christian banner which is the banner of true progress and true
      civilization.&rdquo; The Renaissance is treated as a disastrous but inevitable
      crisis, in which the idealism of the Middle Ages was dethroned by the
      naturalism of modern times&mdash;&ldquo;The Renaissance perhaps robbed us of
      more than it gave us&rdquo;&mdash;and so on. The tone of criticism is
      instructive enough to the student of Amiel&rsquo;s mind, but the product itself
      has no particular savor of its own. The occasional note of depression and
      discouragement, however, is a different thing; here, for those who know
      the &ldquo;Journal Intime,&rdquo; there is already something characteristic, something
      which foretells the future. For instance, after dwelling with evident zest
      on the nature of the metaphysical problems lying at the root of art in
      general, and Christian art in particular, the writer goes on to set the
      difficulty of M. Rio&rsquo;s task against its attractiveness, to insist on the
      intricacy of the investigations involved, and on the impossibility of
      making the two instruments on which their success depends&mdash;the
      imaginative and the analytical faculty&mdash;work harmoniously and
      effectively together. And supposing the goal achieved, supposing a man by
      insight and patience has succeeded in forcing his way farther than any
      previous explorer into the recesses of the Beautiful or the True, there
      still remains the enormous, the insuperable difficulty of expression, of
      fit and adequate communication from mind to mind; there still remains the
      question whether, after all, &ldquo;he who discovers a new world in the depths
      of the invisible would not do wisely to plant on it a flag known to
      himself alone, and, like Achilles, &lsquo;devour his heart in secret;&rsquo; whether
      the greatest problems which have ever been guessed on earth had not better
      have remained buried in the brain which had found the key to them, and
      whether the deepest thinkers&mdash;those whose hand has been boldest in
      drawing aside the veil, and their eye keenest in fathoming the mysteries
      beyond it&mdash;had not better, like the prophetess of Ilion, have kept
      for heaven, and heaven only, secrets and mysteries which human tongue
      cannot truly express, nor human intelligence conceive.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Curious words for a beginner of twenty-one! There is a touch, no doubt, of
      youth and fatuity in the passage; one feels how much the vague sonorous
      phrases have pleased the writer&rsquo;s immature literary sense; but there is
      something else too&mdash;there is a breath of that same speculative
      passion which burns in the Journal, and one hears, as it were, the first
      accents of a melancholy, the first expression of a mood of mind, which
      became in after years the fixed characteristic of the writer. &ldquo;At twenty
      he was already proud, timid, and melancholy,&rdquo; writes an old friend; and a
      little farther on, &ldquo;Discouragement took possession of him <i>very early</i>.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      However, in spite of this inbred tendency, which was probably hereditary
      and inevitable, the years which followed these articles, from 1842 to
      Christmas, 1848, were years of happiness and steady intellectual
      expansion. They were Amiel&rsquo;s <i>Wanderjahre</i>, spent in a free,
      wandering student life, which left deep marks on his intellectual
      development. During four years, from 1844 to 1848, his headquarters were
      at Berlin; but every vacation saw him exploring some new country or fresh
      intellectual center&mdash;Scandinavia in 1845, Holland in 1846, Vienna,
      Munich, and Tübingen in 1848, while Paris had already attracted him in
      1841, and he was to make acquaintance with London ten years later, in
      1851. No circumstances could have been more favorable, one would have
      thought, to the development of such a nature. With his extraordinary power
      of &ldquo;throwing himself into the object&rdquo;&mdash;of effacing himself and his
      own personality in the presence of the thing to be understood and absorbed&mdash;he
      must have passed these years of travel and acquisition in a state of
      continuous intellectual energy and excitement. It is in no spirit of
      conceit that he says in 1857, comparing himself with Maine de Biran, &ldquo;This
      nature is, as it were, only one of the men which exist in me. My horizon
      is vaster; I have seen much more of men, things, countries, peoples,
      books; I have a greater mass of experiences.&rdquo; This fact, indeed, of a wide
      and varied personal experience, must never be forgotten in any critical
      estimate of Amiel as a man or writer. We may so easily conceive him as a
      sedentary professor, with the ordinary professorial knowledge, or rather
      ignorance, of men and the world, falling into introspection under the
      pressure of circumstance, and for want, as it were, of something else to
      think about. Not at all. The man who has left us these microscopic
      analyses of his own moods and feelings, had penetrated more or less into
      the social and intellectual life of half a dozen European countries, and
      was familiar not only with the books, but, to a large extent also, with
      the men of his generation. The meditative and introspective gift was in
      him, not the product, but the mistress of circumstance. It took from the
      outer world what that world had to give, and then made the stuff so gained
      subservient to its own ends.
    </p>
    <p>
      Of these years of travel, however, the four years spent at Berlin were by
      far the most important. &ldquo;It was at Heidelberg and Berlin,&rdquo; says M.
      Scherer, &ldquo;that the world of science and speculation first opened on the
      dazzled eyes of the young man. He was accustomed to speak of his four
      years at Berlin as &lsquo;his intellectual phase,&rsquo; and one felt that he inclined
      to regard them as the happiest period of his life. The spell which Berlin
      laid upon him lasted long.&rdquo; Probably his happiness in Germany was partly
      owing to a sense of reaction against Geneva. There are signs that he had
      felt himself somewhat isolated at school and college, and that in the
      German world his special individuality, with its dreaminess and its
      melancholy, found congenial surroundings far more readily than had been
      the case in the drier and harsher atmosphere of the Protestant Rome.
      However this may be, it is certain that German thought took possession of
      him, that he became steeped not only in German methods of speculation, but
      in German modes of expression, in German forms of sentiment, which clung
      to him through life, and vitally affected both his opinions and his style.
      M. Renan and M. Bourget shake their heads over the Germanisms, which,
      according to the latter, give a certain &ldquo;barbarous&rdquo; air to many passages
      of the Journal. But both admit that Amiel&rsquo;s individuality owes a great
      part of its penetrating force to that intermingling of German with French
      elements, of which there are such abundant traces in the &ldquo;Journal Intime.&rdquo;
       Amiel, in fact, is one more typical product of a movement which is
      certainly of enormous importance in the history of modern thought, even
      though we may not be prepared to assent to all the sweeping terms in which
      a writer like M. Taine describes it. &ldquo;From 1780 to 1830,&rdquo; says M. Taine,
      &ldquo;Germany produced all the ideas of our historical age, and during another
      half-century, perhaps another century, <i>notre grande affaire sera de les
      repenser</i>.&rdquo; He is inclined to compare the influence of German ideas on
      the modern world to the ferment of the Renaissance. No spiritual force
      &ldquo;more original, more universal, more fruitful in consequences of every
      sort and bearing, more capable of transforming and remaking everything
      presented to it, has arisen during the last three hundred years. Like the
      spirit of the Renaissance and of the classical age, it attracts into its
      orbit all the great works of contemporary intelligence.&rdquo; Quinet, pursuing
      a somewhat different line of thought, regards the worship of German ideas
      inaugurated in France by Madame de Staël as the natural result of reaction
      from the eighteenth century and all its ways. &ldquo;German systems, German
      hypotheses, beliefs, and poetry, all were eagerly welcomed as a cure for
      hearts crushed by the mockery of Candide and the materialism of the
      Revolution.... Under the Restoration France continued to study German
      philosophy and poetry with profound veneration and submission. We
      imitated, translated, compiled, and then again we compiled, translated,
      imitated.&rdquo; The importance of the part played by German influence in French
      Romanticism has indeed been much disputed, but the debt of French
      metaphysics, French philology, and French historical study, to German
      methods and German research during the last half-century is beyond
      dispute. And the movement to-day is as strong as ever. A modern critic
      like M. Darmstetter regards it as a misfortune that the artificial
      stimulus given by the war to the study of German has, to some extent,
      checked the study of English in France. He thinks that the French have
      more to gain from our literature&mdash;taking literature in its general
      and popular sense&mdash;than from German literature. But he raises no
      question as to the inevitable subjection of the French to the German mind
      in matters of exact thought and knowledge. &ldquo;To study philology, mythology,
      history, without reading German,&rdquo; he is as ready to confess as any one
      else, &ldquo;is to condemn one&rsquo;s self to remain in every department twenty years
      behind the progress of science.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Of this great movement, already so productive, Amiel is then a fresh and
      remarkable instance. Having caught from the Germans not only their love of
      exact knowledge but also their love of vast horizons, their insatiable
      curiosity as to the whence and whither of all things, their sense of
      mystery and immensity in the universe, he then brings those elements in
      him which belong to his French inheritance&mdash;and something individual
      besides, which is not French but Genevese&mdash;to bear on his new
      acquisitions, and the result is of the highest literary interest and
      value. Not that he succeeds altogether in the task of fusion. For one who
      was to write and think in French, he was perhaps too long in Germany; he
      had drunk too deeply of German thought; he had been too much dazzled by
      the spectacle of Berlin and its imposing intellectual activities. &ldquo;As to
      his <i>literary</i> talent,&rdquo; says M. Scherer, after dwelling on the rapid
      growth of his intellectual powers under German influence, &ldquo;the profit
      which Amiel derived from his stay at Berlin is more doubtful. Too long
      contact with the German mind had led to the development in him of certain
      strangenesses of style which he had afterward to get rid of, and even
      perhaps of some habits of thought which he afterward felt the need of
      checking and correcting.&rdquo; This is very true. Amiel is no doubt often
      guilty, as M. Caro puts it, of attempts &ldquo;to write German in French,&rdquo; and
      there are in his thought itself veins of mysticism, elements of <i>Schwärmerei</i>,
      here and there, of which a good deal must be laid to the account of his
      German training.
    </p>
    <p>
      M. Renan regrets that after Geneva and after Berlin he never came to
      Paris. Paris, he thinks, would have counteracted the Hegelian influences
      brought to hear upon him at Berlin, [Footnote: See a not, however, on the
      subject of Amiel&rsquo;s philosophical relationships, printed as an Appendix to
      the present volume.] would have taught him cheerfulness, and taught him
      also the art of writing, not beautiful fragments, but a book. Possibly&mdash;but
      how much we should have lost! Instead of the Amiel we know, we should have
      had one accomplished French critic the more. Instead of the spiritual
      drama of the &ldquo;Journal Intime,&rdquo; some further additions to French <i>belles
      lettres</i>; instead of something to love, something to admire! No, there
      is no wishing the German element in Amiel away. Its invading, troubling
      effect upon his thought and temperament goes far to explain the interest
      and suggestiveness of his mental history. The language he speaks is the
      language of that French criticism which&mdash;we have Sainte-Beuve&rsquo;s
      authority for it&mdash;is best described by the motto of Montaigne, &ldquo;<i>Un
      peu de chaque chose et rien de l&rsquo;ensemble, à la française</i>,&rdquo; and the
      thought he tries to express in it is thought torn and strained by the
      constant effort to reach the All, the totality of things: &ldquo;What I desire
      is the sum of all desires, and what I seek to know is the sum of all
      different kinds of knowledge. Always the complete, the absolute, the <i>teres
      atque rotundum</i>.&rdquo; And it was this antagonism, or rather this fusion of
      traditions in him, which went far to make him original, which opened to
      him, that is to say, so many new lights on old paths, and stirred in him
      such capacities of fresh and individual expression.
    </p>
    <p>
      We have been carried forward, however, a little too far by this general
      discussion of Amiel&rsquo;s debts to Germany. Let us take up the biographical
      thread again. In 1848 his Berlin apprenticeship came to an end, and he
      returned to Geneva. &ldquo;How many places, how many impressions, observations,
      thoughts&mdash;how many forms of men and things&mdash;have passed before
      me and in me since April, 1843,&rdquo; he writes in the Journal, two or three
      months after his return. &ldquo;The last seven years have been the most
      important of my life; they have been the novitiate of my intelligence, the
      initiation of my being into being.&rdquo; The first literary evidence of his
      matured powers is to be found in two extremely interesting papers on
      Berlin, which he contributed to the <i>Bibliothèque Universelle</i> in
      1848, apparently just before he left Germany. Here for the first time we
      have the Amiel of the &ldquo;Journal Intime.&rdquo; The young man who five years
      before had written his painstaking review of M. Rio is now in his turn a
      master. He speaks with dignity and authority, he has a graphic, vigorous
      prose at command, the form of expression is condensed and epigrammatic,
      and there is a mixture of enthusiasm and criticism in his description of
      the powerful intellectual machine then working in the Prussian capital
      which represents a permanent note of character, a lasting attitude of
      mind. A great deal, of course, in the two papers is technical and
      statistic, but what there is of general comment and criticism is so good
      that one is tempted to make some melancholy comparisons between them and
      another article in the <i>Bibliothèque</i>, that on Adolphe Pictet,
      written in 1856, and from which we have already quoted. In 1848 Amiel was
      for awhile master of his powers and his knowledge; no fatal divorce had
      yet taken place in him between the accumulating and producing faculties;
      he writes readily even for the public, without labor, without
      affectations. Eight years later the reflective faculty has outgrown his
      control; composition, which represents the practical side of the
      intellectual life, has become difficult and painful to him, and he has
      developed what he himself calls &ldquo;a wavering manner, born of doubt and
      scruple.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      How few could have foreseen the failure in public and practical life which
      lay before him at the moment of his reappearance at Geneva in 1848! &ldquo;My
      first meeting with him in 1849 is still vividly present to me,&rdquo; says M.
      Scherer. &ldquo;He was twenty-eight, and he had just come from Germany laden
      with science, but he wore his knowledge lightly, his looks were
      attractive, his conversation animated, and no affectation spoiled the
      favorable impression he made on the bystander&mdash;the whole effect,
      indeed, was of something brilliant and striking. In his young alertness
      Amiel seemed to be entering upon life as a conqueror; one would have said
      the future was all his own.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      His return, moreover, was marked by a success which seemed to secure him
      at once an important position in his native town. After a public
      competition he was appointed, in 1849, professor of esthetics and French
      literature at the Academy of Geneva, a post which he held for four years,
      exchanging it for the professorship of moral philosophy in 1854. Thus at
      twenty-eight, without any struggle to succeed, he had gained, it would
      have seemed, that safe foothold in life which should be all the
      philosopher or the critic wants to secure the full and fruitful
      development of his gifts. Unfortunately the appointment, instead of the
      foundation and support, was to be the stumbling block of his career.
      Geneva at the time was in a state of social and political ferment. After a
      long struggle, beginning with the revolutionary outbreak of November,
      1841, the Radical party, led by James Fazy, had succeeded in ousting the
      Conservatives&mdash;that is to say, the governing class, which had ruled
      the republic since the Restoration&mdash;from power. And with the advent
      of the democratic constitution of 1846, and the exclusion of the old
      Genevese families from the administration they had so long monopolized, a
      number of subsidiary changes were effected, not less important to the
      ultimate success of Radicalism than the change in political machinery
      introduced by the new constitution. Among them was the disappearance of
      almost the whole existing staff of the academy, then and now the center of
      Genevese education, and up to 1847 the stronghold of the moderate ideas of
      1814, followed by the appointment of new men less likely to hamper the
      Radical order of things.
    </p>
    <p>
      Of these new men Amiel was one. He had been absent from Geneva during the
      years of conflict which had preceded Fazy&rsquo;s triumph; he seems to have had
      no family or party connections with the leaders of the defeated side, and
      as M. Scherer points out, he could accept a non-political post at the
      hands of the new government, two years after the violent measures which
      had marked its accession, without breaking any pledges or sacrificing any
      convictions. But none the less the step was a fatal one. M. Renan is so
      far in the right. If any timely friend had at that moment succeeded in
      tempting Amiel to Paris, as Guizot tempted Rossi in 1833, there can be
      little question that the young professor&rsquo;s after life would have been
      happier and saner. As it was, Amiel threw himself into the competition for
      the chair, was appointed professor, and then found himself in a hopelessly
      false position, placed on the threshold of life, in relations and
      surroundings for which he was radically unfitted, and cut off by no fault
      of his own from the <i>milieu</i> to which he rightly belonged, and in
      which his sensitive individuality might have expanded normally and freely.
      For the defeated upper class very naturally shut their doors on the
      nominees of the new <i>régime</i>, and as this class represented at that
      moment almost everything that was intellectually distinguished in Geneva,
      as it was the guardian, broadly speaking, of the scientific and literary
      traditions of the little state, we can easily imagine how galling such a
      social ostracism must have been to the young professor, accustomed to the
      stimulating atmosphere, the common intellectual interests of Berlin, and
      tormented with perhaps more than the ordinary craving of youth for
      sympathy and for affection. In a great city, containing within it a number
      of different circles of life, Amiel would easily have found his own
      circle, nor could political discords have affected his social comfort to
      anything like the same extent. But in a town not much larger than Oxford,
      and in which the cultured class had hitherto formed a more or less
      homogeneous and united whole, it was almost impossible for Amiel to escape
      from his grievance and establish a sufficient barrier of friendly
      interests between himself and the society which ignored him. There can be
      no doubt that he suffered, both in mind and character, from the struggle
      the position involved. He had no natural sympathy with radicalism. His
      taste, which was extremely fastidious, his judgment, his passionate
      respect for truth, were all offended by the noise, the narrowness, the
      dogmatism of the triumphant democracy. So that there was no making up on
      the one side for what he had lost on the other, and he proudly resigned
      himself to an isolation and a reserve which, reinforcing, as they did,
      certain native weaknesses of character, had the most unfortunate effect
      upon his life.
    </p>
    <p>
      In a passage of the Journal written nearly thirty years after his election
      he allows himself a few pathetic words, half of accusation, half of
      self-reproach, which make us realize how deeply this untowardness of
      social circumstance had affected him. He is discussing one of Madame de
      Staël&rsquo;s favorite words, the word <i>consideration</i>. &ldquo;What is <i>consideration</i>?&rdquo;
       he asks. &ldquo;How does a man obtain it? how does it differ from fame, esteem,
      admiration?&rdquo; And then he turns upon himself. &ldquo;It is curious, but the idea
      of consideration has been to me so little of a motive that I have not even
      been conscious of such an idea. But ought I not to have been conscious of
      it?&rdquo; he asks himself anxiously&mdash;&ldquo;ought I not to have been more
      careful to win the good opinion of others, more determined to conquer
      their hostility or indifference? It would have been a joy to me to be
      smiled upon, loved, encouraged, welcomed, and to obtain what I was so
      ready to give, kindness and goodwill. But to hunt down consideration and
      reputation&mdash;to force the esteem of others&mdash;seemed to me an
      effort unworthy of myself, almost a degradation. A struggle with
      unfavorable opinion has seemed to me beneath me, for all the while my
      heart has been full of sadness and disappointment, and I have known and
      felt that I have been systematically and deliberately isolated. Untimely
      despair and the deepest discouragement have been my constant portion.
      Incapable of taking any interest in my talents for their own sake, I let
      everything slip as soon as the hope of being loved for them and by them
      had forsaken me. A hermit against my will, I have not even found peace in
      solitude, because my inmost conscience has not been any better satisfied
      than my heart.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Still one may no doubt easily exaggerate this loneliness of Amiel&rsquo;s. His
      social difficulties represent rather a dull discomfort in his life, which
      in course of time, and in combination with a good many other causes,
      produced certain unfavorable results on his temperament and on his public
      career, than anything very tragic and acute. They were real, and he, being
      what he was, was specially unfitted to cope with and conquer them. But he
      had his friends, his pleasures, and even to some extent his successes,
      like other men. &ldquo;He had an elasticity of mind,&rdquo; says M. Scherer, speaking
      of him as he knew him in youth, &ldquo;which reacted against vexations from
      without, and his cheerfulness was readily restored by conversation and the
      society of a few kindred spirits. We were accustomed, two or three friends
      and I, to walk every Thursday to the Salève, Lamartine&rsquo;s <i>Salève aux
      flancs azurés</i>; we dined there, and did not return till nightfall.&rdquo;
       They were days devoted to <i>débauches platoniciennes</i>, to &ldquo;the free
      exchange of ideas, the free play of fancy and of gayety. Amiel was not one
      of the original members of these Thursday parties; but whenever he joined
      us we regarded it as a fête-day. In serious discussion he was a master of
      the unexpected, and his energy, his <i>entrain</i>, affected us all. If
      his grammatical questions, his discussions of rhymes and synonyms,
      astonished us at times, how often, on the other hand, did he not give us
      cause to admire the variety of his knowledge, the precision of his ideas,
      the charm of his quick intelligence! We found him always, besides, kindly
      and amiable, a nature one might trust and lean upon with perfect security.
      He awakened in us but one regret; <i>we could not understand how it was a
      man so richly gifted produced nothing, or only trivialities</i>.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      In these last words of M. Scherer&rsquo;s we have come across the determining
      fact of Amiel&rsquo;s life in its relation to the outer world&mdash;that
      &ldquo;sterility of genius,&rdquo; of which he was the victim. For social ostracism
      and political anxiety would have mattered to him comparatively little if
      he could but have lost himself in the fruitful activities of thought, in
      the struggles and the victories of composition and creation. A German
      professor of Amiel&rsquo;s knowledge would have wanted nothing beyond his <i>Fach</i>,
      and nine men out of ten in his circumstances would have made themselves
      the slave of a <i>magnum opus</i>, and forgotten the vexations of everyday
      life in the &ldquo;<i>douces joies de la science</i>.&rdquo; But there were certain
      characteristics in Amiel which made it impossible&mdash;which neutralized
      his powers, his knowledge, his intelligence, and condemned him, so far as
      his public performance was concerned, to barrenness and failure. What were
      these characteristics, this element of unsoundness and disease, which M.
      Caro calls &ldquo;<i>la maladie de l&rsquo;idéal</i>?&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Before we can answer the question we must go back a little and try to
      realize the intellectual and moral equipment of the young man of
      twenty-eight, who seemed to M. Scherer to have the world at his feet. What
      were the chief qualities of mind and heart which Amiel brought back with
      him from Berlin? In the first place, an omnivorous desire to know:
      &ldquo;Amiel,&rdquo; says M. Scherer, &ldquo;read everything.&rdquo; In the second, an
      extraordinary power of sustained and concentrated thought, and a
      passionate, almost a religious, delight in the exercise of his power.
      Knowledge, science, stirred in him no mere sense of curiosity or cold
      critical instinct&mdash;&ldquo;he came to his desk as to an altar.&rdquo; &ldquo;A friend
      who knew him well,&rdquo; says M. Scherer, &ldquo;remembers having heard him speak
      with deep emotion of that lofty serenity of mood which he had experienced
      during his years in Germany whenever, in the early morning before dawn,
      with his reading-lamp beside him, he had found himself penetrating once
      more into the region of pure thought, &lsquo;conversing with ideas, enjoying the
      inmost life of things.&rsquo;&rdquo; &ldquo;Thought,&rdquo; he says somewhere in the Journal, &ldquo;is
      like opium. It can intoxicate us and yet leave us broad awake.&rdquo; To this
      intoxication of thought he seems to have been always specially liable, and
      his German experience&mdash;unbalanced, as such an experience generally is
      with a young man, by family life, or by any healthy commonplace interests
      and pleasures&mdash;developed the intellectual passion in him to an
      abnormal degree. For four years he had devoted himself to the alternate
      excitement and satisfaction of this passion. He had read enormously,
      thought enormously, and in the absence of any imperative claim on the
      practical side of him, the accumulative, reflective faculties had grown
      out of all proportion to the rest of the personality. Nor had any special
      subject the power to fix him. Had he been in France, what Sainte-Beuve
      calls the French &ldquo;<i>imagination de détail</i>&rdquo; would probably have
      attracted his pliant, responsive nature, and he would have found happy
      occupation in some one of the innumerable departments of research on which
      the French have been patiently spending their analytical gift since that
      general widening of horizons which accompanied and gave value to the
      Romantic movement. But instead he was at Berlin, in the center of that
      speculative ferment which followed the death of Hegel and the break-up of
      the Hegelian idea into a number of different and conflicting sections of
      philosophical opinion. He was under the spell of German synthesis, of that
      traditional, involuntary effort which the German mind makes, generation
      after generation, to find the unity of experience, to range its
      accumulations from life and thought under a more and more perfect, a more
      and more exhaustive, formula. Not this study or that study, not this
      detail or that, but the whole of things, the sum of Knowledge, the
      Infinite, the Absolute, alone had value or reality. In his own words:
      &ldquo;There is no repose for the mind except in the absolute; for feeling
      except in the infinite; for the soul except in the divine. Nothing finite
      is true, is interesting, is worthy to fix my attention. All that is
      particular is exclusive, and all that is exclusive repels me. There is
      nothing non-exclusive but the All; my end is communion with Being through
      the whole of Being.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      It was not, indeed, that he neglected the study of detail; he had a strong
      natural aptitude for it, and his knowledge was wide and real; but detail
      was ultimately valuable to him, not in itself, but as food for a
      speculative hunger, for which, after all, there is no real satisfaction.
      All the pleasant paths which traverse the kingdom of Knowledge, in which
      so many of us find shelter and life-long means of happiness, led Amiel
      straight into the wilderness of abstract speculation. And the longer he
      lingered in the wilderness, unchecked by any sense of intellectual
      responsibility, and far from the sounds of human life, the stranger and
      the weirder grew the hallucinations of thought. The Journal gives
      marvelous expression to them: &ldquo;I can find no words for what I feel. My
      consciousness is withdrawn into itself; I hear my heart beating, and my
      life passing. It seems to me that I have become a statue on the banks of
      the river of time, that I am the spectator of some mystery, and shall
      issue from it old, or no longer capable of age.&rdquo; Or again: &ldquo;I am a
      spectator, so to speak, of the molecular whirlwind which men call
      individual life; I am conscious of an incessant metamorphosis, an
      irresistible movement of existence, which is going on within me&mdash;and
      this phenomenology of myself serves as a window opened upon the mystery of
      the world. I am, or rather my sensible consciousness is, concentrated upon
      this ideal standing-point, this invisible threshold, as it were, whence
      one hears the impetuous passage of time, rushing and foaming as it flows
      out into the changeless ocean of eternity. After all the bewildering
      distractions of life&mdash;after having drowned myself in a multiplicity
      of trifles and in the caprices of this fugitive existence, yet without
      ever attaining to self-intoxication or self-delusion&mdash;I come again
      upon the fathomless abyss, the silent and melancholy cavern, where dwell &lsquo;<i>Die
      Mütter</i>,&rsquo; where sleeps that which neither lives nor dies, which has
      neither movement nor change, nor extension, nor form, and which lasts when
      all else passes away.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Wonderful sentences! &ldquo;<i>Prodiges de la pensée speculative, décrits dans
      une langue non moins prodigieuse</i>,&rdquo; as M. Scherer says of the
      innumerable passages which describe either this intoxication of the
      infinite, or the various forms and consequences of that deadening of
      personality which the abstract processes of thought tend to produce. But
      it is easy to understand that a man in whom experiences of this kind
      become habitual is likely to lose his hold upon the normal interests of
      life. What are politics or literature to such a mind but fragments without
      real importance&mdash;dwarfed reflections of ideal truths for which
      neither language nor institutions provide any adequate expression! How is
      it possible to take seriously what is so manifestly relative and temporary
      as the various existing forms of human activity? Above all, how is it
      possible to take one&rsquo;s self seriously, to spend one&rsquo;s thought on the petty
      interests of a petty individuality, when the beatific vision of universal
      knowledge, of absolute being, has once dawned on the dazzled beholder? The
      charm and the savor of everything relative and phenomenal is gone. A man
      may go on talking, teaching, writing&mdash;but the spring of personal
      action is broken; his actions are like the actions of a somnambulist.
    </p>
    <p>
      No doubt to some extent this mood is familiar to all minds endowed with
      the true speculative genius. The philosopher has always tended to become
      unfit for practical life; his unfitness, indeed, is one of the comic
      motives, so to speak, of literature. But a mood which, in the great
      majority of thinkers, is intermittent, and is easily kept within bounds by
      the practical needs, the mere physical instincts of life, was in Amiel
      almost constant, and the natural impulse of the human animal toward
      healthy movement and a normal play of function, never very strong in him,
      was gradually weakened and destroyed by an untoward combination of
      circumstances. The low health from which he suffered more or less from his
      boyhood, and then the depressing influences of the social difficulties we
      have described, made it more and more difficult for the rest of the
      organism to react against the tyranny of the brain. And as the normal
      human motives lost their force, what he calls &ldquo;the Buddhist tendency in
      me&rdquo; gathered strength year by year, until, like some strange misgrowth, it
      had absorbed the whole energies and drained the innermost life-blood of
      the personality which had developed it. And the result is another soul&rsquo;s
      tragedy, another story of conflict and failure, which throws fresh light
      on the mysterious capacities of human nature, and warns us, as the letters
      of Obermann in their day warned the generation of George Sand, that with
      the rise of new intellectual perceptions new spiritual dangers come into
      being, and that across the path of continuous evolution which the modern
      mind is traversing there lies many a <i>selva oscura</i>, many a lonely
      and desolate tract, in which loss and pain await it. The story of the
      &ldquo;Journal Intime&rdquo; is a story to make us think, to make us anxious; but at
      the same time, in the case of a nature like Amiel&rsquo;s, there is so much high
      poetry thrown off from the long process of conflict, the power of vision
      and of reproduction which the intellect gains at the expense of the rest
      of the personality is in many respects so real and so splendid, and
      produces results so stirring often to the heart and imagination of the
      listener, that in the end we put down the record not so much with a throb
      of pity as with an impulse of gratitude. The individual error and
      suffering is almost forgotten; all that we can realize is the enrichment
      of human feeling, the quickened sense of spiritual reality bequeathed to
      us by the baffled and solitary thinker whose <i>via dolorosa</i> is before
      us.
    </p>
    <p>
      The manner in which this intellectual idiosyncrasy we have been describing
      gradually affected Amiel&rsquo;s life supplies abundant proof of its actuality
      and sincerity. It is a pitiful story. Amiel might have been saved from
      despair by love and marriage, by paternity, by strenuous and successful
      literary production; and this mental habit of his&mdash;this tyranny of
      ideal conceptions, helped by the natural accompaniment of such a tyranny,
      a critical sense of abnormal acuteness&mdash;stood between him and
      everything healing and restoring. &ldquo;I am afraid of an imperfect, a faulty
      synthesis, and I linger in the provisional, from timidity and from
      loyalty.&rdquo; &ldquo;As soon as a thing attracts me I turn away from it; or rather,
      I cannot either be content with the second-best, or discover anything
      which satisfies my aspiration. The real disgusts me, and I cannot find the
      ideal.&rdquo; And so one thing after another is put away. Family life attracted
      him perpetually. &ldquo;I cannot escape,&rdquo; he writes, &ldquo;from the ideal of it. A
      companion, of my life, of my work, of my thoughts, of my hopes; within a
      common worship&mdash;toward the world outside kindness and beneficence;
      education to undertake; the thousand and one moral relations which develop
      round the first&mdash;all these ideas intoxicate me sometimes.&rdquo; But in
      vain. &ldquo;Reality, the present, the irreparable, the necessary, repel and
      even terrify me. I have too much imagination, conscience, and penetration
      and not enough character. <i>The life of thought alone seems to me to have
      enough elasticity and immensity, to be free enough from the irreparable;
      practical life makes me afraid.</i> I am distrustful of myself and of
      happiness because I know myself. The ideal poisons for me all imperfect
      possession. And I abhor useless regrets and repentance.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      It is the same, at bottom, with his professional work. He protects the
      intellectual freedom, as it were, of his students with the same jealousy
      as he protects his own. There shall be no oratorical device, no
      persuading, no cajoling of the mind this way or that. &ldquo;A professor is the
      priest of his subject, and should do the honors of it gravely and with
      dignity.&rdquo; And so the man who in his private Journal is master of an
      eloquence and a poetry, capable of illuminating the most difficult and
      abstract of subjects, becomes in the lecture-room a dry compendium of
      universal knowledge. &ldquo;Led by his passion for the whole,&rdquo; says M. Scherer,
      &ldquo;Amiel offered his hearers, not so much a series of positive teachings, as
      an index of subjects, a framework&mdash;what the Germans call a <i>Schematismus</i>.
      The skeleton was admirably put together, and excellent of its kind, and
      lent itself admirably to a certain kind of analysis and demonstration; but
      it was a skeleton&mdash;flesh, body, and life were wanting.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      So that as a professor he made no mark. He was conscientiousness itself in
      whatever he conceived to be his duty. But with all the critical and
      philosophical power which, as we know from the Journal, he might have
      lavished on his teaching, had the conditions been other than they were,
      the study of literature, and the study of philosophy as such, owe him
      nothing. But for the Journal his years of training and his years of
      teaching would have left equally little record behind them. &ldquo;His pupils at
      Geneva,&rdquo; writes one who was himself among the number, [Footnote: M.
      Alphonse Rivier, now Professor of International Law at the University of
      Brussels.] &ldquo;never learned to appreciate him at his true worth. We did
      justice no doubt to a knowledge as varied as it was wide, to his vast
      stores of reading, to that cosmopolitanism of the best kind which he had
      brought back with him from his travels; we liked him for his indulgence,
      his kindly wit. But I look back without any sense of pleasure to his
      lectures.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Many a student, however, has shrunk from the burden and risks of family
      life, and has found himself incapable of teaching effectively what he
      knows, and has yet redeemed all other incapacities in the field of
      literary production. And here indeed we come to the strangest feature in
      Amiel&rsquo;s career&mdash;his literary sterility. That he possessed literary
      power of the highest order is abundantly proved by the &ldquo;Journal Intime.&rdquo;
       Knowledge, insight, eloquence, critical power&mdash;all were his. And the
      impulse to produce, which is the natural, though by no means the
      invariable, accompaniment of the literary gift, must have been fairly
      strong in him also. For the &ldquo;Journal Intime&rdquo; runs to 17,000 folio pages of
      MS., and his half dozen volumes of poems, though the actual quantity is
      not large, represent an amount of labor which would have more than carried
      him through some serious piece of critical or philosophical work, and so
      enabled him to content the just expectations of his world. He began to
      write early, as is proved by the fact that at twenty he was a contributor
      to the best literary periodical which Geneva possessed. He was a charming
      correspondent, and in spite of his passion for abstract thought, his
      intellectual interest, at any rate, in all the activities of the day&mdash;politics,
      religious organizations, literature, art&mdash;was of the keenest kind.
      And yet at the time of his death all that this fine critic and profound
      thinker had given to the world, after a life entirely spent in the pursuit
      of letters, was, in the first place, a few volumes of poems which had had
      no effect except on a small number of sympathetic friends; a few pages of
      <i>pensées</i> intermingled with the poems, and, as we now know, extracted
      from the Journal; and four or five scattered essays, the length of
      magazine articles, on Mme. de Staël, Rousseau, the history of the Academy
      of Geneva, the literature of French-speaking Switzerland, and so on! And
      more than this, the production, such as it was, had been a production born
      of effort and difficulty; and the labor squandered on poetical forms, on
      metrical experiments and intricate problems of translation, as well as the
      occasional affectations of the prose style, might well have convinced the
      critical bystander that the mind of which these things were the offspring
      could have no real importance, no profitable message, for the world.
    </p>
    <p>
      The whole &ldquo;Journal Intime&rdquo; is in some sense Amiel&rsquo;s explanation of these
      facts. In it he has made full and bitter confession of his weakness, his
      failure; he has endeavored, with an acuteness of analysis no other hand
      can rival, to make the reasons of his failure and isolation clear both to
      himself and others. &ldquo;To love, to dream, to feel, to learn, to understand&mdash;all
      these are possible to me if only I may be dispensed from willing&mdash;I
      have a sort of primitive horror of ambition, of struggle, of hatred, of
      all which dissipates the soul and makes it dependent on external things
      and aims. The joy of becoming once more conscious of myself, of listening
      to the passage of time and the flow of the universal life, is sometimes
      enough to make me forget every desire and to quench in me both the wish to
      produce and the power to execute.&rdquo; It is the result of what he himself
      calls <i>&ldquo;l&rsquo;éblouissement de l&rsquo;infini</i>.&rdquo; He no sooner makes a step
      toward production, toward action and the realization of himself, than a
      vague sense of peril overtakes him. The inner life, with its boundless
      horizons and its indescribable exaltations, seems endangered. Is he not
      about to place between himself and the forms of speculative truth some
      barrier of sense and matter&mdash;to give up the real for the apparent,
      the substance for the shadow? One is reminded of Clough&rsquo;s cry under a
      somewhat similar experience:
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;If this pure solace should desert my mind,
  What were all else? I dare not risk the loss.
  To the old paths, my soul!&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      And in close combination with the speculative sense, with the tendency
      which carries a man toward the contemplative study of life and nature as a
      whole, is the critical sense&mdash;the tendency which, in the realm of
      action and concrete performance, carries him, as Amiel expresses it, <i>&ldquo;droit
      au défaut,&rdquo;</i> and makes him conscious at once of the weak point, the
      germ of failure in a project or an action. It is another aspect of the
      same idiosyncrasy. &ldquo;The point I have reached seems to be explained by a
      too restless search for perfection, by the abuse of the critical faculty,
      and by an unreasonable distrust of first impulses, first thoughts, first
      words. Confidence and spontaneity of life are drifting out of my reach,
      and this is why I can no longer act.&rdquo; For abuse of the critical faculty
      brings with it its natural consequences&mdash;timidity of soul, paralysis
      of the will, complete self-distrust. &ldquo;To know is enough for me; expression
      seems to me often a profanity. What I lack is character, will,
      individuality.&rdquo; &ldquo;By what mystery,&rdquo; he writes to M. Scherer, &ldquo;do others
      expect much from me? whereas I feel myself to be incapable of anything
      serious or important.&rdquo; <i>Défiance</i> and <i>impuissance</i> are the
      words constantly on his lips. &ldquo;My friends see what I might have been; I
      see what I am.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      And yet the literary instinct remains, and must in some way be satisfied.
      And so he takes refuge in what he himself calls scales, exercises, <i>tours
      de force</i> in verse-translation of the most laborious and difficult
      kind, in ingenious <i>vers d&rsquo;occasion</i>, in metrical experiments and
      other literary trifling, as his friends think it, of the same sort. &ldquo;I am
      afraid of greatness. I am not afraid of ingenuity; all my published
      literary essays are little else than studies, games, exercises, for the
      purpose of testing myself. I play scales, as it were; I run up and down my
      instrument. I train my hand and make sure of its capacity and skill. But
      the work itself remains unachieved. I am always preparing and never
      accomplishing, and my energy is swallowed up in a kind of barren
      curiosity.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Not that he surrenders himself to the nature which is stronger than he all
      at once. His sense of duty rebels, his conscience suffers, and he makes
      resolution after resolution to shake himself free from the mental
      tradition which had taken such hold upon him&mdash;to write, to produce,
      to satisfy his friends. In 1861, a year after M. Scherer had left Geneva,
      Amiel wrote to him, describing his difficulties and his discouragements,
      and asking, as one may ask an old friend of one&rsquo;s youth, for help and
      counsel. M. Scherer, much touched by the appeal, answered it plainly and
      frankly&mdash;described the feeling of those who knew him as they watched
      his life slipping away unmarked by any of the achievements of which his
      youth had given promise, and pointed out various literary openings in
      which, if he were to put out his powers, he could not but succeed. To
      begin with, he urged him to join the <i>Revue Germanique,</i> then being
      started by Charles Dollfus, Renan, Littré, and others. Amiel left the
      letter for three months unanswered and then wrote a reply which M. Scherer
      probably received with a sigh of impatience. For, rightly interpreted, it
      meant that old habits were too strong, and that the momentary impulse had
      died away. When, a little later, &ldquo;Les Etrangères,&rdquo; a collection of
      verse-translations, came out, it was dedicated to M. Scherer, who did not,
      however, pretend to give it any very cordial reception. Amiel took his
      friend&rsquo;s coolness in very good part, calling him his &ldquo;dear Rhadamanthus.&rdquo;
       &ldquo;How little I knew!&rdquo; cries M. Scherer. &ldquo;What I regret is to have
      discovered too late by means of the Journal, the key to a problem which
      seemed to me hardly serious, and which I now feel to have been tragic. A
      kind of remorse seizes me that I was not able to understand my friend
      better, and to soothe his suffering by a sympathy which would have been a
      mixture of pity and admiration.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Was it that all the while Amiel felt himself sure of his <i>revanche</i>
      that he knew the value of all those sheets of Journal which were slowly
      accumulating under his hand? Did he say to himself sometimes: &ldquo;My friends
      are wrong; my gifts and my knowledge are not lost; I have given expression
      to them in the only way possible to me, and when I die it will be found
      that I too, like other men, have performed the task appointed me, and
      contributed my quota to the human store?&rdquo; It is clear that very early he
      began to regard it as possible that portions of the Journal should be
      published after his death, and, as we have seen, he left certain &ldquo;literary
      instructions,&rdquo; dated seven years before his last illness, in which his
      executors were directed to publish such parts of it as might seem to them
      to possess any general interest. But it is clear also that the Journal was
      not, in any sense, written for publication. &ldquo;These pages,&rdquo; say the Geneva
      editors, &ldquo;written <i>au courant de la plume</i>&mdash;sometimes in the
      morning, but more often at the end of the day, without any idea of
      composition or publicity&mdash;are marked by the repetition, the <i>lacunae</i>,
      the carelessness, inherent in this kind of monologue. The thoughts and
      sentiments expressed have no other aim than sincerity of rendering.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      And his estimate of the value of the record thus produced was, in general,
      a low one, especially during the depression and discouragement of his
      later years. &ldquo;This Journal of mine,&rdquo; he writes in 1876, &ldquo;represents the
      material of a good many volumes; what prodigious waste of time, of
      thought, of strength! It will be useful to nobody, and even for myself&mdash;it
      has rather helped me to shirk life than to practice it.&rdquo; And again: &ldquo;Is
      everything I have produced, taken together&mdash;my correspondence, these
      thousands of Journal pages, my lectures, my articles, my poems, my notes
      of different kinds&mdash;anything better than withered leaves? To whom and
      to what have I been useful? Will my name survive me a single day, and will
      it ever mean anything to anybody? A life of no account! When all is added
      up&mdash;nothing!&rdquo; In passages like these there is no anticipation of any
      posthumous triumph over the disapproval of his friends and the criticism
      of his fellow-citizens. The Journal was a relief, the means of satisfying
      a need of expression which otherwise could find no outlet; &ldquo;a
      grief-cheating device,&rdquo; but nothing more. It did not still the sense of
      remorse for wasted gifts and opportunities which followed poor Amiel
      through the painful months of his last illness. Like Keats, he passed
      away, feeling that all was over, and the great game of life lost forever.
    </p>
    <p>
      It still remains for us to gather up a few facts and impressions of a
      different kind from those which we have been dwelling on, which may serve
      to complete and correct the picture we have so far drawn of the author of
      the Journal. For Amiel is full of contradictions and surprises, which, are
      indeed one great source of his attractiveness. Had he only been the
      thinker, the critic, the idealist we have been describing, he would never
      have touched our feeling as he now does; what makes him so interesting is
      that there was in him a <i>fond</i> of heredity, a temperament and
      disposition, which were perpetually reacting against the oppression of the
      intellect and its accumulations. In his hours of intellectual
      concentration he freed himself from all trammels of country or society, or
      even, as he insists, from all sense of personality. But at other times he
      was the dutiful son of a country which he loved, taking a warm interest in
      everything Genevese, especially in everything that represented the older
      life of the town. When it was a question of separating the Genevese state
      from the church, which had been the center of the national life during
      three centuries of honorable history, Amiel the philosopher, the
      cosmopolitan, threw himself ardently on to the side of the opponents of
      separation, and rejoiced in their victory. A large proportion of his poems
      deal with national subjects. He was one of the first members of &ldquo;<i>L&rsquo;Institut
      Genevois</i>,&rdquo; founded in 1853, and he took a warm interest in the
      movement started by M. Eugene Rambert toward 1870, for the improvement of
      secondary education throughout French-speaking Switzerland. One of his
      friends dwells with emphasis on his &ldquo;<i>sens profond des nationalités, des
      langues, des villes</i>&rdquo;&mdash;on his love for local characteristics, for
      everything deep-rooted in the past, and helping to sustain the present. He
      is convinced that no state can live and thrive without a certain number of
      national prejudices, without <i>à priori</i> beliefs and traditions. It
      pleases him to see that there is a force in the Genevese nationality which
      resists the leveling influences of a crude radicalism; it rejoices him
      that Geneva &ldquo;has not yet become a mere copy of anything, and that she is
      still capable of deciding for herself. Those who say to her, &lsquo;Do as they
      do at New York, at Paris, at Rome, at Berlin,&rsquo; are still in the minority.
      The <i>doctrinaires</i> who would split her up and destroy her unity waste
      their breath upon her. She divines the snare laid for her, and turns away.
      I like this proof of vitality.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      His love of traveling never left him. Paris attracted him, as it attracts
      all who cling to letters, and he gained at one time or another a certain
      amount of acquaintance with French literary men. In 1852 we find him for a
      time brought into contact with Thierry, Lamennais, Béranger, Mignet, etc.,
      as well as with Romantics like Alfred de Vigny and Théophile Gautier.
      There are poems addressed to De Vigny and Gautier in his first published
      volume of 1854. He revisited Italy and his old haunts and friends in
      Germany more than once, and in general kept the current of his life fresh
      and vigorous by his openness to impressions and additions from without.
    </p>
    <p>
      He was, as we have said, a delightful correspondent, &ldquo;taking pains with
      the smallest note,&rdquo; and within a small circle of friends much liked. His
      was not a nature to be generally appreciated at its true value; the
      motives which governed his life were too remote from the ordinary motives
      of human conduct, and his characteristics just those which have always
      excited the distrust, if not the scorn, of the more practical and vigorous
      order of minds. Probably, too&mdash;especially in his later years&mdash;there
      was a certain amount of self-consciousness and artificiality in his
      attitude toward the outer world, which was the result partly of the social
      difficulties we have described, partly of his own sense of difference from
      his surroundings, and partly again of that timidity of nature, that
      self-distrust, which is revealed to us in the Journal. So that he was by
      no means generally popular, and the great success of the Journal is still
      a mystery to the majority of those who knew him merely as a fellow-citizen
      and acquaintance. But his friends loved him and believed in him, and the
      reserved student, whose manners were thought affected in general society,
      could and did make himself delightful to those who understood him, or
      those who looked to him for affection. &ldquo;According to my remembrance of
      him,&rdquo; writes M. Scherer, &ldquo;he was bright, sociable, a charming companion.
      Others who knew him better and longer than I say the same. The mobility of
      his disposition counteracted his tendency to exaggerations of feeling. In
      spite of his fits of melancholy, his natural turn of mind was cheerful; up
      to the end he was young, a child even, amused by mere nothings; and
      whoever had heard him laugh his hearty student&rsquo;s laugh would have found it
      difficult to identify him with the author of so many somber pages.&rdquo; M.
      Rivier, his old pupil, remembers him as &ldquo;strong and active, still
      handsome, delightful in conversation, ready to amuse and be amused.&rdquo;
       Indeed, if the photographs of him are to be trusted, there must have been
      something specially attractive in the sensitive, expressive face, with its
      lofty brow, fine eyes, and kindly mouth. It is the face of a poet rather
      than of a student, and makes one understand certain other little points
      which his friends lay stress on&mdash;for instance, his love for and
      popularity with children.
    </p>
    <p>
      In his poems, or at any rate in the earlier ones, this lighter side finds
      more expression, proportionally, than in the Journal. In the volume called
      &ldquo;Grains de Mil,&rdquo; published in 1854, and containing verse written between
      the ages of eighteen and thirty, there are poems addressed, now to his
      sister, now to old Genevese friends, and now to famous men of other
      countries whom he had seen and made friends with in passing, which, read
      side by side with the &ldquo;Journal Intime,&rdquo; bring a certain gleam and sparkle
      into an otherwise somber picture. Amiel was never a master of poetical
      form; his verse, compared to his prose, is tame and fettered; it never
      reaches the glow and splendor of expression which mark the finest passages
      of the Journal. It has ability, thought&mdash;beauty even, of a certain
      kind, but no plastic power, none of the incommunicable magic which a
      George Eliot seeks for in vain, while it comes unasked, to deck with
      imperishable charm the commonplace metaphysic and the simpler emotions of
      a Tennyson or a Burns. Still as Amiel&rsquo;s work, his poetry has an interest
      for those who are interested in him. Sincerity is written in every line of
      it. Most of the thoughts and experiences with which one grows familiar in
      the Journal are repeated in it; the same joys, the same aspirations, the
      same sorrows are visible throughout it, so that in reading it one is more
      and more impressed with the force and reality of the inner life which has
      left behind it so definite an image of itself. And every now and then the
      poems add a detail, a new impression, which seems by contrast to give
      fresh value to the fine-spun speculations, the lofty despairs, of the
      Journal. Take these verses, written at twenty-one, to his younger sister:
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Treize ans! et sur ton front aucun baiser de mère
  Ne viendra, pauvre enfant, invoquer le bonheur;
  Treize ans! et dans ce jour mil regard de ton père
  Ne fera d&rsquo;allégresse épanouir ton coeur.

  &ldquo;Orpheline, c&rsquo;est là le nom dont tu t&rsquo;appelles,
  Oiseau né dans un nid que la foudre a brisé;
  De la couvée, hélas! seuls, trois petits, sans ailes
  Furent lancés au vent, loin du reste écrasé.

  &ldquo;Et, semés par l&rsquo;éclair sur les monts, dans les plaines,
  Un même toit encor n&rsquo;a pu les abriter,
  Et du foyer natal, malgré leurs plaintes vaines
  Dieu, peut-être longtemps, voudra les écarter.

  &ldquo;Pourtant console-toi! pense, dans tes alarmes,
  Qu&rsquo;un double bien te reste, espoir et souvenir;
  Une main dans le ciel pour essuyer tes larmes;
  Une main ici-bas, enfant, pour te bénir.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      The last stanza is especially poor, and in none of them is there much
      poetical promise. But the pathetic image of a forlorn and orphaned
      childhood, &ldquo;<i>un nid que la foudre a brisé</i>,&rdquo; which it calls up, and
      the tone of brotherly affection, linger in one&rsquo;s memory. And through much
      of the volume of 1863, in the verses to &ldquo;My Godson,&rdquo; or in the charming
      poem to Loulou, the little girl who at five years old, daisy in hand, had
      sworn him eternal friendship over Gretchen&rsquo;s game of &ldquo;<i>Er liebt mich&mdash;liebt
      mich nicht</i>,&rdquo; one hears the same tender note.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Merci, prophétique fleurette,
  Corolle à l&rsquo;oracle vainqueur,
  Car voilà trois ans, paquerette,
  Que tu m&rsquo;ouvris un petit coeur.

  &ldquo;Et depuis trois hivers, ma belle,
  L&rsquo;enfant aux grands yeux de velours
  Maintient son petit coeur fidèle,
  Fidèle comme aux premiers jours.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      His last poetical volume, &ldquo;Jour à Jour,&rdquo; published in 1880, is far more
      uniformly melancholy and didactic in tone than the two earlier collections
      from which we have been quoting. But though the dominant note is one of
      pain and austerity, of philosophy touched with emotion, and the general
      tone more purely introspective, there are many traces in it of the younger
      Amiel, dear, for very ordinary human reasons, to his sisters and his
      friends. And, in general, the pathetic interest of the book for all whose
      sympathy answers to what George Sand calls &ldquo;<i>les tragédies que la pensée
      aperçoit et que l&rsquo;oeil ne voit point</i>&rdquo; is very great. Amiel published
      it a year before his death, and the struggle with failing power which the
      Journal reveals to us in its saddest and most intimate reality, is here
      expressed in more reserved and measured form. Faith, doubt, submission,
      tenderness of feeling, infinite aspiration, moral passion, that straining
      hope of something beyond, which is the life of the religious soul&mdash;they
      are all here, and the <i>Dernier Mot</i> with which the sad little volume
      ends is poor Amiel&rsquo;s epitaph on himself, his conscious farewell to that
      more public aspect of his life in which he had suffered much and achieved
      comparatively so little.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Nous avons à plaisir compliqué le bonheur,
  Et par un idéal frivole et suborneur
    Attaché nos coeurs à la terre;
  Dupes des faux dehors tenus pour l&rsquo;important,
  Mille choses pour nous ont du prix ... et pourtant
    Une seule était nécessaire.

  &ldquo;Sans fin nous prodiguons calculs, efforts, travaux;
  Cependant, au milieu des succès, des bravos
  En nous quelque chose soupire;
  Multipliant nos pas et nos soins de fourmis,
  Nous vondrions nous faire une foule d&rsquo;amis....
       Pourtant un seul pouvait suffire.

  &ldquo;Victime des désirs, esclave des regrets,
  L&rsquo;homme s&rsquo;agite, et s&rsquo;use, et vieillit sans progrès
       Sur sa toile de Pénélope;
  Comme un sage mourant, puissions-nous dire en paix
  J&rsquo;ai trop longtemps erré, cherché; je me trompais;
         Tout est bien, mon Dieu m&rsquo;enveloppe.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      Upon the small remains of Amiel&rsquo;s prose outside the Journal there is no
      occasion to dwell. The two essays on Madame de Staël and Rousseau contain
      much fine critical remark, and might find a place perhaps as an appendix
      to some future edition of the Journal; and some of the &ldquo;Pensées,&rdquo;
       published in the latter half of the volume containing the &ldquo;Grains de
      Mils,&rdquo; are worthy of preservation. But in general, whatever he himself
      published was inferior to what might justly have been expected of him, and
      no one was more conscious of the fact than himself.
    </p>
    <p>
      The story of his fatal illness, of the weary struggle for health which
      filled the last seven years of his life, is abundantly told in the Journal&mdash;we
      must not repeat it here. He had never been a strong man, and at
      fifty-three he received, at his doctor&rsquo;s hands, his <i>arrêt de mort</i>.
      We are told that what killed him was &ldquo;heart disease, complicated by
      disease of the larynx,&rdquo; and that he suffered &ldquo;much and long.&rdquo; He was
      buried in the cemetery of Clarens, not far from his great contemporary
      Alexander Vinet; and the affection of a sculptor friend provided the
      monument which now marks his resting-place.
    </p>
    <p>
      We have thus exhausted all the biographical material which is at present
      available for the description of Amiel&rsquo;s life and relations toward the
      outside world. It is to be hoped that the friends to whom the charge of
      his memory has been specially committed may see their way in the future,
      if not to a formal biography, which is very likely better left
      unattempted, at least to a volume of Letters, which would complete the
      &ldquo;Journal Intime,&rdquo; as Joubert&rsquo;s &ldquo;Correspondence&rdquo; completes the &ldquo;Pensées.&rdquo;
       There must be ample material for it; and Amiel&rsquo;s letters would probably
      supply us with more of that literary and critical reflection which his
      mind produced so freely and so well, as long as there was no question of
      publication, but which is at present somewhat overweighted in the &ldquo;Journal
      Intime.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      But whether biography or correspondence is ever forthcoming or not, the
      Journal remains&mdash;and the Journal is the important matter. We shall
      read the Letters if they appear, as we now read the Poems, for the
      Journal&rsquo;s sake. The man himself, as poet, teacher, and <i>littérateur</i>,
      produced no appreciable effect on his generation; but the posthumous
      record of his inner life has stirred the hearts of readers all over
      Europe, and won him a niche in the House of Fame. What are the reasons for
      this striking transformation of a man&rsquo;s position&mdash;a transformation
      which, as M. Scherer says, will rank among the curiosities of literary
      history? In other words, what has given the &ldquo;Journal Intime&rdquo; its sudden
      and unexpected success?
    </p>
    <p>
      In the first place, no doubt, its poetical quality, its beauty of manner&mdash;that
      fine literary expression in which Amiel has been able to clothe the
      subtler processes of thought, no less than the secrets of religious
      feeling, or the aspects of natural scenery. Style is what gives value and
      currency to thought, and Amiel, in spite of all his Germanisms, has style
      of the best kind. He possesses in prose that indispensable magic which he
      lacks in poetry.
    </p>
    <p>
      His style, indeed, is by no means always in harmony with the central
      French tradition. Probably a Frenchman will be inclined to apply
      Sainte-Beuve&rsquo;s remarks on Amiel&rsquo;s elder countryman, Rodolphe Töpffer, to
      Amiel himself: &ldquo;<i>C&rsquo;est ainsi qu&rsquo;on écrit dans les littératures qui n&rsquo;ont
      point de capitale, de quartier général classique, ou d&rsquo;Académie; c&rsquo;est
      ainsi qu&rsquo;un Allemand, qu&rsquo;un Américain, ou même un Anglais, use à son gré
      de sa langue. En France au contraire, où il y a une Académie Française ...
      on doit trouver qu&rsquo;un tel style est une très-grande nouveauté et le succés
      qu&rsquo;il a obtenu un evènement: il a fallu bien des circonstances pour y
      préparer</i>.&rdquo; No doubt the preparatory circumstance in Amiel&rsquo;s case has
      been just that Germanization of the French mind on which M. Taine and M.
      Bourget dwell with so much emphasis. But, be this as it may, there is no
      mistaking the enthusiasm with which some of the best living writers of
      French have hailed these pages&mdash;instinct, as one declares, &ldquo;with a
      strange and marvelous poetry;&rdquo; full of phrases &ldquo;<i>d&rsquo;une intense
      suggestion de beauté</i>;&rdquo; according to another. Not that the whole of the
      Journal flows with the same ease, the same felicity. There are a certain
      number of passages where Amiel ceases to be the writer, and becomes the
      technical philosopher; there are others, though not many, into which a
      certain German heaviness and diffuseness has crept, dulling the edge of
      the sentences, and retarding the development of the thought. When all
      deductions have been made, however, Amiel&rsquo;s claim is still first and
      foremost, the claim of the poet and the artist; of the man whose thought
      uses at will the harmonies and resources of speech, and who has attained,
      in words of his own, &ldquo;to the full and masterly expression of himself.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Then to the poetical beauty of manner which first helped the book to
      penetrate, <i>faire sa trouée</i>, as the French say, we must add its
      extraordinary psychological interest. Both as poet and as psychologist,
      Amiel makes another link in a special tradition; he adds another name to
      the list of those who have won a hearing from their fellows as
      interpreters of the inner life, as the revealers of man to himself. He is
      the successor of St. Augustine and Dante; he is the brother of Obermann
      and Maurice de Guérin. What others have done for the spiritual life of
      other generations he has done for the spiritual life of this, and the
      wealth of poetical, scientific, and psychological faculty which he has
      brought to the analysis of human feeling and human perceptions places him&mdash;so
      far as the present century is concerned&mdash;at the head of the small and
      delicately-gifted class to which he belongs. For beside his spiritual
      experience Obermann&rsquo;s is superficial, and Maurice de Guérin&rsquo;s a passing
      trouble, a mere quick outburst of passionate feeling. Amiel indeed has
      neither the continuous romantic beauty nor the rich descriptive wealth of
      Senancour. The Dent du Midi, with its untrodden solitude, its primeval
      silences and its hovering eagles, the Swiss landscape described in the
      &ldquo;Fragment on the Ranz des Vaches,&rdquo; the summer moonlight on the Lake of
      Neufchâtel&mdash;these various pictures are the work of one of the most
      finished artists in words that literature has produced. But how true
      George Sand&rsquo;s criticism is! &ldquo;<i>Chez Obermann la sensibilité est active,
      l&rsquo;intelligence est paresseuse ou insuffisante.</i>&rdquo; He has a certain
      antique power of making the truisms of life splendid and impressive. No
      one can write more poetical exercises than he on the old text of <i>pulvis
      et umbra sumus</i>, but beyond this his philosophical power fails him. As
      soon as he leaves the region of romantic description how wearisome the
      pages are apt to grow! Instead of a poet, &ldquo;<i>un ergoteur Voltairien</i>;&rdquo;
       instead of the explorer of fresh secrets of the heart, a Parisian talking
      a cheap cynicism! Intellectually, the ground gives way; there is no
      solidity of knowledge, no range of thought. Above all, the scientific idea
      in our sense is almost absent; so that while Amiel represents the modern
      mind at its keenest and best, dealing at will with the vast additions to
      knowledge which the last fifty years have brought forth, Senancour is
      still in the eighteenth-century stage, talking like Rousseau of a return
      to primitive manners, and discussing Christianity in the tone of the
      &ldquo;Encyclopédie.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Maurice de Guérin, again, is the inventor of new terms in the language of
      feeling, a poet as Amiel and Senancour are. His love of nature, the
      earth-passion which breathes in his letters and journal, has a strange
      savor, a force and flame which is all his own. Beside his actual sense of
      community with the visible world, Amiel&rsquo;s love of landscape has a tame,
      didactic air. The Swiss thinker is too ready to make nature a mere vehicle
      of moral or philosophical thought; Maurice de Guérin loves her for herself
      alone, and has found words to describe her influence over him of
      extraordinary individuality and power. But for the rest the story of his
      inner life has but small value in the history of thought. His difficulties
      do not go deep enough; his struggle is intellectually not serious enough&mdash;we
      see in it only a common incident of modern experience poetically told; it
      throws no light on the genesis and progress of the great forces which are
      molding and renovating the thought of the present&mdash;it tells us
      nothing for the future.
    </p>
    <p>
      No&mdash;there is much more in the &ldquo;Journal Intime&rdquo; than the imagination
      or the poetical glow which Amiel shares with his immediate predecessors in
      the art of confession-writing. His book is representative of human
      experience in its more intimate and personal forms to an extent hardly
      equaled since Rousseau. For his study of himself is only a means to an
      end. &ldquo;What interests me in myself,&rdquo; he declares, &ldquo;is that I find in my own
      case a genuine example of human nature, and therefore a specimen of
      general value.&rdquo; It is the human consciousness of to-day, of the modern
      world, in its two-fold relation&mdash;its relation toward the infinite and
      the unknowable, and its relation toward the visible universe which
      conditions it&mdash;which is the real subject of the &ldquo;Journal Intime.&rdquo;
       There are few elements of our present life which, in a greater or less
      degree, are not made vocal in these pages. Amiel&rsquo;s intellectual interest
      is untiring. Philosophy, science, letters, art&mdash;he has penetrated the
      spirit of them all; there is nothing, or almost nothing, within the wide
      range of modern activities which he has not at one time or other felt the
      attraction of, and learned in some sense to understand. &ldquo;Amiel,&rdquo; says M.
      Renan, &ldquo;has his defects, but he was certainly one of the strongest
      speculative heads who, during the period from 1845 to 1880, have reflected
      on the nature of things.&rdquo; And, although a certain fatal spiritual weakness
      debarred him to a great extent from the world of practical life, his
      sympathy with action, whether it was the action of the politician or the
      social reformer, or merely that steady half-conscious performance of its
      daily duty which keeps humanity sweet and living, was unfailing. His
      horizon was not bounded by his own &ldquo;prison-cell,&rdquo; or by that dream-world
      which he has described with so much subtle beauty; rather the energies
      which should have found their natural expression in literary or family
      life, pent up within the mind itself, excited in it a perpetual eagerness
      for intellectual discovery, and new powers of sympathy with whatever
      crossed its field of vision.
    </p>
    <p>
      So that the thinker, the historian, the critic, will find himself at home
      with Amiel. The power of organizing his thought, the art of writing a
      book, <i>monumentum aere perennius</i>, was indeed denied him&mdash;he
      laments it bitterly; but, on the other hand, he is receptivity itself,
      responsive to all the great forces which move the time, catching and
      reflecting on the mobile mirror of his mind whatever winds are blowing
      from the hills of thought.
    </p>
    <p>
      And if the thinker is at home with him, so too are the religious minds,
      the natures for whom God and duty are the foundation of existence. Here,
      indeed, we come to the innermost secret of Amiel&rsquo;s charm, the fact which
      probably goes farther than any other to explain his fascination for a
      large and growing class of readers. For, while he represents all the
      intellectual complexities of a time bewildered by the range and number of
      its own acquisitions, the religious instinct in him is as strong and
      tenacious as in any of the representative exponents of the life of faith.
      The intellect is clear and unwavering; but the heart clings to old
      traditions, and steadies itself on the rock of duty. His Calvinistic
      training lingers long in him; and what detaches him from the Hegelian
      school, with which he has much in common, is his own stronger sense of
      personal need, his preoccupation with the idea of &ldquo;sin.&rdquo; &ldquo;He speaks,&rdquo; says
      M. Renan contemptuously, &ldquo;of sin, of salvation, of redemption, and
      conversion, as if these things were realities. He asks me &lsquo;What does M.
      Renan make of sin?&rsquo; <i>Eh bien, je crois que je le supprime</i>.&rdquo; But it
      is just because Amiel is profoundly sensitive to the problems of evil and
      responsibility, and M. Renan dismisses them with this half-tolerant,
      half-skeptical smile, that M. Renan&rsquo;s &ldquo;Souvenirs&rdquo; inform and entertain us,
      while the &ldquo;Journal Intime&rdquo; makes a deep impression on that moral sense
      which is at the root of individual and national life.
    </p>
    <p>
      The Journal is full, indeed, of this note of personal religion. Religion,
      Amiel declares again and again, cannot be replaced by philosophy. The
      redemption of the intelligence is not the redemption of the heart. The
      philosopher and critic may succeed in demonstrating that the various
      definite forms into which the religious thought of man has thrown itself
      throughout history are not absolute truth, but only the temporary
      creations of a need which gradually and surely outgrows them all. &ldquo;The
      Trinity, the life to come, paradise and hell, may cease to be dogmas and
      spiritual realities, the form and the letter may vanish away&mdash;the
      question of humanity remains: What is it which saves?&rdquo; Amiel&rsquo;s answer to
      the question will recall to a wide English circle the method and spirit of
      an English teacher, whose dear memory lives to-day in many a heart, and is
      guiding many an effort in the cause of good&mdash;the method and spirit of
      the late Professor Green of Balliol. In many respects there was a gulf of
      difference between the two men. The one had all the will and force of
      personality which the other lacked. But the ultimate creed of both, the
      way in which both interpret the facts of nature and consciousness, is
      practically the same. In Amiel&rsquo;s case, we have to gather it through all
      the variations and inevitable contradictions of a Journal which is the
      reflection of a life, not the systematic expression of a series of ideas,
      but the main results are clear enough. Man is saved by love and duty, and
      by the hope which springs from duty, or rather from the moral facts of
      consciousness, as a flower springs from the soil. Conscience and the moral
      progress of the race&mdash;these are his points of departure. Faith in the
      reality of the moral law is what he clings to when his inherited creed has
      yielded to the pressure of the intellect, and after all the storms of
      pessimism and necessitarianism have passed over him. The reconciliation of
      the two certitudes, the two methods, the scientific and the religious, &ldquo;is
      to be sought for in that moral law which is also a fact, and every step of
      which requires for its explanation another cosmos than the cosmos of
      necessity.&rdquo; &ldquo;Nature is the virtuality of mind, the soul the fruit of life,
      and liberty the flower of necessity.&rdquo; Consciousness is the one fixed point
      in this boundless and bottomless gulf of things, and the soul&rsquo;s inward
      law, as it has been painfully elaborated by human history, the only
      revelation of God.
    </p>
    <p>
      The only but the sufficient revelation! For this first article of a
      reasonable creed is the key to all else&mdash;the clue which leads the
      mind safely through the labyrinth of doubt into the presence of the
      Eternal. Without attempting to define the indefinable, the soul rises from
      the belief in the reality of love and duty to the belief in &ldquo;a holy will
      at the root of nature and destiny&rdquo;&mdash;for &ldquo;if man is capable of
      conceiving goodness, the general principle of things, which cannot be
      inferior to man, must be good.&rdquo; And then the religious consciousness
      seizes on this intellectual deduction, and clothes it in language of the
      heart, in the tender and beautiful language of faith. &ldquo;There is but one
      thing needful&mdash;to possess God. All our senses, all our powers of mind
      and soul, are so many ways of approaching the Divine, so many modes of
      tasting and adoring God. Religion is not a method; it is a life&mdash;a
      higher and supernatural life, mystical in its root and practical in its
      fruits; a communion with God, a calm and deep enthusiasm, a love which
      radiates, a force which acts, a happiness which overflows.&rdquo; And the faith
      of his youth and his maturity bears the shock of suffering, and supports
      him through his last hours. He writes a few months before the end: &ldquo;The
      animal expires; man surrenders his soul to the author of the soul.&rdquo; ...
      &ldquo;We dream alone, we suffer alone, we die alone, we inhabit the last
      resting-place alone. But there is nothing to prevent us from opening our
      solitude to God. And so what was an austere monologue becomes dialogue,
      reluctance becomes docility, renunciation passes into peace, and the sense
      of painful defeat is lost in the sense of recovered liberty&rdquo;&mdash;<i>&ldquo;Tout
      est bien, mon Dieu m&rsquo;enveloppe.&rdquo;</i>
    </p>
    <p>
      Nor is this all. It is not only that Amiel&rsquo;s inmost thought and affections
      are stayed on this conception of &ldquo;a holy will at the root of nature and
      destiny&rdquo;&mdash;in a certain very real sense he is a Christian. No one is
      more sensitive than he to the contribution which Christianity has made to
      the religious wealth of mankind; no one more penetrated than he with the
      truth of its essential doctrine &ldquo;death unto sin and a new birth unto
      righteousness.&rdquo; &ldquo;The religion of sin, of repentance and reconciliation,&rdquo;
       he cries, &ldquo;the religion of the new birth and of eternal life, is not a
      religion to be ashamed of.&rdquo; The world has found inspiration and guidance
      for eighteen centuries in the religious consciousness of Jesus. &ldquo;The
      gospel has modified the world and consoled mankind,&rdquo; and so &ldquo;we may hold
      aloof from the churches and yet bow ourselves before Jesus. We may be
      suspicious of the clergy and refuse to have anything to do with
      catechisms, and yet love the Holy and the Just who came to save and not to
      curse.&rdquo; And in fact Amiel&rsquo;s whole life and thought are steeped in
      Christianity. He is the spiritual descendant of one of the intensest and
      most individual forms of Christian belief, and traces of his religious
      ancestry are visible in him at every step. Protestantism of the sincerer
      and nobler kind leaves an indelible impression on the nature which has
      once surrounded itself to the austere and penetrating influences flowing
      from the religion of sin and grace; and so far as feeling and temperament
      are concerned, Amiel retained throughout his life the marks of Calvinism
      and Geneva.
    </p>
    <p>
      And yet how clear the intellect remains, through all the anxieties of
      thought, and in the face of the soul&rsquo;s dearest memories and most
      passionate needs! Amiel, as soon as his reasoning faculty has once reached
      its maturity, never deceives himself as to the special claims of the
      religion which by instinct and inheritance he loves; he makes no
      compromise with dogma or with miracle. Beyond the religions of the present
      he sees always the essential religion which lasts when all local forms and
      marvels have passed away; and as years go on, with more and more clearness
      of conviction, he learns to regard all special beliefs and systems as
      &ldquo;prejudices, useful in practice, but still narrownesses of the mind;&rdquo;
       misgrowths of thought, necessary in their time and place, but still of no
      absolute value, and having no final claim on the thought of man.
    </p>
    <p>
      And it is just here&mdash;in this mixture of the faith which clings and
      aspires, with the intellectual pliancy which allows the mind to sway
      freely under the pressure of life and experience, and the deep respect for
      truth, which will allow nothing to interfere between thought and its
      appointed tasks&mdash;that Amiel&rsquo;s special claim upon us lies. It is this
      balance of forces in him which makes him so widely representative of the
      modern mind&mdash;of its doubts, its convictions, its hopes. He speaks for
      the life of to-day as no other single voice has yet spoken for it; in his
      contradictions, his fears, his despairs, and yet in the constant straining
      toward the unseen and the ideal which gives a fundamental unity to his
      inner life, he is the type of a generation universally touched with doubt,
      and yet as sensitive to the need of faith as any that have gone before it;
      more widely conscious than its predecessors of the limitations of the
      human mind, and of the iron pressure of man&rsquo;s physical environment; but at
      the same time&mdash;paradox as it may seem&mdash;more conscious of man&rsquo;s
      greatness, more deeply thrilled by the spectacle of the nobility and
      beauty interwoven with the universe.
    </p>
    <p>
      And he plays this part of his so modestly, with so much hesitation, so
      much doubt of his thought and of himself! He is no preacher, like Emerson
      and Carlyle, with whom, as poet and idealist, he has so much in common;
      there is little resemblance between him and the men who speak, as it were,
      from a height to the crowd beneath, sure always of themselves and what
      they have to say. And here again he represents the present and foreshadows
      the future. For the age of the preachers is passing those who speak with
      authority on the riddles of life and nature as the priests of this or that
      all-explaining dogma, are becoming less important as knowledge spreads,
      and the complexity of experience is made evident to a wider range of
      minds. The force of things is against <i>the certain people</i>. Again and
      again truth escapes from the prisons made for her by mortal hands, and as
      humanity carries on the endless pursuit she will pay more and more
      respectful heed to voices like this voice of the lonely Genevese thinker&mdash;with
      its pathetic alterations of hope and fear, and the moral steadfastness
      which is the inmost note of it&mdash;to these meditative lives, which,
      through all the ebb and flow of thought, and in the dim ways of doubt and
      suffering, rich in knowledge, and yet rich in faith, grasp in new forms,
      and proclaim to us in new words,
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;The mighty hopes which make us men.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      AMIEL&rsquo;S JOURNAL.
    </h2>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      [Where no other name is mentioned, Geneva is to be understood as the
      author&rsquo;s place of residence.]
    </p>
    <p>
      BERLIN, July 16. 1848.&mdash;There is but one thing needful&mdash;to
      possess God. All our senses, all our powers of mind and soul, all our
      external resources, are so many ways of approaching the divinity, so many
      modes of tasting and of adoring God. We must learn to detach ourselves
      from all that is capable of being lost, to bind ourselves absolutely only
      to what is absolute and eternal, and to enjoy the rest as a loan, a
      usufruct.... To adore, to understand, to receive, to feel, to give, to
      act: there is my law my duty, my happiness, my heaven. Let come what come
      will&mdash;even death. Only be at peace with self, live in the presence of
      God, in communion with Him, and leave the guidance of existence to those
      universal powers against whom thou canst do nothing! If death gives me
      time, so much the better. If its summons is near, so much the better
      still; if a half-death overtake me, still so much the better, for so the
      path of success is closed to me only that I may find opening before me the
      path of heroism, of moral greatness and resignation. Every life has its
      potentiality of greatness, and as it is impossible to be outside God, the
      best is consciously to dwell in Him.
    </p>
    <p>
      BERLIN, July 20, 1848.&mdash;It gives liberty and breadth to thought, to
      learn to judge our own epoch from the point of view of universal history,
      history from the point of view of geological periods, geology from the
      point of view of astronomy. When the duration of a man&rsquo;s life or of a
      people&rsquo;s life appears to us as microscopic as that of a fly and inversely,
      the life of a gnat as infinite as that of a celestial body, with all its
      dust of nations, we feel ourselves at once very small and very great, and
      we are able, as it were, to survey from the height of the spheres our own
      existence, and the little whirlwinds which agitate our little Europe.
    </p>
    <p>
      At bottom there is but one subject of study: the forms and metamorphoses
      of mind. All other subjects may be reduced to that; all other studies
      bring us back to this study.
    </p>
    <p>
      GENEVA, April 20, 1849.&mdash;It is six years [Footnote: Amiel left Geneva
      for Paris and Berlin in April, 1848, the preceding year, 1841-42, having
      been spent in Italy and Sicily.] to-day since I last left Geneva. How many
      journeys, how many impressions, observations, thoughts, how many forms of
      men and things have since then passed before me and in me! The last seven
      years have been the most important of my life: they have been the
      novitiate of my intelligence, the initiation of my being into being.
    </p>
    <p>
      Three snowstorms this afternoon. Poor blossoming plum-trees and peach
      trees! What a difference from six years ago, when the cherry-trees,
      adorned in their green spring dress and laden with their bridal flowers,
      smiled at my departure along the Vaudois fields, and the lilacs of
      Burgundy threw great gusts of perfume into my face!...
    </p>
    <p>
      May 3, 1849.&mdash;I have never felt any inward assurance of genius, or
      any presentiment of glory or of happiness. I have never seen myself in
      imagination great or famous, or even a husband, a father, an influential
      citizen. This indifference to the future, this absolute self-distrust,
      are, no doubt, to be taken as signs. What dreams I have are all vague and
      indefinite; I ought not to live, for I am now scarcely capable of living.
      Recognize your place; let the living live; and you, gather together your
      thoughts, leave behind you a legacy of feeling and ideas; you will be most
      useful so. Renounce yourself, accept the cup given you, with its honey and
      its gall, as it comes. Bring God down into your heart. Embalm your soul in
      Him now, make within you a temple for the Holy Spirit, be diligent in good
      works, make others happier and better.
    </p>
    <p>
      Put personal ambition away from you, and then you will find consolation in
      living or in dying, whatever may happen to you.
    </p>
    <p>
      May 27, 1849.&mdash;To be misunderstood even by those whom one loves is
      the cross and bitterness of life. It is the secret of that sad and
      melancholy smile on the lips of great men which so few understand; it is
      the cruelest trial reserved for self-devotion; it is what must have
      oftenest wrung the heart of the Son of man; and if God could suffer, it
      would be the wound we should be forever inflicting upon Him. He also&mdash;He
      above all&mdash;is the great misunderstood, the least comprehended. Alas!
      alas! never to tire, never to grow cold; to be patient, sympathetic,
      tender; to look for the budding flower and the opening heart; to hope
      always, like God; to love always&mdash;this is duty.
    </p>
    <p>
      June 3, 1849.&mdash;Fresh and delicious weather. A long morning walk.
      Surprised the hawthorn and wild rose-trees in flower. From the fields
      vague and health-giving scents. The Voirons fringed with dazzling mists,
      and tints of exquisite softness over the Salève. Work in the fields, two
      delightful donkeys, one pulling greedily at a hedge of barberry. Then
      three little children. I felt a boundless desire to caress and play with
      them. To be able to enjoy such leisure, these peaceful fields, fine
      weather, contentment; to have my two sisters with me; to rest my eyes on
      balmy meadows and blossoming orchards; to listen to the life singing in
      the grass and on the trees; to be so calmly happy&mdash;is it not too
      much? is it deserved? O let me enjoy it with gratitude. The days of
      trouble come soon enough and are many enough. I have no presentiment of
      happiness. All the more let me profit by the present. Come, kind nature,
      smile and enchant me! Veil from me awhile my own griefs and those of
      others; let me see only the folds of thy queenly mantle, and hide all
      miserable and ignoble things from me under thy bounties and splendors!
    </p>
    <p>
      October 1, 1849.&mdash;Yesterday, Sunday, I read through and made extracts
      from the gospel of St. John. It confirmed me in my belief that about Jesus
      we must believe no one but Himself, and that what we have to do is to
      discover the true image of the founder behind all the prismatic reactions
      through which it comes to us, and which alter it more or less. A ray of
      heavenly light traversing human life, the message of Christ has been
      broken into a thousand rainbow colors and carried in a thousand
      directions. It is the historical task of Christianity to assume with every
      succeeding age a fresh metamorphosis, and to be forever spiritualizing
      more and more her understanding of the Christ and of salvation.
    </p>
    <p>
      I am astounded at the incredible amount of Judaism and formalism which
      still exists nineteen centuries after the Redeemer&rsquo;s proclamation, &ldquo;it is
      the letter which killeth&rdquo;&mdash;after his protest against a dead
      symbolism. The new religion is so profound that it is not understood even
      now, and would seem a blasphemy to the greater number of Christians. The
      person of Christ is the center of it. Redemption, eternal life, divinity,
      humanity, propitiation, incarnation, judgment, Satan, heaven and hell&mdash;all
      these beliefs have been so materialized and coarsened, that with a strange
      irony they present to us the spectacle of things having a profound meaning
      and yet carnally interpreted. Christian boldness and Christian liberty
      must be reconquered; it is the church which is heretical, the church whose
      sight is troubled and her heart timid. Whether we will or no, there is an
      esoteric doctrine, there is a relative revelation; each man enters into
      God so much as God enters into him, or as Angelus, [Footnote: Angelus
      Silesius, otherwise Johannes Soheffler, the German seventeenth century
      hymn-writer, whose tender and mystical verses have been popularized in
      England by Miss Winkworth&rsquo;s translations in the <i>Lyra Germanica</i>.] I
      think, said, &ldquo;the eye by which I see God is the same eye by which He sees
      me.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Christianity, if it is to triumph over pantheism, must absorb it. To our
      pusillanimous eyes Jesus would have borne the marks of a hateful
      pantheism, for he confirmed the Biblical phrase &ldquo;ye are gods,&rdquo; and so
      would St. Paul, who tells us that we are of &ldquo;the race of God.&rdquo; Our century
      wants a new theology&mdash;that is to say, a more profound explanation of
      the nature of Christ and of the light which it flashes upon heaven and
      upon humanity.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Heroism is the brilliant triumph of the soul over the flesh&mdash;that is
      to say, over fear: fear of poverty, of suffering, of calumny, of sickness,
      of isolation, and of death. There is no serious piety without heroism.
      Heroism is the dazzling and glorious concentration of courage.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive world
      while at the same time detaching us from it.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      December 30, 1850.&mdash;The relation of thought to action filled my mind
      on waking, and I found myself carried toward a bizarre formula, which
      seems to have something of the night still clinging about it: <i>Action is
      but coarsened thought</i>; thought become concrete, obscure, and
      unconscious. It seemed to me that our most trifling actions, of eating,
      walking, and sleeping, were the condensation of a multitude of truths and
      thoughts, and that the wealth of ideas involved was in direct proportion
      to the commonness of the action (as our dreams are the more active, the
      deeper our sleep). We are hemmed round with mystery, and the greatest
      mysteries are contained in what we see and do every day. In all
      spontaneity the work of creation is reproduced in analogy. When the
      spontaneity is unconscious, you have simple action; when it is conscious,
      intelligent and moral action. At bottom this is nothing more than the
      proposition of Hegel: [&ldquo;What is rational is real; and what is real is
      rational;&rdquo;] but it had never seemed to me more evident, more palpable.
      Everything which is, is thought, but not conscious and individual thought.
      The human intelligence is but the consciousness of being. It is what I
      have formulated before: Everything is a symbol of a symbol, and a symbol
      of what? of mind.
    </p>
    <p>
      ... I have just been looking through the complete works of Montesquieu,
      and cannot yet make plain to myself the impression left on me by this
      singular style, with its mixture of gravity and affectation, of
      carelessness and precision, of strength and delicacy; so full of sly
      intention for all its coldness, expressing at once inquisitiveness and
      indifference, abrupt, piecemeal, like notes thrown together haphazard, and
      yet deliberate. I seem to see an intelligence naturally grave and austere
      donning a dress of wit for convention&rsquo;s sake. The author desires to
      entertain as much as to teach, the thinker is also a <i>bel-esprit</i>,
      the jurisconsult has a touch of the coxcomb, and a perfumed breath from
      the temple of Venus has penetrated the tribunal of Minos. Here we have
      austerity, as the century understood it, in philosophy or religion. In
      Montesquieu, the art, if there is any, lies not in the words but in the
      matter. The words run freely and lightly, but the thought is
      self-conscious.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Each bud flowers but once and each flower has but its minute of perfect
      beauty; so, in the garden of the soul each feeling has, as it were, its
      flowering instant, its one and only moment of expansive grace and radiant
      kingship. Each star passes but once in the night through the meridian over
      our heads and shines there but an instant; so, in the heaven of the mind
      each thought touches its zenith but once, and in that moment all its
      brilliancy and all its greatness culminate. Artist, poet, or thinker, if
      you want to fix and immortalize your ideas or your feelings, seize them at
      this precise and fleeting moment, for it is their highest point. Before
      it, you have but vague outlines or dim presentiments of them. After it you
      will have only weakened reminiscence or powerless regret; that moment is
      the moment of your ideal.
    </p>
    <p>
      Spite is anger which is afraid to show itself, it is an impotent fury
      conscious of its impotence.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Nothing resembles pride so much as discouragement.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      To repel one&rsquo;s cross is to make it heavier.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      In the conduct of life, habits count for more than maxims, because habit
      is a living maxim, becomes flesh and instinct. To reform one&rsquo;s maxims is
      nothing: it is but to change the title of the book. To learn new habits is
      everything, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a tissue
      of habits.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      February 17, 1851.&mdash;I have been reading, for six or seven hours
      without stopping the <i>Pensées</i> of Joubert. I felt at first a very
      strong attraction toward the book, and a deep interest in it, but I have
      already a good deal cooled down. These scattered and fragmentary thoughts,
      falling upon one without a pause, like drops of light, tire, not my head,
      but reasoning power. The merits of Joubert consist in the grace of the
      style, the vivacity or <i>finesse</i> of the criticisms, the charm of the
      metaphors; but he starts many more problems than he solves, he notices and
      records more than he explains. His philosophy is merely literary and
      popular; his originality is only in detail and in execution. Altogether,
      he is a writer of reflections rather than a philosopher, a critic of
      remarkable gifts, endowed with exquisite sensibility, but, as an
      intelligence, destitute of the capacity for co-ordination. He wants
      concentration and continuity. It is not that he has no claims to be
      considered a philosopher or an artist, but rather that he is both
      imperfectly, for he thinks and writes marvelously, <i>on a small scale</i>.
      He is an entomologist, a lapidary, a jeweler, a coiner of sentences, of
      adages, of criticisms, of aphorisms, counsels, problems; and his book,
      extracted from the accumulations of his journal during fifty years of his
      life, is a collection of precious stones, of butterflies, coins and
      engraved gems. The whole, however, is more subtle than strong, more
      poetical than profound, and leaves upon the reader rather the impression
      of a great wealth of small curiosities of value, than of a great
      intellectual existence and a new point of view. The place of Joubert seems
      to me then, below and very far from the philosophers and the true poets,
      but honorable among the moralists and the critics. He is one of those men
      who are superior to their works, and who have themselves the unity which
      these lack. This first judgment is, besides, indiscriminate and severe. I
      shall have to modify it later.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 20th.&mdash;I have almost finished these two volumes of <i>Pensées</i>
      and the greater part of the <i>Correspondance</i>. This last has
      especially charmed me; it is remarkable for grace, delicacy, atticism, and
      precision. The chapters on metaphysics and philosophy are the most
      insignificant. All that has to do with large views with the whole of
      things, is very little at Joubert&rsquo;s command; he has no philosophy of
      history, no speculative intuition. He is the thinker of detail, and his
      proper field is psychology and matters of taste. In this sphere of the
      subtleties and delicacies of imagination and feeling, within the circle of
      personal affectation and preoccupations, of social and educational
      interests, he abounds in ingenuity and sagacity, in fine criticisms, in
      exquisite touches. It is like a bee going from flower to flower, a
      teasing, plundering, wayward zephyr, an Aeolian harp, a ray of furtive
      light stealing through the leaves. Taken as a whole, there is something
      impalpable and immaterial about him, which I will not venture to call
      effeminate, but which is scarcely manly. He wants bone and body: timid,
      dreamy, and <i>clairvoyant</i>, he hovers far above reality. He is rather
      a soul, a breath, than a man. It is the mind of a woman in the character
      of a child, so that we feel for him less admiration than tenderness and
      gratitude.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 27, 1851.&mdash;Read over the first book of <i>Emile</i>. I was
      revolted, contrary to all expectation, for I opened the book with a sort
      of hunger for style and beauty. I was conscious instead of an impression
      of heaviness and harshness, of labored, <i>hammering</i> emphasis, of
      something violent, passionate, and obstinate, without serenity, greatness,
      nobility. Both the qualities and the defects of the book produced in me a
      sense of lack of good manners, a blaze of talent, but no grace, no
      distinction, the accent of good company wanting. I understood how it is
      that Rousseau rouses a particular kind of repugnance, the repugnance of
      good taste, and I felt the danger to style involved in such a model as
      well as the danger to thought arising from a truth so alloyed and
      sophisticated. What there is of true and strong in Rousseau did not escape
      me, and I still admired him, but his bad sides appeared to me with a
      clearness relatively new.
    </p>
    <p>
      (<i>Same day.</i>)&mdash;The <i>pensée</i>-writer is to the philosopher
      what the <i>dilettante</i> is to the artist. He plays with thought, and
      makes it produce a crowd of pretty things in detail, but he is more
      anxious about truths than truth, and what is essential in thought, its
      sequence, its unity, escapes him. He handles his instrument agreeably, but
      he does not possess it, still less does he create it. He is a gardener and
      not a geologist; he cultivates the earth only so much as is necessary to
      make it produce for him flowers and fruits; he does not dig deep enough
      into it to understand it. In a word, the <i>pensée</i>-writer deals with
      what is superficial and fragmentary. He is the literary, the oratorical,
      the talking or writing philosopher; whereas the philosopher is the
      scientific <i>pensée</i>-writer. The <i>pensée</i>-writers serve to
      stimulate or to popularize the philosophers. They have thus a double use,
      besides their charm. They are the pioneers of the army of readers, the
      doctors of the crowd, the money-changers of thought, which they convert
      into current coin. The writer of <i>pensée</i> is a man of letters, though
      of a serious type, and therefore he is popular. The philosopher is a
      specialist, as far as the form of his science goes, though not in
      substance, and therefore he can never become popular. In France, for one
      philosopher (Descartes) there have been thirty writers of <i>pensées</i>;
      in Germany, for ten such writers there have been twenty philosophers.
    </p>
    <p>
      March 25, 1851.&mdash;How many illustrious men whom I have known have been
      already reaped by death, Steffens, Marheineke, Neander, Mendelssohn,
      Thorwaldsen, Oelenschläger, Geijer, Tegner, Oersted, Stuhr, Lachmann; and
      with us, Sismondi, Töpffer, de Candolle, savants, artists, poets,
      musicians, historians. [Footnote: Of these Marheineke, Neander, and
      Lachmann had been lecturing at Berlin during Amiel&rsquo;s residence there. The
      Danish dramatic poet Oelenschläger and the Swedish writer Tegner were
      among the Scandinavian men of letters with whom he made acquaintance
      during his tour of Sweden and Denmark in 1845. He probably came across the
      Swedish historian Geijer on the same occasion. Schelling and Alexander von
      Humboldt, mentioned a little lower down, were also still holding sway at
      Berlin when he was a student. There is an interesting description in one
      of his articles on Berlin, published in the <i>Bibliothèque Universelle de
      Genève</i>, of a university ceremonial there in or about 1847, and of the
      effect produced on the student&rsquo;s young imagination by the sight of half
      the leaders of European research gathered into a single room. He saw
      Schlosser, the veteran historian, at Heidelberg at the end of 1843.] The
      old generation is going. What will the new bring us? What shall we
      ourselves contribute? A few great old men&mdash;Schelling, Alexander von
      Humboldt, Schlosser&mdash;still link us with the glorious past. Who is
      preparing to bear the weight of the future? A shiver seizes us when the
      ranks grow thin around us, when age is stealing upon us, when we approach
      the zenith, and when destiny says to us: &ldquo;Show what is in thee! Now is the
      moment, now is the hour, else fall back into nothingness! It is thy turn!
      Give the world thy measure, say thy word, reveal thy nullity or thy
      capacity. Come forth from the shade! It is no longer a question of
      promising, thou must perform. The time of apprenticeship is over. Servant,
      show us what thou hast done with thy talent. Speak now, or be silent
      forever.&rdquo; This appeal of the conscience is a solemn summons in the life of
      every man, solemn and awful as the trumpet of the last judgment. It cries,
      &ldquo;Art thou ready? Give an account. Give an account of thy years, thy
      leisure, thy strength, thy studies, thy talent, and thy works. Now and
      here is the hour of great hearts, the hour of heroism and of genius.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      April 6, 1851.&mdash;Was there ever any one so vulnerable as I? If I were
      a father how many griefs and vexations, a child might cause me. As a
      husband I should have a thousand ways of suffering because my happiness
      demands a thousand conditions I have a heart too easily reached, a too
      restless imagination; despair is easy to me, and every sensation
      reverberates again and again within me. What might be, spoils for me what
      is. What ought to be consumes me with sadness. So the reality, the
      present, the irreparable, the necessary, repel and even terrify me. I have
      too much imagination, conscience and penetration, and not enough
      character. The life of thought alone seems to me to have enough elasticity
      and immensity, to be free enough from the irreparable; practical life
      makes me afraid.
    </p>
    <p>
      And yet, at the same time it attracts me; I have need of it. Family life,
      especially, in all its delightfulness, in all its moral depth, appeals to
      me almost like a duty. Sometimes I cannot escape from the ideal of it. A
      companion of my life, of my work, of my thoughts, of my hopes; within, a
      common worship, toward the world outside, kindness and beneficence;
      educations to undertake, the thousand and one moral relations which
      develop round the first, all these ideas intoxicate me sometimes. But I
      put them aside because every hope is, as it were, an egg whence a serpent
      may issue instead of a dove, because every joy missed is a stab; because
      every seed confided to destiny contains an ear of grief which the future
      may develop.
    </p>
    <p>
      I am distrustful of myself and of happiness because I know myself. The
      ideal poisons for me all imperfect possession. Everything which
      compromises the future or destroys my inner liberty, which enslaves me to
      things or obliges me to be other than I could and ought to be, all which
      injures my idea of the perfect man, hurts me mortally, degrades and wounds
      me in mind, even beforehand. I abhor useless regrets and repentances. The
      fatality of the consequences which follow upon every human act, the
      leading idea of dramatic art and the most tragic element of life, arrests
      me more certainly than the arm of the <i>Commandeur</i>. I only act with
      regret, and almost by force.
    </p>
    <p>
      To be dependent is to me terrible; but to depend upon what is irreparable,
      arbitrary and unforeseen, and above all to be so dependent by my fault and
      through my own error, to give up liberty and hope, to slay sleep and
      happiness, this would be hell!
    </p>
    <p>
      All that is necessary, providential, in short, <i>unimputable</i>, I could
      bear, I think, with some strength of mind. But responsibility mortally
      envenoms grief; and as an act is essentially voluntary, therefore I act as
      little as possible.
    </p>
    <p>
      Last outbreak of a rebellious and deceitful self-will, craving for repose
      for satisfaction, for independence! is there not some relic of selfishness
      in such a disinterestedness, such a fear, such idle susceptibility.
    </p>
    <p>
      I wish to fulfill my duty, but where is it, what is it? Here inclination
      comes in again and interprets the oracle. And the ultimate question is
      this: Does duty consist in obeying one&rsquo;s nature, even the best and most
      spiritual? or in conquering it?
    </p>
    <p>
      Life, is it essentially the education of the mind and intelligence, or
      that of the will? And does will show itself in strength or in resignation?
      If the aim of life is to teach us renunciation, then welcome sickness,
      hindrances, sufferings of every kind! But if its aim is to produce the
      perfect man, then one must watch over one&rsquo;s integrity of mind and body. To
      court trial is to tempt God. At bottom, the God of justice veils from me
      the God of love. I tremble instead of trusting.
    </p>
    <p>
      Whenever conscience speaks with a divided, uncertain, and disputed voice,
      it is not yet the voice of God. Descend still deeper into yourself, until
      you hear nothing but a clear and undivided voice, a voice which does away
      with doubt and brings with it persuasion, light and serenity. Happy, says
      the apostle, are they who are at peace with themselves, and whose heart
      condemneth them not in the part they take. This inner identity, this unity
      of conviction, is all the more difficult the more the mind analyzes,
      discriminates, and foresees. It is difficult, indeed, for liberty to
      return to the frank unity of instinct.
    </p>
    <p>
      Alas! we must then re-climb a thousand times the peaks already scaled, and
      reconquer the points of view already won, we must <i>fight the fight</i>!
      The human heart, like kings, signs mere truces under a pretence of
      perpetual peace. The eternal life is eternally to be re-won. Alas, yes!
      peace itself is a struggle, or rather it is struggle and activity which
      are the law. We only find rest in effort, as the flame only finds
      existence in combustion. O Heraclitus! the symbol of happiness is after
      all the same as that of grief; anxiety and hope, hell and heaven, are
      equally restless. The altar of Vesta and the sacrifice of Beelzebub burn
      with the same fire. Ah, yes, there you have life&mdash;life double-faced
      and double-edged. The fire which enlightens is also the fire which
      consumes; the element of the gods may become that of the accursed.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 7, 1851.&mdash;Read a part of Ruge&rsquo;s [Footnote: Arnold Ruge, born in
      1803, died at Brighton in 1880, principal editor of the <i>Hallische</i>,
      afterward the <i>Deutsche Jahrbücher</i> (1838-43), in which Strauss,
      Bruno Bauer, and Louis Feuerbach wrote. He was a member of the parliament
      of Frankfort.] volume &ldquo;<i>Die Academie</i>&rdquo; (1848) where the humanism of
      the neo-Hegelians in politics, religion, and literature is represented by
      correspondents or articles (Kuno Fischer, Kollach, etc). They recall the
      <i>philosophist</i> party of the last century, able to dissolve anything
      by reason and reasoning, but unable to construct anything; for
      construction rests upon feeling, instinct, and will. One finds them
      mistaking philosophic consciousness for realizing power, the redemption of
      the intelligence for the redemption of the heart, that is to say, the part
      for the whole. These papers make me understand the radical difference
      between morals and intellectualism. The writers of them wish to supplant
      religion by philosophy. Man is the principle of their religion, and
      intellect is the climax of man. Their religion, then, is the religion of
      intellect. There you have the two worlds: Christianity brings and preaches
      salvation by the conversion of the will, humanism by the emancipation of
      the mind. One attacks the heart, the other the brain. Both wish to enable
      man to reach his ideal. But the ideal differs, if not by its content, at
      least by the disposition of its content, by the predominance and
      sovereignty given to this for that inner power. For one, the mind is the
      organ of the soul; for the other, the soul is an inferior state of the
      mind; the one wishes to enlighten by making better, the other to make
      better by enlightening. It is the difference between Socrates and Jesus.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>The cardinal question is that of sin.</i> The question of immanence or
      of dualism is secondary. The trinity, the life to come, paradise and hell,
      may cease to be dogmas, and spiritual realities, the form and the letter
      may vanish away, the question of humanity remains: What is it which saves?
      How can man be led to be truly man? Is the ultimate root of his being
      responsibility, yes or no? And is doing or knowing the right, acting or
      thinking, his ultimate end? If science does not produce love it is
      insufficient. Now all that science gives is the <i>amor intellectualis</i>
      of Spinoza, light without warmth, a resignation which is contemplative and
      grandiose, but inhuman, because it is scarcely transmissible and remains a
      privilege, one of the rarest of all. Moral love places the center of the
      individual in the center of being. It has at least salvation in principle,
      the germ of eternal life. <i>To love is virtually to know; to know is not
      virtually to love</i>; there you have the relation of these two modes of
      man. The redemption wrought by science or by intellectual love is then
      inferior to the redemption wrought by will or by moral love. The first may
      free a man from himself, it may enfranchise him from egotism. The second
      drives the <i>ego</i> out of itself, makes it active and fruitful. The one
      is critical, purifying, negative; the other is vivifying, fertilizing,
      positive. Science, however spiritual and substantial it may be in itself,
      is still formal relatively to love. Moral force is then the vital point.
      And this force is only produced by moral force. Like alone acts upon like.
      Therefore do not amend by reasoning, but by example; approach feeling by
      feeling; do not hope to excite love except by love. Be what you wish
      others to become. Let yourself and not your words preach for you.
    </p>
    <p>
      Philosophy, then, to return to the subject, can never replace religion;
      revolutionaries are not apostles, although the apostles may have been
      revolutionaries. To save from the outside to the inside&mdash;and by the
      outside I understand also the intelligence relatively to the will&mdash;is
      an error and danger. The negative part of the humanist&rsquo;s work is good; it
      will strip Christianity of an outer shell, which has become superfluous;
      but Ruge and Feuerbach cannot save humanity. She must have her saints and
      her heroes to complete the work of her philosophers. Science is the power
      of man, and love his strength; man <i>becomes</i> man only by the
      intelligence, but he <i>is</i> man only by the heart. Knowledge, love,
      power&mdash;there is the complete life.
    </p>
    <p>
      June 16, 1851.&mdash;This evening I walked up and down on the Pont des
      Bergues, under a clear, moonless heaven delighting in the freshness of the
      water, streaked with light from the two quays, and glimmering under the
      twinkling stars. Meeting all these different groups of young people,
      families, couples and children, who were returning to their homes, to
      their garrets or their drawing-rooms, singing or talking as they went, I
      felt a movement of sympathy for all these passers-by; my eyes and ears
      became those of a poet or a painter; while even one&rsquo;s mere kindly
      curiosity seems to bring with it a joy in living and in seeing others
      live.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 15, 1851.&mdash;To know how to be ready, a great thing, a precious
      gift, and one that implies calculation, grasp and decision. To be always
      ready a man must be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied;
      he must know how to disengage what is essential from the detail in which
      it is enwrapped, for everything cannot be equally considered; in a word,
      he must be able to simplify his duties, his business, and his life. To
      know how to be ready, is to know how to start.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is astonishing how all of us are generally cumbered up with the
      thousand and one hindrances and duties which are not such, but which
      nevertheless wind us about with their spider threads and fetter the
      movement of our wings. It is the lack of order which makes us slaves; the
      confusion of to-day discounts the freedom of to-morrow.
    </p>
    <p>
      Confusion is the enemy of all comfort, and confusion is born of
      procrastination. To know how to be ready we must be able to finish.
      Nothing is done but what is finished. The things which we leave dragging
      behind us will start up again later on before us and harass our path. Let
      each day take thought for what concerns it, liquidate its own affairs and
      respect the day which is to follow, and then we shall be always ready. To
      know how to be ready is at bottom to know how to die.
    </p>
    <p>
      September 2, 1851.&mdash;Read the work of Tocqueville (&ldquo;<i>De la
      Democratie en Amérique</i>.&rdquo;) My impression is as yet a mixed one. A fine
      book, but I feel in it a little too much imitation of Montesquieu. This
      abstract, piquant, sententious style, too, is a little dry, over-refined
      and monotonous. It has too much cleverness and not enough imagination. It
      makes one think, more than it charms, and though really serious, it seems
      flippant. His method of splitting up a thought, of illuminating a subject
      by successive facets, has serious inconveniences. We see the details too
      clearly, to the detriment of the whole. A multitude of sparks gives but a
      poor light. Nevertheless, the author is evidently a ripe and penetrating
      intelligence, who takes a comprehensive view of his subject, while at the
      same time possessing a power of acute and exhaustive analysis.
    </p>
    <p>
      September 6th.&mdash;Tocqueville&rsquo;s book has on the whole a calming effect
      upon the mind, but it leaves a certain sense of disgust behind. It makes
      one realize the necessity of what is happening around us and the
      inevitableness of the goal prepared for us; but it also makes it plain
      that the era of <i>mediocrity</i> in everything is beginning, and
      mediocrity freezes all desire. Equality engenders uniformity, and it is by
      sacrificing what is excellent, remarkable, and extraordinary that we get
      rid of what is bad. The whole becomes less barbarous, and at the same time
      more vulgar.
    </p>
    <p>
      The age of great men is going; the epoch of the ant-hill, of life in
      multiplicity, is beginning. The century of individualism, if abstract
      equality triumphs, runs a great risk of seeing no more true individuals.
      By continual leveling and division of labor, society will become
      everything and man nothing.
    </p>
    <p>
      As the floor of valleys is raised by the denudation and washing down of
      the mountains, what is average will rise at the expense of what is great.
      The exceptional will disappear. A plateau with fewer and fewer
      undulations, without contrasts and without oppositions, such will be the
      aspect of human society. The statistician will register a growing
      progress, and the moralist a gradual decline: on the one hand, a progress
      of things; on the other, a decline of souls. The useful will take the
      place of the beautiful, industry of art, political economy of religion,
      and arithmetic of poetry. The spleen will become the malady of a leveling
      age.
    </p>
    <p>
      Is this indeed the fate reserved for the democratic era? May not the
      general well-being be purchased too dearly at such a price? The creative
      force which in the beginning we see forever tending to produce and
      multiply differences, will it afterward retrace its steps and obliterate
      them one by one? And equality, which in the dawn of existence is mere
      inertia, torpor, and death, is it to become at last the natural form of
      life? Or rather, above the economic and political equality to which the
      socialist and non-socialist democracy aspires, taking it too often for the
      term of its efforts, will there not arise a new kingdom of mind, a church
      of refuge, a republic of souls, in which, far beyond the region of mere
      right and sordid utility, beauty, devotion, holiness, heroism, enthusiasm,
      the extraordinary, the infinite, shall have a worship and an abiding city?
      Utilitarian materialism, barren well-being, the idolatry of the flesh and
      of the &ldquo;I,&rdquo; of the temporal and of mammon, are they to be the goal if our
      efforts, the final recompense promised to the labors of our race? I do not
      believe it. The ideal of humanity is something different and higher.
    </p>
    <p>
      But the animal in us must be satisfied first, and we must first banish
      from among us all suffering which is superfluous and has its origin in
      social arrangements, before we can return to spiritual goods.
    </p>
    <p>
      September 7, 1851. (<i>Aix</i>).&mdash;It is ten o&rsquo;clock at night. A
      strange and mystic moonlight, with a fresh breeze and a sky crossed by a
      few wandering clouds, makes our terrace delightful. These pale and gentle
      rays shed from the zenith a subdued and penetrating peace; it is like the
      calm joy or the pensive smile of experience, combined with a certain stoic
      strength. The stars shine, the leaves tremble in the silver light. Not a
      sound in all the landscape; great gulfs of shadow under the green alleys
      and at the corners of the steps. Everything is secret, solemn, mysterious.
    </p>
    <p>
      O night hours, hours of silence and solitude! with you are grace and
      melancholy; you sadden and you console. You speak to us of all that has
      passed away, and of all that must still die, but you say to us, &ldquo;courage!&rdquo;
       and you promise us rest.
    </p>
    <p>
      November 9, 1851. (Sunday).&mdash;At the church of St. Gervais, a second
      sermon from Adolphe Monod, less grandiose perhaps but almost more
      original, and to me more edifying than that of last Sunday. The subject
      was St. Paul or the active life, his former one having been St. John or
      the inner life, of the Christian. I felt the golden spell of eloquence: I
      found myself hanging on the lips of the orator, fascinated by his
      boldness, his grace, his energy, and his art, his sincerity, and his
      talent; and it was borne in upon me that for some men difficulties are a
      source of inspiration, so that what would make others stumble is for them
      the occasion of their highest triumphs. He made St. Paul <i>cry</i> during
      an hour and a half; he made an old nurse of him, he hunted up his old
      cloak, his prescriptions of water and wine to Timothy, the canvas that he
      mended, his friend Tychicus, in short, all that could raise a smile; and
      from it he drew the most unfailing pathos, the most austere and
      penetrating lessons. He made the whole St. Paul, martyr, apostle and man,
      his grief, his charities, his tenderness, live again before us, and this
      with a grandeur, an unction, a warmth of reality, such as I had never seen
      equaled.
    </p>
    <p>
      How stirring is such an apotheosis of pain in our century of comfort, when
      shepherds and sheep alike sink benumbed in Capuan languors, such an
      apotheosis of ardent charity in a time of coldness and indifference toward
      souls, such an apotheosis of a <i>human</i>, natural, inbred Christianity,
      in an age, when some put it, so to speak, above man, and others below man!
      Finally, as a peroration, he dwelt upon the necessity for a new people,
      for a stronger generation, if the world is to be saved from the tempests
      which threaten it. &ldquo;People of God, awake! Sow in tears, that ye may reap
      in triumph!&rdquo; What a study is such a sermon! I felt all the extraordinary
      literary skill of it, while my eyes were still dim with tears. Diction,
      composition, similes, all is instructive and precious to remember. I was
      astonished, shaken, taken hold of.
    </p>
    <p>
      November 18, 1851.&mdash;The energetic subjectivity, which has faith in
      itself, which does not fear to be something particular and definite
      without any consciousness or shame of its subjective illusion, is unknown
      to me. I am, so far as the intellectual order is concerned, essentially
      objective, and my distinctive speciality, is to be able to place myself in
      all points of view, to see through all eyes, to emancipate myself, that is
      to say, from the individual prison. Hence aptitude for theory and
      irresolution in practice; hence critical talent and difficulty in
      spontaneous production. Hence, also, a continuous uncertainty of
      conviction and opinion, so long as my aptitude remained mere instinct; but
      now that it is conscious and possesses itself, it is able to conclude and
      affirm in its turn, so that, after having brought disquiet, it now brings
      peace. It says: &ldquo;There is no repose for the mind except in the absolute;
      for feeling, except in the infinite; for the soul, except in the divine.&rdquo;
       Nothing finite is true, is interesting, or worthy to fix my attention. All
      that is particular is exclusive, and all that is exclusive, repels me.
      There is nothing non-exclusive but the All; my end is communion with Being
      through the whole of Being. Then, in the light of the absolute, every idea
      becomes worth studying; in that of the infinite, every existence worth
      respecting; in that of the divine, every creature worth loving.
    </p>
    <p>
      December 2, 1851.&mdash;Let mystery have its place in you; do not be
      always turning up your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination,
      but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the
      winds may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a
      place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an altar for the unknown
      God. Then if a bird sing among your branches, do not be too eager to tame
      it. If you are conscious of something new&mdash;thought or feeling,
      wakening in the depths of your being&mdash;do not be in a hurry to let in
      light upon it, to look at it; let the springing germ have the protection
      of being forgotten, hedge it round with quiet, and do not break in upon
      its darkness; let it take shape and grow, and not a word of your happiness
      to any one! Sacred work of nature as it is, all conception should be
      enwrapped by the triple veil of modesty, silence and night.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Kindness is the principle of tact, and respect for others the first
      condition of <i>savoir-vivre</i>.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      He who is silent is forgotten; he who abstains is taken at his word; he
      who does not advance, falls back; he who stops is overwhelmed, distanced,
      crushed; he who ceases to grow greater becomes smaller; he who leaves off,
      gives up; the stationary condition is the beginning of the end&mdash;it is
      the terrible symptom which precedes death. To live, is to achieve a
      perpetual triumph; it is to assert one&rsquo;s self against destruction, against
      sickness, against the annulling and dispersion of one&rsquo;s physical and moral
      being. It is to will without ceasing, or rather to refresh one&rsquo;s will day
      by day.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      It is not history which teaches conscience to be honest; it is the
      conscience which educates history. Fact is corrupting, it is we who
      correct it by the persistence of our ideal. The soul moralizes the past in
      order not to be demoralized by it. Like the alchemists of the middle ages,
      she finds in the crucible of experience only the gold that she herself has
      poured into it.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      February 1, 1852. (Sunday).&mdash;Passed the afternoon in reading the <i>Monologues</i>
      of Schleiermacher. This little book made an impression on me almost as
      deep as it did twelve years ago, when I read it for the first time. It
      replunged me into the inner world, to which I return with joy whenever I
      may have forsaken it. I was able besides, to measure my progress since
      then by the transparency of all the thoughts to me, and by the freedom
      with which I entered into and judged the point of view.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is great, powerful, profound, but there is still pride in it, and even
      selfishness. For the center of the universe is still the self, the great
      <i>Ich</i> of Fichte. The tameless liberty, the divine dignity of the
      individual spirit, expanding till it admits neither any limit nor anything
      foreign to itself, and conscious of a strength instinct with creative
      force, such is the point of view of the <i>Monologues</i>.
    </p>
    <p>
      The inner life in its enfranchisement from time, in its double end, the
      realization of the species and of the individuality, in its proud dominion
      over all hostile circumstances, in its prophetic certainty of the future,
      in its immortal youth, such is their theme. Through them we are enabled to
      enter into a life of monumental interest, wholly original and beyond the
      influence of anything exterior, an astonishing example of the autonomy of
      the <i>ego</i>, an imposing type of character, Zeno and Fichte in one. But
      still the motive power of this life is not religious; it is rather moral
      and philosophic. I see in it not so much a magnificent model to imitate as
      a precious subject of study. This ideal of a liberty, absolute,
      indefeasible, inviolable, respecting itself above all, disdaining the
      visible and the universe, and developing itself after its own laws alone,
      is also the ideal of Emerson, the stoic of a young America. According to
      it, man finds his joy in himself, and, safe in the inaccessible sanctuary,
      of his personal consciousness, becomes almost a god. [Footnote: Compare
      Clough&rsquo;s lines:
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Where are the great, whom thou would&rsquo;st wish to praise thee?
  Where are the pure, whom thou would&rsquo;st choose to love thee?
  Where are the brave, to stand supreme above thee?
  Whose high commands would cheer, whose chidings raise thee?
  Seek, seeker, in thyself; submit to find
  In the stones, bread, and life in the blank mind.&rdquo;]
</pre>
    <p>
      He is himself principle, motive, and end of his own destiny; he is
      himself, and that is enough for him. This superb triumph of life is not
      far from being a sort of impiety, or at least a displacement of adoration.
      By the mere fact that it does away with humility, such a superhuman point
      of view becomes dangerous; it is the very temptation to which the first
      man succumbed, that of becoming his own master by becoming like unto the
      Elohim. Here then the heroism of the philosopher approaches temerity, and
      the <i>Monologues</i> are therefore open to three reproaches:
      Ontologically, the position of man in the spiritual universe is wrongly
      indicated; the individual soul, not being unique and not springing from
      itself, can it be conceived without God? Psychologically, the force of
      spontaneity in the <i>ego</i> is allowed a dominion too exclusive of any
      other. As a fact, it is not everything in man. Morally, evil is scarcely
      named, and conflict, the condition of true peace, is left out of count. So
      that the peace described in the <i>Monologues</i> is neither a conquest by
      man nor a grace from heaven; it is rather a stroke of good fortune.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 2d.&mdash;Still the <i>Monologues</i>. Critically I defended
      myself enough against them yesterday; I may abandon myself now, without
      scruple and without danger, to the admiration and the sympathy with which
      they inspire me. This life so proudly independent, this sovereign
      conception of human dignity, this actual possession of the universe and
      the infinite, this perfect emancipation from all which passes, this calm
      sense of strength and superiority, this invincible energy of will, this
      infallible clearness of self-vision, this autocracy of the consciousness
      which is its own master, all these decisive marks of a royal personality
      of a nature Olympian, profound, complete, harmonious, penetrate the mind
      with joy and heart with gratitude. What a life! what a man! These glimpses
      into the inner regions of a great soul do one good. Contact of this kind
      strengthens, restores, refreshes. Courage returns as we gaze; when we see
      what has been, we doubt no more that it can be again. At the sight of a <i>man</i>
      we too say to ourselves, let us also be men.
    </p>
    <p>
      March 3, 1852.&mdash;Opinion has its value and even its power: to have it
      against us is painful when we are among friends, and harmful in the case
      of the outer world. We should neither flatter opinion nor court it; but it
      is better, if we can help it, not to throw it on to a false scent. The
      first error is a meanness; the second an imprudence. We should be ashamed
      of the one; we may regret the other. Look to yourself; you are much given
      to this last fault, and it has already done you great harm. Be ready to
      bend your pride; abase yourself even so far as to show yourself ready and
      clever like others. This world of skillful egotisms and active ambitions,
      this world of men, in which one must deceive by smiles, conduct, and
      silence as much as by actual words, a world revolting to the proud and
      upright soul, it is our business to learn to live in it! Success is
      required in it: succeed. Only force is recognized there: be strong.
      Opinion seeks to impose her law upon all, instead of setting her at
      defiance, it would be better to struggle with her and conquer.... I
      understand the indignation of contempt, and the wish to crush, roused
      irresistibly by all that creeps, all that is tortuous, oblique,
      ignoble.... But I cannot maintain such a mood, which is a mood of
      vengeance, for long. This world is a world of men, and these men are our
      brothers. We must not banish from us the divine breath, we must love. Evil
      must be conquered by good; and before all things one must keep a pure
      conscience. Prudence may be preached from this point of view too. &ldquo;Be ye
      simple as the dove and prudent as the serpent,&rdquo; are the words of Jesus. Be
      careful of your reputation, not through vanity, but that you may not harm
      your life&rsquo;s work, and out of love for truth. There is still something of
      self-seeking in the refined disinterestedness which will not justify
      itself, that it may feel itself superior to opinion. It requires ability,
      to make what we seem agree with what we are, and humility, to feel that we
      are no great things.
    </p>
    <p>
      There, thanks to this journal, my excitement has passed away. I have just
      read the last book of it through again, and the morning has passed by. On
      the way I have been conscious of a certain amount of monotony. It does not
      signify! These pages are not written to be read; they are written for my
      own consolation and warning. They are landmarks in my past; and some of
      the landmarks are funeral crosses, stone pyramids, withered stalks grown
      green again, white pebbles, coins&mdash;all of them helpful toward finding
      one&rsquo;s way again through the Elysian fields of the soul. The pilgrim has
      marked his stages in it; he is able to trace by it his thoughts, his
      tears, his joys. This is my traveling diary: if some passages from it may
      be useful to others, and if sometimes even I have communicated such
      passages to the public, these thousand pages as a whole are only of value
      to me and to those who, after me, may take some interest in the itinerary
      of an obscurely conditioned soul, far from the world&rsquo;s noise and fame.
      These sheets will be monotonous when my life is so; they will repeat
      themselves when feelings repeat themselves; truth at any rate will be
      always there, and truth is their only muse, their only pretext, their only
      duty.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 2, 1852.&mdash;What a lovely walk! Sky clear, sun rising, all the
      tints bright, all the outlines sharp, save for the soft and misty infinite
      of the lake. A pinch of white frost, powdered the fields, lending a
      metallic relief to the hedges of green box, and to the whole landscape,
      still without leaves, an air of health and vigor, of youth and freshness.
      &ldquo;Bathe, O disciple, thy thirsty soul in the dew of the dawn!&rdquo; says Faust,
      to us, and he is right. The morning air breathes a new and laughing energy
      into veins and marrow. If every day is a repetition of life, every dawn
      gives signs as it were a new contract with existence. At dawn everything
      is fresh, light, simple, as it is for children. At dawn spiritual truth,
      like the atmosphere, is more transparent, and our organs, like the young
      leaves, drink in the light more eagerly, breathe in more ether, and less
      of things earthly. If night and the starry sky speak to the meditative
      soul of God, of eternity and the infinite, the dawn is the time for
      projects, for resolutions, for the birth of action. While the silence and
      the &ldquo;sad serenity of the azure vault,&rdquo; incline the soul to
      self-recollection, the vigor and gayety of nature spread into the heart
      and make it eager for life and living. Spring is upon us. Primroses and
      violets have already hailed her coming. Rash blooms are showing on the
      peach trees; the swollen buds of the pear trees and the lilacs point to
      the blossoming that is to be; the honeysuckles are already green.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 26, 1852.&mdash;This evening a feeling of emptiness took possession
      of me; and the solemn ideas of duty, the future, solitude, pressed
      themselves upon me. I gave myself to meditation, a very necessary defense
      against the dispersion and distraction brought about by the day&rsquo;s work and
      its detail. Read a part of Krause&rsquo;s book &ldquo;<i>Urbild der Menschheit</i>&rdquo;
       [Footnote: Christian Frederick Krause, died 1832, Hegel&rsquo;s younger
      contemporary, and the author of a system which he called <i>panentheism</i>&mdash;Amiel
      alludes to it later on.] which answered marvelously to my thought and my
      need. This philosopher has always a beneficent effect upon me; his sweet
      religious serenity gains upon me and invades me. He inspires me with a
      sense of peace and infinity.
    </p>
    <p>
      Still I miss something, common worship, a positive religion, shared with
      other people. Ah! when will the church to which I belong in heart rise
      into being? I cannot like Scherer, content myself with being in the right
      all alone. I must have a less solitary Christianity. My religious needs
      are not satisfied any more than my social needs, or my needs of affection.
      Generally I am able to forget them and lull them to sleep. But at times
      they wake up with a sort of painful bitterness ... I waver between languor
      and <i>ennui</i>, between frittering myself away on the infinitely little,
      and longing after what is unknown and distant. It is like the situation
      which French novelists are so fond of, the story of a <i>vie de province</i>;
      only the province is all that is not the country of the soul, every place
      where the heart feels itself strange, dissatisfied, restless and thirsty.
      Alas! well understood, this place is the earth, this country of one&rsquo;s
      dreams is heaven, and this suffering is the eternal homesickness, the
      thirst for happiness.
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;<i>In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister</i>,&rdquo; says Goethe. <i>Mâle
      résignation</i>, this also is the motto of those who are masters of the
      art of life; &ldquo;manly,&rdquo; that is to say, courageous, active, resolute,
      persevering, &ldquo;resignation,&rdquo; that is to say, self-sacrifice, renunciation,
      limitation. Energy in resignation, there lies the wisdom of the sons of
      earth, the only serenity possible in this life of struggle and of combat.
      In it is the peace of martyrdom, in it too the promise of triumph.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 28, 1852. (Lancy.) [Footnote: A village near Geneva.]&mdash;Once
      more I feel the spring languor creeping over me, the spring air about me.
      This morning the poetry of the scene, the song of the birds, the tranquil
      sunlight, the breeze blowing over the fresh green fields, all rose into
      and filled my heart. Now all is silent. O silence, thou art terrible!
      terrible as that calm of the ocean which lets the eye penetrate the
      fathomless abysses below. Thou showest us in ourselves depths which make
      us giddy, inextinguishable needs, treasures of suffering. Welcome
      tempests! at least they blur and trouble the surface of these waters with
      their terrible secrets. Welcome the passion blasts which stir the wares of
      the soul, and so veil from us its bottomless gulfs! In all of us, children
      of dust, sons of time, eternity inspires an involuntary anguish, and the
      infinite, a mysterious terror. We seem to be entering a kingdom of the
      dead. Poor heart, thy craving is for life, for love, for illusions! And
      thou art right after all, for life is sacred.
    </p>
    <p>
      In these moments of <i>tête-à-tête</i> with the infinite, how different
      life looks! How all that usually occupies and excites us becomes suddenly
      puerile, frivolous and vain. We seem to ourselves mere puppets,
      marionettes, strutting seriously through a fantastic show, and mistaking
      gewgaws for things of great price. At such moments, how everything becomes
      transformed, how everything changes! Berkeley and Fichte seem right,
      Emerson too; the world is but an allegory; the idea is more real than the
      fact; fairy tales, legends, are as true as natural history, and even more
      true, for they are emblems of greater transparency. The only substance
      properly so called is the soul. What is all the rest? Mere shadow,
      pretext, figure, symbol, or dream. Consciousness alone is immortal,
      positive, perfectly real. The world is but a firework, a sublime
      phantasmagoria, destined to cheer and form the soul. Consciousness is a
      universe, and its sun is love....
    </p>
    <p>
      Already I am falling back into the objective life of thought. It delivers
      me from&mdash;shall I say? no, it deprives me of the intimate life of
      feeling. Reflection solves reverie and burns her delicate wings. This is
      why science does not make men, but merely entities and abstractions. Ah,
      let us feel and live and beware of too much analysis! Let us put
      spontaneity, <i>naïveté</i>, before reflection, experience before study;
      let us make life itself our study. Shall I then never have the heart of a
      woman to rest upon? a son in whom to live again, a little world where I
      may see flowering and blooming all that is stifled in me? I shrink and
      draw back, for fear of breaking my dream. I have staked so much on this
      card that I dare not play it. Let me dream again....
    </p>
    <p>
      Do no violence to yourself, respect in yourself the oscillations of
      feeling. They are your life and your nature; One wiser than you ordained
      them. Do not abandon yourself altogether either to instinct or to will.
      Instinct is a siren, will a despot. Be neither the slave of your impulses
      and sensations of the moment, nor of an abstract and general plan; be open
      to what life brings from within and without, and welcome the unforeseen;
      but give to your life unity, and bring the unforeseen within the lines of
      your plan. Let what is natural in you raise itself to the level of the
      spiritual, and let the spiritual become once more natural. Thus will your
      development be harmonious, and the peace of heaven will shine upon your
      brow; always on condition that your peace is made, and that you have
      climbed your Calvary.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Afternoon</i>&mdash;Shall I ever enjoy again those marvelous reveries
      of past days, as, for instance, once, when I was still quite a youth, in
      the early dawn, sitting among the ruins of the castle of Faucigny; another
      time in the mountains above Lavey, under the midday sun, lying under a
      tree and visited by three butterflies; and again another night on the
      sandy shore of the North Sea, stretched full length upon the beach, my
      eyes wandering over the Milky Way? Will they ever return to me, those
      grandiose, immortal, cosmogonic dreams, in which one seems to carry the
      world in one&rsquo;s breast, to touch the stars, to possess the infinite? Divine
      moments, hours of ecstasy, when thought flies from world to world,
      penetrates the great enigma, breathes with a respiration large, tranquil,
      and profound, like that of the ocean, and hovers serene and boundless like
      the blue heaven! Visits from the muse, Urania, who traces around the
      foreheads of those she loves the phosphorescent nimbus of contemplative
      power, and who pours into their hearts the tranquil intoxication, if not
      the authority of genius, moments of irresistible intuition in which a man
      feels himself great like the universe and calm like a god! From the
      celestial spheres down to the shell or the moss, the whole of creation is
      then submitted to our gaze, lives in our breast, and accomplishes in us
      its eternal work with the regularity of destiny and the passionate ardor
      of love. What hours, what memories! The traces which remain to us of them
      are enough to fill us with respect and enthusiasm, as though they had been
      visits of the Holy Spirit. And then, to fall back again from these heights
      with their boundless horizons into the muddy ruts of triviality! what a
      fall! Poor Moses! Thou too sawest undulating in the distance the ravishing
      hills of the promised land, and it was thy fate nevertheless to lay thy
      weary bones in a grave dug in the desert! Which of us has not his promised
      land, his day of ecstasy and his death in exile? What a pale counterfeit
      is real life of the life we see in glimpses, and how these flaming
      lightnings of our prophetic youth make the twilight of our dull monotonous
      manhood more dark and dreary!
    </p>
    <p>
      April 29 (Lancy).&mdash;This morning the air was calm, the sky slightly
      veiled. I went out into the garden to see what progress the spring was
      making. I strolled from the irises to the lilacs, round the flower-beds,
      and in the shrubberies. Delightful surprise! at the corner of the walk,
      half hidden under a thick clump of shrubs, a small leaved <i>chorchorus</i>
      had flowered during the night. Gay and fresh as a bunch of bridal flowers,
      the little shrub glittered before me in all the attraction of its opening
      beauty. What springlike innocence, what soft and modest loveliness, there
      was in these white corollas, opening gently to the sun, like thoughts
      which smile upon us at waking, and perched upon their young leaves of
      virginal green like bees upon the wing! Mother of marvels, mysterious and
      tender nature, why do we not live more in thee? The poetical <i>flâneurs</i>
      of Töpffer, his Charles and Jules, the friends and passionate lovers of
      thy secret graces, the dazzled and ravished beholders of thy beauties,
      rose up in my memory, at once a reproach and a lesson. A modest garden and
      a country rectory, the narrow horizon of a garret, contain for those who
      know how to look and to wait more instruction than a library, even than
      that of <i>Mon oncle</i>. [Footnote: The allusions in this passage are to
      Töpffer&rsquo;s best known books&mdash;&ldquo;La Presbytère&rdquo; and &ldquo;La Bibliothèque de
      mon Oncle,&rdquo; that airy chronicle of a hundred romantic or vivacious
      nothings which has the young student Jules for its center.] Yes, we are
      too busy, too encumbered, too much occupied, too active! We read too much!
      The one thing needful is to throw off all one&rsquo;s load of cares, of
      preoccupations, of pedantry, and to become again young, simple,
      child-like, living happily and gratefully in the present hour. We must
      know how to put occupation aside, which does not mean that we must be
      idle. In an inaction which is meditative and attentive the wrinkles of the
      soul are smoothed away, and the soul itself spreads, unfolds, and springs
      afresh, and, like the trodden grass of the roadside or the bruised leaf of
      a plant, repairs its injuries, becomes new, spontaneous, true, and
      original. Reverie, like the rain of night, restores color and force to
      thoughts which have been blanched and wearied by the heat of the day. With
      gentle fertilizing power it awakens within us a thousand sleeping germs,
      and as though in play, gathers round us materials for the future, and
      images for the use of talent. <i>Reverie is the Sunday of thought</i>; and
      who knows which is the more important and fruitful for man, the laborious
      tension of the week, or the life-giving repose of the Sabbath? The <i>flânerie</i>
      so exquisitely glorified and sung by Töpffer is not only delicious, but
      useful. It is like a bath which gives vigor and suppleness to the whole
      being, to the mind as to the body; it is the sign and festival of liberty,
      a joyous and wholesome banquet, the banquet of the butterfly wandering
      from flower to flower over the hills and in the fields. And remember, the
      soul too is a butterfly.
    </p>
    <p>
      May 2, 1852. (Sunday) Lancy.&mdash;This morning read the epistle of St.
      James, the exegetical volume of Cellérier [Footnote: Jacob-Élysée
      Cellérier, professor of theology at the Academy of Geneva, and son of the
      pastor of Satigny mentioned in Madame de Staël&rsquo;s &ldquo;L&rsquo;Allemagne.&rdquo;] on this
      epistle, and a great deal of Pascal, after having first of all passed more
      than an hour in the garden with the children. I made them closely examine
      the flowers, the shrubs, the grasshoppers, the snails, in order to
      practice them in observation, in wonder, in kindness.
    </p>
    <p>
      How enormously important are these first conversations of childhood! I
      felt it this morning with a sort of religious terror. Innocence and
      childhood are sacred. The sower who casts in the seed, the father or
      mother casting in the fruitful word are accomplishing a pontifical act and
      ought to perform it with religious awe, with prayer and gravity, for they
      are laboring at the kingdom of God. All seed-sowing is a mysterious thing,
      whether the seed fall into the earth or into souls. Man is a husbandman;
      his whole work rightly understood is to develop life, to sow it
      everywhere. Such is the mission of humanity, and of this divine mission
      the great instrument is speech. We forget too often that language is both
      a seed-sowing and a revelation. The influence of a word in season, is it
      not incalculable? What a mystery is speech! But we are blind to it,
      because we are carnal and earthy. We see the stones and the trees by the
      road, the furniture of our houses, all that is palpable and material. We
      have no eyes for the invisible phalanxes of ideas which people the air and
      hover incessantly around each one of us.
    </p>
    <p>
      Every life is a profession of faith, and exercises an inevitable and
      silent propaganda. As far as lies in its power, it tends to transform the
      universe and humanity into its own image. Thus we have all a cure of
      souls. Every man is the center of perpetual radiation like a luminous
      body; he is, as it were, a beacon which entices a ship upon the rocks if
      it does not guide it into port. Every man is a priest, even involuntarily;
      his conduct is an unspoken sermon, which is forever preaching to others;
      but there are priests of Baal, of Moloch, and of all the false gods. Such
      is the high importance of example. Thence comes the terrible
      responsibility which weighs upon us all. An evil example is a spiritual
      poison: it is the proclamation of a sacrilegious faith, of an impure God.
      Sin would be only an evil for him who commits it, were it not a crime
      toward the weak brethren, whom it corrupts. Therefore, it has been said:
      &ldquo;It were better for a man not to have been born than to offend one of
      these little ones.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      May 6, 1852.&mdash;It is women who, like mountain flowers, mark with most
      characteristic precision the gradation of social zones. The hierarchy of
      classes is plainly visible among them; it is blurred in the other sex.
      With women this hierarchy has the average regularity of nature; among men
      we see it broken by the incalculable varieties of human freedom. The
      reason is that the man on the whole, makes himself by his own activity,
      and that the woman, is, on the whole, made by her situation; that the one
      modifies and shapes circumstance by his own energy, while the gentleness
      of the other is dominated by and reflects circumstance; so that woman, so
      to speak, inclines to be species, and man to be individual.
    </p>
    <p>
      Thus, which is curious, women are at once the sex which is most constant
      and most variable. Most constant from the moral point of view, most
      variable from the social. A confraternity in the first case, a hierarchy
      in the second. All degrees of culture and all conditions of society are
      clearly marked in their outward appearance, their manners and their
      tastes; but the inward fraternity is traceable in their feelings, their
      instincts, and their desires. The feminine sex represents at the same time
      natural and historical inequality; it maintains the unity of the species
      and marks off the categories of society, it brings together and divides,
      it gathers and separates, it makes castes and breaks through them,
      according as it interprets its twofold <i>rôle</i> in the one sense or the
      other. At bottom, woman&rsquo;s mission is essentially conservative, but she is
      a conservative without discrimination. On the one side, she maintains
      God&rsquo;s work in man, all that is lasting, noble, and truly human, in the
      race, poetry, religion, virtue, tenderness. On the other, she maintains
      the results of circumstance, all that is passing, local, and artificial in
      society; that is to say, customs, absurdities, prejudices, littlenesses.
      She surrounds with the same respectful and tenacious faith the serious and
      the frivolous, the good and the bad. Well, what then? Isolate if you can,
      the fire from its smoke. It is a divine law that you are tracing, and
      therefore good. The woman preserves; she is tradition as the man is
      progress. And if there is no family and no humanity without the two sexes,
      without these two forces there is no history.
    </p>
    <p>
      May 14, 1852. (Lancy.)&mdash;Yesterday I was full of the philosophy of
      joy, of youth, of the spring, which smiles and the roses which intoxicate;
      I preached the doctrine of strength, and I forgot that, tried and
      afflicted like the two friends with whom I was walking, I should probably
      have reasoned and felt as they did.
    </p>
    <p>
      Our systems, it has been said, are the expression of our character, or the
      theory of our situation, that is to say, we like to think of what has been
      given as having been acquired, we take our nature for our own work, and
      our lot in life for our own conquest, an illusion born of vanity and also
      of the craving for liberty. We are unwilling to be the product of
      circumstances, or the mere expansion of an inner germ. And yet we have
      received everything, and the part which is really ours, is small indeed,
      for it is mostly made up of negation, resistance, faults. We receive
      everything, both life and happiness; but the <i>manner</i> in which we
      receive, this is what is still ours. Let us then, receive trustfully
      without shame or anxiety. Let us humbly accept from God even our own
      nature, and treat it charitably, firmly, intelligently. Not that we are
      called upon to accept the evil and the disease in us, but let us accept <i>ourselves</i>
      in spite of the evil and the disease. And let us never be afraid of
      innocent joy; God is good, and what He does is well done; resign yourself
      to everything, even to happiness; ask for the spirit of sacrifice, of
      detachment, of renunciation, and above all, for the spirit of joy and
      gratitude, that genuine and religious optimism which sees in God a father,
      and asks no pardon for His benefits. We must dare to be happy, and dare to
      confess it, regarding ourselves always as the depositaries, not as the
      authors of our own joy.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      ... This evening I saw the first glow-worm of the season in the turf
      beside the little winding road which descends from Lancy toward the town.
      It was crawling furtively under the grass, like a timid thought or a
      dawning talent.
    </p>
    <p>
      June 17, 1852.&mdash;Every despotism has a specially keen and hostile
      instinct for whatever keeps up human dignity, and independence. And it is
      curious to see scientific and realist teaching used everywhere as a means
      of stifling all freedom of investigation as addressed to moral questions
      under a dead weight of facts. Materialism is the auxiliary doctrine of
      every tyranny, whether of the one or of the masses. To crush what is
      spiritual, moral, human so to speak, in man, by specializing him; to form
      mere wheels of the great social machine, instead of perfect individuals;
      to make society and not conscience the center of life, to enslave the soul
      to things, to de-personalize man, this is the dominant drift of our epoch.
      Everywhere you may see a tendency to substitute the laws of dead matter
      (number, mass) for the laws of the moral nature (persuasion, adhesion,
      faith) equality, the principle of mediocrity, becoming a dogma; unity
      aimed at through uniformity; numbers doing duty for argument; negative
      liberty, which has no law <i>in itself</i>, and recognizes no limit except
      in force, everywhere taking the place of positive liberty, which means
      action guided by an inner law and curbed by a moral authority. Socialism
      <i>versus</i> individualism: this is how Vinet put the dilemma. I should
      say rather that it is only the eternal antagonism between letter and
      spirit, between form and matter, between the outward and the inward,
      appearance and reality, which is always present in every conception and in
      all ideas.
    </p>
    <p>
      Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything; makes everything vulgar and
      every truth false. And there is a religious and political materialism
      which spoils all that it touches, liberty, equality, individuality. So
      that there are two ways of understanding democracy....
    </p>
    <p>
      What is threatened to-day is moral liberty, conscience, respect for the
      soul, the very nobility of man. To defend the soul, its interests, its
      rights, its dignity, is the most pressing duty for whoever sees the
      danger. What the writer, the teacher, the pastor, the philosopher, has to
      do, is to defend humanity in man. Man! the true man, the ideal man! Such
      should be their motto, their rallying cry. War to all that debases,
      diminishes, hinders, and degrades him; protection for all that fortifies,
      ennobles, and raises him. The test of every religious, political, or
      educational system, is the man which it forms. If a system injures the
      intelligence it is bad. If it injures the character it is vicious. If it
      injures the conscience it is criminal.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 12, 1852. (Lancy.)&mdash;Each sphere of being tends toward a higher
      sphere, and has already revelations and presentiments of it. The ideal
      under all its forms is the anticipation and the prophetic vision of that
      existence, higher than his own, toward which every being perpetually
      aspires. And this higher and more dignified existence is more inward in
      character, that is to say, more spiritual. Just as volcanoes reveal to us
      the secrets of the interior of the globe, so enthusiasm and ecstasy are
      the passing explosions of this inner world of the soul; and human life is
      but the preparation and the means of approach to this spiritual life. The
      degrees of initiation are innumerable. Watch, then, disciple of life,
      watch and labor toward the development of the angel within thee! For the
      divine Odyssey is but a series of more and more ethereal metamorphoses, in
      which each form, the result of what goes before, is the condition of those
      which follow. The divine life is a series of successive deaths, in which
      the mind throws off its imperfections and its symbols, and yields to the
      growing attraction of the ineffable center of gravitation, the sun of
      intelligence and love. Created spirits in the accomplishment of their
      destinies tend, so to speak, to form constellations and milky ways within
      the empyrean of the divinity; in becoming gods, they surround the throne
      of the sovereign with a sparkling court. In their greatness lies their
      homage. The divinity with which they are invested is the noblest glory of
      God. God is the father of spirits, and the constitution of the eternal
      kingdom rests on the vassalship of love.
    </p>
    <p>
      September 27, 1852. (Lancy.)&mdash;To-day I complete my thirty-first
      year....
    </p>
    <p>
      The most beautiful poem there is, is life&mdash;life which discerns its
      own story in the making, in which inspiration and self-consciousness go
      together and help each other, life which knows itself to be the world in
      little, a repetition in miniature of the divine universal poem. Yes, be
      man; that is to say, be nature, be spirit, be the image of God, be what is
      greatest, most beautiful, most lofty in all the spheres of being, be
      infinite will and idea, a reproduction of the great whole. And be
      everything while being nothing, effacing thyself, letting God enter into
      thee as the air enters an empty space, reducing the <i>ego</i> to the mere
      vessel which contains the divine essence. Be humble, devout, silent, that
      so thou mayest hear within the depths of thyself the subtle and profound
      voice; be spiritual and pure, that so thou mayest have communion with the
      pure spirit. Withdraw thyself often into the sanctuary of thy inmost
      consciousness; become once more point and atom, that so thou mayest free
      thyself from space, time, matter, temptation, dispersion, that thou mayest
      escape thy very organs themselves and thine own life. That is to say, die
      often, and examine thyself in the presence of this death, as a preparation
      for the last death. He who can without shuddering confront blindness,
      deafness, paralysis, disease, betrayal, poverty; he who can without terror
      appear before the sovereign justice, he alone can call himself prepared
      for partial or total death. How far am I from anything of the sort, how
      far is my heart from any such stoicism! But at least we can try to detach
      ourselves from all that can be taken away from us, to accept everything as
      a loan and a gift, and to cling only to the imperishable&mdash;this at any
      rate we can attempt. To believe in a good and fatherly God, who educates
      us, who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, who punishes only when he
      must, and takes away only with regret; this thought, or rather this
      conviction, gives courage and security. Oh, what need we have of love, of
      tenderness, of affection, of kindness, and how vulnerable we are, we the
      sons of God, we, immortal and sovereign beings! Strong as the universe or
      feeble as the worm, according as we represent God or only ourselves, as we
      lean upon infinite being, or as we stand alone.
    </p>
    <p>
      The point of view of religion, of a religion at once active and moral,
      spiritual and profound, alone gives to life all the dignity and all the
      energy of which it is capable. Religion makes invulnerable and invincible.
      Earth can only be conquered in the name of heaven. All good things are
      given over and above to him who desires but righteousness. To be
      disinterested is to be strong, and the world is at the feet of him whom it
      cannot tempt. Why? Because spirit is lord of matter, and the world belongs
      to God. &ldquo;Be of good cheer,&rdquo; saith a heavenly voice, &ldquo;I have overcome the
      world.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Lord, lend thy strength to those who are weak in the flesh, but willing in
      the spirit!
    </p>
    <p>
      October 31, 1852. (Lancy.)&mdash;Walked for half an hour in the garden. A
      fine rain was falling, and the landscape was that of autumn. The sky was
      hung with various shades of gray, and mists hovered about the distant
      mountains, a melancholy nature. The leaves were falling on all sides like
      the last illusions of youth under the tears of irremediable grief. A brood
      of chattering birds were chasing each other through the Shrubberies, and
      playing games among the branches, like a knot of hiding schoolboys. The
      ground strewn with leaves, brown, yellow, and reddish; the trees
      half-stripped, some more, some less, and decked in ragged splendors of
      dark-red, scarlet, and yellow; the reddening shrubs and plantations; a few
      flowers still lingering behind, roses, nasturtiums, dahlias, shedding
      their petals round them; the bare fields, the thinned hedges; and the fir,
      the only green thing left, vigorous and stoical, like eternal youth
      braving decay; all these innumerable and marvelous symbols which forms
      colors, plants, and living beings, the earth and the sky, yield at all
      times to the eye which has learned to look for them, charmed and
      enthralled me. I wielded a poetic wand, and had but to touch a phenomenon
      to make it render up to me its moral significance. Every landscape is, as
      it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is
      astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail. True poetry
      is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what
      the combination of all the sciences is able at most to attain as a final
      result. The soul of nature is divined by the poet; the man of science,
      only serves to accumulate materials for its demonstration.
    </p>
    <p>
      November 6, 1852.&mdash;I am capable of all the passions, for I bear them
      all within me. Like a tamer of wild beasts, I keep them caged and lassoed,
      but I sometimes hear them growling. I have stifled more than one nascent
      love. Why? Because with that prophetic certainty which belongs to moral
      intuition, I felt it lacking in true life, and less durable than myself. I
      choked it down in the name of the supreme affection to come. The loves of
      sense, of imagination, of sentiment, I have seen through and rejected them
      all; I sought the love which springs from the central profundities of
      being. And I still believe in it. I will have none of those passions of
      straw which dazzle, burn up, and wither; I invoke, I await, and I hope for
      the love which is great, pure and earnest, which lives and works in all
      the fibres and through all the powers of the soul. And even if I go lonely
      to the end, I would rather my hope and my dream died with me, than that my
      soul should content itself with any meaner union.
    </p>
    <p>
      November 8, 1852.&mdash;Responsibility is my invisible nightmare. To
      suffer through one&rsquo;s own fault is a torment worthy of the lost, for so
      grief is envenomed by ridicule, and the worst ridicule of all, that which
      springs from shame of one&rsquo;s self. I have only force and energy wherewith
      to meet evils coming from outside; but an irreparable evil brought about
      by myself, a renunciation for life of my liberty, my peace of mind, the
      very thought of it is maddening&mdash;I expiate my privilege indeed. My
      privilege is to be spectator of my life drama, to be fully conscious of
      the tragi-comedy of my own destiny, and, more than that, to be in the
      secret of the tragi-comic itself, that is to say, to be unable to take my
      illusions seriously, to see myself, so to speak, from the theater on the
      stage, or to be like a man looking from beyond the tomb into existence. I
      feel myself forced to feign a particular interest in my individual part,
      while all the time I am living in the confidence of the poet who is
      playing with all these agents which seem so important, and knows all that
      they are ignorant of. It is a strange position, and one which becomes
      painful as soon as grief obliges me to betake myself once more to my own
      little <i>rôle</i>, binding me closely to it, and warning me that I am
      going too far in imagining myself, because of my conversations with the
      poet, dispensed from taking up again my modest part of valet in the piece.
      Shakespeare must have experienced this feeling often, and Hamlet, I think,
      must express it somewhere. It is a <i>Doppelgängerei</i>, quite German in
      character, and which explains the disgust with reality and the repugnance
      to public life, so common among the thinkers of Germany. There is, as it
      were, a degradation a gnostic fall, in thus folding one&rsquo;s wings and going
      back again into the vulgar shell of one&rsquo;s own individuality. Without
      grief, which is the string of this venturesome kite, man would soar too
      quickly and too high, and the chosen souls would be lost for the race,
      like balloons which, save for gravitation, would never return from the
      empyrean.
    </p>
    <p>
      How, then, is one to recover courage enough for action? By striving to
      restore in one&rsquo;s self something of that unconsciousness, spontaneity,
      instinct, which reconciles us to earth and makes man useful and relatively
      happy.
    </p>
    <p>
      By believing more practically in the providence which pardons and allows
      of reparation.
    </p>
    <p>
      By accepting our human condition in a more simple and childlike spirit,
      fearing trouble less, calculating less, hoping more. For we decrease our
      responsibility, if we decrease our clearness of vision, and fear lessens
      with the lessening of responsibility.
    </p>
    <p>
      By extracting a richer experience out of our losses and lessons.
    </p>
    <p>
      November 9, 1852.&mdash;A few pages of the <i>Chrestomathie Française</i>
      and Vinet&rsquo;s remarkable letter at the head of the volume, have given me one
      or two delightful hours. As a thinker, as a Christian, and as a man, Vinet
      occupies a typical place. His philosophy, his theology, his esthetics, in
      short, his work, will be, or has been already surpassed at all points. His
      was a great soul and a fine talent. But neither were well enough served by
      circumstances. We see in him a personality worthy of all veneration, a man
      of singular goodness and a writer of distinction, but not quite a great
      man, nor yet a great writer. Profundity and purity, these are what he
      possesses in a high degree, but not greatness, properly speaking. For
      that, he is a little too subtle and analytical, too ingenious and
      fine-spun; his thought is overladen with detail, and has not enough flow,
      eloquence, imagination, warmth, and largeness. Essentially and constantly
      meditative, he has not strength enough left to deal with what is outside
      him. The casuistries of conscience and of language, eternal
      self-suspicion, and self-examination, his talent lies in these things, and
      is limited by them. Vinet wants passion, abundance, <i>entraînement</i>,
      and therefore popularity. The individualism which is his title to glory is
      also the cause of his weakness.
    </p>
    <p>
      We find in him always the solitary and the ascetic. His thought is, as it
      were, perpetually at church; it is perpetually devising trials and
      penances for itself. Hence the air of scruple and anxiety which
      characterizes it even in its bolder flights. Moral energy, balanced by a
      disquieting delicacy of fibre; a fine organization marred, so to speak, by
      low health, such is the impression it makes upon us. Is it reproach or
      praise to say of Vinet&rsquo;s mind that it seems to one a force perpetually
      reacting upon itself? A warmer and more self-forgetful manner; more
      muscles, as it were, around the nerves, more circles of intellectual and
      historical life around the individual circle, these are what Vinet, of all
      writers perhaps the one who makes us <i>think</i> most, is still lacking
      in. Less <i>reflexivity</i> and more plasticity, the eye more on the
      object, would raise the style of Vinet, so rich in substance, so nervous,
      so full of ideas, and variety, into a grand style. Vinet, to sum up, is
      conscience personified, as man and as writer. Happy the literature and the
      society which is able to count at one time two or three like him, if not
      equal to him!
    </p>
    <p>
      November 10, 1852.&mdash;How much have we not to learn from the Greeks,
      those immortal ancestors of ours! And how much better they solved their
      problem than we have solved ours. Their ideal man is not ours, but they
      understood infinitely better than we how to reverence, cultivate and
      ennoble the man whom they knew. In a thousand respects we are still
      barbarians beside them, as Béranger said to me with a sigh in 1843:
      barbarians in education, in eloquence, in public life, in poetry, in
      matters of art, etc. We must have millions of men in order to produce a
      few elect spirits: a thousand was enough in Greece. If the measure of a
      civilization is to be the number of perfected men that it produces, we are
      still far from this model people. The slaves are no longer below us, but
      they are among us. Barbarism is no longer at our frontiers; it lives side
      by side with us. We carry within us much greater things than they, but we
      ourselves are smaller. It is a strange result. Objective civilization
      produced great men while making no conscious effort toward such a result;
      subjective civilization produces a miserable and imperfect race, contrary
      to its mission and its earnest desire. The world grows more majestic but
      man diminishes. Why is this?
    </p>
    <p>
      We have too much barbarian blood in our veins, and we lack measure,
      harmony and grace. Christianity, in breaking man up into outer and inner,
      the world into earth and heaven, hell and paradise, has decomposed the
      human unity, in order, it is true, to reconstruct it more profoundly and
      more truly. But Christianity has not yet digested this powerful leaven.
      She has not yet conquered the true humanity; she is still living under the
      antimony of sin and grace, of here below and there above. She has not
      penetrated into the whole heart of Jesus. She is still in the <i>narthex</i>
      of penitence; she is not reconciled, and even the churches still wear the
      livery of service, and have none of the joy of the daughters of God,
      baptized of the Holy Spirit.
    </p>
    <p>
      Then, again, there is our excessive division of labor; our bad and foolish
      education which does not develop the whole man; and the problem of
      poverty. We have abolished slavery, but without having solved the question
      of labor. In law there are no more slaves, in fact, there are many. And
      while the majority of men are not free, the free man, in the true sense of
      the term can neither be conceived nor realized. Here are enough causes for
      our inferiority.
    </p>
    <p>
      November 12, 1852.&mdash;St. Martin&rsquo;s summer is still lingering, and the
      days all begin in mist. I ran for a quarter of an hour round the garden to
      get some warmth and suppleness. Nothing could be lovelier than the last
      rosebuds, or than the delicate gaufred edges of the strawberry leaves
      embroidered with hoar-frost, while above them Arachne&rsquo;s delicate webs hung
      swaying in the green branches of the pines, little ball-rooms for the
      fairies carpeted with powdered pearls and kept in place by a thousand dewy
      strands hanging from above like the chains of a lamp and supporting them
      from below like the anchors of a vessel. These little airy edifices had
      all the fantastic lightness of the elf-world and all the vaporous
      freshness of dawn. They recalled to me the poetry of the north, wafting to
      me a breath from Caledonia or Iceland or Sweden, Frithiof and the Edda,
      Ossian and the Hebrides. All that world of cold and mist, of genius and of
      reverie, where warmth comes not from the sun but from the heart where man
      is more noticeable than nature&mdash;that chaste and vigorous world in
      which will plays a greater part than sensation and thought has more power
      than instinct&mdash;in short the whole romantic cycle of German and
      northern poetry, awoke little by little in my memory and laid claim upon
      my sympathy. It is a poetry of bracing quality, and acts upon one like a
      moral tonic. Strange charm of imagination! A twig of pine wood and a few
      spider-webs are enough to make countries, epochs, and nations live again
      before her.
    </p>
    <p>
      December 26, 1852. (Sunday.)&mdash;If I reject many portions of our
      theology and of our church system, it is that I may the better reach the
      Christ himself. My philosophy allows me this. It does not state the
      dilemma as one of religion or philosophy, but as one of religion accepted
      or experienced, understood or not understood. For me philosophy is a
      manner of apprehending things, a mode of perception of reality. It does
      not create nature, man or God, but it finds them and seeks to understand
      them. Philosophy is consciousness taking account of itself with all that
      it contains. Now consciousness may contain a new life&mdash;the facts of
      regeneration and of salvation, that is to say, Christian experience. The
      understanding of the Christian consciousness is an integral part of
      philosophy, as the Christian consciousness is a leading form of religious
      consciousness, and religious consciousness an essential form of
      consciousness.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which
      it contains.
    </p>
    <p>
      Look twice, if what you want is a just conception; look once, if what you
      want is a sense of beauty.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      A man only understands what is akin to something already existing in
      himself.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience
      and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      The wealth of each mind is proportioned to the number and to the precision
      of its categories and its points of view.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      To feel himself freer than his neighbor is the reward of the critic.
    </p>
    <p>
      Modesty (<i>pudeur</i>) is always the sign and safeguard of a mystery. It
      is explained by its contrary&mdash;profanation. Shyness or modesty is, in
      truth, the half-conscious sense of a secret of nature or of the soul too
      intimately individual to be given or surrendered. It is <i>exchanged</i>.
      To surrender what is most profound and mysterious in one&rsquo;s being and
      personality at any price less than that of absolute reciprocity is
      profanation.
    </p>
    <p>
      January 6, 1853.&mdash;Self-government with tenderness&mdash;here you have
      the condition of all authority over children. The child must discover in
      us no passion, no weakness of which he can make use; he must feel himself
      powerless to deceive or to trouble us; then he will recognize in us his
      natural superiors, and he will attach a special value to our kindness,
      because he will respect it. The child who can rouse in us anger, or
      impatience, or excitement, feels himself stronger than we, and a child
      only respects strength. The mother should consider herself as her child&rsquo;s
      sun, a changeless and ever radiant world, whither the small restless
      creature, quick at tears and laughter, light, fickle, passionate, full of
      storms, may come for fresh stores of light, warmth, and electricity, of
      calm and of courage. The mother represents goodness, providence, law; that
      is to say, the divinity, under that form of it which is accessible to
      childhood. If she is herself passionate, she will inculcate on her child a
      capricious and despotic God, or even several discordant gods. The religion
      of a child depends on what its mother and its father are, and not on what
      they say. The inner and unconscious ideal which guides their life is
      precisely what touches the child; their words, their remonstrances, their
      punishments, their bursts of feeling even, are for him merely thunder and
      comedy; what they worship, this it is which his instinct divines and
      reflects.
    </p>
    <p>
      The child sees what we are, behind what we wish to be. Hence his
      reputation as a physiognomist. He extends his power as far as he can with
      each of us; he is the most subtle of diplomatists. Unconsciously he passes
      under the influence of each person about him, and reflects it while
      transforming it after his own nature. He is a magnifying mirror. This is
      why the first principle of education is: train yourself; and the first
      rule to follow if you wish to possess yourself of a child&rsquo;s will is:
      master your own.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 5, 1853 (seven o&rsquo;clock in the morning).&mdash;I am always
      astonished at the difference between one&rsquo;s inward mood of the evening and
      that of the morning. The passions which are dominant in the evening, in
      the morning leave the field free for the contemplative part of the soul.
      Our whole being, irritated and overstrung by the nervous excitement of the
      day, arrives in the evening at the culminating point of its human
      vitality; the same being, tranquilized by the calm of sleep, is in the
      morning nearer heaven. We should weigh a resolution in the two balances,
      and examine an idea under the two lights, if we wish to minimize the
      chances of error by taking the average of our daily oscillations. Our
      inner life describes regular curves, barometical curves, as it were,
      independent of the accidental disturbances which the storms of sentiment
      and passion may raise in us. Every soul has its climate, or rather, is a
      climate; it has, so to speak, its own meteorology in the general
      meteorology of the soul. Psychology, therefore, cannot be complete so long
      as the physiology of our planet is itself incomplete&mdash;that science to
      which we give nowadays the insufficient name of physics of the globe.
    </p>
    <p>
      I became conscious this morning that what appears to us impossible is
      often an impossibility altogether subjective. Our mind, under the action
      of the passions, produces by a strange mirage gigantic obstacles,
      mountains or abysses, which stop us short. Breathe upon the passion and
      the phantasmagoria will vanish. This power of mirage, by which we are able
      to delude and fascinate ourselves, is a moral phenomenon worthy of
      attentive study. We make for ourselves, in truth, our own spiritual world
      monsters, chimeras, angels, we make objective what ferments in us. All is
      marvelous for the poet; all is divine for the saint; all is great for the
      hero; all is wretched, miserable, ugly, and bad for the base and sordid
      soul. The bad man creates around him a pandemonium, the artist, an
      Olympus, the elect soul, a paradise, which each of them sees for himself
      alone. We are all visionaries, and what we see is our soul in things. We
      reward ourselves and punish ourselves without knowing it, so that all
      appears to change when we change.
    </p>
    <p>
      The soul is essentially active, and the activity of which we are conscious
      is but a part of our activity, and voluntary activity is but a part of our
      conscious activity. Here we have the basis of a whole psychology and
      system of morals. Man reproducing the world, surrounding himself with a
      nature which is the objective rendering of his spiritual nature, rewarding
      and punishing himself; the universe identical with the divine nature, and
      the nature of the perfect spirit only becoming understood according to the
      measure of our perfection; intuition the recompense of inward purity;
      science as the result of goodness; in short, a new phenomenology more
      complete and more moral, in which the total soul of things becomes spirit.
      This shall perhaps be my subject for my summer lectures. How much is
      contained in it! the whole domain of inner education, all that is
      mysterious in our life, the relation of nature to spirit, of God and all
      other beings to man, the repetition in miniature of the cosmogony,
      mythology, theology, and history of the universe, the evolution of mind,
      in a word the problem of problems into which I have often plunged but from
      which finite things, details, minutiae, have turned me back a thousand
      times. I return to the brink of the great abyss with the clear perception
      that here lies the problem of science, that to sound it is a duty, that
      God hides Himself only in light and love, that He calls upon us to become
      spirits, to possess ourselves and to possess Him in the measure of our
      strength and that it is our incredulity, our spiritual cowardice, which is
      our infirmity and weakness.
    </p>
    <p>
      Dante, gazing into the three worlds with their divers heavens, saw under
      the form of an image what I would fain seize under a purer form. But he
      was a poet, and I shall only be a philosopher. The poet makes himself
      understood by human generations and by the crowd; the philosopher
      addresses himself only to a few rare minds. The day has broken. It brings
      with it dispersion of thought in action. I feel myself de-magnetized, pure
      clairvoyance gives place to study, and the ethereal depth of the heaven of
      contemplation vanishes before the glitter of finite things. Is it to be
      regretted? No. But it proves that the hours most apt for philosophical
      thought are those which precede the dawn.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 10, 1853.&mdash;This afternoon I made an excursion to the Salève
      with my particular friends, Charles Heim, Edmond Scherer, Élie Lecoultre,
      and Ernest Naville. The conversation was of the most interesting kind, and
      prevented us from noticing the deep mud which hindered our walking. It was
      especially Scherer, Naville, and I who kept it alive. Liberty in God, the
      essence of Christianity, new publications in philosophy, these were our
      three subjects of conversation. The principle result for me was an
      excellent exercise in dialectic and in argumentation with solid champions.
      If I learned nothing, many of my ideas gained new confirmation, and I was
      able to penetrate more deeply into the minds of my friends. I am much
      nearer to Scherer than to Naville, but from him also I am in some degree
      separated.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is a striking fact, not unlike the changing of swords in &ldquo;Hamlet,&rdquo; that
      the abstract minds, those which move from ideas to facts, are always
      fighting on behalf of concrete reality; while the concrete minds, which
      move from facts to ideas, are generally the champions of abstract notions.
      Each pretends to that over which he has least power; each aims
      instinctively at what he himself lacks. It is an unconscious protest
      against the incompleteness of each separate nature. We all tend toward
      that which we possess least of, and our point of arrival is essentially
      different from our point of departure. The promised land is the land where
      one is not. The most intellectual of natures adopts an ethical theory of
      mind; the most moral of natures has an intellectual theory of morals. This
      reflection was brought home to me in the course of our three or four
      hours&rsquo; discussion. Nothing is more hidden from us than the illusion which
      lives with us day by day, and our greatest illusion is to believe that we
      are what we think ourselves to be.
    </p>
    <p>
      The mathematical intelligence and the historical intelligence (the two
      classes of intelligences) can never understand each other. When they
      succeed in doing so as to words, they differ as to the things which the
      words mean. At the bottom of every discussion of detail between them
      reappears the problem of the origin of ideas. If the problem is not
      present to them, there is confusion; if it is present to them, there is
      separation. They only agree as to the goal&mdash;truth; but never as to
      the road, the method, and the criterion.
    </p>
    <p>
      Heim represented the impartiality of consciousness, Naville the morality
      of consciousness, Lecoultre the religion of consciousness, Scherer the
      intelligence of consciousness, and I the consciousness of consciousness. A
      common ground, but differing individualities. <i>Discrimen ingeniorum</i>.
    </p>
    <p>
      What charmed me most in this long discussion was the sense of mental
      freedom which it awakened in me. To be able to set in motion the greatest
      subjects of thought without any sense of fatigue, to be greater than the
      world, to play with one&rsquo;s strength, this is what makes the well-being of
      intelligence, the Olympic festival of thought. <i>Habere, non haberi</i>.
      There is an equal happiness in the sense of reciprocal confidence, of
      friendship, and esteem in the midst of conflict; like athletes, we embrace
      each other before and after the combat, and the combat is but a deploying
      of the forces of free and equal men.
    </p>
    <p>
      March 20, 1853.&mdash;I sat up alone; two or three times I paid a visit to
      the children&rsquo;s room. It seemed to me, young mothers, that I understood
      you! sleep is the mystery of life; there is a profound charm in this
      darkness broken by the tranquil light of the night-lamp, and in this
      silence measured by the rhythmic breathings of two young sleeping
      creatures. It was brought home to me that I was looking on at a marvelous
      operation of nature, and I watched it in no profane spirit. I sat silently
      listening, a moved and hushed spectator of this poetry of the cradle, this
      ancient and ever new benediction of the family, this symbol of creation,
      sleeping under the wing of God, of our consciousness withdrawing into the
      shade that it may rest from the burden of thought, and of the tomb, that
      divine bed, where the soul in its turn rests from life. To sleep is to
      strain and purify our emotions, to deposit the mud of life, to calm the
      fever of the soul, to return into the bosom of maternal nature, thence to
      re-issue, healed and strong. Sleep is a sort of innocence and
      purification. Blessed be He who gave it to the poor sons of men as the
      sure and faithful companion of life, our daily healer and consoler.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 27, 1853.&mdash;This evening I read the treatise by Nicole so much
      admired by Mme. de Sévigné: &ldquo;<i>Des moyens de conserver la paix avec les
      hommes.</i>&rdquo; Wisdom so gentle and so insinuating, so shrewd, piercing, and
      yet humble, which divines so well the hidden thoughts and secrets of the
      heart, and brings them all into the sacred bondage of love to God and man,
      how good and delightful a thing it is! Everything in it is smooth, even
      well put together, well thought out, but no display, no tinsel, no worldly
      ornaments of style. The moralist forgets himself and in us appeals only to
      the conscience. He becomes a confessor, a friend, a counsellor.
    </p>
    <p>
      May 11, 1853.&mdash;Psychology, poetry, philosophy, history, and science,
      I have swept rapidly to-day on the wings of the invisible hippogriff
      through all these spheres of thought. But the general impression has been
      one of tumult and anguish, temptation and disquiet.
    </p>
    <p>
      I love to plunge deep into the ocean of life; but it is not without losing
      sometimes all sense of the axis and the pole, without losing myself and
      feeling the consciousness of my own nature and vocation growing faint and
      wavering. The whirlwind of the wandering Jew carries me away, tears me
      from my little familiar enclosure, and makes me behold all the empires of
      men. In my voluntary abandonment to the generality, the universal, the
      infinite, my particular <i>ego</i> evaporates like a drop of water in a
      furnace; it only condenses itself anew at the return of cold, after
      enthusiasm has died out and the sense of reality has returned. Alternate
      expansion and condensation, abandonment and recovery of self, the conquest
      of the world to be pursued on the one side, the deepening of consciousness
      on the other&mdash;such is the play of the inner life, the march of the
      microcosmic mind, the marriage of the individual soul with the universal
      soul, the finite with the infinite, whence springs the intellectual
      progress of man. Other betrothals unite the soul to God, the religious
      consciousness with the divine; these belong to the history of the will.
      And what precedes will is feeling, preceded itself by instinct. Man is
      only what he becomes&mdash;profound truth; but he becomes only what he is,
      truth still more profound. What am I? Terrible question! Problem of
      predestination, of birth, of liberty, there lies the abyss. And yet one
      must plunge into it, and I have done so. The prelude of Bach I heard this
      evening predisposed me to it; it paints the soul tormented and appealing
      and finally seizing upon God, and possessing itself of peace and the
      infinite with an all-prevailing fervor and passion.
    </p>
    <p>
      May 14, 1853.&mdash;Third quartet concert. It was short. Variations for
      piano and violin by Beethoven, and two quartets, not more. The quartets
      were perfectly clear and easy to understand. One was by Mozart and the
      other by Beethoven, so that I could compare the two masters. Their
      individuality seemed to become plain to me: Mozart&mdash;grace, liberty,
      certainty, freedom, and precision of style, and exquisite and aristocratic
      beauty, serenity of soul, the health and talent of the master, both on a
      level with his genius; Beethoven&mdash;more pathetic, more passionate,
      more torn with feeling, more intricate, more profound, less perfect, more
      the slave of his genius, more carried away by his fancy or his passion,
      more moving, and more sublime than Mozart. Mozart refreshes you, like the
      &ldquo;Dialogues&rdquo; of Plato; he respects you, reveals to you your strength, gives
      you freedom and balance. Beethoven seizes upon you; he is more tragic and
      oratorical, while Mozart is more disinterested and poetical. Mozart is
      more Greek, and Beethoven more Christian. One is serene, the other
      serious. The first is stronger than destiny, because he takes life less
      profoundly; the second is less strong, because he has dared to measure
      himself against deeper sorrows. His talent is not always equal to his
      genius, and pathos is his dominant feature, as perfection is that of
      Mozart. In Mozart the balance of the whole is perfect, and art triumphs;
      in Beethoven feeling governs everything and emotion troubles his art in
      proportion as it deepens it.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 26, 1853.&mdash;Why do I find it easier and more satisfactory, as a
      writer of verse, to compose in the short metres than in the long and
      serious ones? Why, in general, am I better fitted for what is difficult
      than for what is easy? Always for the same reason. I cannot bring myself
      to move freely, to show myself without a veil, to act on my own account
      and act seriously, to believe in and assert myself, whereas a piece of
      badinage which diverts attention from myself to the thing in hand, from
      the feeling to the skill of the writer, puts me at my ease. It is timidity
      which is at the bottom of it. There is another reason, too&mdash;I am
      afraid of greatness, I am not afraid of ingenuity, and distrustful as I am
      both of my gift and my instrument, I like to reassure myself by an
      elaborate practice of execution. All my published literary essays,
      therefore, are little else than studies, games, exercises for the purpose
      of testing myself. I play scales, as it were; I run up and down my
      instrument, I train my hand and make sure of its capacity and skill. But
      the work itself remains unachieved. My effort expires, and satisfied with
      the <i>power</i> to act I never arrive at the will to act. I am always
      preparing and never accomplishing, and my energy is swallowed up in a kind
      of barren curiosity. Timidity, then, and curiosity&mdash;these are the two
      obstacles which bar against me a literary career. Nor must procrastination
      be forgotten. I am always reserving for the future what is great, serious,
      and important, and meanwhile, I am eager to exhaust what is pretty and
      trifling. Sure of my devotion to things that are vast and profound, I am
      always lingering in their contraries lest I should neglect them. Serious
      at bottom, I am frivolous in appearance. A lover of thought, I seem to
      care above all, for expression; I keep the substance for myself, and
      reserve the form for others. So that the net result of my timidity is that
      I never treat the public seriously, and that I only show myself to it in
      what is amusing, enigmatical, or capricious; the result of my curiosity is
      that everything tempts me, the shell as well as the mountain, and that I
      lose myself in endless research; while the habit of procrastination keeps
      me forever at preliminaries and antecedents, and production itself is
      never even begun.
    </p>
    <p>
      But if that is the fact, the fact might be different. I understand myself,
      but I do not approve myself.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 1, 1853.&mdash;I have just finished Pelletan&rsquo;s book, &ldquo;Profession de
      foi du dix-neuvième Siècle.&rdquo; It is a fine book Only one thing is wanting
      to it&mdash;the idea of evil. It is a kind of supplement to the theory of
      Condorcet&mdash;indefinite perfectibility, man essentially good, <i>life</i>,
      which is a physiological notion, dominating virtue, duty, and holiness, in
      short, a non-ethical conception of history, liberty identified with
      nature, the natural man taken for the whole man. The aspirations which
      such a book represents are generous and poetical, but in the first place
      dangerous, since they lead to an absolute confidence in instinct; and in
      the second, credulous and unpractical, for they set before us a mere dream
      man, and throw a veil over both present and past reality. The book is at
      once the plea justificatory of progress, conceived as fatal and
      irresistible, and an enthusiastic hymn to the triumph of humanity. It is
      earnest, but morally superficial; poetical, but fanciful and untrue. It
      confounds the progress of the race with the progress of the individual,
      the progress of civilization with the advance of the inner life. Why?
      Because its criterion is quantitative, that is to say, purely exterior
      (having regard to the wealth of life), and not qualitative (the goodness
      of life). Always the same tendency to take the appearance for the thing,
      the form for the substance, the law for the essence, always the same
      absence of moral personality, the same obtuseness of conscience, which has
      never recognized sin present in the will, which places evil outside of
      man, moralizes from outside, and transforms to its own liking the whole
      lesson of history! What is at fault is the philosophic superficiality of
      France, which she owes to her fatal notion of religion, itself due to a
      life fashioned by Catholicism and by absolute monarchy.
    </p>
    <p>
      Catholic thought cannot conceive of personality as supreme and conscious
      of itself. Its boldness and its weakness come from one and the same cause&mdash;from
      an absence of the sense of responsibility, from that vassal state of
      conscience which knows only slavery or anarchy, which proclaims but does
      not obey the law, because the law is outside it, not within it. Another
      illusion is that of Quinet and Michelet, who imagine it possible to come
      out of Catholicism without entering into any other positive form of
      religion, and whose idea is to fight Catholicism by philosophy, a
      philosophy which is, after all, Catholic at bottom, since it springs from
      anti-Catholic reaction. The mind and the conscience, which have been
      formed by Catholicism, are powerless to rise to any other form of
      religion. From Catholicism, as from Epicureanism there is no return.
    </p>
    <p>
      October 11, 1853.&mdash;My third day at Turin, is now over. I have been
      able to penetrate farther than ever before into the special genius of this
      town and people. I have felt it live, have realized it little by little,
      as my intuition became more distinct. That is what I care for most: to
      seize the soul of things, the soul of a nation; to live the objective
      life, the life outside self; to find my way into a new moral country. I
      long to assume the citizenship of this unknown world, to enrich myself
      with this fresh form of existence, to feel it from within, to link myself
      to it, and to reproduce it sympathetically; this is the end and the reward
      of my efforts. To-day the problem grew clear to me as I stood on the
      terrace of the military hospital, in full view of the Alps, the weather
      fresh and clear in spite of a stormy sky. Such an intuition after all is
      nothing out a synthesis wrought by instinct, a synthesis to which
      everything&mdash;streets, houses, landscape, accent, dialect,
      physiognomies, history, and habits contribute their share. I might call it
      the ideal integration of a people or its reduction to the generating
      point, or an entering into its consciousness. This generating point
      explains everything else, art, religion, history, politics, manners; and
      without it nothing can be explained. The ancients realized their
      consciousness in the national God. Modern nationalities, more complicated
      and less artistic, are more difficult to decipher. What one seeks for in
      them is the daemon, the fatum, the inner genius, the mission, the
      primitive disposition, both what there is desire for and what there is
      power for, the force in them and its limitations.
    </p>
    <p>
      A pure and life-giving freshness of thought and of the spiritual life
      seemed to play about me, borne on the breeze descending from the Alps. I
      breathed an atmosphere of spiritual freedom, and I hailed with emotion and
      rapture the mountains whence was wafted to me this feeling of strength and
      purity. A thousand sensations, thoughts, and analogies crowded upon me.
      History, too, the history of the sub-Alpine countries, from the Ligurians
      to Hannibal, from Hannibal to Charlemagne, from Charlemagne to Napoleon,
      passed through my mind. All the possible points of view, were, so to
      speak, piled upon each other, and one caught glimpses of some
      eccentrically across others. I was enjoying and I was learning. Sight
      passed into vision without a trace of hallucination, and the landscape was
      my guide, my Virgil.
    </p>
    <p>
      All this made me very sensible of the difference between me and the
      majority of travelers, all of whom have a special object, and content
      themselves with one thing or with several, while I desire all or nothing,
      and am forever straining toward the total, whether of all possible
      objects, or of all the elements present in the reality. In other words,
      what I desire is the sum of all desires, and what I seek to know is the
      sum of all different kinds of knowledge. Always the complete, the
      absolute; the <i>teres atque rotundum</i>, sphericity, non-resignation.
    </p>
    <p>
      October 27, 1853.&mdash;I thank Thee, my God, for the hour that I have
      just passed in Thy presence. Thy will was clear to me; I measured my
      faults, counted my griefs, and felt Thy goodness toward me. I realized my
      own nothingness, Thou gavest me Thy peace. In bitterness there is
      sweetness; in affliction, joy; in submission, strength; in the God who
      punishes, the God who loves. To lose one&rsquo;s life that one may gain it, to
      offer it that one may receive it, to possess nothing that one may conquer
      all, to renounce self that God may give Himself to us, how impossible a
      problem, and how sublime a reality! No one truly knows happiness who has
      not suffered, and the redeemed are happier than the elect.
    </p>
    <p>
      (Same day.)&mdash;The divine miracle <i>par excellence</i> consists surely
      in the apotheosis of grief, the transfiguration of evil by good. The work
      of creation finds its consummation, and the eternal will of the infinite
      mercy finds its fulfillment only in the restoration of the free creature
      to God and of an evil world to goodness, through love. Every soul in which
      conversion has taken place is a symbol of the history of the world. To be
      happy, to possess eternal life, to be in God, to be saved, all these are
      the same. All alike mean the solution of the problem, the aim of
      existence. And happiness is cumulative, as misery may be. An eternal
      growth is an unchangeable peace, an ever profounder depth of apprehension,
      a possession constantly more intense and more spiritual of the joy of
      heaven&mdash;this is happiness. Happiness has no limits, because God has
      neither bottom nor bounds, and because happiness is nothing but the
      conquest of God through love.
    </p>
    <p>
      The center of life is neither in thought nor in feeling, nor in will, nor
      even in consciousness, so far as it thinks, feels, or wishes. For moral
      truth may have been penetrated and possessed in all these ways, and escape
      us still. Deeper even than consciousness there is our being itself, our
      very substance, our nature. Only those truths which have entered into this
      last region, which have become ourselves, become spontaneous and
      involuntary, instinctive and unconscious, are really our life&mdash;that
      is to say something more than our property. So long as we are able to
      distinguish any space whatever between the truth and us we remain outside
      it. The thought, the feeling, the desire, the consciousness of life, are
      not yet quite life. But peace and repose can nowhere be found except in
      life, and in eternal life and the eternal life is the divine life, is God.
      To become divine is then the aim of life: then only can truth be said to
      be ours beyond the possibility of loss, because it is no longer outside
      us, nor even in us, but we are it, and it is we; we ourselves are a truth,
      a will, a work of God. Liberty has become nature; the creature is one with
      its creator&mdash;one through love. It is what it ought to be; its
      education is finished, and its final happiness begins. The sun of time
      declines and the light of eternal blessedness arises.
    </p>
    <p>
      Our fleshly hearts may call this mysticism. It is the mysticism of Jesus:
      &ldquo;I am one with my Father; ye shall be one with me. We will be one with
      you.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Do not despise your situation; in it you must act, suffer, and conquer.
      From every point on earth we are equally near to heaven and to the
      infinite.
    </p>
    <p>
      There are two states or conditions of pride. The first is one of
      self-approval, the second one of self-contempt. Pride is seen probably at
      its purest in the last.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by
      affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we
      think, by pumping that we draw water into the well.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      February 1, 1854.&mdash;A walk. The atmosphere incredibly pure, a warm
      caressing gentleness in the sunshine&mdash;joy in one&rsquo;s whole being.
      Seated motionless upon a bench on the Tranchées, beside the slopes clothed
      with moss and tapestried with green, I passed some intense delicious
      moments, allowing great elastic waves of music, wafted to me from a
      military band on the terrace of St. Antoine, to surge and bound through
      me. Every way I was happy, as idler, as painter, as poet. Forgotten
      impressions of childhood and youth came back to me&mdash;all those
      indescribable effects wrought by color, shadow, sunlight, green hedges,
      and songs of birds, upon the soul just opening to poetry. I became again
      young, wondering, and simple, as candor and ignorance are simple. I
      abandoned myself to life and to nature, and they cradled me with an
      infinite gentleness. To open one&rsquo;s heart in purity to this ever pure
      nature, to allow this immortal life of things to penetrate into one&rsquo;s
      soul, is at the same time to listen to the voice of God. Sensation may be
      a prayer, and self-abandonment an act of devotion.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 18, 1854.&mdash;Everything tends to become fixed, solidified, and
      crystallized in this French tongue of ours, which seeks form and not
      substance, the result and not its formation, what is seen rather than what
      is thought, the outside rather than the inside.
    </p>
    <p>
      We like the accomplished end and not the pursuit of the end, the goal and
      not the road, in short, ideas ready-made and bread ready-baked, the
      reverse of Lessing&rsquo;s principle. What we look for above all are
      conclusions. This clearness of the &ldquo;ready-made&rdquo; is a superficial clearness&mdash;physical,
      outward, solar clearness, so to speak, but in the absence of a sense for
      origin and genesis it is the clearness of the incomprehensible, the
      clearness of opacity, the clearness of the obscure. We are always trifling
      on the surface. Our temper is formal&mdash;that is to say, frivolous and
      material, or rather artistic and not philosophical. For what it seeks is
      the figure, the fashion and manner of things, not their deepest life,
      their soul, their secret.
    </p>
    <p>
      March 16, 1854. (From Veevay to Geneva.)&mdash;What message had this lake
      for me, with its sad serenity, its soft and even tranquility, in which was
      mirrored the cold monotonous pallor of mountains and clouds? That
      disenchanted disillusioned life may still be traversed by duty, lit by a
      memory of heaven. I was visited by a clear and profound intuition of the
      flight of things, of the fatality of all life, of the melancholy which is
      below the surface of all existence, but also of that deepest depth which
      subsists forever beneath the fleeting wave.
    </p>
    <p>
      December 17, 1854.&mdash;When we are doing nothing in particular, it is
      then that we are living through all our being; and when we cease to add to
      our growth it is only that we may ripen and possess ourselves. Will is
      suspended, but nature and time are always active and if our life is no
      longer our work, the work goes on none the less. With us, without us, or
      in spite of us, our existence travels through its appointed phases, our
      invisible Psyche weaves the silk of its chrysalis, our destiny fulfills
      itself, and all the hours of life work together toward that flowering time
      which we call death. This activity, then, is inevitable and fatal; sleep
      and idleness do not interrupt it, but it may become free and moral, a joy
      instead of a terror.
    </p>
    <p>
      Nothing is more characteristic of a man than the manner in which he
      behaves toward fools.
    </p>
    <p>
      It costs us a great deal of trouble not to be of the same opinion as our
      self-love, and not to be ready to believe in the good taste of those who
      believe in our merits.
    </p>
    <p>
      Does not true humility consist in accepting one&rsquo;s infirmity as a trial,
      and one&rsquo;s evil disposition as a cross, in sacrificing all one&rsquo;s
      pretensions and ambitions, even those of conscience? True humility is
      contentment.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      A man only understands that of which he has already the beginnings in
      himself.
    </p>
    <p>
      Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and of life, the secret
      of eloquence and of virtue, and of all moral authority.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      March 28, 1855.&mdash;Not a blade of grass but has a story to tell, not a
      heart but has its romance, not a life which does not hide a secret which
      is either its thorn or its spur. Everywhere grief, hope, comedy, tragedy;
      even under the petrifaction of old age, as in the twisted forms of
      fossils, we may discover the agitations and tortures of youth. This
      thought is the magic wand of poets and of preachers: it strips the scales
      from our fleshly eyes, and gives us a clear view into human life; it opens
      to the ear a world of unknown melodies, and makes us understand the
      thousand languages of nature. Thwarted love makes a man a polyglot, and
      grief transforms him into a diviner and a sorcerer.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 16, 1855.&mdash;I realized this morning the prodigious effect of
      climate on one&rsquo;s state of mind. I was Italian or Spanish. In this blue and
      limpid air, and under this southern sun, the very walls smile at you. All
      the chestnut trees were en fete; with their glistening buds shining like
      little flames at the curved ends of the branches, they were the candelabra
      of the spring decking the festival of eternal nature. How young everything
      was, how kindly, how gracious! the moist freshness of the grass, the
      transparent shadows in the courtyards, the strength of the old cathedral
      towers, the white edges of the roads. I felt myself a child; the sap of
      life mounted again into my veins as it does in plants. How sweet a thing
      is a little simple enjoyment! And now, a brass band which has stopped in
      the street makes my heart leap as it did at eighteen. Thanks be to God;
      there have been so many weeks and months when I thought myself an old man.
      Come poetry, nature, youth, and love, knead my life again with your fairy
      hands; weave round me once more your immortal spells; sing your siren
      melodies, make me drink of the cup of immortality, lead me back to the
      Olympus of the soul. Or rather, no paganism! God of joy and of grief, do
      with me what Thou wilt; grief is good, and joy is good also. Thou art
      leading me now through joy. I take it from Thy hands, and I give Thee
      thanks for it.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 17, 1855.&mdash;The weather is still incredibly brilliant, warm, and
      clear. The day is full of the singing of birds, the night is full of
      stars, nature has become all kindness, and it is a kindness clothed upon
      with splendor.
    </p>
    <p>
      For nearly two hours have I been lost in the contemplation of this
      magnificent spectacle. I felt myself in the temple of the infinite, in the
      presence of the worlds, God&rsquo;s guest in this vast nature. The stars
      wandering in the pale ether drew me far away from earth. What peace beyond
      the power of words, what dews of life eternal, they shed on the adoring
      soul! I felt the earth floating like a boat in this blue ocean. Such deep
      and tranquil delight nourishes the whole man, it purifies and ennobles. I
      surrendered myself, I was all gratitude and docility.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 21, 1855.&mdash;I have been reading a great deal: ethnography,
      comparative anatomy, cosmical systems. I have traversed the universe from
      the deepest depths of the empyrean to the peristaltic movements of the
      atoms in the elementary cell. I have felt myself expanding in the
      infinite, and enfranchised in spirit from the bounds of time and space,
      able to trace back the whole boundless creation to a point without
      dimensions, and seeing the vast multitude of suns, of milky ways, of
      stars, and nebulae, all existent in the point.
    </p>
    <p>
      And on all sides stretched mysteries, marvels and prodigies, without
      limit, without number, and without end. I felt the unfathomable thought of
      which the universe is the symbol live and burn within me; I touched,
      proved, tasted, embraced my nothingness and my immensity; I kissed the hem
      of the garments of God, and gave Him thanks for being Spirit and for being
      life. Such moments are glimpses of the divine. They make one conscious of
      one&rsquo;s immortality; they bring home to one that an eternity is not too much
      for the study of the thoughts and works of the eternal; they awaken in us
      an adoring ecstasy and the ardent humility of love.
    </p>
    <p>
      May 23, 1855.&mdash;Every hurtful passion draws us to it, as an abyss
      does, by a kind of vertigo. Feebleness of will brings about weakness of
      head, and the abyss in spite of its horror, comes to fascinate us, as
      though it were a place of refuge. Terrible danger! For this abyss is
      within us; this gulf, open like the vast jaws of an infernal serpent bent
      on devouring us, is in the depth of our own being, and our liberty floats
      over this void, which is always seeking to swallow it up. Our only
      talisman lies in that concentration of moral force which we call
      conscience, that small inextinguishable flame of which the light is duty
      and the warmth love. This little flame should be the star of our life; it
      alone can guide our trembling ark across the tumult of the great waters;
      it alone can enable us to escape the temptations of the sea, the storms
      and the monsters which are the offspring of night and the deluge. Faith in
      God, in a holy, merciful, fatherly God, is the divine ray which kindles
      this flame.
    </p>
    <p>
      How deeply I feel the profound and terrible poetry of all these primitive
      terrors from which have issued the various theogonies of the world, and
      how it all grows clear to me, and becomes a symbol of the one great
      unchanging thought, the thought of God about the universe! How present and
      sensible to my inner sense is the unity of everything! It seems to me that
      I am able to pierce to the sublime motive which, in all the infinite
      spheres of existence, and through all the modes of space and time, every
      created form reproduces and sings within the bond of an eternal harmony.
      From the infernal shades I feel myself mounting toward the regions of
      light; my flight across chaos finds its rest in paradise. Heaven, hell,
      the world, are within us. Man is the great abyss.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 27, 1855.&mdash;So life passes away, tossed like a boat by the waves
      up and down, hither and thither, drenched by the spray, stained by the
      foam, now thrown upon the bank, now drawn back again according to the
      endless caprice of the water. Such, at least, is the life of the heart and
      the passions, the life which Spinoza and the stoics reprove, and which is
      the exact opposite of that serene and contemplative life, always equable
      like the starlight, in which man lives at peace, and sees everything
      tinder its eternal aspect; the opposite also of the life of conscience, in
      which God alone speaks, and all self-will surrenders itself to His will
      made manifest.
    </p>
    <p>
      I pass from one to another of these three existences, which are equally
      known to me; but this very mobility deprives me of the advantages of each.
      For my heart is worn with scruples, the soul in me cannot crush the needs
      of the heart, and the conscience is troubled and no longer knows how to
      distinguish, in the chaos of contradictory inclinations, the voice of duty
      or the will of God. The want of simple faith, the indecision which springs
      from distrust of self, tend to make all my personal life a matter of doubt
      and uncertainty. I am afraid of the subjective life, and recoil from every
      enterprise, demand, or promise which may oblige me to realize myself; I
      feel a terror of action, and am only at ease in the impersonal,
      disinterested, and objective life of thought. The reason seems to be
      timidity, and the timidity springs from the excessive development of the
      reflective power which has almost destroyed in me all spontaneity,
      impulse, and instinct, and therefore all boldness and confidence. Whenever
      I am forced to act, I see cause for error and repentance everywhere,
      everywhere hidden threats and masked vexations. From a child I have been
      liable to the disease of irony, and that it may not be altogether crushed
      by destiny, my nature seems to have armed itself with a caution strong
      enough to prevail against any of life&rsquo;s blandishments. It is just this
      strength which is my weakness. I have a horror of being duped, above all,
      duped by myself, and I would rather cut myself off from all life&rsquo;s joys
      than deceive or be deceived. Humiliation, then, is the sorrow which I fear
      the most, and therefore it would seem as if pride were the deepest rooted
      of my faults.
    </p>
    <p>
      This may be logical, but it is not the truth: it seems to me that it is
      really distrust, incurable doubt of the future, a sense of the justice but
      not of the goodness of God&mdash;in short, unbelief, which is my
      misfortune and my sin. Every act is a hostage delivered over to avenging
      destiny&mdash;there is the instinctive belief which chills and freezes;
      every act is a pledge confided to a fatherly providence, there is the
      belief which calms.
    </p>
    <p>
      Pain seems to me a punishment and not a mercy: this is why I have a secret
      horror of it. And as I feel myself vulnerable at all points, and
      everywhere accessible to pain, I prefer to remain motionless, like a timid
      child, who, left alone in his father&rsquo;s laboratory, dares not touch
      anything for fear of springs; explosions, and catastrophes, which may
      burst from every corner at the least movement of his inexperienced hands.
      I have trust in God directly and as revealed in nature, but I have a deep
      distrust of all free and evil agents. I feel or foresee evil, moral and
      physical, as the consequence of every error, fault, or sin, and I am
      ashamed of pain.
    </p>
    <p>
      At bottom, is it not a mere boundless self-love, the purism of perfection,
      an incapacity to accept our human condition, a tacit protest against the
      order of the world, which lies at the root of my inertia? It means <i>all
      or nothing</i>, a vast ambition made inactive by disgust, a yearning that
      cannot be uttered for the ideal, joined with an offended dignity and a
      wounded pride which will have nothing to say to what they consider beneath
      them. It springs from the ironical temper which refuses to take either
      self or reality seriously, because it is forever comparing both with the
      dimly-seen infinite of its dreams. It is a state of mental reservation in
      which one lends one&rsquo;s self to circumstances for form&rsquo;s sake, but refuses
      to recognize them in one&rsquo;s heart because one cannot see the necessity or
      the divine order in them. I am disinterested because I am indifferent; I
      have nothing to say against what is, and yet I am never satisfied. I am
      too weak to conquer, and yet I will not be Conquered&mdash;it is the
      isolation of the disenchanted soul, which has put even hope away from it.
    </p>
    <p>
      But even this is a trial laid upon one. Its providential purpose is no
      doubt to lead one to that true renunciation of which charity is the sign
      and symbol. It is when one expects nothing more for one&rsquo;s self that one is
      able to love. To do good to men because we love them, to use every talent
      we have so as to please the Father from whom we hold it for His service,
      there is no other way of reaching and curing this deep discontent with
      life which hides itself under an appearance of indifference.
    </p>
    <p>
      September 4, 1855.&mdash;In the government of the soul the parliamentary
      form succeeds the monarchical. Good sense, conscience, desire, reason, the
      present and the past, the old man and the new, prudence and generosity,
      take up their parable in turn; the reign of argument begins; chaos
      replaces order, and darkness light. Simple will represents the autocratic
      <i>régime</i>, interminable discussion the deliberate regime of the soul.
      The one is preferable from the theoretical point of view, the other from
      the practical. Knowledge and action are their two respective advantages.
    </p>
    <p>
      But the best of all would be to be able to realize three powers in the
      soul. Besides the man of counsel we want the man of action and the man of
      judgment. In me, reflection comes to no useful end, because it is forever
      returning upon itself, disputing and debating. I am wanting in both the
      general who commands and the judge who decides.
    </p>
    <p>
      Analysis is dangerous if it overrules the synthetic faculty; reflection is
      to be feared if it destroys our power of intuition, and inquiry is fatal
      if it supplants faith. Decomposition becomes deadly when it surpasses in
      strength the combining and constructive energies of life, and the <i>separate</i>
      action of the powers of the soul tends to mere disintegration and
      destruction as soon as it becomes impossible to bring them to bear as <i>one</i>
      undivided force. When the sovereign abdicates anarchy begins.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is just here that my danger lies. Unity of life, of force, of action,
      of expression, is becoming impossible to me; I am legion, division,
      analysis, and reflection; the passion for dialectic, for fine
      distinctions, absorbs and weakens me. The point which I have reached seems
      to be explained by a too restless search for perfection, by the abuse of
      the critical faculty, and by an unreasonable distrust of first impulses,
      first thoughts, first words. Unity and simplicity of being, confidence,
      and spontaneity of life, are drifting out of my reach, and this is why I
      can no longer act.
    </p>
    <p>
      Give up, then, this trying to know all, to embrace all. Learn to limit
      yourself, to content yourself with some definite thing, and some definite
      work; dare to be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all
      that you are not, and to believe in your own individuality. Self-distrust
      is destroying you; trust, surrender, abandon yourself; &ldquo;believe and thou
      shalt be healed.&rdquo; Unbelief is death, and depression and self-satire are
      alike unbelief.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      From the point of view of happiness, the problem of life is insoluble, for
      it is our highest aspirations which prevent us from being happy. From the
      point of view of duty, there is the same difficulty, for the fulfillment
      of duty brings peace, not happiness. It is divine love, the love of the
      holiest, the possession of God by faith, which solves the difficulty; for
      if sacrifice has itself become a joy, a lasting, growing and imperishable
      joy&mdash;the soul is then secure of an all-sufficient and unfailing
      nourishment.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      January 21, 1856.&mdash;Yesterday seems to me as far off as though it were
      last year. My memory holds nothing more of the past than its general plan,
      just as my eye perceives nothing more in the starry heaven. It is no more
      possible for me to recover one of my days from the depths of memory than
      if it were a glass of water poured into a lake; it is not so much a lost
      thing as a thing melted and fused; the individual has returned into the
      whole. The divisions of time are categories which have no power to mold my
      life, and leave no more lasting impression than lines traced by a stick in
      water. My life, my individuality, are fluid, there is nothing for it but
      to resign one&rsquo;s self.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 9, 1856.&mdash;How true it is that our destinies are decided by
      nothings and that a small imprudence helped by some insignificant
      accident, as an acorn is fertilized by a drop of rain, may raise the trees
      on which perhaps we and others shall be crucified. What happens is quite
      different from that we planned; we planned a blessing and there springs
      from it a curse. How many times the serpent of fatality, or rather the law
      of life, the force of things, intertwining itself with some very simple
      facts, cannot be cut away by any effort, and the logic of situations and
      characters leads inevitably to a dreaded <i>dénouement</i>. It is the
      fatal spell of destiny, which obliges us to feed our grief from our own
      hand, to prolong the existence of our vulture, to throw into the furnace
      of our punishment and expiation, our powers, our qualities, our very
      virtues, one by one, and so forces us to recognize our nothingness, our
      dependence and the implacable majesty of law. Faith in a providence
      softens punishment but does not do away with it. The wheels of the divine
      chariot crush us first of all that justice may be satisfied and an example
      given to men, and then a hand is stretched out to us to raise us up, or at
      least to reconcile us with the love hidden under the justice. Pardon
      cannot precede repentance and repentance only begins with humility. And so
      long as any fault whatever appears trifling to us, so long as we see, not
      so much the culpability of as the excuses for imprudence or negligence, so
      long, in short, as Job murmurs and as providence is thought to be too
      severe, so long as there is any inner protestation against fate, or doubt
      as to the perfect justice of God, there is not yet entire humility or true
      repentance. It is when we accept the expiation that it can be spared us;
      it is when we submit sincerely that grace can be granted to us. Only when
      grief finds its work done can God dispense us from it. Trial then only
      stops when it is useless: that is why it scarcely ever stops. Faith in the
      justice and love of the Father is the best and indeed the only support
      under the sufferings of this life. The foundation of all of our pains is
      unbelief; we doubt whether what happens to us ought to happen to us; we
      think ourselves wiser than providence, because to avoid fatalism we
      believe in accident. Liberty in submission&mdash;what a problem! And yet
      that is what we must always come back to.
    </p>
    <p>
      May 7, 1856.&mdash;I have been reading Rosenkrantz&rsquo;s &ldquo;History of Poetry&rdquo;
       [Footnote: &ldquo;Geschichte der Poesie,&rdquo; by Rosenkrantz, the pupil and
      biographer of Hegel] all day: it touches upon all the great names of
      Spain, Portugal, and France, as far as Louis XV. It is a good thing to
      take these rapid surveys; the shifting point of view gives a perpetual
      freshness to the subject and to the ideas presented, a literary experience
      which is always pleasant and bracing. For one of my temperament, this
      philosophic and morphological mode of embracing and expounding literary
      history has a strong attraction. But it is the antipodes of the French
      method of proceeding, which takes, as it were, only the peaks of the
      subject, links them together by theoretical figures and triangulations,
      and then assumes these lines to represent the genuine face of the country.
      The real process of formation of a general opinion, of a public taste, of
      an established <i>genre</i>, cannot be laid bare by an abstract method,
      which suppresses the period of growth in favor of the final fruit, which
      prefers clearness of outline to fullness of statement, and sacrifices the
      preparation to the result, the multitude to the chosen type. This French
      method, however, is eminently characteristic, and it is linked by
      invisible ties to their respect for custom and fashion, to the Catholic
      and dualist instinct which admits two truths, two contradictory worlds,
      and accepts quite naturally what is magical, incomprehensible, and
      arbitrary in God, the king, or language. It is the philosophy of accident
      become habit, instinct, nature and belief, it is the religion of caprice.
    </p>
    <p>
      By one of those eternal contrasts which redress the balance of things, the
      romance peoples, who excel in the practical matters of life, care nothing
      for the philosophy of it; while the Germans, who know very little about
      the practice of life, are masters of its theory. Every living being seeks
      instinctively to complete itself; this is the secret law according to
      which that nation whose sense of life is fullest and keenest, drifts most
      readily toward a mathematical rigidity of theory. Matter and form are the
      eternal oppositions, and the mathematical intellects are often attracted
      by the facts of life, just as the sensuous minds are often drawn toward
      the study of abstract law. Thus strangely enough, what we think we are is
      just what we are not: what we desire to be is what suits us least; our
      theories condemn us, and our practice gives the lie to our theories. And
      the contradiction is an advantage, for it is the source of conflict, of
      movement, and therefore a condition of progress. Every life is an inward
      struggle, every struggle supposes two contrary forces; nothing real is
      simple, and whatever thinks itself simple is in reality the farthest from
      simplicity. Therefore it would seem that every state is a moment in a
      series; every being a compromise between contraries. In concrete dialectic
      we have the key which opens to us the understanding of beings in the
      series of beings, of states in the series of moments; and it is in
      dynamics that we have the explanation of equilibrium. Every situation is
      an <i>equilibrium</i> of forces; every life is a <i>struggle</i> between
      opposing forces working within the limits of a certain equilibrium.
    </p>
    <p>
      These two principles have been often clear to me, but I have never applied
      them widely or rigorously enough.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 1, 1856.&mdash;A man and still more a woman, always betrays something
      of his or her nationality. The women of Russia, for instance, like the
      lakes and rivers of their native country, seem to be subject to sudden and
      prolonged fits of torpor. In their movement, undulating and caressing like
      that of water, there is always a threat of unforeseen frost. The high
      latitude, the difficulty of life, the inflexibility of their autocratic <i>régime</i>,
      the heavy and mournful sky, the inexorable climate, all these harsh
      fatalities have left their mark upon the Muscovite race. A certain somber
      obstinacy, a kind of primitive ferocity, a foundation of savage harshness
      which, under the influence of circumstances, might become implacable and
      pitiless; a cold strength, an indomitable power of resolution which would
      rather wreck the whole world than yield, the indestructible instinct of
      the barbarian tribe, perceptible in the half-civilized nation, all these
      traits are visible to an attentive eye, even in the harmless extravagances
      and caprices of a young woman of this powerful race. Even in their <i>badinage</i>
      they betray something of that fierce and rigid nationality which burns its
      own towns and [as Napoleon said] keeps battalions of dead soldiers on
      their feet.
    </p>
    <p>
      What terrible rulers the Russians would be if ever they should spread the
      night of their rule over the countries of the south! They would bring us a
      polar despotism, tyranny such as the world has never known, silent as
      darkness, rigid as ice, insensible as bronze, decked with an outer
      amiability and glittering with the cold brilliancy of snow, a slavery
      without compensation or relief. Probably, however, they will gradually
      lose both the virtues and the defects of their semi-barbarism. The
      centuries as they pass will ripen these sons of the north, and they will
      enter into the concert of peoples in some other capacity than as a menace
      or a dissonance. They have only to transform their hardiness into
      strength, their cunning into grace, their Muscovitism into humanity, to
      win love instead of inspiring aversion or fear.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 3, 1856.&mdash;The German admires form, but he has no genius for it.
      He is the opposite of the Greek; he has critical instinct, aspiration, and
      desire, but no serene command of beauty. The south, more artistic, more
      self-satisfied, more capable of execution, rests idly in the sense of its
      own power to achieve. On one side you have ideas, on the other side,
      talent. The realm of Germany is beyond the clouds; that of the southern
      peoples is on this earth. The Germanic race thinks and feels; the
      southerners feel and express; the Anglo-Saxons will and do. To know, to
      feel, to act, there you have the trio of Germany, Italy, England. France
      formulates, speaks, decides, and laughs. Thought, talent, will, speech;
      or, in other words science, art, action, proselytism. So the parts of the
      quartet are assigned.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 21, 1856.&mdash;<i>Mit sack und pack</i> here I am back again in my
      town rooms. I have said good-bye to my friends and my country joys, to
      verdure, flowers, and happiness. Why did I leave them after all? The
      reason I gave myself was that I was anxious about my poor uncle, who is
      ill. But at bottom are there not other reasons? Yes, several. There is the
      fear of making myself a burden upon the two or three families of friends
      who show me incessant kindness, for which I can make no return. There are
      my books, which call me back. There is the wish to keep faith with myself.
      But all that would be nothing, I think, without another instinct, the
      instinct of the wandering Jew, which snatches from me the cup I have but
      just raised to my lips, which forbids me any prolonged enjoyment, and
      cries &ldquo;go forward! Let there be no falling asleep, no stopping, no
      attaching yourself to this or that!&rdquo; This restless feeling is not the need
      of change. It is rather the fear of what I love, the mistrust of what
      charms me, the unrest of happiness. What a <i>bizarre</i> tendency, and
      what a strange nature! not to be able to enjoy anything simply, naïvely,
      without scruple, to feel a force upon one impelling one to leave the
      table, for fear the meal should come to an end. Contradiction and mystery!
      not to use, for fear of abusing; to think one&rsquo;s self obliged to go, not
      because one has had enough, but because one has stayed awhile. I am indeed
      always the same; the being who wanders when he need not, the voluntary
      exile, the eternal traveler, the man incapable of repose, who, driven on
      by an inward voice, builds nowhere, buys and labors nowhere, but passes,
      looks, camps, and goes. And is there not another reason for all this
      restlessness, in a certain sense of void? of incessant pursuit of
      something wanting? of longing for a truer peace and a more entire
      satisfaction? Neighbors, friends, relations, I love them all; and so long
      as these affections are active, they leave in me no room for a sense of
      want. But yet they do not <i>fill</i> my heart; and that is why they have
      no power to fix it. I am always waiting for the woman and the work which
      shall be capable of taking entire possession of my soul, and of becoming
      my end and aim.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Promenant par tout séjour
  Le deuil que tu cèles,
  Psyché-papillon, un jour
  Puisses-tu trouver l&rsquo;amour
  Et perdre tes ailes!&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      I have not given away my heart: hence this restlessness of spirit. I will
      not let it be taken captive by that which cannot fill and satisfy it;
      hence this instinct of pitiless detachment from all that charms me without
      permanently binding me; so that it seems as if my love of movement, which
      looks so like inconstancy, was at bottom only a perpetual search, a hope,
      a desire, and a care, the malady of the ideal.
    </p>
    <p>
      ... Life indeed must always be a compromise between common sense and the
      ideal, the one abating nothing of its demands, the other accommodating
      itself to what is practicable and real. But marriage by common sense!
      arrived at by a bargain! Can it be anything but a profanation? On the
      other, hand, is that not a vicious ideal which hinders life from
      completing itself, and destroys the family in germ? Is there not too much
      of pride in my ideal, pride which will not accept the common destiny?...
    </p>
    <p>
      Noon.&mdash;I have been dreaming&mdash;my head in my hand. About what?
      About happiness. I have as it were, been asleep on the fatherly breast of
      God. His will be done!
    </p>
    <p>
      August 3, 1856.&mdash;A delightful Sunday afternoon at Pressy. Returned
      late, under a great sky magnificently starred, with summer lightning
      playing from a point behind the Jura. Drunk with poetry, and overwhelmed
      by sensation after sensation, I came back slowly, blessing the God of
      life, and plunged in the joy of the infinite. One thing only I lacked, a
      soul with whom to share it all&mdash;for emotion and enthusiasm overflowed
      like water from a full cup. The Milky Way, the great black poplars, the
      ripple of the waves, the shooting stars, distant songs, the lamp-lit town,
      all spoke to me in the language of poetry. I felt myself almost a poet.
      The wrinkles of science disappeared under the magic breath of admiration;
      the old elasticity of soul, trustful, free, and living was mine once more.
      I was once more young, capable of self-abandonment and of love. All my
      barrenness had disappeared; the heavenly dew had fertilized the dead and
      gnarled stick; it began to be green and flower again. My God, how wretched
      should we be without beauty! But with it, everything is born afresh in us;
      the senses, the heart, imagination, reason, will, come together like the
      dead bones of the prophet, and become one single and self-same energy.
      What is happiness if it is not this plentitude of existence, this close
      union with the universal and divine life? I have been happy a whole half
      day, and I have been brooding over my joy, steeping myself in it to the
      very depths of consciousness.
    </p>
    <p>
      October 22, 1856.&mdash;We must learn to look upon life as an
      apprenticeship to a progressive renunciation, a perpetual diminution in
      our pretensions, our hopes, our powers, and our liberty. The circle grows
      narrower and narrower; we began with being eager to learn everything, to
      see everything, to tame and conquer everything, and in all directions we
      reach our limit&mdash;<i>non plus ultra</i>. Fortune, glory, love, power,
      health, happiness, long life, all these blessings which have been
      possessed by other men seem at first promised and accessible to us, and
      then we have to put the dream away from us, to withdraw one personal claim
      after another to make ourselves small and humble, to submit to feel
      ourselves limited, feeble, dependent, ignorant and poor, and to throw
      ourselves upon God for all, recognizing our own worthlessness, and that we
      have no right to anything. It is in this nothingness that we recover
      something of life&mdash;the divine spark is there at the bottom of it.
      Resignation comes to us, and, in believing love, we reconquer the true
      greatness.
    </p>
    <p>
      October 27, 1856.&mdash;In all the chief matters of life we are alone, and
      our true history is scarcely ever deciphered by others. The chief part of
      the drama is a monologue, rather an intimate debate between God, our
      conscience, and ourselves. Tears, griefs, depressions, disappointments,
      irritations, good and evil thoughts, decisions, uncertainties,
      deliberations, all these belong to our secret, and are almost all
      incommunicable and intransmissible, even when we try to speak of them, and
      even when we write them down. What is most precious in us never shows
      itself, never finds an issue even in the closest intimacy. Only a part of
      it reaches our consciousness, it scarcely enters into action except in
      prayer, and is perhaps only perceived by God, for our past rapidly becomes
      strange to us. Our monad may be influenced by other monads, but none the
      less does it remain impenetrable to them in its essence; and we ourselves,
      when all is said, remain outside our own mystery. The center of our
      consciousness is unconscious, as the kernel of the sun is dark. All that
      we are, desire, do, and know, is more or less superficial, and below the
      rays and lightnings of our periphery there remains the darkness of
      unfathomable substance.
    </p>
    <p>
      I was then well-advised when, in my theory of the inner man, I placed at
      the foundation of the self, after the seven spheres which the self
      contains had been successively disengaged, a lowest depth of darkness, the
      abyss of the un-revealed, the virtual pledge of an infinite future, the
      obscure self, the pure subjectivity which is incapable of realizing itself
      in mind, conscience, or reason, in the soul, the heart, the imagination,
      or the life of the senses, and which makes for itself attributes and
      conditions out of all these forms of its own life.
    </p>
    <p>
      But the obscure only exists that it may cease to exist. In it lies the
      opportunity of all victory and all progress. Whether it call itself
      fatality, death, night, or matter, it is the pedestal of life, of light,
      of liberty, and the spirit. For it represents <i>resistance</i>&mdash;that
      is to say, the fulcrum of all activity, the occasion for its development
      and its triumph.
    </p>
    <p>
      December 17, 1856.&mdash;This evening was the second quartet concert. It
      stirred me much more than the first; the music chosen was loftier and
      stronger. It was the quartet in D minor of Mozart, and the quartet in C
      major of Beethoven, separated by a Spohr concerto. This last, vivid, and
      brilliant as a whole, has fire in the allegro, feeling in the adagio, and
      elegance in the <i>finale</i>, but it is the product of one fine gift in a
      mediocre personality. With the two others you are at once in contact with
      genius; you are admitted to the secrets of two great souls. Mozart stands
      for inward liberty, Beethoven for the power of enthusiasm. The one sets us
      free, the other ravishes us out of ourselves. I do not think I ever felt
      more distinctly than to-day, or with more intensity, the difference
      between these two masters. Their two personalities became transparent to
      me, and I seemed to read them to their depths.
    </p>
    <p>
      The work of Mozart, penetrated as it is with mind and thought, represents
      a solved problem, a balance struck between aspiration and executive
      capacity, the sovereignty of a grace which is always mistress of itself,
      marvelous harmony and perfect unity. His quartet describes a day in one of
      those Attic souls who pre-figure on earth the serenity of Elysium. The
      first scene is a pleasant conversation, like that of Socrates on the banks
      of the Ilissus; its chief mark is an exquisite urbanity. The second scene
      is deeply pathetic. A cloud has risen in the blue of this Greek heaven. A
      storm, such as life inevitably brings with it, even in the case of great
      souls who love and esteem each other, has come to trouble the original
      harmony. What is the cause of it&mdash;a misunderstanding, apiece of
      neglect? Impossible to say, but it breaks out notwithstanding. The andante
      is a scene of reproach and complaint, but as between immortals. What
      loftiness in complaint, what dignity, what feeling, what noble sweetness
      in reproach! The voice trembles and grows graver, but remains affectionate
      and dignified. Then, the storm has passed, the sun has come back, the
      explanation has taken place, peace is re-established. The third scene
      paints the brightness of reconciliation. Love, in its restored confidence,
      and as though in sly self-testing, permits itself even gentle mocking and
      friendly <i>badinage</i>. And the <i>finale</i> brings us back to that
      tempered gaiety and happy serenity, that supreme freedom, flower of the
      inner life, which is the leading motive of the whole composition.
    </p>
    <p>
      In Beethoven&rsquo;s on the other hand, a spirit of tragic irony paints for you
      the mad tumult of existence as it dances forever above the threatening
      abyss of the infinite. No more unity, no more satisfaction, no more
      serenity! We are spectators of the eternal duel between the great forces,
      that of the abyss which absorbs all finite things, and that of life which
      defends and asserts itself, expands, and enjoys. The first bars break the
      seals and open the caverns of the great deep. The struggle begins. It is
      long. Life is born, and disports itself gay and careless as the butterfly
      which flutters above a precipice. Then it expands the realm of its
      conquests, and chants its successes. It founds a kingdom, it constructs a
      system of nature. But the typhon rises from the yawning gulf, and the
      Titans beat upon the gates of the new empire. A battle of giants begins.
      You hear the tumultuous efforts of the powers of chaos. Life triumphs at
      last, but the victory is not final, and through all the intoxication of it
      there is a certain note of terror and bewilderment. The soul of Beethoven
      was a tormented soul. The passion and the awe of the infinite seemed to
      toss it to and fro from heaven to hell, Hence its vastness. Which is the
      greater, Mozart or Beethoven? Idle question! The one is more perfect, the
      other more colossal. The first gives you the peace of perfect art, beauty,
      at first sight. The second gives you sublimity, terror, pity, a beauty of
      second impression. The one gives that for which the other rouses a desire.
      Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the
      romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and sea, and while
      the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that
      of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed
      be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us
      good. Our love is due to both.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      To judge is to see clearly, to care for what is just and therefore to be
      impartial, more exactly, to be disinterested, more exactly still, to be
      impersonal.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do
      what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires but according to
      our powers.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      If nationality is consent, the state is compulsion.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only
      begins for man with self-surrender.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides,
      never decides. Accept life, and you must accept regret.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint
      which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 3, 1857.&mdash;The phantasmagoria of the soul cradles and soothes
      me as though I were an Indian yoghi, and everything, even my own life,
      becomes to me smoke, shadow, vapor, and illusion. I hold so lightly to all
      phenomena that they end by passing over me like gleams over a landscape,
      and are gone without leaving any impression. Thought is a kind of opium;
      it can intoxicate us, while still broad awake; it can make transparent the
      mountains and everything that exists. It is by love only that one keeps
      hold upon reality, that one recovers one&rsquo;s proper self, that one becomes
      again will, force, and individuality. Love could do everything with me; by
      myself and for myself I prefer to be nothing....
    </p>
    <p>
      I have the imagination of regret and not that of hope. My
      clear-sightedness is retrospective, and the result with me of
      disinterestedness and prudence is that I attach myself to what I have no
      chance of obtaining....
    </p>
    <p>
      May 27, 1857. (Vandoeuvres. [Footnote: Also a village in the neighborhood
      of Geneva.])&mdash;We are going down to Geneva to hear the &ldquo;Tannhäuser&rdquo; of
      Richard Wagner performed at the theater by the German troup now passing
      through. Wagner&rsquo;s is a powerful mind endowed with strong poetical
      sensitiveness. His work is even more poetical than musical. The
      suppression of the lyrical element, and therefore of melody, is with him a
      systematic <i>parti pris</i>. No more duos or trios; monologue and the <i>aria</i>
      are alike done away with. There remains only declamation, the recitative,
      and the choruses. In order to avoid the conventional in singing, Wagner
      falls into another convention&mdash;that of not singing at all. He
      subordinates the voice to articulate speech, and for fear lest the muse
      should take flight he clips her wings. So that his works are rather
      symphonic dramas than operas. The voice is brought down to the rank of an
      instrument, put on a level with the violins, the hautboys, and the drums,
      and treated instrumentally. Man is deposed from his superior position, and
      the center of gravity of the work passes into the baton of the conductor.
      It is music depersonalized, neo-Hegelian music&mdash;music multiple
      instead of individual. If this is so, it is indeed the music of the
      future, the music of the socialist democracy replacing the art which is
      aristocratic, heroic, or subjective.
    </p>
    <p>
      The overture pleased me even less than at the first hearing: it is like
      nature before man appeared. Everything in it is enormous, savage,
      elementary, like the murmur of forests and the roar of animals. It is
      forbidding and obscure, because man, that is to say, mind, the key of the
      enigma, personality, the spectator, is wanting to it.
    </p>
    <p>
      The idea of the piece is grand. It is nothing less than the struggle of
      passion and pure love, of flesh and spirit, of the animal and the angel in
      man. The music is always expressive, the choruses very beautiful, the
      orchestration skillful, but the whole is fatiguing and excessive, too
      full, too laborious. When all is said, it lacks gayety, ease, naturalness
      and vivacity&mdash;it has no smile, no wings. Poetically one is
      fascinated, but one&rsquo;s musical enjoyment is hesitating, often doubtful, and
      one recalls nothing but the general impression&mdash;Wagner&rsquo;s music
      represents the abdication of the self, and the emancipation of all the
      forces once under its rule. It is a falling back into Spinozism&mdash;the
      triumph of fatality. This music has its root and its fulcrum in two
      tendencies of the epoch, materialism and socialism&mdash;each of them
      ignoring the true value of the human personality, and drowning it in the
      totality of nature or of society.
    </p>
    <p>
      June 17, 1857. (Vandoeuvres).&mdash;I have just followed Maine de Biran
      from his twenty-eighth to his forty-eighth year by means of his journal,
      and a crowd of thoughts have besieged me. Let me disengage those which
      concern myself. In this eternal self-chronicler and observer I seem to see
      myself reflected with all my faults, indecision, discouragement,
      over-dependence on sympathy, difficulty of finishing, with my habit of
      watching myself feel and live, with my growing incapacity for practical
      action, with my aptitude for psychological study. But I have also
      discovered some differences which cheer and console me. This nature is, as
      it were, only one of the men which exist in me. It is one of my
      departments. It is not the whole of my territory, the whole of my inner
      kingdom. Intellectually, I am more objective and more constructive; my
      horizon is vaster; I have seen much more of men, things, countries,
      peoples and books; I have a greater mass of experiences&mdash;in a word, I
      feel that I have more culture, greater wealth, range, and freedom of mind,
      in spite of my wants, my limits, and my weaknesses. Why does Maine de
      Biran make <i>will</i> the whole of man? Perhaps because he had too little
      will. A man esteems most highly what he himself lacks, and exaggerates
      what he longs to possess. Another incapable of thought, and meditation,
      would have made self-consciousness the supreme thing. Only the totality of
      things has an objective value. As soon as one isolates a part from the
      whole, as soon as one chooses, the choice is involuntarily and
      instinctively dictated by subjective inclinations which obey one or other
      of the two opposing laws, the attraction of similars or the affinity of
      contraries.
    </p>
    <p>
      Five o&rsquo;clock.&mdash;The morning has passed like a dream. I went on with
      the journal of Maine de Biran down to the end of 1817. After dinner I
      passed my time with the birds in the open air, wandering in the shady
      walks which wind along under Pressy. The sun was brilliant and the air
      clear. The midday orchestra of nature was at its best. Against the humming
      background made by a thousand invisible insects there rose the delicate
      caprices and improvisations of the nightingale singing from the ash-trees,
      or of the hedge-sparrows and the chaffinches in their nests. The hedges
      are hung with wild roses, the scent of the acacia still perfumes the
      paths; the light down of the poplar seeds floated in the air like a kind
      of warm, fair-weather snow. I felt myself as gay as a butterfly. On coming
      in I read the three first books of that poem &ldquo;Corinne,&rdquo; which I have not
      seen since I was a youth. Now as I read it again, I look at it across
      interposing memories; the romantic interest of it seems to me to have
      vanished, but not the poetical, pathetic, or moral interest.
    </p>
    <p>
      June 18th.&mdash;I have just been spending three hours in the orchard
      under the shade of the hedge, combining the spectacle of a beautiful
      morning with reading and taking a turn between each chapter. Now the sky
      is again covered with its white veil of cloud, and I have come up with
      Biran, whose &ldquo;Pensée&rdquo; I have just finished, and Corinne, whom I have
      followed with Oswald in their excursions among the monuments of the
      eternal city. Nothing is so melancholy and wearisome as this journal of
      Maine de Biran. This unchanging monotony of perpetual reflection has an
      enervating and depressing effect upon one. Here, then, is the life of a
      distinguished man seen in its most intimate aspects! It is one long
      repetition, in which the only change is an almost imperceptible
      displacement of center in the writer&rsquo;s manner of viewing himself. This
      thinker takes thirty years to move from the Epicurean quietude to the
      quietism of Fénélon, and this only speculatively, for his practical life
      remains the same, and all his anthropological discovery consists in
      returning to the theory of the three lives, lower, human, and higher,
      which is in Pascal and in Aristotle. And this is what they call a
      philosopher in France! Beside the great philosophers, how poor and narrow
      seems such an intellectual life! It is the journey of an ant, bounded by
      the limits of a field; of a mole, who spends his days in the construction
      of a mole-hill. How narrow and stifling the swallow who flies across the
      whole Old World, and whose sphere of life embraces Africa and Europe,
      would find the circle with which the mole and the ant are content! This
      volume of Biran produces in me a sort of asphyxia; as I assimilate it, it
      seems to paralyze me; I am chained to it by some spell of secret sympathy.
      I pity, and I am afraid of my pity, for I feel how near I am to the same
      evils and the same faults....
    </p>
    <p>
      Ernest Naville&rsquo;s introductory essay is full of interest, written in a
      serious and noble style; but it is almost as sad as it is ripe and mature.
      What displeases me in it a little is its exaggeration of the merits of
      Biran. For the rest, the small critical impatience which the volume has
      stirred in me will be gone by to-morrow. Maine de Biran is an important
      link in the French literary tradition. It is from him that our Swiss
      critics descend, Naville father and son, Secrétan. He is the source of our
      best contemporary psychology, for Stapfer, Royer-Collard, and Cousin
      called him their master, and Ampère, his junior by nine years, was his
      friend.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 25, 1857. (Vandoeuvres).&mdash;At ten o&rsquo;clock this evening, under a
      starlit sky, a group of rustics under the windows of the salon employed
      themselves in shouting disagreeable songs. Why is it that this tuneless
      shrieking of false notes and scoffing words delights these people? Why is
      it that this ostentatious parade of ugliness, this jarring vulgarity and
      grimacing is their way of finding expression and expansion in the great
      solitary and tranquil night?
    </p>
    <p>
      Why? Because of a sad and secret instinct. Because of the need they have
      of realizing themselves as individuals, of asserting themselves
      exclusively, egotistically, idolatrously&mdash;opposing the self in them
      to everything else, placing it in harsh contrast with the nature which
      enwraps us, with the poetry which raises us above ourselves, with the
      harmony which binds us to others, with the adoration which carries us
      toward God. No, no, no! Myself only, and that is enough! Myself by
      negation, by ugliness, by grimace and irony! Myself, in my caprice, in my
      independence, in my irresponsible sovereignty; myself, set free by
      laughter, free as the demons are, and exulting in my freedom; I, master of
      myself, invincible and self-sufficient, living for this one time yet by
      and for myself! This is what seems to me at the bottom of this
      merry-making. One hears in it an echo of Satan, the temptation to make
      self the center of all things, to be like an Elohim, the worst and last
      revolt of man. It means also, perhaps, some rapid perception of what is
      absolute in personality, some rough exaltation of the subject, the
      individual, who thus claims, by abasing them, the rights of subjective
      existence. If so, it is the caricature of our most precious privilege, the
      parody of our apotheosis, a vulgarizing of our highest greatness. Shout
      away, then, drunkards! Your ignoble concert, with all its repulsive
      vulgarity, still reveals to us, without knowing it, something of the
      majesty of life and the sovereign power of the soul.
    </p>
    <p>
      September 15, 1857.&mdash;I have just finished Sismondi&rsquo;s journal and
      correspondence. Sismondi is essentially the honest man, conscientious,
      upright, respectable, the friend of the public good and the devoted
      upholder of a great cause, the amelioration of the common lot of men.
      Character and heart are the dominant elements in his individuality, and
      cordiality is the salient feature of his nature. Sismondi&rsquo;s is a most
      encouraging example. With average faculties, very little imagination, not
      much taste, not much talent, without subtlety of feeling, without great
      elevation or width or profundity of mind, he yet succeeded in achieving a
      career which was almost illustrious, and he has left behind him some sixty
      volumes, well-known and well spoken of. How was this? His love for men on
      the one side, and his passion for work on the other, are the two factors
      in his fame. In political economy, in literary or political history, in
      personal action, Sismondi showed no genius&mdash;scarcely talent; but in
      all he did there was solidity, loyalty, good sense and integrity. The
      poetical, artistic and philosophic sense is deficient in him, but he
      attracts and interests us by his moral sense. We see in him the sincere
      writer, a man of excellent heart, a good citizen and warm friend, worthy
      and honest in the widest sense of terms, not brilliant, but inspiring
      trust and confidence by his character, his principles and his virtues.
      More than this, he is the best type of good Genevese liberalism,
      republican but not democratic, Protestant but not Calvinist, human but not
      socialist, progressive but without any sympathy with violence. He was a
      conservative without either egotism or hypocrisy, a patriot without
      narrowness. In his theories he was governed by experience and observation,
      and in his practice by general ideas. A laborious philanthropist, the past
      and the present were to him but fields of study, from which useful lessons
      might be gleaned. Positive and reasonable in temper, his mind was set upon
      a high average well-being for human society, and his efforts were directed
      toward founding such a social science as might most readily promote it.
    </p>
    <p>
      September 24, 1857.&mdash;In the course of much thought yesterday about
      &ldquo;Atala&rdquo; and &ldquo;René,&rdquo; Châteaubriand became clear to me. I saw in him a great
      artist but not a great man, immense talent but a still vaster pride&mdash;a
      nature at once devoured with ambition and unable to find anything to love
      or admire in the world except itself&mdash;indefatigable in labor and
      capable of everything except of true devotion, self-sacrifice and faith.
      Jealous of all success, he was always on the opposition side, that he
      might be the better able to disavow all services received, and to hold
      aloof from any other glory but his own. Legitimist under the empire, a
      parliamentarian tinder the legitimist <i>régime</i>, republican under the
      constitutional monarchy, defending Christianity when France was
      philosophical, and taking a distaste for religion as soon as it became
      once more a serious power, the secret of these endless contradictions in
      him was simply the desire to reign alone like the sun&mdash;a devouring
      thirst for applause, an incurable and insatiable vanity, which, with the
      true, fierce instinct of tyranny, would endure no brother near the throne.
      A man of magnificent imagination but of poor character, of indisputable
      power, but cursed with a cold egotism and an incurable barrenness of
      feeling, which made it impossible for him to tolerate about him anybody
      but slaves or adorers. A tormented soul and miserable life, when all is
      said, under its aureole of glory and its crown of laurels!
    </p>
    <p>
      Essentially jealous and choleric, Châteaubriand from the beginning was
      inspired by mistrust, by the passion for contradicting, for crushing and
      conquering. This motive may always be traced in him. Rousseau seems to me
      his point of departure, the man who suggested to him by contrast and
      opposition all his replies and attacks, Rousseau is revolutionary:
      Châteaubriand therefore writes his &ldquo;Essay on Revolutions.&rdquo; Rousseau is
      republican and Protestant; Châteaubriand will be royalist and Catholic.
      Rousseau is <i>bourgeois</i>; Chateaubriand will glorify nothing but noble
      birth, honor, chivalry and deeds of arms. Rousseau conquered nature for
      French letters, above all the nature of the mountains and of the Swiss and
      Savoy, and lakes. He pleaded for her against civilization. Châteaubriand
      will take possession of a new and colossal nature, of the ocean, of
      America; but he will make his savages speak the language of Louis XIV., he
      will bow Atala before a Catholic missionary, and sanctify passions born on
      the banks of the Mississippi by the solemnities of Catholic ceremonial.
      Rousseau was the apologist of reverie; Châteaubriand will build the
      monument of it in order to break it in René. Rousseau preaches Deism with
      all his eloquence in the &ldquo;Vicaire Savoyard;&rdquo; Châteaubriand surrounds the
      Roman creed with all the garlands of his poetry in the &ldquo;Génie du
      Christianisme.&rdquo; Rousseau appeals to natural law and pleads for the future
      of nations; Châteaubriand will only sing the glories of the past, the
      ashes of history and the noble ruins of empires. Always a rôle to be
      filled, cleverness to be displayed, a <i>parti-pris</i> to be upheld and
      fame to be won&mdash;his theme, one of imagination, his faith one to
      order, but sincerity, loyalty, candor, seldom or never! Always a real
      indifference simulating a passion for truth; always an imperious thirst
      for glory instead of devotion to the good; always the ambitious artist,
      never the citizen, the believer, the man. Châteaubriand posed all his life
      as the wearied Colossus, smiling pitifully upon a pygmy world, and
      contemptuously affecting to desire nothing from it, though at the same
      time wishing it to be believed that he could if he pleased possess himself
      of everything by mere force of genius. He is the type of an untoward race,
      and the father of a disagreeable lineage.
    </p>
    <p>
      But to return to the two episodes. &ldquo;René&rdquo; seems to me very superior to
      &ldquo;Atala.&rsquo;&rdquo; Both the stories show a talent of the first rank, but of the two
      the beauty of &ldquo;Atala&rdquo; is of the more transitory kind. The attempt to
      render in the style of Versailles the loves of a Natchez and a Seminole,
      and to describe the manners of the adorers of the Manitous in the tone of
      Catholic sentiment, was an attempt too violent to succeed. But the work is
      a <i>tour de force</i> of style, and it was only by the polished
      classicism of the form, that the romantic matter of the sentiments and the
      descriptions could have been imported into the colorless literature of the
      empire. &ldquo;Atala&rdquo; is already old-fashioned and theatrical in all the parts
      which are not descriptive or European&mdash;that is to say, throughout all
      the sentimental savagery.
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;René&rdquo; is infinitely more durable. Its theme, which is the malady of a
      whole generation&mdash;distaste for life brought about by idle reverie and
      the ravages of a vague and unmeasured ambition&mdash;is true to reality.
      Without knowing or wishing it, Châteaubriand has been sincere, for René is
      himself. This little sketch is in every respect a masterpiece. It is not,
      like &ldquo;Atala,&rdquo; spoilt artistically by intentions alien to the subject, by
      being made the means of expression of a particular tendency. Instead of
      taking a passion for René, indeed, future generations will scorn and
      wonder at him; instead of a hero they will see in him a pathological case;
      but the work itself, like the Sphinx, will endure. A work of art will bear
      all kinds of interpretations; each in turn finds a basis in it, while the
      work itself, because it represents an idea, and therefore partakes of the
      richness and complexity which belong to ideas, suffices for all and
      survives all. A portrait proves whatever one asks of it. Even in its forms
      of style, in the disdainful generality of the terms in which the story is
      told, in the terseness of the sentences, in the sequence of the images and
      of the pictures, traced with classic purity and marvelous vigor, &ldquo;René&rdquo;
       maintains its monumental character. Carved, as it were, in material of the
      present century, with the tools of classical art, &ldquo;René&rdquo; is the immortal
      cameo of Châteaubriand.
    </p>
    <p>
      We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented
      with ourselves. The consciousness of wrong-doing makes us irritable, and
      our heart in its cunning quarrels with what is outside it, in order that
      it may deafen the clamor within.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      The faculty of intellectual metamorphosis is the first and indispensable
      faculty of the critic; without it he is not apt at understanding other
      minds, and ought, therefore, if he love truth, to hold his peace. The
      conscientious critic must first criticise himself; what we do not
      understand we have not the right to judge.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      June 14, 1858.&mdash;Sadness and anxiety seem to be increasing upon me.
      Like cattle in a burning stable, I cling to what consumes me, to the
      solitary life which does me so much harm. I let myself be devoured by
      inward suffering....
    </p>
    <p>
      Yesterday, however, I struggled against this fatal tendency. I went out
      into the country, and the children&rsquo;s caresses restored to me something of
      serenity and calm. After we had dined out of doors all three sang some
      songs and school hymns, which were delightful to listen to. The spring
      fairy had been scattering flowers over the fields with lavish hands; it
      was a little glimpse of paradise. It is true, indeed, that the serpent too
      was not far off. Yesterday there was a robbery close by the house, and
      death had visited another neighbor. Sin and death lurk around every Eden,
      and sometimes within it. Hence the tragic beauty, the melancholy poetry of
      human destiny. Flowers, shade, a fine view, a sunset sky, joy, grace,
      feeling, abundance and serenity, tenderness and song&mdash;here you have
      the element of beauty: the dangers of the present and the treacheries of
      the future, here is the element of pathos. The fashion of this world
      passeth away. Unless we have laid hold upon eternity, unless we take the
      religious view of life, these bright, fleeting days can only be a subject
      for terror. Happiness should be a prayer&mdash;and grief also. Faith in
      the moral order, in the protecting fatherhood of God, appeared to me in
      all its serious sweetness.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Pense, aime, agis et souffre en Dieu
  C&rsquo;est la grande science.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      July 18, 1858.&mdash;To-day I have been deeply moved by the <i>nostalgia</i>
      of happiness and by the appeals of memory. My old self, the dreams which
      used to haunt me in Germany, passionate impulses, high aspirations, all
      revived in me at once with unexpected force. The dread lest I should have
      missed my destiny and stifled my true nature, lest I should have buried
      myself alive, passed through me like a shudder. Thirst for the unknown,
      passionate love of life, the yearning for the blue vaults of the infinite
      and the strange worlds of the ineffable, and that sad ecstasy which the
      ideal wakens in its beholders&mdash;all these carried me away in a
      whirlwind of feeling that I cannot describe. Was it a warning, a
      punishment, a temptation? Was it a secret protest, or a violent act of
      rebellion on the part of a nature which is unsatisfied?&mdash;the last
      agony of happiness and of a hope that will not die?
    </p>
    <p>
      What raised all this storm? Nothing but a book&mdash;the first number of
      the &ldquo;<i>Revue Germanique</i>.&rdquo; The articles of Dollfus, Renan, Littré,
      Montégut, Taillandier, by recalling to me some old and favorite subjects,
      made me forget ten wasted years, and carried me back to my university
      life. I was tempted to throw off my Genevese garb and to set off, stick in
      hand, for any country that might offer&mdash;stripped and poor, but still
      young, enthusiastic, and alive, full of ardor and of faith.
    </p>
    <p>
      ... I have been dreaming alone since ten o&rsquo;clock at the window, while the
      stars twinkled among the clouds, and the lights of the neighbors
      disappeared one by one in the houses round. Dreaming of what? Of the
      meaning of this tragic comedy which we call life. Alas! alas! I was as
      melancholy as the preacher. A hundred years seemed to me a dream, life a
      breath, and everything a nothing. What tortures of mind and soul, and all
      that we may die in a few minutes! What should interest us, and why?
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Le temps n&rsquo;est rien pour l&rsquo;âme, enfant, ta vie est pleine,
  Et ce jour vaut cent ans, s&rsquo;il te fait trouver Dieu.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      To make an object for myself, to hope, to struggle, seems to me more and
      more impossible and amazing. At twenty I was the embodiment of curiosity,
      elasticity and spiritual ubiquity; at thirty-seven I have not a will, a
      desire, or a talent left; the fireworks of my youth have left nothing but
      a handful of ashes behind them.
    </p>
    <p>
      December 13, 1858.&mdash;Consider yourself a refractory pupil for whom you
      are responsible as mentor and tutor. To sanctify sinful nature, by
      bringing it gradually under the control of the angel within us, by the
      help of a holy God, is really the whole of Christian pedagogy and of
      religious morals. Our work&mdash;my work&mdash;consists in taming,
      subduing, evangelizing and <i>angelizing</i> the evil self; and in
      restoring harmony with the good self. Salvation lies in abandoning the
      evil self in principle and in taking refuge with the other, the divine
      self, in accepting with courage and prayer the task of living with one&rsquo;s
      own demon, and making it into a less and less rebellious instrument of
      good. The Abel in us must labor for the salvation of the Cain. To
      undertake it is to be converted, and this conversion must be repeated day
      by day. Abel only redeems and touches Cain by exercising him constantly in
      good works. To do right is in one sense an act of violence; it is
      suffering, expiation, a cross, for it means the conquest and enslavement
      of self. In another sense it is the apprenticeship to heavenly things,
      sweet and secret joy, contentment and peace. Sanctification implies
      perpetual martyrdom, but it is a martyrdom which glorifies. A crown of
      thorns is the sad eternal symbol of the life of the saints. The best
      measure of the profundity of any religious doctrine is given by its
      conception of sin and the cure of sin.
    </p>
    <p>
      A duty is no sooner divined than from that very moment it becomes binding
      upon us.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Latent genius is but a presumption. Everything that can be, is bound to
      come into being, and what never comes into being is nothing.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 14, 1859.&mdash;I have just read &ldquo;Faust&rdquo; again. Alas, every year I am
      fascinated afresh by this somber figure, this restless life. It is the
      type of suffering toward which I myself gravitate, and I am always finding
      in the poem words which strike straight to my heart. Immortal, malign,
      accursed type! Specter of my own conscience, ghost of my own torment,
      image of the ceaseless struggle of the soul which has not yet found its
      true aliment, its peace, its faith&mdash;art thou not the typical example
      of a life which feeds upon itself, because it has not found its God, and
      which, in its wandering flight across the worlds, carries within it, like
      a comet, an inextinguishable flame of desire, and an agony of incurable
      disillusion? I also am reduced to nothingness, and I shiver on the brink
      of the great empty abysses of my inner being, stifled by longing for the
      unknown, consumed with the thirst for the infinite, prostrate before the
      ineffable. I also am torn sometimes by this blind passion for life, these
      desperate struggles for happiness, though more often I am a prey to
      complete exhaustion and taciturn despair. What is the reason of it all?
      Doubt&mdash;doubt of one&rsquo;s self, of thought, of men, and of life&mdash;doubt
      which enervates the will and weakens all our powers, which makes us forget
      God and neglect prayer and duty&mdash;that restless and corrosive doubt
      which makes existence impossible and meets all hope with satire.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 17, 1859.&mdash;Always and everywhere salvation is torture,
      deliverance means death, and peace lies in sacrifice. If we would win our
      pardon, we must kiss the fiery crucifix. Life is a series of agonies, a
      Calvary, which we can only climb on bruised and aching knees. We seek
      distractions; we wander away; we deafen and stupefy ourselves that we may
      escape the test; we turn away oar eyes from the <i>via dolorosa</i>; and
      yet there is no help for it&mdash;we must come back to it in the end. What
      we have to recognize is that each of us carries within himself his own
      executioner&mdash;his demon, his hell, in his sin; that his sin is his
      idol, and that this idol, which seduces the desire of his heart, is his
      curse.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Die unto sin!</i> This great saying of Christianity remains still the
      highest theoretical solution of the inner life. Only in it is there any
      peace of conscience; and without this peace there is no peace....
    </p>
    <p>
      I have just read seven chapters of the gospel. Nothing calms me so much.
      To do one&rsquo;s duty in love and obedience, to do what is right&mdash;these
      are the ideas which remain with one. To live in God and to do his work&mdash;this
      is religion, salvation, life eternal; this is both the effect and the sign
      of love and of the Holy Spirit; this is the new man announced by Jesus,
      and the new life into which we enter by the second birth. To be born again
      is to renounce the old life, sin, and the natural man, and to take to
      one&rsquo;s self another principle of life. It is to exist for God with another
      self, another will, another love.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 9, 1859.&mdash;Nature is forgetful: the world is almost more so.
      However little the individual may lend himself to it, oblivion soon covers
      him like a shroud. This rapid and inexorable expansion of the universal
      life, which covers, overflows, and swallows up all individual being, which
      effaces our existence and annuls all memory of us, fills me with
      unbearable melancholy. To be born, to struggle, to disappear&mdash;there
      is the whole ephemeral drama of human life. Except in a few hearts, and
      not even always in one, our memory passes like a ripple on the water, or a
      breeze in the air. If nothing in us is immortal, what a small thing is
      life. Like a dream which trembles and dies at the first glimmer of dawn,
      all my past, all my present, dissolve in me, and fall away from my
      consciousness at the moment when it returns upon itself. I feel myself
      then stripped and empty, like a convalescent who remembers nothing. My
      travels, my reading, my studies, my projects, my hopes, have faded from my
      mind. It is a singular state. All my faculties drop away from me like a
      cloak that one takes off, like the chrysalis case of a larva. I feel
      myself returning into a more elementary form. I behold my own unclothing;
      I forget, still more than I am forgotten; I pass gently into the grave
      while still living, and I feel, as it were, the indescribable peace of
      annihilation, and the dim quiet of the Nirvana. I am conscious of the
      river of time passing before and in me, of the impalpable shadows of life
      gliding past me, but nothing breaks the cateleptic tranquillity which
      enwraps me.
    </p>
    <p>
      I come to understand the Buddhist trance of the Soufis, the kief of the
      Turk, the &ldquo;ecstasy&rdquo; of the orientals, and yet I am conscious all the time
      that the pleasure of it is deadly, that, like the use of opium or of
      hasheesh, it is a kind of slow suicide, inferior in all respects to the
      joys of action, to the sweetness of love, to the beauty of enthusiasm, to
      the sacred savor of accomplished duty. November 28, 1859.&mdash;This
      evening I heard the first lecture of Ernest Naville [Footnote: The
      well-known Genevese preacher and writer, Ernest Naville, the son of a
      Genevese pastor, was born in 1816, became professor at the Academy of
      Geneva in 1844, lost his post after the revolution of 1846, and, except
      for a short interval in 1860, has since then held no official position.
      His courses of theological lectures, delivered at intervals from 1859
      onward, were an extraordinary success. They were at first confined to men
      only, and an audience of two thousand persons sometimes assembled to hear
      them. To literature he is mainly known as the editor of Maine de Biran&rsquo;s
      Journal.] on &ldquo;The Eternal Life.&rdquo; It was admirably sure in touch, true,
      clear, and noble throughout. He proved that, whether we would or no, we
      were bound to face the question of another life. Beauty of character,
      force of expression, depth of thought, were all equally visible in this
      extemporized address, which was as closely reasoned as a book, and can
      scarcely be disentangled from the quotations of which it was full. The
      great room of the Casino was full to the doors, and one saw a fairly large
      number of white heads.
    </p>
    <p>
      December 13, 1859.&mdash;Fifth lecture on &ldquo;The Eternal Life&rdquo; (&ldquo;The Proof
      of the Gospel by the Supernatural.&rdquo;) The same talent and great eloquence;
      but the orator does not understand that the supernatural must either be
      historically proved, or, supposing it cannot be proved, that it must
      renounce all pretensions to overstep the domain of faith and to encroach
      upon that of history and science. He quotes Strauss, Renan, Scherer, but
      he touches only the letter of them, not the spirit. Everywhere one sees
      the Cartesian dualism and a striking want of the genetic, historical, and
      critical sense. The idea of a living evolution has not penetrated into the
      consciousness of the orator. With every intention of dealing with things
      as they are, he remains, in spite of himself, subjective and oratorical.
      There is the inconvenience of handling a matter polemically instead of in
      the spirit of the student. Naville&rsquo;s moral sense is too strong for his
      discernment and prevents him from seeing what he does not wish to see. In
      his metaphysic, will is placed above intelligence, and in his personality
      the character is superior to the understanding, as one might logically
      expect. And the consequence is, that he may prop up what is tottering, but
      he makes no conquests; he may help to preserve existing truths and
      beliefs, but he is destitute of initiative or vivifying power. He is a
      moralizing but not a suggestive or stimulating influence. A popularizer,
      apologist and orator of the greatest merit, he is a schoolman at bottom;
      his arguments are of the same type as those of the twelfth century, and he
      defends Protestantism in the same way in which Catholicism has been
      commonly defended. The best way of demonstrating the insufficiency of this
      point of view is to show by history how incompletely it has been
      superseded. The chimera of a simple and absolute truth is wholly Catholic
      and anti-historic. The mind of Naville is mathematical and his objects
      moral. His strength lies in <i>mathematicizing</i> morals. As soon as it
      becomes a question of development, metamorphosis, organization&mdash;as
      soon as he is brought into contact with the mobile world of actual life,
      especially of the spiritual life, he has no longer anything serviceable to
      say. Language is for him a system of fixed signs; a man, a people, a book,
      are so many geometrical figures of which we have only to discover the
      properties.
    </p>
    <p>
      December 15th.&mdash;Naville&rsquo;s sixth lecture, an admirable one, because it
      did nothing more than expound the Christian doctrine of eternal life. As
      an extempore performance&mdash;marvelously exact, finished, clear and
      noble, marked by a strong and disciplined eloquence. There was not a
      single reservation to make in the name of criticism, history or
      philosophy. It was all beautiful, noble, true and pure. It seems to me
      that Naville has improved in the art of speech during these latter years.
      He has always had a kind of dignified and didactic beauty, but he has now
      added to it the contagious cordiality and warmth of feeling which complete
      the orator; he moves the whole man, beginning with the intellect but
      finishing with the heart. He is now very near to the true virile
      eloquence, and possesses one species of it indeed very nearly in
      perfection. He has arrived at the complete command of the resources of his
      own nature, at an adequate and masterly expression of himself. Such
      expression is the joy and glory of the oratorical artist as of every
      other. Naville is rapidly becoming a model in the art of premeditated and
      self-controlled eloquence.
    </p>
    <p>
      There is another kind of eloquence&mdash;that which seems inspired, which
      finds, discovers, and illuminates by bounds and flashes, which is born in
      the sight of the audience and transports it. Such is not Naville&rsquo;s kind.
      Is it better worth having? I do not know.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Every real need is stilled, and every vice is stimulated by satisfaction.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Obstinacy is will asserting itself without being able to justify itself.
      It is persistence without a plausible motive. It is the tenacity of
      self-love substituted for the tenacity of reason or conscience.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is not what he has, nor even what he does, which directly expresses the
      worth of a man, but what he is.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      What comfort, what strength, what economy there is in <i>order</i>&mdash;material
      order, intellectual order, moral order. To know where one is going and
      what one wishes&mdash;this is order; to keep one&rsquo;s word and one&rsquo;s
      engagements&mdash;again order; to have everything ready under one&rsquo;s hand,
      to be able to dispose of all one&rsquo;s forces, and to have all one&rsquo;s means of
      whatever kind under command&mdash;still order; to discipline one&rsquo;s habits,
      one&rsquo;s effort, one&rsquo;s wishes; to organize one&rsquo;s life, to distribute one&rsquo;s
      time, to take the measure of one&rsquo;s duties and make one&rsquo;s rights respected;
      to employ one&rsquo;s capital and resources, one&rsquo;s talent and one&rsquo;s chances
      profitably&mdash;all this belongs to and is included in the word <i>order</i>.
      Order means light and peace, inward liberty and free command over one&rsquo;s
      self; order is power. Aesthetic and moral beauty consist, the first in a
      true perception of order, and the second in submission to it, and in the
      realization of it, by, in, and around one&rsquo;s self. Order is man&rsquo;s greatest
      need and his true well-being.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 17, 1860.&mdash;The cloud has lifted; I am better. I have been able
      to take my usual walk on the Treille; all the buds were opening and the
      young shoots were green on all the branches. The rippling of clear water,
      the merriment of birds, the young freshness of plants, and the noisy play
      of children, produce a strange effect upon an invalid. Or rather it was
      strange to me to be looking at such things with the eyes of a sick and
      dying man; it was my first introduction to a new phase of experience.
      There is a deep sadness in it. One feels one&rsquo;s self cut off from nature&mdash;outside
      her communion as it were. She is strength and joy and eternal health.
      &ldquo;Room for the living,&rdquo; she cries to us; &ldquo;do not come to darken my blue sky
      with your miseries; each has his turn: begone!&rdquo; But to strengthen our own
      courage, we must say to ourselves, No; it is good for the world to see
      suffering and weakness; the sight adds zest to the joy of the happy and
      the careless, and is rich in warning for all who think. Life has been lent
      to us, and we owe it to our traveling companions to let them see what use
      we make of it to the end. We must show our brethren both how to live and
      how to die. These first summonses of illness have besides a divine value;
      they give us glimpses behind the scenes of life; they teach us something
      of its awful reality and its inevitable end. They teach us sympathy. They
      warn us to redeem the time while it is yet day. They awaken in us
      gratitude for the blessings which are still ours, and humility for the
      gifts which are in us. So that, evils though they seem, they are really an
      appeal to us from on high, a touch of God&rsquo;s fatherly scourge.
    </p>
    <p>
      How frail a thing is health, and what a thin envelope protects our life
      against being swallowed up from without, or disorganized from within! A
      breath, and the boat springs a leak or founders; a nothing, and all is
      endangered; a passing cloud, and all is darkness! Life is indeed a flower
      which a morning withers and the beat of a passing wing breaks down; it is
      the widow&rsquo;s lamp, which the slightest blast of air extinguishes. In order
      to realize the poetry which clings to morning roses, one needs to have
      just escaped from the claws of that vulture which we call illness. The
      foundation and the heightening of all things is the graveyard. The only
      certainty in this world of vain agitations and endless anxieties, is the
      certainty of death, and that which is the foretaste and small change of
      death&mdash;pain.
    </p>
    <p>
      As long as we turn our eyes away from this implacable reality, the tragedy
      of life remains hidden from us. As soon as we look at it face to face, the
      true proportions of everything reappear, and existence becomes solemn
      again. It is made clear to us that we have been frivolous and petulant,
      intractable and forgetful, and that we have been wrong.
    </p>
    <p>
      We must die and give an account of our life: here in all its simplicity is
      the teaching of sickness! &ldquo;Do with all diligence what you have to do;
      reconcile yourself with the law of the universe; think of your duty;
      prepare yourself for departure:&rdquo; such is the cry of conscience and of
      reason.
    </p>
    <p>
      May 3, 1860.&mdash;Edgar Quinet has attempted everything: he has aimed at
      nothing but the greatest things; he is rich in ideas, a master of splendid
      imagery, serious, enthusiastic, courageous, a noble writer. How is it,
      then, that he has not more reputation? Because he is too pure; because he
      is too uniformly ecstatic, fantastic, inspired&mdash;a mood which soon
      palls on Frenchmen. Because he is too single-minded, candid, theoretical,
      and speculative, too ready to believe in the power of words and of ideas,
      too expansive and confiding; while at the same time he is lacking in the
      qualities which amuse clever people&mdash;in sarcasm, irony, cunning and
      <i>finesse</i>. He is an idealist reveling in color: a Platonist
      brandishing the <i>thyrsus</i> of the Menads. At bottom his is a mind of
      no particular country. It is in vain that he satirizes Germany and abuses
      England; he does not make himself any more of a Frenchman by doing so. It
      is a northern intellect wedded to a southern imagination, but the marriage
      has not been a happy one. He has the disease of chronic magniloquence, of
      inveterate sublimity; abstractions for him become personified and colossal
      beings, which act or speak in colossal fashion; he is intoxicated with the
      infinite. But one feels all the time that his creations are only
      individual monologues; he cannot escape from the bounds of a subjective
      lyrism. Ideas, passions, anger, hopes, complaints&mdash;he himself is
      present in them all. We never have the delight of escaping from his magic
      circle, of seeing truth as it is, of entering into relation with the
      phenomena and the beings of whom he speaks, with the reality of things.
      This imprisonment of the author within his personality looks like conceit.
      But on the contrary, it is because the heart is generous that the mind is
      egotistical. It is because Quinet thinks himself so much of a Frenchman
      that he is it so little. These ironical compensations of destiny are very
      familiar to me: I have often observed them. Man is nothing but
      contradiction: the less he knows it the more dupe he is. In consequence of
      his small capacity for seeing things as they are, Quinet has neither much
      accuracy nor much balance of mind. He recalls Victor Hugo, with much less
      artistic power but more historical sense. His principal gift is a great
      command of imagery and symbolism. He seems to me a Görres [Footnote:
      Joseph Goerres, a German mystic and disciple of Schelling. He published,
      among other works, &ldquo;Mythengeschichte der Asiatischen Welt,&rdquo; and
      &ldquo;Christliche Mystik.&rdquo;] transplanted to Franche Comté, a sort of
      supernumerary prophet, with whom his nation hardly knows what to do,
      seeing that she loves neither enigmas nor ecstasy nor inflation of
      language, and that the intoxication of the tripod bores her.
    </p>
    <p>
      The real excellence of Quinet seems to me to lie in his historical works
      (&ldquo;Marnix,&rdquo; &ldquo;L&rsquo;Italie,&rdquo; &ldquo;Les Roumains&rdquo;), and especially in his studies of
      nationalities. He was born, to understand these souls, at once more vast
      and more sublime than individual souls.
    </p>
    <p>
      (<i>Later</i>).&mdash;I have been translating into verse that page of
      Goethe&rsquo;s &ldquo;Faust&rdquo; in which is contained his pantheistic confession of
      faith. The translation is not bad, I think. But what a difference between
      the two languages in the matter of precision! It is like the difference
      between stump and graving-tool&mdash;the one showing the effort, the other
      noting the result of the act; the one making you feel all that is merely
      dreamed or vague, formless or vacant, the other determining, fixing,
      giving shape even to the indefinite; the one representing the cause, the
      force, the limbo whence things issue, the other the things themselves.
      German has the obscure depth of the infinite, French the clear brightness
      of the finite.
    </p>
    <p>
      May 5, 1860.&mdash;To grow old is more difficult than to die, because to
      renounce a good once and for all, costs less than to renew the sacrifice
      day by day and in detail. To bear with one&rsquo;s own decay, to accept one&rsquo;s
      own lessening capacity, is a harder and rarer virtue than to face death.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      There is a halo round tragic and premature death; there is but a long
      sadness in declining strength. But look closer: so studied, a resigned and
      religious old age will often move us more than the heroic ardor of young
      years. The maturity of the soul is worth more than the first brilliance of
      its faculties, or the plentitude of its strength, and the eternal in us
      can but profit from all the ravages made by time. There is comfort in this
      thought.
    </p>
    <p>
      May 22, 1860.&mdash;There is in me a secret incapacity for expressing my
      true feeling, for saying what pleases others, for bearing witness to the
      present&mdash;a reserve which I have often noticed in myself with
      vexation. My heart never dares to speak seriously, either because it is
      ashamed of being thought to flatter, or afraid lest it should not find
      exactly the right expression. I am always trifling with the present
      moment. Feeling in me is retrospective. My refractory nature is slow to
      recognize the solemnity of the hour in which I actually stand. An ironical
      instinct, born of timidity, makes me pass lightly over what I have on
      pretence of waiting for some other thing at some other time. Fear of being
      carried away, and distrust of myself pursue me even in moments of emotion;
      by a sort of invincible pride, I can never persuade myself to say to any
      particular instant: &ldquo;Stay! decide for me; be a supreme moment! stand out
      from the monotonous depths of eternity and mark a unique experience in my
      life!&rdquo; I trifle, even with happiness, out of distrust of the future.
    </p>
    <p>
      May 27, 1860. (Sunday).&mdash;I heard this morning a sermon on the Holy
      Spirit&mdash;good but insufficient. Why was I not edified? Because there
      was no unction. Why was there no unction? Because Christianity from this
      rationalistic point of view is a Christianity of <i>dignity</i>, not of
      humility. Penitence, the struggles of weakness, austerity, find no place
      in it. The law is effaced, holiness and mysticism evaporate; the
      specifically Christian accent is wanting. My impression is always the same&mdash;faith
      is made a dull poor thing by these attempts to reduce it to simple moral
      psychology. I am oppressed by a feeling of inappropriateness and <i>malaise</i>
      at the sight of philosophy in the pulpit. &ldquo;They have taken away my
      Saviour, and I know not where they have laid him;&rdquo; so the simple folk have
      a right to say, and I repeat it with them. Thus, while some shock me by
      their sacerdotal dogmatism, others repel me by their rationalizing
      laicism. It seems to me that good preaching ought to combine, as
      Schleiermacher did, perfect moral humility with energetic independence of
      thought, a profound sense of sin with respect for criticism and a passion
      for truth.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      The free being who abandons the conduct of himself, yields himself to
      Satan; in the moral world there is no ground without a master, and the
      waste lands belong to the Evil One.
    </p>
    <p>
      The poetry of childhood consists in simulating and forestalling the
      future, just as the poetry of mature life consists often in going backward
      to some golden age. Poetry is always in the distance. The whole art of
      moral government lies in gaining a directing and shaping hold over the
      poetical ideals of an age.
    </p>
    <p>
      January 9, 1861.&mdash;I have just come from the inaugural lecture of
      Victor Cherbuliez in a state of bewildered admiration. As a lecture it was
      exquisite: if it was a recitation of prepared matter, it was admirable; if
      an extempore performance, it was amazing. In the face of superiority and
      perfection, says Schiller, we have but one resource&mdash;to love them,
      which is what I have done. I had the pleasure, mingled with a little
      surprise, of feeling in myself no sort of jealousy toward this young
      conqueror.
    </p>
    <p>
      March 15th.&mdash;This last lecture in Victor Cherbuliez&rsquo;s course on
      &ldquo;Chivalry,&rdquo; which is just over, showed the same magical power over his
      subject as that with which he began the series two months ago. It was a
      triumph and a harvest of laurels. Cervantes, Ignatius Loyola, and the
      heritage of chivalry&mdash;that is to say, individualism, honor, the
      poetry of the present and the poetry of contrasts, modern liberty and
      progress&mdash;have been the subjects of this lecture.
    </p>
    <p>
      The general impression left upon me all along has been one of admiration
      for the union in him of extraordinary skill in execution with admirable
      cultivation of mind. With what freedom of spirit he uses and wields his
      vast erudition, and what capacity for close attention he must have to be
      able to carry the weight of a whole improvised speech with the same ease
      as though it were a single sentence! I do not know if I am partial, but I
      find no occasion for anything but praise in this young wizard and his
      lectures. The fact is, that in my opinion we have now one more first rate
      mind, one more master of language among us. This course, with the
      &ldquo;Causeries Athéniennes,&rdquo; seems to me to establish Victor Cherbuliez&rsquo;s
      position at Geneva.
    </p>
    <p>
      March 17, 1861.&mdash;This afternoon a homicidal languor seized hold upon
      me&mdash;disgust, weariness of life, mortal sadness. I wandered out into
      the churchyard, hoping to find quiet and peace there, and so to reconcile
      myself with duty. Vain dream! The place of rest itself had become
      inhospitable. Workmen were stripping and carrying away the turf, the trees
      were dry, the wind cold, the sky gray&mdash;something arid, irreverent,
      and prosaic dishonored the resting-place of the dead. I was struck with
      something wanting in our national feeling&mdash;respect for the dead, the
      poetry of the tomb, the piety of memory. Our churches are too little open;
      our churchyards too much. The result in both cases is the same. The
      tortured and trembling heart which seeks, outside the scene of its daily
      miseries, to find some place where it may pray in peace, or pour out its
      grief before God, or meditate in the presence of eternal things, with us
      has nowhere to go. Our church ignores these wants of the soul instead of
      divining and meeting them. She shows very little compassionate care for
      her children, very little wise consideration for the more delicate griefs,
      and no intuition of the deeper mysteries of tenderness, no religious
      suavity. Under a pretext of spirituality we are always checking legitimate
      aspirations. We have lost the mystical sense; and what is religion without
      mysticism? A rose without perfume.
    </p>
    <p>
      The words <i>repentance</i> and <i>sanctification</i> are always on our
      lips. But <i>adoration</i> and <i>consolation</i> are also two essential
      elements in religion, and we ought perhaps to make more room for them than
      we do.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 28, 1861.&mdash;In the same way as a dream transforms according to
      its nature, the incidents of sleep, so the soul converts into psychical
      phenomena the ill-defined impressions of the organism. An uncomfortable
      attitude becomes nightmare; an atmosphere charged with storm becomes moral
      torment. Not mechanically and by direct causality; but imagination and
      conscience engender, according to their own nature, analogous effects;
      they translate into their own language, and cast into their own mold,
      whatever reaches them from outside. Thus dreams may be helpful to medicine
      and to divination, and states of weather may stir up and set free within
      the soul vague and hidden evils. The suggestions and solicitations which
      act upon life come from outside, but life produces nothing but itself
      after all. Originality consists in rapid and clear reaction against these
      outside influences, in giving to them our individual stamp. To think is to
      withdraw, as it were, into one&rsquo;s impression&mdash;to make it clear to
      one&rsquo;s self, and then to put it forth in the shape of a personal judgment.
      In this also consists self-deliverance, self-enfranchisement,
      self-conquest. All that comes from outside is a question to which we owe
      an answer&mdash;a pressure to be met by counter-pressure, if we are to
      remain free and living agents. The development of our unconscious nature
      follows the astronomical laws of Ptolemy; everything in it is change&mdash;cycle,
      epi-cycle, and metamorphosis.
    </p>
    <p>
      Every man then possesses in himself the analogies and rudiments of all
      things, of all beings, and of all forms of life. He who knows how to
      divine the small beginnings, the germs and symptoms of things, can retrace
      in himself the universal mechanism, and divine by intuition the series
      which he himself will not finish, such as vegetable and animal existences,
      human passions and crises, the diseases of the soul and those of the body.
      The mind which is subtle and powerful may penetrate all these
      potentialities, and make every point flash out the world which it
      contains. This is to be conscious of and to possess the general life, this
      is to enter into the divine sanctuary of contemplation.
    </p>
    <p>
      September 12, 1861.&mdash;In me an intellect which would fain forget
      itself in things, is contradicted by a heart which yearns to live in human
      beings. The uniting link of the two contradictions is the tendency toward
      self-abandonment, toward ceasing to will and exist for one&rsquo;s self, toward
      laying down one&rsquo;s own personality, and losing&mdash;dissolving&mdash;one&rsquo;s
      self in love and contemplation. What I lack above all things is character,
      will, individuality. But, as always happens, the appearance is exactly the
      contrary of the reality, and my outward life the reverse of my true and
      deepest aspiration. I whose whole being&mdash;heart and intellect&mdash;thirsts
      to absorb itself in reality, in its neighbor man, in nature and in God, I,
      whom solitude devours and destroys, I shut myself up in solitude and seem
      to delight only in myself and to be sufficient for myself. Pride and
      delicacy of soul, timidity of heart, have made me thus do violence to all
      my instincts and invert the natural order of my life. It is not
      astonishing that I should be unintelligible to others. In fact I have
      always avoided what attracted me, and turned my back upon the point where
      secretly I desired to be.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Deux instincts sont en moi: vertige et déraison;
  J&rsquo;ai l&rsquo;effroi du bonheur et la soif du poison.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      It is the Nemesis which dogs the steps of life, the secret instinct and
      power of death in us, which labors continually for the destruction of all
      that seeks to be, to take form, to exist; it is the passion for
      destruction, the tendency toward suicide, identifying itself with the
      instinct of self-preservation. This antipathy toward all that does one
      good, all that nourishes and heals, is it not a mere variation of the
      antipathy to moral light and regenerative truth? Does not sin also create
      a thirst for death, a growing passion for what does harm? Discouragement
      has been my sin. Discouragement is an act of unbelief. Growing weakness
      has been the consequence of it; the principle of death in me and the
      influence of the Prince of Darkness have waxed stronger together. My will
      in abdicating has yielded up the scepter to instinct; and as the
      corruption of the best results in what is worst, love of the ideal,
      tenderness, unworldliness, have led me to a state in which I shrink from
      hope and crave for annihilation. Action is my cross.
    </p>
    <p>
      October 11, 1861. (<i>Heidelberg</i>).&mdash;After eleven days journey,
      here I am under the roof of my friends, in their hospitable house on the
      banks of the Neckar, with its garden climbing up the side of the
      Heiligenberg.... Blazing sun; my room is flooded with light and warmth.
      Sitting opposite the Geisberg, I write to the murmur of the Neckar, which
      rolls its green waves, flecked with silver, exactly beneath the balcony on
      which my room opens. A great barge coming from Heilbron passes silently
      under my eyes, while the wheels of a cart which I cannot see are dimly
      heard on the road which skirts the river. Distant voices of children, of
      cocks, of chirping sparrows, the clock of the Church of the Holy Spirit,
      which chimes the hour, serve to gauge, without troubling, the general
      tranquility of the scene. One feels the hours gently slipping by, and
      time, instead of flying, seems to hover. A peace beyond words steals into
      my heart, an impression of morning grace, of fresh country poetry which
      brings back the sense of youth, and has the true German savor.... Two
      decked barges carrying red flags, each with a train of flat boats filled
      with coal, are going up the river and making their way under the arch of
      the great stone bridge. I stand at the window and see a whole perspective
      of boats sailing in both directions; the Neckar is as animated as the
      street of some great capital; and already on the slope of the wooded
      mountain, streaked by the smoke-wreaths of the town, the castle throws its
      shadow like a vast drapery, and traces the outlines of its battlements and
      turrets. Higher up, in front of me, rises the dark profile of the
      Molkenkur; higher still, in relief against the dazzling east, I can
      distinguish the misty forms of the two towers of the Kaiserstuhl and the
      Trutzheinrich.
    </p>
    <p>
      But enough of landscape. My host, Dr. George Weber, tells me that his
      manual of history is translated into Polish, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and
      French, and that of his great &ldquo;Universal History&rdquo;&mdash;three volumes are
      already published. What astonishing power of work, what prodigious
      tenacity, what solidity! <i>O deutscher Fleiss</i>!
    </p>
    <p>
      November 25, 1861.&mdash;To understand a drama requires the same mental
      operation as to understand an existence, a biography, a man. It is a
      putting back of the bird into the egg, of the plant into its seed, a
      reconstitution of the whole genesis of the being in question. Art is
      simply the bringing into relief of the obscure thought of nature; a
      simplification of the lines, a falling into place of groups otherwise
      invisible. The fire of inspiration brings out, as it were, designs traced
      beforehand in sympathetic ink. The mysterious grows clear, the confused
      plain; what is complicated becomes simple&mdash;what is accidental,
      necessary.
    </p>
    <p>
      In short, art reveals nature by interpreting its intentions and
      formulating its desires. Every ideal is the key of a long enigma. The
      great artist is the simplifier.
    </p>
    <p>
      Every man is a tamer of wild beasts, and these wild beasts are his
      passions. To draw their teeth and claws, to muzzle and tame them, to turn
      them into servants and domestic animals, fuming, perhaps, but submissive&mdash;in
      this consists personal education.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 3, 1862.&mdash;Self-criticism is the corrosive of all oratorical
      or literary spontaneity. The thirst to know turned upon the self is
      punished, like the curiosity of Psyche, by the flight of the thing
      desired. Force should remain a mystery to itself; as soon as it tries to
      penetrate its own secret it vanishes away. The hen with the golden eggs
      becomes unfruitful as soon as she tries to find out why her eggs are
      golden. The consciousness of consciousness is the term and end of
      analysis. True, but analysis pushed to extremity devours itself, like the
      Egyptian serpent. We must give it some external matter to crush and
      dissolve if we wish to prevent its destruction by its action upon itself.
      &ldquo;We are, and ought to be, obscure to ourselves,&rdquo; said Goethe, &ldquo;turned
      outward, and working upon the world which surrounds us.&rdquo; Outward radiation
      constitutes health; a too continuous concentration upon what is within
      brings us back to vacuity and blank. It is better that life should dilate
      and extend itself in ever-widening circles, than that it should be
      perpetually diminished and compressed by solitary contraction. Warmth
      tends to make a globe out of an atom; cold, to reduce a globe to the
      dimensions of an atom. Analysis has been to me self-annulling,
      self-destroying.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 23, 1862. (<i>Mornex sur Salève</i>).&mdash;I was awakened by the
      twittering of the birds at a quarter to five, and saw, as I threw open my
      windows, the yellowing crescent of the moon looking in upon me, while the
      east was just faintly whitening. An hour later it was delicious out of
      doors. The anemones were still closed, the apple-trees in full flower:
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Ces beaux pommiers, coverts de leurs fleurs étoiléens,
  Neige odorante du printemps.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      The view was exquisite, and nature, in full festival, spread freshness and
      joy around her. I breakfasted, read the paper, and here I am. The ladies
      of the <i>pension</i> are still under the horizon. I pity them for the
      loss of two or three delightful hours.
    </p>
    <p>
      Eleven o&rsquo;clock.&mdash;Preludes, scales, piano-exercises going on under my
      feet. In the garden children&rsquo;s voices. I have just finished Rosenkrantz on
      &ldquo;Hegel&rsquo;s Logic,&rdquo; and have run through a few articles in the Reviews....
      The limitation of the French mind consists in the insufficiency of its
      spiritual alphabet, which does not allow it to translate the Greek,
      German, or Spanish mind without changing the accent. The hospitality of
      French manners is not completed by a real hospitality of thought.... My
      nature is just the opposite. I am individual in the presence of men,
      objective in the presence of things. I attach myself to the object, and
      absorb myself in it; I detach myself from subjects [<i>i.e.</i>. persons],
      and hold myself on my guard against them. I feel myself different from the
      mass of men, and akin to the great whole of nature. My way of asserting
      myself is in cherishing this sense of sympathetic unity with life, which I
      yearn to understand, and in repudiating the tyranny of commonplace. All
      that is imitative and artificial inspires me with a secret repulsion,
      while the smallest true and spontaneous existence (plant, animal, child)
      draws and attracts me. I feel myself in community of spirit with the
      Goethes, the Hegels, the Schleiermachers, the Leibnitzes, opposed as they
      are among themselves; while the French mathematicians, philosophers, or
      rhetoricians, in spite of their high qualities, leave me cold, because
      there is in them no sense of the whole, the sum of things [Footnote: The
      following passage from Sainte-Beuve may be taken as a kind of answer by
      anticipation to this accusation, which Amiel brings more than once in the
      course of the Journal:
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;Toute nation livrée à elle-même et à son propre génie se fait une
      critique littéraire qui y est conforme. La France en son beau temps a eu
      la sienne, qui ne ressemble ni à celle de l&rsquo;Allemagne ni à celle de ses
      autres voisins&mdash;un peu plus superficielle, dira-t-on&mdash;je ne le
      crois pas: mais plus vive, moins chargée d&rsquo;erudition, moins théorique et
      systématique, plus confiante au sentiment immédiat du goût. <i>Un peu de
      chaque chose et rien de l&rsquo;ensemble, à la Française</i>: telle était la
      devise de Montaigne et telle est aussi la devise de la critique française.
      Nous ne sommes pas <i>synthétiques</i>, comme diraient les Allemands; le
      mot même n&rsquo;est pas française. L&rsquo;imagination de détail nous suffit.
      Montaigne, La Fontaine Madame de Sévigné, sont volontiers nos livres de
      chevet.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      The French critic then goes on to give a rapid sketch of the authors and
      the books, &ldquo;qui ont peu a peu formé comme notre rhétorique.&rdquo; French
      criticism of the old characteristic kind rests ultimately upon the minute
      and delicate knowledge of a few Greek and Latin classics. Arnauld,
      Boileau, Fénélon, Rollin, Racine <i>fils</i>, Voltaire, La Harpe,
      Marmontel, Delille, Fontanes, and Châteaubriand in one aspect, are the
      typical names of this tradition, the creators and maintainers of this
      common literary <i>fonds</i>, this &ldquo;sorte de circulation courante à
      l&rsquo;usage des gens instruits. J&rsquo;avoue ma faiblesse: nous sommes devenus bien
      plus forts dans la dissertation érudite, mais j&rsquo;aurais un éternel regret
      pour cette moyenne et plus libre habitude littéraire qui laissait à
      l&rsquo;imagination tout son espace et à l&rsquo;esprit tout son jeu; qui formait une
      atmosphère saine et facile où le talent respirait et se mouvait à son gré:
      cette atmosphère-là, je ne la trouve plus, et je la regrette.&rdquo;&mdash;(<i>Châteaubriand
      et son Groupe Littéraire</i>, vol. i. p. 311.)
    </p>
    <p>
      The following <i>pensée</i> of La Bruyère applies to the second half of
      Amiel&rsquo;s criticism of the French mind: &ldquo;If you wish to travel in the
      Inferno or the Paradiso you must take other guides,&rdquo; etc.
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;Un homme né Chrétien et François se trouve contraint dans la satyre; les
      grands sujets lui sont défendus, il les entame quelquefois, et se détourne
      ensuite sur de petites choses qu&rsquo;il relève par la beauté de son génie et
      de son style.&rdquo;&mdash;<i>Les Caractères</i>, etc., &ldquo;<i>Des Ouvrages
      del&rsquo;Esprit</i>.&rdquo;]&mdash;because they have no <i>grasp</i> of reality in
      its fullness, and therefore either cramp and limit me or awaken my
      distrust. The French lack that intuitive faculty to which the living unity
      of things is revealed, they have very little sense of what is sacred, very
      little penetration into the mysteries of being. What they excel in is the
      construction of special sciences; the art of writing a book, style,
      courtesy, grace, literary models, perfection and urbanity; the spirit of
      order, the art of teaching, discipline, elegance, truth of detail, power
      of arrangement; the desire and the gift for proselytism, the vigor
      necessary for practical conclusions. But if you wish to travel in the
      &ldquo;Inferno&rdquo; or the &ldquo;Paradiso&rdquo; you must take other guides. Their home is on
      the earth, in the region of the finite, the changing, the historical, and
      the diverse. Their logic never goes beyond the category of mechanism nor
      their metaphysic beyond dualism. When they undertake anything else they
      are doing violence to themselves.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 24th. (<i>Noon</i>).&mdash;All around me profound peace, the silence
      of the mountains in spite of a full house and a neighboring village. No
      sound is to be heard but the murmur of the flies. There is something very
      striking in this calm. The middle of the day is like the middle of the
      night. Life seems suspended just when it is most intense. These are the
      moments in which one hears the infinite and perceives the ineffable.
      Victor Hugo, in his &ldquo;Contemplations,&rdquo; has been carrying me from world to
      world, and since then his contradictions have reminded me of the convinced
      Christian with whom I was talking yesterday in a house near by.... The
      same sunlight floods both the book and nature, the doubting poet and the
      believing preacher, as well as the mobile dreamer, who, in the midst of
      all these various existences, allows himself to be swayed by every passing
      breath, and delights, stretched along the car of his balloon, in floating
      aimlessly through all the sounds and shallows of the ether, and in
      realizing within himself all the harmonies and dissonances of the soul, of
      feeling, and of thought. Idleness and contemplation! Slumber of the will,
      lapses of the vital force, indolence of the whole being&mdash;how well I
      know you! To love, to dream, to feel, to learn, to understand&mdash;all
      these are possible to me if only I may be relieved from willing. It is my
      tendency, my instinct, my fault, my sin. I have a sort of primitive horror
      of ambition, of struggle, of hatred, of all which dissipates the soul and
      makes it dependent upon external things and aims. The joy of becoming once
      more conscious of myself, of listening to the passage of time and the flow
      of the universal life, is sometimes enough to make me forget every desire,
      and to quench in me both the wish to produce and the power to execute.
      Intellectual Epicureanism is always threatening to overpower me. I can
      only combat it by the idea of duty; it is as the poet has said:
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Ceux qui vivent, ce sont ceux qui luttent; ce sont
  Ceux dont un dessein ferme emplit l&rsquo;âme et le front,
  Ceux qui d&rsquo;un haut destin gravissent l&rsquo;âpre cime,
  Ceux qui marchent pensifs, épris d&rsquo;un but sublime,
  Ayant devant les yeux sans cesse, nuit et jour,
  Ou quelque saint labeur ou quelque grand amour!&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      [Footnote: Victor Hugo, &ldquo;Les Chatiments.&rdquo;]
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Five o&rsquo;clock.</i>&mdash;In the afternoon our little society met in
      general talk upon the terrace. Some amount of familiarity and friendliness
      begins to show itself in our relations to each other. I read over again
      with emotion some passages of &ldquo;Jocelyn.&rdquo; How admirable it is!
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Il se fit de sa vie une plus mâle idée:
  Sa douleur d&rsquo;un seul trait ne l&rsquo;avait pas vidée;
  Mais, adorant de Dieu le sévère dessein,
  Il sut la porter pleine et pure dans son sein,
  Et ne se hâtant pas de la répandre toute,
  Sa résignation l&rsquo;épancha goutte à goutte,
  Selon la circonstance et le besoin d&rsquo;autrui,
  Pour tout vivifier sur terre autour de lui.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      [Footnote: Epilogue of &ldquo;Jocelyn.&rdquo;]
    </p>
    <p>
      The true poetry is that which raises you, as this does, toward heaven, and
      fills you with divine emotion; which sings of love and death, of hope and
      sacrifice, and awakens the sense of the infinite. &ldquo;Jocelyn&rdquo; always stirs
      in me impulses of tenderness which it would be hateful to me to see
      profaned by satire. As a tragedy of feeling, it has no parallel in French,
      for purity, except &ldquo;Paul et Virginie,&rdquo; and I think that I prefer
      &ldquo;Jocelyn.&rdquo; To be just, one ought to read them side by side.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Six o&rsquo;clock.</i>&mdash;One more day is drawing to its close. With the
      exception of Mont Blanc, all the mountains have already lost their color.
      The evening chill succeeds the heat of the afternoon. The sense of the
      implacable flight of things, of the resistless passage of the hours,
      seizes upon me afresh and oppresses me.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Nature au front serein, comme vous oubliez!&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      In vain we cry with the poet, &ldquo;O time, suspend thy flight!&rdquo;... And what
      days, after all, would we keep and hold? Not only the happy days, but the
      lost days! The first have left at least a memory behind them, the others
      nothing but a regret which is almost a remorse....
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Eleven o&rsquo;clock.</i>&mdash;A gust of wind. A few clouds in the sky. The
      nightingale is silent. On the other hand, the cricket and the river are
      still singing.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 9, 1862.&mdash;Life, which seeks its own continuance, tends to
      repair itself without our help. It mends its spider&rsquo;s webs when they have
      been torn; it re-establishes in us the conditions of health, and itself
      heals the injuries inflicted upon it; it binds the bandage again upon our
      eyes, brings back hope into our hearts, breathes health once more into our
      organs, and regilds the dream of our imagination. But for this, experience
      would have hopelessly withered and faded us long before the time, and the
      youth would be older than the centenarian. The wise part of us, then, is
      that which is unconscious of itself; and what is most reasonable in man
      are those elements in him which do not reason. Instinct, nature, a divine,
      an impersonal activity, heal in us the wounds made by our own follies; the
      invisible <i>genius</i> of our life is never tired of providing material
      for the prodigalities of the self. The essential, maternal basis of our
      conscious life, is therefore that unconscious life which we perceive no
      more than the outer hemisphere of the moon perceives the earth, while all
      the time indissolubly and eternally bound to it. It is our [Greek:
      antichoon], to speak with Pythagoras.
    </p>
    <p>
      November 7, 1862.&mdash;How malign, infectious, and unwholesome is the
      eternal smile of that indifferent criticism, that attitude of ironical
      contemplation, which corrodes and demolishes everything, that mocking
      pitiless temper, which holds itself aloof from every personal duty and
      every vulnerable affection, and cares only to understand without
      committing itself to action! Criticism become a habit, a fashion, and a
      system, means the destruction of moral energy, of faith, and of all
      spiritual force. One of my tendencies leads me in this direction, but I
      recoil before its results when I come across more emphatic types of it
      than myself. And at least I cannot reproach myself with having ever
      attempted to destroy the moral force of others; my reverence for life
      forbade it, and my self-distrust has taken from me even the temptation to
      it.
    </p>
    <p>
      This kind of temper is very dangerous among us, for it flatters all the
      worst instincts of men&mdash;indiscipline, irreverence, selfish
      individualism&mdash;and it ends in social atomism. Minds inclined to mere
      negation are only harmless in great political organisms, which go without
      them and in spite of them. The multiplication of them among ourselves will
      bring about the ruin of our little countries, for small states only live
      by faith and will. Woe to the society where negation rules, for life is an
      affirmation; and a society, a country, a nation, is a living whole capable
      of death. No nationality is possible without prejudices, for public spirit
      and national tradition are but webs woven out of innumerable beliefs which
      have been acquired, admitted, and continued without formal proof and
      without discussion. To act, we must believe; to believe, we must make up
      our minds, affirm, decide, and in reality prejudge the question. He who
      will only act upon a full scientific certitude is unfit for practical
      life. But we are made for action, and we cannot escape from duty. Let us
      not, then, condemn prejudice so long as we have nothing but doubt to put
      in its place, or laugh at those whom we should be incapable of consoling!
      This, at least, is my point of view.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Beyond the element which is common to all men there is an element which
      separates them. This element may be religion, country, language,
      education. But all these being supposed common, there still remains
      something which serves as a line of demarcation&mdash;namely, the ideal.
      To have an ideal or to have none, to have this ideal or that&mdash;this is
      what digs gulfs between men, even between those who live in the same
      family circle, under the same roof or in the same room. You must love with
      the same love, think with the same thought as some one else, if you are to
      escape solitude.
    </p>
    <p>
      Mutual respect implies discretion and reserve even in love itself; it
      means preserving as much liberty as possible to those whose life we share.
      We must distrust our instinct of intervention, for the desire to make
      one&rsquo;s own will prevail is often disguised under the mask of solicitude.
    </p>
    <p>
      How many times we become hypocrites simply by remaining the same outwardly
      and toward others, when we know that inwardly and to ourselves we are
      different. It is not hypocrisy in the strict sense, for we borrow no other
      personality than our own; still, it is a kind of deception. The deception
      humiliates us, and the humiliation is a chastisement which the mask
      inflicts upon the face, which our past inflicts upon our present. Such
      humiliation is good for us; for it produces shame, and shame gives birth
      to repentance. Thus in an upright soul good springs out of evil, and it
      falls only to rise again.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      January 8, 1863.&mdash;This evening I read through the &ldquo;Cid&rdquo; and
      &ldquo;Rodogune.&rdquo; My impression is still a mixed and confused one. There is much
      disenchantment in my admiration, and a good deal of reserve in my
      enthusiasm. What displeases me in this dramatic art, is the mechanical
      abstraction of the characters, and the scolding, shrewish tone of the
      interlocutors. I had a vague impression of listening to gigantic
      marionettes, perorating through a trumpet, with the emphasis of Spaniards.
      There is power in it, but we have before us heroic idols rather than human
      beings. The element of artificiality, of strained pomposity and
      affectation, which is the plague of classical tragedy, is everywhere
      apparent, and one hears, as it were, the cords and pulleys of these
      majestic <i>colossi</i> creaking and groaning. I much prefer Racine and
      Shakespeare; the one from the point of view of aesthetic sensation, the
      other from that of psychological sensation. The southern theater can never
      free itself from masks. Comic masks are bearable, but in the case of
      tragic heroes, the abstract type, the mask, make one impatient. I can
      laugh with personages of tin and pasteboard: I can only weep with the
      living, or what resembles them. Abstraction turns easily to caricature; it
      is apt to engender mere shadows on the wall, mere ghosts and puppets. It
      is psychology of the first degree&mdash;elementary psychology&mdash;just
      as the colored pictures of Germany are elementary painting. And yet with
      all this, you have a double-distilled and often sophistical refinement:
      just as savages are by no means simple. The fine side of it all is the
      manly vigor, the bold frankness of ideas, words, and sentiments. Why is it
      that we find so large an element of factitious grandeur, mingled with true
      grandeur, in this drama of 1640, from which the whole dramatic development
      of monarchical France was to spring? Genius is there, but it is hemmed
      round by a conventional civilization, and, strive as he may, no man wears
      a wig with impunity.
    </p>
    <p>
      January 13, 1863.&mdash;To-day it has been the turn of &ldquo;Polyeucte&rdquo; and &ldquo;La
      Morte de Pompée.&rdquo; Whatever one&rsquo;s objections may be, there is something
      grandiose in the style of Corneille which reconciles you at last even to
      his stiff, emphatic manner, and his over-ingenious rhetoric. But it is the
      dramatic <i>genre</i> which is false. His heroes are rôles rather than
      men. They pose as magnanimity, virtue, glory, instead of realizing them
      before us. They are always <i>en scène</i>, studied by others, or by
      themselves. With them glory&mdash;that is to say, the life of ceremony and
      of affairs, and the opinion of the public&mdash;replaces nature&mdash;becomes
      nature. They never speak except <i>ore rotundo</i>, in <i>cothurnus</i>,
      or sometimes on stilts. And what consummate advocates they all are! The
      French drama is an oratorical tournament, a long suit between opposing
      parties, on a day which is to end with the death of somebody, and where
      all the personages represented are in haste to speak before the hour of
      silence strikes. Elsewhere, speech serves to make action intelligible; in
      French tragedy action is but a decent motive for speech. It is the
      procedure calculated to extract the finest possible speeches from the
      persons who are engaged in the action, and who represent different
      perceptions of it at different moments and from different points of view.
      Love and nature, duty and desire, and a dozen other moral antitheses, are
      the limbs moved by the wire of the dramatist, who makes them fall into all
      the tragic attitudes. What is really curious and amusing is that the
      people of all others the most vivacious, gay, and intelligent, should have
      always understood the grand style in this pompous, pedantic fashion. But
      it was inevitable.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 8, 1863.&mdash;I have been turning over the 3,500 pages of &ldquo;Les
      Misérables,&rdquo; trying to understand the guiding idea of this vast
      composition. The fundamental idea of &ldquo;Les Misérables&rdquo; seems to be this.
      Society engenders certain frightful evils&mdash;prostitution, vagabondage,
      rogues, thieves, convicts, war, revolutionary clubs and barricades. She
      ought to impress this fact on her mind, and not treat all those who come
      in contact with her law as mere monsters. The task before us is to
      humanize law and opinion, to raise the fallen as well as the vanquished,
      to create a social redemption. How is this to be done? By enlightening
      vice and lawlessness, and so diminishing the sum of them, and by bringing
      to bear upon the guilty the healing influence of pardon. At bottom is it
      not a Christianization of society, this extension of charity from the
      sinner to the condemned criminal, this application to our present life of
      what the church applies more readily to the other? Struggle to restore a
      human soul to order and to righteousness by patience and by love, instead
      of crushing it by your inflexible vindictiveness, your savage justice!
      Such is the cry of the book. It is great and noble, but it is a little
      optimistic and Rousseau-like. According to it the individual is always
      innocent and society always responsible, and the ideal before us for the
      twentieth century is a sort of democratic age of gold, a universal
      republic from which war, capital punishment, and pauperism will have
      disappeared. It is the religion and the city of progress; in a word, the
      Utopia of the eighteenth century revived on a great scale. There is a
      great deal of generosity in it, mixed with not a little fanciful
      extravagance. The fancifulness consists chiefly in a superficial notion of
      evil. The author ignores or pretends to forget the instinct of perversity,
      the love of evil for evil&rsquo;s sake, which is contained in the human heart.
    </p>
    <p>
      The great and salutary idea of the book, is that honesty before the law is
      a cruel hypocrisy, in so far as it arrogates to itself the right of
      dividing society according to its own standard into elect and reprobates,
      and thus confounds the relative with the absolute. The leading passage is
      that in which Javert, thrown off the rails, upsets the whole moral system
      of the strict Javert, half spy, half priest&mdash;of the irreproachable
      police-officer. In this chapter the writer shows us social charity
      illuminating and transforming a harsh and unrighteous justice. Suppression
      of the social hell, that is to say, of all irreparable stains, of all
      social outlawries for which there is neither end nor hope&mdash;it is an
      essentially religious idea.
    </p>
    <p>
      The erudition, the talent, the brilliancy of execution, shown in the book
      are astonishing, bewildering almost. Its faults are to be found in the
      enormous length allowed to digressions and episodical dissertations, in
      the exaggeration of all the combinations and all the theses, and, finally,
      in something strained, spasmodic, and violent in the style, which is very
      different from the style of natural eloquence or of essential truth.
      Effect is the misfortune of Victor Hugo, because he makes it the center of
      his aesthetic system; and hence exaggeration, monotony of emphasis,
      theatricality of manner, a tendency to force and over-drive. A powerful
      artist, but one with whom you never forget the artist; and a dangerous
      model, for the master himself is already grazing the rock of burlesque,
      and passes from the sublime to the repulsive, from lack of power to
      produce one harmonious impression of beauty. It is natural enough that he
      should detest Racine.
    </p>
    <p>
      But what astonishing philological and literary power has Victor Hugo! He
      is master of all the dialects contained in our language, dialects of the
      courts of law, of the stock-exchange, of war, and of the sea, of
      philosophy and the convict-gang, the dialects of trade and of archaeology,
      of the antiquarian and the scavenger. All the bric-à-brac of history and
      of manners, so to speak, all the curiosities of soil, and subsoil, are
      known and familiar to him. He seems to have turned his Paris over and
      over, and to know it body and soul as one knows the contents of one&rsquo;s
      pocket. What a prodigious memory and what a lurid imagination! He is at
      once a visionary and yet master of his dreams; he summons up and handles
      at will the hallucinations of opium or of hasheesh, without ever becoming
      their dupe; he makes of madness one of his tame animals, and bestrides,
      with equal coolness, Pegasus or Nightmare, the Hippogriff or the Chimera.
      As a psychological phenomenon he is of the deepest interest. Victor Hugo
      draws in sulphuric acid, he lights his pictures with electric light. He
      deafens, blinds, and bewilders his reader rather than he charms or
      persuades him. Strength carried to such a point as this is a fascination;
      without seeming to take you captive, it makes you its prisoner; it does
      not enchant you, but it holds you spellbound. His ideal is the
      extraordinary, the gigantic, the overwhelming, the incommensurable. His
      most characteristic words are <i>immense, colossal, enormous, huge,
      monstrous</i>. He finds a way of making even child-nature extravagant and
      bizarre. The only thing which seems impossible to him is to be natural. In
      short, his passion is grandeur, his fault is excess; his distinguishing
      mark is a kind of Titanic power with strange dissonances of puerility in
      its magnificence. Where he is weakest is, in measure, taste, and sense of
      humor: he fails in <i>esprit</i>, in the subtlest sense of the word.
      Victor Hugo is a gallicized Spaniard, or rather he unites all the extremes
      of south and north, the Scandinavian and the African. Gaul has less part
      in him than any other country. And yet, by a caprice of destiny, he is one
      of the literary geniuses of France in the nineteenth century! His
      resources are inexhaustible, and age seems to have no power over him. What
      an infinite store of words, forms, and ideas he carries about with him,
      and what a pile of works he has left behind him to mark his passage! His
      eruptions are like those of a volcano; and, fabulous workman that he is,
      he goes on forever raising, destroying, crushing, and rebuilding a world
      of his own creation, and a world rather Hindoo than Hellenic.
    </p>
    <p>
      He amazes me: and yet I prefer those men of genius who awaken in me the
      sense of truth, and who increase the sum of one&rsquo;s inner liberty. In Hugo
      one feels the effort of the laboring Cyclops; give me rather the sonorous
      bow of Apollo, and the tranquil brow of the Olympian Jove. His type is
      that of the Satyr in the &ldquo;Légende des Siècles,&rdquo; who crushes Olympus, a
      type midway between the ugliness of the faun and the overpowering
      sublimity of the great Pan.
    </p>
    <p>
      May 23, 1863.&mdash;Dull, cloudy, misty weather; it rained in the night
      and yet the air is heavy. This somber reverie of earth and sky has a
      sacredness of its own, but it fills the spectator with a vague and
      stupefying <i>ennui</i>. Light brings life: darkness may bring thought,
      but a dull daylight, the uncertain glimmer of a leaden sky, merely make
      one restless and weary. These indecisive and chaotic states of nature are
      ugly, like all amorphous things, like smeared colors, or bats, or the
      viscous polyps of the sea. The source of all attractiveness is to be found
      in character, in sharpness of outline, in individualization. All that is
      confused and indistinct, without form, or sex, or accent, is antagonistic
      to beauty; for the mind&rsquo;s first need is light; light means order, and
      order means, in the first place, the distinction of the parts, in the
      second, their regular action. Beauty is based on reason.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 7, 1863.&mdash;A walk after supper, a sky sparkling with stars, the
      Milky Way magnificent. Alas! all the same my heart is heavy. At bottom I
      am always brought up against an incurable distrust of myself and of life,
      which toward my neighbor has become indulgence, but for myself has led to
      a <i>régime</i> of absolute abstention. All or nothing! This is my inborn
      disposition, my primitive stuff, my &ldquo;old man.&rdquo; And yet if some one will
      but give me a little love, will but penetrate a little into my inner
      feeling, I am happy and ask for scarcely anything else. A child&rsquo;s
      caresses, a friend&rsquo;s talk, are enough to make me gay and expansive. So
      then I aspire to the infinite, and yet a very little contents me;
      everything disturbs me and the least thing calms me. I have often
      surprised in my self the wish for death, and yet my ambitions for
      happiness scarcely go beyond those of the bird: wings! sun! a nest! I
      persist in solitude because of a taste for it, so people think. No, it is
      from distaste, disgust, from shame at my own need of others, shame at
      confessing it, a fear of passing into bondage if I do confess it.
    </p>
    <p>
      September 2, 1863.&mdash;How shall I find a name for that subtle feeling
      which seized hold upon me this morning in the twilight of waking? It was a
      reminiscence, charming indeed, but nameless, vague, and featureless, like
      the figure of a woman seen for an instant by a sick man in the uncertainty
      of delirium, and across the shadows of his darkened room. I had a distinct
      sense of a form which I had seen somewhere, and which had moved and
      charmed me once, and then had fallen back with time into the catacombs of
      oblivion. But all the rest was confused: place, occasion, and the figure
      itself, for I saw neither the face nor its expression. The whole was like
      a fluttering veil under which the enigma&mdash;the secret of happiness&mdash;might
      have been hidden. And I was awake enough to be sure that it was not a
      dream.
    </p>
    <p>
      In impressions like these we recognize the last trace of things which are
      sinking out of sight and call within us, of memories which are perishing.
      It is like a shimmering marsh-light falling upon some vague outline of
      which one scarcely knows whether it represents a pain or a pleasure&mdash;a
      gleam upon a grave. How strange! One might almost call such things the
      ghosts of the soul, reflections of past happiness, the <i>manes</i> of our
      dead emotions. If, as the Talmud, I think, says, every feeling of love
      gives birth involuntarily to an invisible genius or spirit which yearns to
      complete its existence, and these glimmering phantoms, which have never
      taken to themselves form and reality, are still wandering in the limbo of
      the soul, what is there to astonish us in the strange apparitions which
      sometimes come to visit our pillow? At any rate, the fact remains that I
      was not able to force the phantom to tell me its name, nor to give any
      shape or distinctness to my reminiscence.
    </p>
    <p>
      What a melancholy aspect life may wear to us when we are floating down the
      current of such dreamy thoughts as these! It seems like some vast
      nocturnal shipwreck in which a hundred loving voices are clamoring for
      help, while the pitiless mounting wave is silencing all the cries one by
      one, before we have been able, in this darkness of death, to press a hand
      or give the farewell kiss. Prom such a point of view destiny looks harsh,
      savage, and cruel, and the tragedy of life rises like a rock in the midst
      of the dull waters of daily triviality. It is impossible not to be serious
      under the weight of indefinable anxiety produced in us by such a
      spectacle. The surface of things may be smiling or commonplace, but the
      depths below are austere and terrible. As soon as we touch upon eternal
      things, upon the destiny of the soul, upon truth or duty, upon the secrets
      of life and death, we become grave whether we will or no.
    </p>
    <p>
      Love at its highest point&mdash;love sublime, unique, invincible&mdash;leads
      us straight to the brink of the great abyss, for it speaks to us directly
      of the infinite and of eternity. It is eminently religious; it may even
      become religion. When all around a man is wavering and changing, when
      everything is growing dark and featureless to him in the far distance of
      an unknown future, when the world seems but a fiction or a fairy tale, and
      the universe a chimera, when the whole edifice of ideas vanishes in smoke,
      and all realities are penetrated with doubt, what is the fixed point which
      may still be his? The faithful heart of a woman! There he may rest his
      head; there he will find strength to live, strength to believe, and, if
      need be, strength to die in peace with a benediction on his lips. Who
      knows if love and its beatitude, clear manifestation as it is of the
      universal harmony of things, is not the best demonstration of a fatherly
      and understanding God, just as it is the shortest road by which to reach
      him? Love is a faith, and one faith leads to another. And this faith is
      happiness, light and force. Only by it does a man enter into the series of
      the living, the awakened, the happy, the redeemed&mdash;of those true men
      who know the value of existence and who labor for the glory of God and of
      the truth. Till then we are but babblers and chatterers, spendthrifts of
      our time, our faculties and our gifts, without aim, without real joy&mdash;weak,
      infirm, and useless beings, of no account in the scheme of things. Perhaps
      it is through love that I shall find my way back to faith, to religion, to
      energy, to concentration. It seems to me, at least, that if I could but
      find my work-fellow and my destined companion, all the rest would be added
      unto me, as though to confound my unbelief and make me blush for my
      despair. Believe, then, in a fatherly Providence, and dare to love!
    </p>
    <p>
      November 25, 1863.&mdash;Prayer is the essential weapon of all religions.
      He who can no longer pray because he doubts whether there is a being to
      whom prayer ascends and from whom blessing descends, he indeed is cruelly
      solitary and prodigiously impoverished. And you, what do you believe about
      it? At this moment I should find it very difficult to say. All my positive
      beliefs are in the crucible ready for any kind of metamorphosis. Truth
      above all, even when it upsets and overwhelms us! But what I believe is
      that the highest idea we can conceive of the principle of things will be
      the truest, and that the truest truth is that which makes man the most
      wholly good, wisest, greatest, and happiest.
    </p>
    <p>
      My creed is in transition. Yet I still believe in God, and the immortality
      of the soul. I believe in holiness, truth, beauty; I believe in the
      redemption of the soul by faith in forgiveness. I believe in love,
      devotion, honor. I believe in duty and the moral conscience. I believe
      even in prayer. I believe in the fundamental intuitions of the human race,
      and in the great affirmations of the inspired of all ages. I believe that
      our higher nature is our truer nature.
    </p>
    <p>
      Can one get a theology and a theodicy out of this? Probably, but just now
      I do not see it distinctly. It is so long since I have ceased to think
      about my own metaphysic, and since I have lived in the thoughts of others,
      that I am ready even to ask myself whether the crystallization of my
      beliefs is necessary. Yes, for preaching and acting; less for studying,
      contemplating and learning.
    </p>
    <p>
      December 4, 1863.&mdash;The whole secret of remaining young in spite of
      years, and even of gray hairs, is to cherish enthusiasm in one&rsquo;s self by
      poetry, by contemplation, by charity&mdash;that is, in fewer words, by the
      maintenance of harmony in the soul. When everything is in its right place
      within us, we ourselves are in equilibrium with the whole work of God.
      Deep and grave enthusiasm for the eternal beauty and the eternal order,
      reason touched with emotion and a serene tenderness of heart&mdash;these
      surely are the foundations of wisdom.
    </p>
    <p>
      Wisdom! how inexhaustible a theme! A sort of peaceful aureole surrounds
      and illumines this thought, in which are summed up all the treasures of
      moral experience, and which is the ripest fruit of a well-spent life.
      Wisdom never grows old, for she is the expression of order itself&mdash;that
      is, of the Eternal. Only the wise man draws from life, and from every
      stage of it, its true savor, because only he feels the beauty, the
      dignity, and the value of life. The flowers of youth may fade, but the
      summer, the autumn, and even the winter of human existence, have their
      majestic grandeur, which the wise man recognizes and glorifies. To see all
      things in God; to make of one&rsquo;s own life a journey toward the ideal; to
      live with gratitude, with devoutness, with gentleness and courage; this
      was the splendid aim of Marcus Aurelius. And if you add to it the humility
      which kneels, and the charity which gives, you have the whole wisdom of
      the children of God, the immortal joy which is the heritage of the true
      Christian. But what a false Christianity is that which slanders wisdom and
      seeks to do without it! In such a case I am on the side of wisdom, which
      is, as it were, justice done to God, even in this life. The relegation of
      life to some distant future, and the separation of the holy man from the
      virtuous man, are the signs of a false religious conception. This error
      is, in some degree, that of the whole Middle Age, and belongs, perhaps, to
      the essence of Catholicism. But the true Christianity must purge itself
      from so disastrous a mistake. The eternal life is not the future life; it
      is life in harmony with the true order of things&mdash;life in God. We
      must learn to look upon time as a movement of eternity, as an undulation
      in the ocean of being. To live, so as to keep this consciousness of ours
      in perpetual relation with the eternal, is to be wise; to live, so as to
      personify and embody the eternal, is to be religious.
    </p>
    <p>
      The modern leveler, after having done away with conventional inequalities,
      with arbitrary privilege and historical injustice, goes still farther, and
      rebels against the inequalities of merit, capacity, and virtue. Beginning
      with a just principle, he develops it into an unjust one. Inequality may
      be as true and as just as equality: it depends upon what you mean by it.
      But this is precisely what nobody cares to find out. All passions dread
      the light, and the modern zeal for equality is a disguised hatred which
      tries to pass itself off as love.
    </p>
    <p>
      Liberty, equality&mdash;bad principles! The only true principle for
      humanity is justice, and justice toward the feeble becomes necessarily
      protection or kindness.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 2, 1864.&mdash;To-day April has been displaying her showery
      caprices. We have had floods of sunshine followed by deluges of rain,
      alternate tears and smiles from the petulant sky, gusts of wind and
      storms. The weather is like a spoiled child whose wishes and expression
      change twenty times in an hour. It is a blessing for the plants, and means
      an influx of life through all the veins of the spring. The circle of
      mountains which bounds the valley is covered with white from top to toe,
      but two hours of sunshine would melt the snow away. The snow itself is but
      a new caprice, a simple stage decoration ready to disappear at the signal
      of the scene-shifter.
    </p>
    <p>
      How sensible I am to the restless change which rules the world. To appear,
      and to vanish&mdash;there is the biography of all individuals, whatever
      may be the length of the cycle of existence which they describe, and the
      drama of the universe is nothing more. All life is the shadow of a
      smoke-wreath, a gesture in the empty air, a hieroglyph traced for an
      instant in the sand, and effaced a moment afterward by a breath of wind,
      an air-bubble expanding and vanishing on the surface of the great river of
      being&mdash;an appearance, a vanity, a nothing. But this nothing is,
      however, the symbol of the universal being, and this passing bubble is the
      epitome of the history of the world.
    </p>
    <p>
      The man who has, however imperceptibly, helped in the work of the
      universe, has lived; the man who has been conscious, in however small a
      degree, of the cosmical movement, has lived also. The plain man serves the
      world by his action and as a wheel in the machine; the thinker serves it
      by his intellect, and as a light upon its path. The man of meditative
      soul, who raises and comforts and sustains his traveling companions,
      mortal and fugitive like himself, plays a nobler part still, for he unites
      the other two utilities. Action, thought, speech, are the three modes of
      human life. The artisan, the savant, and the orator, are all three God&rsquo;s
      workmen. To do, to discover, to teach&mdash;these three things are all
      labor, all good, all necessary. Will-o&rsquo;-the-wisps that we are, we may yet
      leave a trace behind us; meteors that we are, we may yet prolong our
      perishable being in the memory of men, or at least in the contexture of
      after events. Everything disappears, but nothing is lost, and the
      civilization or city of man is but an immense spiritual pyramid, built up
      out of the work of all that has ever lived under the forms of moral being,
      just as our calcareous mountains are made of the debris of myriads of
      nameless creatures who have lived under the forms of microscopic animal
      life.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 5, 1864.&mdash;I have been reading &ldquo;Prince Vitale&rdquo; for the second
      time, and have been lost in admiration of it. What wealth of color, facts,
      ideas&mdash;what learning, what fine-edged satire, what <i>esprit</i>,
      science, and talent, and what an irreproachable finish of style&mdash;so
      limpid, and yet so profound! It is not heartfelt and it is not
      spontaneous, but all other kinds of merit, culture, and cleverness the
      author possesses. It would be impossible to be more penetrating, more
      subtle, and less fettered in mind, than this wizard of language, with his
      irony and his chameleon-like variety. Victor Cherbuliez, like the sphinx,
      is able to play all lyres, and takes his profit from them all, with a
      Goethe-like serenity. It seems as if passion, grief, and error had no hold
      on this impassive soul. The key of his thought is to be looked for in
      Hegel&rsquo;s &ldquo;Phenomenology of Mind,&rdquo; remolded by Greek and French influences.
    </p>
    <p>
      His faith, if he has one, is that of Strauss-Humanism. But he is perfectly
      master of himself and of his utterances, and will take good care never to
      preach anything prematurely.
    </p>
    <p>
      What is there quite at the bottom of this deep spring?
    </p>
    <p>
      In any case a mind as free as any can possibly be from stupidity and
      prejudice. One might almost say that Cherbuliez knows all that he wishes
      to know, without the trouble of learning it. He is a calm Mephistopheles,
      with perfect manners, grace, variety, and an exquisite urbanity; and
      Mephisto is a clever jeweler; and this jeweler is a subtle musician; and
      this fine singer and storyteller, with his amber-like delicacy and
      brilliancy, is making mock of us all the while. He takes a malicious
      pleasure in withdrawing his own personality from scrutiny and divination,
      while he himself divines everything, and he likes to make us feel that
      although he holds in his hand the secret of the universe, he will only
      unfold his prize at his own time, and if it pleases him. Victor Cherbuliez
      is a little like Proudhon and plays with paradoxes, to shock the <i>bourgeois</i>.
      Thus he amuses himself with running down Luther and the Reformation in
      favor of the Renaissance. Of the troubles of conscience he seems to know
      nothing. His supreme tribunal is reason. At bottom he is Hegelian and
      intellectualist. But it is a splendid organization. Only sometimes he must
      be antipathetic to those men of duty who make renunciation, sacrifice, and
      humility the measure of individual worth.
    </p>
    <p>
      July, 1864.&mdash;Among the Alps I become a child again, with all the
      follies and <i>naïveté</i> of childhood. Shaking off the weight of years,
      the trappings of office, and all the tiresome and ridiculous caution with
      which one lives, I plunge into the full tide of pleasure, and amuse myself
      sans façon, as it comes. In this careless light-hearted mood, my ordinary
      formulas and habits fall away from me so completely that I feel myself no
      longer either townsman, or professor, or savant, or bachelor, and I
      remember no more of my past than if it were a dream. It is like a bath in
      Lethe.
    </p>
    <p>
      It makes me really believe that the smallest illness would destroy my
      memory, and wipe out all my previous existence, when I see with what ease
      I become a stranger to myself, and fall back once more into the condition
      of a blank sheet, a <i>tabula rasa</i>. Life wears such a dream-aspect to
      me that I can throw myself without any difficulty into the situation of
      the dying, before whose eyes all this tumult of images and forms fades
      into nothingness. I have the inconsistency of a fluid, a vapor, a cloud,
      and all is easily unmade or transformed in me; everything passes and is
      effaced like the waves which follow each other on the sea. When I say all,
      I mean all that is arbitrary, indifferent, partial, or intellectual in the
      combinations of one&rsquo;s life. For I feel that the things of the soul, our
      immortal aspirations, our deepest affections, are not drawn into this
      chaotic whirlwind of impressions. It is the finite things which are mortal
      and fugitive. Every man feels it OH his deathbed. I feel it during the
      whole of life; that is the only difference between me and others.
      Excepting only love, thought, and liberty, almost everything is now a
      matter of indifference to me, and those objects which excite the desires
      of most men, rouse in me little more than curiosity. What does it mean&mdash;detachment
      of soul, disinterestedness, weakness, or wisdom?
    </p>
    <p>
      September 19, 1864.&mdash;I have been living for two hours with a noble
      soul&mdash;with Eugénie de Guérin, the pious heroine of fraternal love.
      How many thoughts, feelings, griefs, in this journal of six years! How it
      makes one dream, think and live! It produces a certain homesick impression
      on me, a little like that of certain forgotten melodies whereof the accent
      touches the heart, one knows not why. It is as though far-off paths came
      back to me, glimpses of youth, a confused murmur of voices, echoes from my
      past. Purity, melancholy, piety, a thousand memories of a past existence,
      forms fantastic and intangible, like the fleeting shadows of a dream at
      waking, began to circle round the astonished reader.
    </p>
    <p>
      September 20, 1864.&mdash;Read Eugénie de Guérin&rsquo;s volume again right and
      left with a growing sense of attraction. Everything is heart, force,
      impulse, in these pages which have the power of sincerity and a brilliance
      of suffused poetry. A great and strong soul, a clear mind, distinction,
      elevation, the freedom of unconscious talent, reserve and depth&mdash;nothing
      is wanting for this Sévigné of the fields, who has to hold herself in with
      both hands lest she should write verse, so strong in her is the artistic
      impulse.
    </p>
    <p>
      October 16, 1864.&mdash;I have just read a part of Eugénie de Guérin&rsquo;s
      journal over again. It charmed me a little less than the first time. The
      nature seemed to me as beautiful, but the life of Eugénie was too empty,
      and the circle of ideas which occupied her, too narrow.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is touching and wonderful to see how little space is enough for thought
      to spread its wings in, but this perpetual motion within the four walls of
      a cell ends none the less by becoming wearisome to minds which are
      accustomed to embrace more objects in their field of vision. Instead of a
      garden, the world; instead of a library, the whole of literature; instead
      of three or four faces, a whole people and all history&mdash;this is what
      the virile, the philosophic temper demands. Men must have more air, more
      room, mere horizon, more positive knowledge, and they end by suffocating
      in this little cage where Eugenie lives and moves, though the breath of
      heaven blows into it and the radiance of the stars shines down upon it.
    </p>
    <p>
      October 27, 1864. (<i>Promenade de la Treille</i>).&mdash;The air this
      morning was so perfectly clear and lucid that one might have distinguished
      a figure on the Vouache. [Footnote: The Vouache is the hill which bounds
      the horizon of Geneva to the south-west.] This level and brilliant sun had
      set fire to the whole range of autumn colors; amber, saffron, gold,
      sulphur, yellow ochre, orange, red, copper-color, aquamarine, amaranth,
      shone resplendent on the leaves which were still hanging from the boughs
      or had already fallen beneath the trees. It was delicious. The martial
      step of our two battalions going out to their drilling-ground, the sparkle
      of the guns, the song of the bugles, the sharp distinctness of the house
      outlines, still moist with the morning dew, the transparent coolness of
      all the shadows&mdash;every detail in the scene was instinct with a keen
      and wholesome gayety.
    </p>
    <p>
      There are two forms of autumn: there is the misty and dreamy autumn, there
      is the vivid and brilliant autumn: almost the difference between the two
      sexes. The very word autumn is both masculine and feminine. Has not every
      season, in some fashion, its two sexes? Has it not its minor and its major
      key, its two sides of light and shadow, gentleness and force? Perhaps. All
      that is perfect is double; each face has two profiles, each coin two
      sides. The scarlet autumn stands for vigorous activity: the gray autumn
      for meditative feeling. The one is expansive and overflowing; the other
      still and withdrawn. Yesterday our thoughts were with the dead. To-day we
      are celebrating the vintage.
    </p>
    <p>
      November 16, 1864.&mdash;Heard of the death of&mdash;. Will and
      intelligence lasted till there was an effusion on the brain which stopped
      everything.
    </p>
    <p>
      A bubble of air in the blood, a drop of water in the brain, and a man is
      out of gear, his machine falls to pieces, his thought vanishes, the world
      disappears from him like a dream at morning. On what a spider thread is
      hung our individual existence! Fragility, appearance, nothingness. If it
      were for our powers of self-detraction and forgetfulness, all the fairy
      world which surrounds and draws us would seem to us but a broken spectre
      in the darkness, an empty appearance, a fleeting hallucination. Appeared&mdash;disappeared&mdash;there
      is the whole history of a man, or of a world, or of an infusoria.
    </p>
    <p>
      Time is the supreme illusion. It is but the inner prism by which we
      decompose being and life, the mode under which we perceive successively
      what is simultaneous in idea. The eye does not see a sphere all at once
      although the sphere exists all at once. Either the sphere must turn before
      the eye which is looking at it, or the eye must go round the sphere. In
      the first case it is the world which unrolls, or seems to unroll in time;
      in the second case it is our thought which successively analyzes and
      recomposes. For the supreme intelligence there is no time; what will be,
      is. Time and space are fragments of the infinite for the use of finite
      creatures. God permits them, that he may not be alone. They are the mode
      under which creatures are possible and conceivable. Let us add that they
      are also the Jacob&rsquo;s ladder of innumerable steps by which the creation
      reascends to its Creator, participates in being, tastes of life, perceives
      the absolute, and can adore the fathomless mystery of the infinite
      divinity. That is the other side of the question. Our life is nothing, it
      is true, but our life is divine. A breath of nature annihilates us, but we
      surpass nature in penetrating far beyond her vast phantasmagoria to the
      changeless and the eternal. To escape by the ecstasy of inward vision from
      the whirlwind of time, to see one&rsquo;s self <i>sub specie eterni</i> is the
      word of command of all the great religions of the higher races; and this
      psychological possibility is the foundation of all great hopes. The soul
      may be immortal because she is fitted to rise toward that which is neither
      born nor dies, toward that which exists substantially, necessarily,
      invariably, that is to say toward God.
    </p>
    <p>
      To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. To attain it we must
      be able to guess what will interest; we must learn to read the childish
      soul as we might a piece of music. Then, by simply changing the key, we
      keep up the attraction and vary the song.
    </p>
    <p>
      The germs of all things are in every heart, and the greatest criminals as
      well as the greatest heroes are but different modes of ourselves. Only
      evil grows of itself, while for goodness we want effort and courage.
    </p>
    <p>
      Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all
      rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts,
      where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the
      secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less
      closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.
    </p>
    <p>
      A man takes to &ldquo;piety&rdquo; from a thousand different reasons&mdash;from
      imitation or from eccentricity, from bravado or from reverence, from shame
      of the past or from terror of the future, from weakness and from pride,
      for pleasure&rsquo;s sake or for punishment&rsquo;s sake, in order to be able to
      judge, or in order to escape being judged, and for a thousand other
      reasons; but he only becomes truly religious for religion&rsquo;s sake.
    </p>
    <p>
      January 11, 1865.&mdash;It is pleasant to feel nobly&mdash;that is to say,
      to live above the lowlands of vulgarity. Manufacturing Americanism and
      Caesarian democracy tend equally to the multiplying of crowds, governed by
      appetite, applauding charlatanism, vowed to the worship of mammon and of
      pleasure, and adoring no other God than force. What poor samples of
      mankind they are who make up this growing majority! Oh, let us remain
      faithful to the altars of the ideal! It is possible that the spiritualists
      may become the stoics of a new epoch of Caesarian rule. Materialistic
      naturalism has the wind in its sails, and a general moral deterioration is
      preparing. NO matter, so long as the salt does not lose its savor, and so
      long as the friends of the higher life maintain the fire of Vesta. The
      wood itself may choke the flame, but if the flame persists, the fire will
      only be the more splendid in the end. The great democratic deluge will not
      after all be able to effect what the invasion of the barbarians was
      powerless to bring about; it will not drown altogether the results of the
      higher culture; but we must resign ourselves to the fact that it tends in
      the beginning to deform and vulgarize everything. It is clear that
      aesthetic delicacy, elegance, distinction, and nobleness&mdash;that
      atticism, urbanity, whatever is suave and exquisite, fine and subtle&mdash;all
      that makes the charm of the higher kinds of literature and of aristocratic
      cultivation&mdash;vanishes simultaneously with the society which
      corresponds to it. If, as Pascal, [Footnote: The saying of Pascal&rsquo;s
      alluded to is in the <i>Pensées</i>, Art. xi. No. 10: &ldquo;A mesure qu&rsquo;on a
      plus d&rsquo;esprit on trouve qu&rsquo;il y a plus d&rsquo;hommes originaux. Les gens du
      commun ne trouvent pas de différence entre les hommes.&rdquo;] I think, says,
      the more one develops, the more difference one observes between man and
      man, then we cannot say that the democratic instinct tends to mental
      development, since it tends to make a man believe that the pretensions
      have only to be the same to make the merits equal also.
    </p>
    <p>
      March 20, 1865.&mdash;I have just heard of fresh cases of insubordination
      among the students. Our youth become less and less docile, and seem to
      take for their motto, &ldquo;Our master is our enemy.&rdquo; The boy insists upon
      having the privileges of the young man, and the young man tries to keep
      those of the <i>gamin</i>. At bottom all this is the natural consequence
      of our system of leveling democracy. As soon as difference of quality is,
      in politics, officially equal to zero, the authority of age, of knowledge,
      and of function disappears.
    </p>
    <p>
      The only counterpoise of pure equality is military discipline. In military
      uniform, in the police court, in prison, or on the execution ground, there
      is no reply possible. But is it not curious that the <i>régime</i> of
      individual right should lead to nothing but respect for brute strength?
      Jacobinism brings with it Caesarism; the rule of the tongue leads to the
      rule of the sword. Democracy and liberty are not one but two. A republic
      supposes a high state of morals, but no such state of morals is possible
      without the habit of respect; and there is no respect without humility.
      Now the pretension that every man has the necessary qualities of a
      citizen, simply because he was born twenty-one years ago, is as much as to
      say that labor, merit, virtue, character, and experience are to count for
      nothing; and we destroy humility when we proclaim that a man becomes the
      equal of all other men, by the mere mechanical and vegetative process of
      natural growth. Such a claim annihilates even the respect for age; for as
      the elector of twenty-one is worth as much as the elector of fifty, the
      boy of nineteen has no serious reason to believe himself in any way the
      inferior of his elder by one or two years. Thus the fiction on which the
      political order of democracy is based ends in something altogether opposed
      to that which democracy desires: its aim was to increase the whole sum of
      liberty; but the result is to diminish it for all.
    </p>
    <p>
      The modern state is founded on the philosophy of atomism. Nationality,
      public spirit, tradition, national manners, disappear like so many hollow
      and worn-out entities; nothing remains to create movement but the action
      of molecular force and of dead weight. In such a theory liberty is
      identified with caprice, and the collective reason and age-long tradition
      of an old society are nothing more than soap-bubbles which the smallest
      urchin may shiver with a snap of the fingers.
    </p>
    <p>
      Does this mean that I am an opponent of democracy? Not at all. Fiction for
      fiction, it is the least harmful. But it is well not to confound its
      promises with realities. The fiction consists in the postulate of all
      democratic government, that the great majority of the electors in a state
      are enlightened, free, honest, and patriotic&mdash;whereas such a
      postulate is a mere chimera. The majority in any state is necessarily
      composed of the most ignorant, the poorest, and the least capable; the
      state is therefore at the mercy of accident and passion, and it always
      ends by succumbing at one time or another to the rash conditions which
      have been made for its existence. A man who condemns himself to live upon
      the tight-rope must inevitably fall; one has no need to be a prophet to
      foresee such a result.
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;[Greek: Aridton men udor],&rdquo; said Pindar; the best thing in the world is
      wisdom, and, in default of wisdom, science. States, churches, society
      itself, may fall to pieces; science alone has nothing to fear&mdash;until
      at least society once more falls a prey to barbarism. Unfortunately this
      triumph of barbarism is not impossible. The victory of the socialist
      Utopia, or the horrors of a religious war, reserve for us perhaps even
      this lamentable experience.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 3, 1865.&mdash;What doctor possesses such curative resources as
      those latent in a spark of happiness or a single ray of hope? The
      mainspring of life is in the heart. Joy is the vital air of the soul, and
      grief is a kind of asthma complicated by atony. Our dependence upon
      surrounding circumstances increases with our own physical weakness, and on
      the other hand, in health there is liberty. Health is the first of all
      liberties, and happiness gives us the energy which is the basis of health.
      To make any one happy, then, is strictly to augment his store of being, to
      double the intensity of his life, to reveal him to himself, to ennoble him
      and transfigure him. Happiness does away with ugliness, and even makes the
      beauty of beauty. The man who doubts it, can never have watched the first
      gleams of tenderness dawning in the clear eyes of one who loves; sunrise
      itself is a lesser marvel. In paradise, then, everybody will be beautiful.
      For, as the righteous soul is naturally beautiful, as the spiritual body
      is but the <i>visibility</i> of the soul, its impalpable and angelic form,
      and as happiness beautifies all that it penetrates or even touches,
      ugliness will have no more place in the universe, and will disappear with
      grief, sin, and death.
    </p>
    <p>
      To the materialist philosopher the beautiful is a mere accident, and
      therefore rare. To the spiritualist philosopher the beautiful is the rule,
      the law, the universal foundation of things, to which every form returns
      as soon as the force of accident is withdrawn. Why are we ugly? Because we
      are not in the angelic state, because we are evil, morose, and unhappy.
    </p>
    <p>
      Heroism, ecstasy, prayer, love, enthusiasm, weave a halo round the brow,
      for they are a setting free of the soul, which through them gains force to
      make its envelope transparent and shine through upon all around it. Beauty
      is, then, a phenomenon belonging to the spiritualization of matter. It is
      a momentary transfiguration of the privileged object or being&mdash;a
      token fallen from heaven to earth in order to remind us of the ideal
      world. To study it, is to Platonize almost inevitably. As a powerful
      electric current can render metals luminous, and reveal their essence by
      the color of their flame, so intense life and supreme joy can make the
      most simple mortal dazzlingly beautiful. Man, therefore, is never more
      truly man than in these divine states.
    </p>
    <p>
      The ideal, after all, is truer than the real: for the ideal is the eternal
      element in perishable things: it is their type, their sum, their <i>raison
      d&rsquo;être</i>, their formula in the book of the Creator, and therefore at
      once the most exact and the most condensed expression of them.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 11, 1865.&mdash;I have been measuring and making a trial of the new
      gray plaid which is to take the place of my old mountain shawl. The old
      servant which has been my companion for ten years, and which recalls to me
      so many poetical and delightful memories, pleases me better than its
      brilliant successor, even though this last has been a present from a
      friendly hand. But can anything take the place of the past, and have not
      even the inanimate witnesses of our life voice and language for us? Glion,
      Villars, Albisbrunnen, the Righi, the Chamossaire, and a hundred other
      places, have left something of themselves behind them in the meshes of
      this woolen stuff which makes a part of my most intimate history. The
      shawl, besides, is the only <i>chivalrous</i> article of dress which is
      still left to the modern traveler, the only thing about him which may be
      useful to others than himself, and by means of which he may still do his
      <i>devoir</i> to fair women! How many times mine has served them for a
      cushion, a cloak, a shelter, on the damp grass of the Alps, on seats of
      hard rock, or in the sudden cool of the pinewood, during the walks, the
      rests, the readings, and the chats of mountain life! How many kindly
      smiles it has won for me! Even its blemishes are dear to me, for each darn
      and tear has its story, each scar is an armorial bearing. This tear was
      made by a hazel tree under Jaman&mdash;that by the buckle of a strap on
      the Frohnalp&mdash;that, again, by a bramble at Charnex; and each time
      fairy needles have repaired the injury.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Mon vieux manteau, que je vous remercie
  Car c&rsquo;est à vous que je dois ces plaisirs!&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      And has it not been to me a friend in suffering, a companion in good and
      evil fortune? It reminds me of that centaur&rsquo;s tunic which could not be
      torn off without carrying away the flesh and blood of its wearer. I am
      unwilling to give it up; whatever gratitude for the past, and whatever
      piety toward my vanished youth is in me, seem to forbid it. The warp of
      this rag is woven out of Alpine joys, and its woof out of human
      affections. It also says to me in its own way:
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Pauvre bouquet, fleurs aujourd&rsquo;hui fanées!&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      And the appeal is one of those which move the heart, although profane ears
      neither hear it nor understand it.
    </p>
    <p>
      What a stab there is in those words, <i>thou hast been</i>! when the sense
      of them becomes absolutely clear to us. One feels one&rsquo;s self sinking
      gradually into one&rsquo;s grave, and the past tense sounds the knell of our
      illusions as to ourselves. What is past is past: gray hairs will never
      become black curls again; the forces, the gifts, the attractions of youth,
      have vanished with our young days.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Plus d&rsquo;amour; partant plus de joie.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      How hard it is to grow old, when we have missed our life, when we have
      neither the crown of completed manhood nor of fatherhood! How sad it is to
      feel the mind declining before it has done its work, and the body growing
      weaker before it has seen itself renewed in those who might close our eyes
      and honor our name! The tragic solemnity of existence strikes us with
      terrible force, on that morning when we wake to find the mournful word <i>too
      late</i> ringing in our ears! &ldquo;Too late, the sand is turned, the hour is
      past! Thy harvest is unreaped&mdash;too late! Thou hast been dreaming,
      forgetting, sleeping&mdash;so much the worse! Every man rewards or
      punishes himself. To whom or of whom wouldst thou complain?&rdquo;&mdash;Alas!
    </p>
    <p>
      April 21, 1865. (<i>Mornex</i>).&mdash;A morning of intoxicating beauty,
      fresh as the feelings of sixteen, and crowned with flowers like a bride.
      The poetry of youth, of innocence, and of love, overflowed my soul. Even
      to the light mist hovering over the bosom of the plain&mdash;image of that
      tender modesty which veils the features and shrouds in mystery the inmost
      thoughts of the maiden&mdash;everything that I saw delighted my eyes and
      spoke to my imagination. It was a sacred, a nuptial day! and the matin
      bells ringing in some distant village harmonized marvelously with the hymn
      of nature. &ldquo;Pray,&rdquo; they said, &ldquo;and love! Adore a fatherly and beneficent
      God.&rdquo; They recalled to me the accent of Haydn; there was in them and in
      the landscape a childlike joyousness, a naïve gratitude, a radiant
      heavenly joy innocent of pain and sin, like the sacred, simple-hearted
      ravishment of Eve on the first day of her awakening in the new world. How
      good a thing is feeling, admiration! It is the bread of angels, the
      eternal food of cherubim and seraphim.
    </p>
    <p>
      I have not yet felt the air so pure, so life-giving, so ethereal, during
      the five days that I have been here. To breathe is a beatitude. One
      understands the delights of a bird&rsquo;s existence&mdash;that emancipation
      from all encumbering weight&mdash;that luminous and empyrean life,
      floating in blue space, and passing from one horizon to another with a
      stroke of the wing. One must have a great deal of air below one before one
      can be conscious of such inner freedom as this, such lightness of the
      whole being. Every element has its poetry, but the poetry of air is
      liberty. Enough; to your work, dreamer!
    </p>
    <p>
      May 30, 1865.&mdash;All snakes fascinate their prey, and pure wickedness
      seems to inherit the power of fascination granted to the serpent. It
      stupefies and bewilders the simple heart, which sees it without
      understanding it, which touches it without being able to believe in it,
      and which sinks engulfed in the problem of it, like Empedocles in Etna. <i>Non
      possum capere te, cape me</i>, says the Aristotelian motto. Every
      diminutive of Beelzebub is an abyss, each demoniacal act is a gulf of
      darkness. Natural cruelty, inborn perfidy and falseness, even in animals,
      cast lurid gleams, as it were, into that fathomless pit of Satanic
      perversity which is a moral reality.
    </p>
    <p>
      Nevertheless behind this thought there rises another which tells me that
      sophistry is at the bottom of human wickedness, that the majority of
      monsters like to justify themselves in their own eyes, and that the first
      attribute of the Evil One is to be the father of lies. Before crime is
      committed conscience must be corrupted, and every bad man who succeeds in
      reaching a high point of wickedness begins with this. It is all very well
      to say that hatred is murder; the man who hates is determined to see
      nothing in it but an act of moral hygiene. It is to do himself good that
      he does evil, just as a mad dog bites to get rid of his thirst.
    </p>
    <p>
      To injure others while at the same time knowingly injuring one&rsquo;s self is a
      step farther; evil then becomes a frenzy, which, in its turn, sharpens
      into a cold ferocity.
    </p>
    <p>
      Whenever a man, under the influence of such a diabolical passion,
      surrenders himself to these instincts of the wild or venomous beast he
      must seem to the angels a madman&mdash;a lunatic, who kindles his own
      Gehenna that he may consume the world in it, or as much of it as his
      devilish desires can lay hold upon. Wickedness is forever beginning a new
      spiral which penetrates deeper still into the abysses of abomination, for
      the circles of hell have this property&mdash;that they have no end. It
      seems as though divine perfection were an infinite of the first degree,
      but as though diabolical perfection were an infinite of unknown power. But
      no; for if so, evil would be the true God, and hell would swallow up
      creation. According to the Persian and the Christian faiths, good is to
      conquer evil, and perhaps even Satan himself will be restored to grace&mdash;which
      is as much as to say that the divine order will be everywhere
      re-established. Love will be more potent than hatred; God will save his
      glory, and his glory is in his goodness. But it is very true that all
      gratuitous wickedness troubles the soul, because it seems to make the
      great lines of the moral order tremble within us by the sudden withdrawal
      of the curtain which hides from us the action of those dark corrosive
      forces which have ranged themselves in battle against the divine plan.
    </p>
    <p>
      June 26, 1865.&mdash;One may guess the why and wherefore of a tear and yet
      find it too subtle to give any account of. A tear may be the poetical <i>resumé</i>
      of so many simultaneous impressions, the quintessence of so many opposing
      thoughts! It is like a drop of one of those precious elixirs of the East
      which contain the life of twenty plants fused into a single aroma.
      Sometimes it is the mere overflow of the soul, the running over of the cup
      of reverie. All that one cannot or will not say, all that one refuses to
      confess even to one&rsquo;s self&mdash;confused desires, secret trouble,
      suppressed grief, smothered conflict, voiceless regret, the emotions we
      have struggled against, the pain we have sought to hide, our superstitious
      fears, our vague sufferings, our restless presentiments, our unrealized
      dreams, the wounds inflicted upon our ideal, the dissatisfied languor, the
      vain hopes, the multitude of small indiscernible ills which accumulate
      slowly in a corner of the heart like water dropping noiselessly from the
      roof of a cavern&mdash;all these mysterious movements of the inner life
      end in an instant of emotion, and the emotion concentrates itself in a
      tear just visible on the edge of the eyelid.
    </p>
    <p>
      For the rest, tears express joy as well as sadness. They are the symbol of
      the powerlessness of the soul to restrain its emotion and to remain
      mistress of itself. Speech implies analysis; when we are overcome by
      sensation or by feeling analysis ceases, and with it speech and liberty.
      Our only resource, after silence and stupor, is the language of action&mdash;pantomime.
      Any oppressive weight of thought carries us back to a stage anterior to
      humanity, to a gesture, a cry, a sob, and at last to swooning and
      collapse; that is to say, incapable of bearing the excessive strain of
      sensation as men, we fall back successively to the stage of mere animate
      being, and then to that of the vegetable. Dante swoons at every turn in
      his journey through hell, and nothing paints better the violence of his
      emotions and the ardor of his piety.
    </p>
    <p>
      ... And intense joy? It also withdraws into itself and is silent. To speak
      is to disperse and scatter. Words isolate and localize life in a single
      point; they touch only the circumference of being; they analyze, they
      treat one thing at a time. Thus they decentralize emotion, and chill it in
      doing so. The heart would fain brood over its feeling, cherishing and
      protecting it. Its happiness is silent and meditative; it listens to its
      own beating and feeds religiously upon itself.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 8, 1865. (<i>Gryon sur Bex</i>).&mdash;Splendid moonlight without a
      cloud. The night is solemn and majestic. The regiment of giants sleeps
      while the stars keep sentinel. In the vast shadow of the valley glimmer a
      few scattered roofs, while the torrent, organ-like, swells its eternal
      note in the depths of this mountain cathedral which has the heavens for
      roof.
    </p>
    <p>
      A last look at this blue night and boundless landscape. Jupiter is just
      setting on the counterscarp of the Dent du Midi. Prom the starry vault
      descends an invisible snow-shower of dreams, calling us to a pure sleep.
      Nothing of voluptuous or enervating in this nature. All is strong, austere
      and pure. Good night to all the world!&mdash;to the unfortunate and to the
      happy. Rest and refreshment, renewal and hope; a day is dead&mdash;<i>vive
      le lendemain!</i> Midnight is striking. Another step made toward the tomb.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 13, 1865.&mdash;I have just read through again the letter of J. J.
      Rousseau to Archbishop Beaumont with a little less admiration than I felt
      for it&mdash;was it ten or twelve years ago? This emphasis, this
      precision, which never tires of itself, tires the reader in the long run.
      The intensity of the style produces on one the impression of a treatise on
      mathematics. One feels the need of relaxation after it in something easy,
      natural, and gay. The language of Rousseau demands an amount of labor
      which makes one long for recreation and relief.
    </p>
    <p>
      But how many writers and how many books descend from our Rousseau! On my
      way I noticed the points of departure of Châteaubriand, Lamennais,
      Proudhon. Proudhon, for instance, modeled the plan of his great work, &ldquo;De
      la Justice dang l&rsquo;Eglise et dans la Révolution,&rdquo; upon the letter of
      Rousseau to Beaumont; his three volumes are a string of letters to an
      archbishop; eloquence, daring, and elocution are all fused in a kind of <i>persiflage</i>,
      which is the foundation of the whole.
    </p>
    <p>
      How many men we may find in one man, how many styles in a great writer!
      Rousseau, for instance, has created a number of different <i>genres</i>.
      Imagination transforms him, and he is able to play the most varied parts
      with credit, among them even that of the pure logician. But as the
      imagination is his intellectual axis&mdash;his master faculty&mdash;he is,
      as it were, in all his works only half sincere, only half in earnest. We
      feel that his talent has laid him the wager of Carneades; it will lose no
      cause, however bad, as soon as the point of honor Is engaged. It is indeed
      the temptation of all talent to subordinate things to itself and not
      itself to things; to conquer for the sake of conquest, and to put
      self-love in the place of conscience. Talent is glad enough, no doubt, to
      triumph in a good cause; but it easily becomes a free lance, content,
      whatever the cause, so long as victory follows its banner. I do not know
      even whether success in a weak and bad cause is not the most flattering
      for talent, which then divides the honors of its triumph with nothing and
      no one.
    </p>
    <p>
      Paradox is the delight of clever people and the joy of talent. It is so
      pleasant to pit one&rsquo;s self against the world, and to overbear mere
      commonplace good sense and vulgar platitudes! Talent and love of truth are
      then not identical; their tendencies and their paths are different. In
      order to make talent obey when its instinct is rather to command, a
      vigilant moral sense and great energy of character are needed. The Greeks&mdash;those
      artists of the spoken or written word&mdash;were artificial by the time of
      Ulysses, sophists by the time of Pericles, cunning, rhetorical, and versed
      in all the arts of the courtier down to the end of the lower empire. From
      the talent of the nation sprang its vices.
    </p>
    <p>
      For a man to make his mark, like Rousseau by polemics, is to condemn
      himself to perpetual exaggeration and conflict. Such a man expiates his
      celebrity by a double bitterness; he is never altogether true, and he is
      never able to recover the free disposal of himself. To pick a quarrel with
      the world is attractive, but dangerous.
    </p>
    <p>
      J. J. Rousseau is an ancestor in all things. It was he who founded
      traveling on foot before Töpffer, reverie before &ldquo;René,&rdquo; literary botany
      before George Sand, the worship of nature before Bernardin de S. Pierre,
      the democratic theory before the Revolution of 1789, political discussion
      and theological discussion before Mirabeau and Renan, the science of
      teaching before Pestalozzi, and Alpine description before De Saussure. He
      made music the fashion, and created the taste for confessions to the
      public. He formed a new French style&mdash;the close, chastened,
      passionate, interwoven style we know so well. Nothing indeed of Rousseau
      has been lost, and nobody has had more influence than he upon the French
      Revolution, for he was the demigod of it, and stands between Neckar and
      Napoleon. Nobody, again, has had more than he upon the nineteenth century,
      for Byron, Châteaubriand, Madame de Staël, and George Sand all descend
      from him.
    </p>
    <p>
      And yet, with these extraordinary talents, he was an extremely unhappy man&mdash;why?
      Because he always allowed himself to be mastered by his imagination and
      his sensations; because he had no judgment in deciding, no self-control in
      acting. Regret indeed on this score would be hardly reasonable, for a
      calm, judicious, orderly Rousseau would never have made so great an
      impression. He came into collision with his time: hence his eloquence and
      his misfortunes. His naïve confidence in life and himself ended in jealous
      misanthropy and hypochondria.
    </p>
    <p>
      What a contrast to Goethe or Voltaire, and how differently they understood
      the practical wisdom of life and the management of literary gifts! They
      were the able men&mdash;Rousseau is a visionary. They knew mankind as it
      is&mdash;he always represented it to himself either whiter or blacker than
      it is; and having begun by taking life the wrong way, he ended in madness.
      In the talent of Rousseau there is always something unwholesome,
      uncertain, stormy, and sophistical, which destroys the confidence of the
      reader; and the reason is no doubt that we feel passion to have been the
      governing force in him as a writer: passion stirred his imagination, and
      ruled supreme over his reason.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our
      faults&mdash;a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide from us our
      favorite sin.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      The unfinished is nothing.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Great men are the true men, the men in whom nature has succeeded. They are
      not extraordinary&mdash;they are in the true order. It is the other
      species of men who are not what they ought to be.
    </p>
    <p>
      January 7, 1866.&mdash;Our life is but a soap-bubble hanging from a reed;
      it is formed, expands to its full size, clothes itself with the loveliest
      colors of the prism, and even escapes at moments from the law of
      gravitation; but soon the black speck appears in it, and the globe of
      emerald and gold vanishes into space, leaving behind it nothing but a
      simple drop of turbid water. All the poets have made this comparison, it
      is so striking and so true. To appear, to shine, to disappear; to be born,
      to suffer, and to die; is it not the whole sum of life, for a butterfly,
      for a nation, for a star?
    </p>
    <p>
      Time is but the measure of the difficulty of a conception. Pure thought
      has scarcely any need of time, since it perceives the two ends of an idea
      almost at the same moment. The thought of a planet can only be worked out
      by nature with labor and effort, but supreme intelligence sums up the
      whole in an instant. Time is then the successive dispersion of being, just
      as speech is the successive analysis of an intuition or of an act of will.
      In itself it is relative and negative, and disappears within the absolute
      being. God is outside time because he thinks all thought at once; Nature
      is within time, because she is only speech&mdash;the discursive unfolding
      of each thought contained within the infinite thought. But nature exhausts
      herself in this impossible task, for the analysis of the infinite is a
      contradiction. With limitless duration, boundless space, and number
      without end, Nature does at least what she can to translate into visible
      form the wealth of the creative formula. By the vastness of the abysses
      into which she penetrates, in the effort&mdash;the unsuccessful effort&mdash;to
      house and contain the eternal thought, we may measure the greatness of the
      divine mind. For as soon as this mind goes out of itself and seeks to
      explain itself, the effort at utterance heaps universe upon universe,
      during myriads of centuries, and still it is not expressed, and the great
      harangue must go on for ever and ever.
    </p>
    <p>
      The East prefers immobility as the form of the Infinite: the West,
      movement. It is because the West is infected by the passion for details,
      and sets proud store by individual worth. Like a child upon whom a hundred
      thousand francs have been bestowed, he thinks she is multiplying her
      fortune by counting it out in pieces of twenty sous, or five centimes. Her
      passion for progress is in great part the product of an infatuation, which
      consists in forgetting the goal to be aimed at, and absorbing herself in
      the pride and delight of each tiny step, one after the other. Child that
      she is, she is even capable of confounding change with improvement&mdash;beginning
      over again, with growth in perfectness.
    </p>
    <p>
      At the bottom of the modern man there is always a great thirst for
      self-forgetfulness, self-distraction; he has a secret horror of all which
      makes him feel his own littleness; the eternal, the infinite, perfection,
      therefore scare and terrify him. He wishes to approve himself, to admire
      and congratulate himself; and therefore he turns away from all those
      problems and abysses which might recall to him his own nothingness. This
      is what makes the real pettiness of so many of our great minds, and
      accounts for the lack of personal dignity among us&mdash;civilized parrots
      that we are&mdash;as compared with the Arab of the desert; or explains the
      growing frivolity of our masses, more and more educated, no doubt, but
      also more and more superficial in all their conceptions of happiness.
    </p>
    <p>
      Here, then, is the service which Christianity&mdash;the oriental element
      in our culture&mdash;renders to us Westerns. It checks and counterbalances
      our natural tendency toward the passing, the finite, and the changeable,
      by fixing the mind upon the contemplation of eternal things, and by
      Platonizing our affections, which otherwise would have too little outlook
      upon the ideal world. Christianity leads us back from dispersion to
      concentration, from worldliness to self-recollection. It restores to our
      souls, fevered with a thousand sordid desires, nobleness, gravity, and
      calm. Just as sleep is a bath of refreshing for our actual life, so
      religion is a bath of refreshing for our immortal being. What is sacred
      has a purifying virtue; religious emotion crowns the brow with an aureole,
      and thrills the heart with an ineffable joy.
    </p>
    <p>
      I think that the adversaries of religion as such deceive themselves as to
      the needs of the western man, and that the modern world will lose its
      balance as soon as it has passed over altogether to the crude doctrine of
      progress. We have always need of the infinite, the eternal, the absolute;
      and since science contents itself with what is relative, it necessarily
      leaves a void, which it is good for man to fill with contemplation,
      worship, and adoration. &ldquo;Religion,&rdquo; said Bacon, &ldquo;is the spice which is
      meant to keep life from corruption,&rdquo; and this is especially true to-day of
      religion taken in the Platonist and oriental sense. A capacity for
      self-recollection&mdash;for withdrawal from the outward to the inward&mdash;is
      in fact the condition of all noble and useful activity.
    </p>
    <p>
      This return, indeed, to what is serious, divine, and sacred, is becoming
      more and more difficult, because of the growth of critical anxiety within
      the church itself, the increasing worldliness of religious preaching, and
      the universal agitation and disquiet of society. But such a return is more
      and more necessary. Without it there is no inner life, and the inner life
      is the only means whereby we may oppose a profitable resistance to
      circumstance. If the sailor did not carry with him his own temperature he
      could not go from the pole to the equator, and remain himself in spite of
      all. The man who has no refuge in himself, who lives, so to speak, in his
      front rooms, in the outer whirlwind of things and opinions, is not
      properly a personality at all; he is not distinct, free, original, a cause&mdash;in
      a word, <i>some one</i>. He is one of a crowd, a taxpayer, an elector, an
      anonymity, but not a man. He helps to make up the mass&mdash;to fill up
      the number of human consumers or producers; but he interests nobody but
      the economist and the statistician, who take the heap of sand as a whole
      into consideration, without troubling themselves about the uninteresting
      uniformity of the individual grains. The crowd counts only as a massive
      elementary force&mdash;why? because its constituent parts are individually
      insignificant: they are all like each other, and we add them up like the
      molecules of water in a river, gauging them by the fathom instead of
      appreciating them as individuals. Such men are reckoned and weighed merely
      as so many bodies: they have never been individualized by conscience,
      after the manner of souls.
    </p>
    <p>
      He who floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to
      higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions&mdash;such a man is a
      mere article of the world&rsquo;s furniture&mdash;a thing moved, instead of a
      living and moving being&mdash;an echo, not a voice. The man who has no
      inner life is the slave of his surroundings, as the barometer is the
      obedient servant of the air at rest, and the weathercock the humble
      servant of the air in motion.
    </p>
    <p>
      January 21, 1866.&mdash;This evening after supper I did not know whither
      to betake my solitary self. I was hungry for conversation, society,
      exchange of ideas. It occurred to me to go and see our friends, the&mdash;&mdash;s;
      they were at supper. Afterward we went into the <i>salon</i>: mother and
      daughter sat down to the piano and sang a duet by Boïeldieu. The ivory
      keys of the old grand piano, which the mother had played on before her
      marriage, and which has followed and translated into music the varying
      fortunes of the family, were a little loose and jingling; but the poetry
      of the past sang in this faithful old servant, which had been a friend in
      trouble, a companion in vigils, and the echo of a lifetime of duty,
      affection, piety and virtue. I was more moved than I can say. It was like
      a scene of Dickens, and I felt a rush of sympathy, untouched either by
      egotism or by melancholy.
    </p>
    <p>
      Twenty-five years! It seems to me a dream as far as I am concerned, and I
      can scarcely believe my eyes, or this inanimate witness to so many lustres
      passed away. How strange a thing <i>to have lived</i>, and to feel myself
      so far from a past which yet is so present to me! One does not know
      whether one is sleeping or waking. Time is but the space between our
      memories; as soon as we cease to perceive this space, time has
      disappeared. The whole life of an old man may appear to him no longer than
      an hour, or less still; and as soon as time is but a moment to us, we have
      entered upon eternity. Life is but the dream of a shadow; I felt it anew
      this evening with strange intensity.
    </p>
    <p>
      January 29, 1866. (<i>Nine o&rsquo;clock in the morning</i>).&mdash;The gray
      curtain of mist has spread itself again over the town; everything is dark
      and dull. The bells are ringing in the distance for some festival; with
      this exception everything is calm and silent. Except for the crackling of
      the fire, no noise disturbs my solitude in this modest home, the shelter
      of my thoughts and of my work, where the man of middle age carries on the
      life of his student-youth without the zest of youth, and the sedentary
      professor repeats day by day the habits which he formed as a traveler.
    </p>
    <p>
      What is it which makes the charm of this existence outwardly so barren and
      empty? Liberty! What does the absence of comfort and of all else that is
      wanting to these rooms matter to me? These things are indifferent to me. I
      find under this roof light, quiet, shelter. I am near to a sister and her
      children, whom I love; my material life is assured&mdash;that ought to be
      enough for a bachelor.... Am I not, besides, a creature of habit? more
      attached to the <i>ennuis</i> I know, than in love with pleasures unknown
      to me. I am, then, free and not unhappy. Then I am well off here, and I
      should be ungrateful to complain. Nor do I. It is only the heart which
      sighs and seeks for something more and better. The heart is an insatiable
      glutton, as we all know&mdash;and for the rest, who is without yearnings?
      It is our destiny here below. Only some go through torments and troubles
      in order to satisfy themselves, and all without success; others foresee
      the inevitable result, and by a timely resignation save themselves a
      barren and fruitless effort. Since we cannot be happy, why give ourselves
      so much trouble? It is best to limit one&rsquo;s self to what is strictly
      necessary, to live austerely and by rule, to content one&rsquo;s self with a
      little, and to attach no value to anything but peace of conscience and a
      sense of duty done.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is true that this itself is no small ambition, and that it only lands
      us in another impossibility. No&mdash;the simplest course is to submit
      one&rsquo;s self wholly and altogether to God. Everything else, as saith the
      preacher, is but vanity and vexation of spirit.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is a long while now since this has been plain to me, and since this
      religious renunciation has been sweet and familiar to me. It is the
      outward distractions of life, the examples of the world, and the
      irresistible influence exerted upon us by the current of things which make
      us forget the wisdom we have acquired and the principles we have adopted.
      That is why life is such weariness! This eternal beginning over again is
      tedious, even to repulsion. It would be so good to go to sleep when we
      have gathered the fruit of experience, when we are no longer in opposition
      to the supreme will, when we have broken loose from self, when we are at
      peace with all men. Instead of this, the old round of temptations,
      disputes, <i>ennuis</i>, and forgettings, has to be faced again and again,
      and we fall back into prose, into commonness, into vulgarity. How
      melancholy, how humiliating! The poets are wise in withdrawing their
      heroes more quickly from the strife, and in not dragging them after
      victory along the common rut of barren days. &ldquo;Whom the gods love die
      young,&rdquo; said the proverb of antiquity.
    </p>
    <p>
      Yes, but it is our secret self-love which is set upon this favor from on
      high; such may be our desire, but such is not the will of God. We are to
      be exercised, humbled, tried, and tormented to the end. It is our patience
      which is the touchstone of our virtue. To bear with life even when
      illusion and hope are gone; to accept this position of perpetual war,
      while at the same time loving only peace; to stay patiently in the world,
      even when it repels us as a place of low company, and seems to us a mere
      arena of bad passions; to remain faithful to one&rsquo;s own faith without
      breaking with the followers of the false gods; to make no attempt to
      escape from the human hospital, long-suffering and patient as Job upon his
      dung hill&mdash;this is duty. When life ceases to be a promise it does not
      cease to be a task; its true name even is trial.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 2, 1866. (<i>Mornex</i>).&mdash;The snow is melting and a damp fog
      is spread over everything. The asphalt gallery which runs along the <i>salon</i>
      is a sheet of quivering water starred incessantly by the hurrying drops
      falling from the sky. It seems as if one could touch the horizon with
      one&rsquo;s hand, and the miles of country which were yesterday visible are all
      hidden under a thick gray curtain.
    </p>
    <p>
      This imprisonment transports me to Shetland, to Spitzbergen, to Norway, to
      the Ossianic countries of mist, where man, thrown back upon himself, feels
      his heart beat more quickly and his thought expand more freely&mdash;so
      long, at least, as he is not frozen and congealed by cold. Fog has
      certainly a poetry of its own&mdash;a grace, a dreamy charm. It does for
      the daylight what a lamp does for us at night; it turns the mind toward
      meditation; it throws the soul back on itself. The sun, as it were, sheds
      us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us; mist draws us together and
      concentrates us&mdash;it is cordial, homely, charged with feeling. The
      poetry of the sun has something of the epic in it; that of fog and mist is
      elegaic and religious. Pantheism is the child of light; mist engenders
      faith in near protectors. When the great world is shut off from us, the
      house becomes itself a small universe. Shrouded in perpetual mist, men
      love each other better; for the only reality then is the family, and,
      within the family, the heart; and the greatest thoughts come from the
      heart&mdash;so says the moralist.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 6, 1866.&mdash;The novel by Miss Mulock, &ldquo;John Halifax, Gentleman,&rdquo;
       is a bolder book than it seems, for it attacks in the English way the
      social problem of equality. And the solution reached is that every one may
      become a gentleman, even though he may be born in the gutter. In its way
      the story protests against conventional superiorities, and shows that true
      nobility consists in character, in personal merit, in moral distinction,
      in elevation of feeling and of language, in dignity of life, and in
      self-respect. This is better than Jacobinism, and the opposite of the mere
      brutal passion for equality. Instead of dragging everybody down, the
      author simply proclaims the right of every one to rise. A man may be born
      rich and noble&mdash;he is not born a gentleman. This word is the
      Shibboleth of England; it divides her into two halves, and civilized
      society into two castes. Among gentlemen&mdash;courtesy, equality, and
      politeness; toward those below&mdash;contempt, disdain, coldness and
      indifference. It is the old separation between the <i>ingenui</i> and all
      others; between the [Greek: eleutheroi] and the [Greek: banauphoi], the
      continuation of the feudal division between the gentry and the <i>roturiers</i>.
    </p>
    <p>
      What, then, is a gentleman? Apparently he is the free man, the man who is
      stronger than things, and believes in personality as superior to all the
      accessory attributes of fortune, such as rank and power, and as
      constituting what is essential, real, and intrinsically valuable in the
      individual. Tell me what you are, and I will tell you what you are worth.
      &ldquo;God and my Right;&rdquo; there is the only motto he believes in. Such an ideal
      is happily opposed to that vulgar ideal which is equally English, the
      ideal of wealth, with its formula, &ldquo;<i>How much</i> is he worth?&rdquo; In a
      country where poverty is a crime, it is good to be able to say that a
      nabob need not as such be a gentleman. The mercantile ideal and the
      chivalrous ideal counterbalance each other; and if the one produces the
      ugliness of English society and its brutal side, the other serves as a
      compensation.
    </p>
    <p>
      The gentleman, then, is the man who is master of himself, who respects
      himself, and makes others respect him. The essence of gentlemanliness is
      self-rule, the sovereignty of the soul. It means a character which
      possesses itself, a force which governs itself, a liberty which affirms
      and regulates itself, according to the type of true dignity. Such an ideal
      is closely akin to the Roman type of <i>dignitas cum auctoritate</i>. It
      is more moral than intellectual, and is particularly suited to England,
      which is pre-eminently the country of will. But from self-respect a
      thousand other things are derived&mdash;such as the care of a man&rsquo;s
      person, of his language, of his manners; watchfulness over his body and
      over his soul; dominion over his instincts and his passions; the effort to
      be self-sufficient; the pride which will accept no favor; carefulness not
      to expose himself to any humiliation or mortification, and to maintain
      himself independent of any human caprice; the constant protection of his
      honor and of his self-respect. Such a condition of sovereignty, insomuch
      as it is only easy to the man who is well-born, well-bred, and rich, was
      naturally long identified with birth, rank, and above all with property.
      The idea &ldquo;gentleman&rdquo; is, then, derived from feudality; it is, as it were,
      a milder version of the seigneur.
    </p>
    <p>
      In order to lay himself open to no reproach, a gentleman will keep himself
      irreproachable; in order to be treated with consideration, he will always
      be careful himself to observe distances, to apportion respect, and to
      observe all the gradations of conventional politeness, according to rank,
      age, and situation. Hence it follows that he will be imperturbably
      cautious in the presence of a stranger, whose name and worth are unknown
      to him, and to whom he might perhaps show too much or too little courtesy.
      He ignores and avoids him; if he is approached, he turns away, if he is
      addressed, he answers shortly and with <i>hauteur</i>. His politeness is
      not human and general, but individual and relative to persons. This is why
      every Englishman contains two different men&mdash;one turned toward the
      world, and another. The first, the outer man, is a citadel, a cold and
      angular wall; the other, the inner man, is a sensible, affectionate,
      cordial, and loving creature. Such a type is only formed in a moral
      climate full of icicles, where, in the face of an indifferent world, the
      hearth alone is hospitable.
    </p>
    <p>
      So that an analysis of the national type of gentlemen reveals to us the
      nature and the history of the nation, as the fruit reveals the tree.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 7, 1866.&mdash;If philosophy is the art of understanding, it is
      evident that it must begin by saturating itself with facts and realities,
      and that premature abstraction kills it, just as the abuse of fasting
      destroys the body at the age of growth. Besides, we only understand that
      which is already within us. To understand is to possess the thing
      understood, first by sympathy and then by intelligence. Instead, then, of
      first dismembering and dissecting the object to be conceived, we should
      begin by laying hold of it in its <i>ensemble</i>, then in its formation,
      last of all in its parts. The procedure is the same, whether we study a
      watch or a plant, a work of art or a character. We must study, respect,
      and question what we want to know, instead of massacring it. We must
      assimilate ourselves to things and surrender ourselves to them; we must
      open our minds with docility to their influence, and steep ourselves in
      their spirit and their distinctive form, before we offer violence to them
      by dissecting them.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 14, 1866.&mdash;Panic, confusion, <i>sauve qui peut</i> on the
      Bourse at Paris. In our epoch of individualism, and of &ldquo;each man for
      himself and God for all,&rdquo; the movements of the public funds are all that
      now represent to us the beat of the common heart. The solidarity of
      interests which they imply counterbalances the separateness of modern
      affections, and the obligatory sympathy they impose upon us recalls to one
      a little the patriotism which bore the forced taxes of old days. We feel
      ourselves bound up with and compromised in all the world&rsquo;s affairs, and we
      must interest ourselves whether we will or no in the terrible machine
      whose wheels may crush us at any moment. Credit produces a restless
      society, trembling perpetually for the security of its artificial basis.
      Sometimes society may forget for awhile that it is dancing upon a volcano,
      but the least rumor of war recalls the fact to it inexorably. Card-houses
      are easily ruined.
    </p>
    <p>
      All this anxiety is intolerable to those humble little investors who,
      having no wish to be rich, ask only to be able to go about their work in
      peace. But no; tyrant that it is, the world cries to us, &ldquo;Peace, peace&mdash;there
      is no peace: whether you will or no you shall suffer and tremble with me!&rdquo;
       To accept humanity, as one does nature, and to resign one&rsquo;s self to the
      will of an individual, as one does to destiny, is not easy. We bow to the
      government of God, but we turn against the despot. No man likes to share
      in the shipwreck of a vessel in which he has been embarked by violence,
      and which has been steered contrary to his wish and his opinion. And yet
      such is perpetually the case in life. We all of us pay for the faults of
      the few.
    </p>
    <p>
      Human solidarity is a fact more evident and more certain than personal
      responsibility, and even than individual liberty. Our dependence has it
      over our independence; for we are only independent in will and desire,
      while we are dependent upon our health, upon nature and society; in short,
      upon everything in us and without us. Our liberty is confined to one
      single point. We may protest against all these oppressive and fatal
      powers; we may say, Crush me&mdash;you will never win my consent! We may,
      by an exercise of will, throw ourselves into opposition to necessity, and
      refuse it homage and obedience. In that consists our moral liberty. But
      except for that, we belong, body and goods, to the world. We are its
      playthings, as the dust is the plaything of the wind, or the dead leaf of
      the floods. God at least respects our dignity, but the world rolls us
      contemptuously along in its merciless waves, in order to make it plain
      that we are its thing and its chattel.
    </p>
    <p>
      All theories of the nullity of the individual, all pantheistic and
      materialist conceptions, are now but so much forcing of an open door, so
      much slaying of the slain. As soon as we cease to glorify this
      imperceptible point of conscience, and to uphold the value of it, the
      individual becomes naturally a mere atom in the human mass, which is but
      an atom in the planetary mass, which is a mere nothing in the universe.
      The individual is then but a nothing of the third power, with a capacity
      for measuring its nothingness! Thought leads to resignation. Self-doubt
      leads to passivity, and passivity to servitude. From this a voluntary
      submission is the only escape, that is to say, a state of dependence
      religiously accepted, a vindication of ourselves as free beings, bowed
      before duty only. Duty thus becomes our principle of action, our source of
      energy, the guarantee of our partial independence of the world, the
      condition of our dignity, the sign of our nobility. The world can neither
      make me will nor make me will my duty; here I am my own and only master,
      and treat with it as sovereign with sovereign. It holds my body in its
      clutches; but my soul escapes and braves it. My thought and my love, my
      faith and my hope, are beyond its reach. My true being, the essence of my
      nature, myself, remain inviolate and inaccessible to the world&rsquo;s attacks.
      In this respect we are greater than the universe, which has mass and not
      will; we become once more independent even in relation to the human mass,
      which also can destroy nothing more than our happiness, just as the mass
      of the universe can destroy nothing more than our body. Submission, then,
      is not defeat; on the contrary, it is strength.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 28, 1866.&mdash;I have just read the <i>procès-verbal</i> of the
      Conference of Pastors held on the 15th and 16th of April at Paris. The
      question of the supernatural has split the church of France in two. The
      liberals insist upon individual right; the orthodox upon the notion of a
      church. And it is true indeed that a church is an affirmation, that it
      subsists by the positive element in it, by definite belief; the pure
      critical element dissolves it. Protestantism is a combination of two
      factors&mdash;the authority of the Scriptures and free inquiry; as soon as
      one of these factors is threatened or disappears, Protestantism
      disappears; a new form of Christianity succeeds it, as, for example, the
      church of the Brothers of the Holy Ghost, or that of Christian Theism. As
      far as I am concerned, I see nothing objectionable in such a result, but I
      think the friends of the Protestant church are logical in their refusal to
      abandon the apostle&rsquo;s creed, and the individualists are illogical in
      imagining that they can keep Protestantism and do away with authority.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is a question of method which separates the two camps. I am
      fundamentally separated from both. As I understand it, Christianity is
      above all religions, and religion is not a method, it is a life, a higher
      and supernatural life, mystical in its root and practical in its fruits, a
      communion with God, a calm and deep enthusiasm, a love which radiates, a
      force which acts, a happiness which overflows. Religion, in short, is a
      state of the soul. These quarrels as to method have their value, but it is
      a secondary value; they will never console a heart or edify a conscience.
      This is why I feel so little interest in these ecclesiastical struggles.
      Whether the one party or the other gain the majority and the victory, what
      is essential is in no way profited, for dogma, criticism, the church, are
      not religion; and it is religion, the sense of a divine life, which
      matters. &ldquo;Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all
      these things shall be added unto you.&rdquo; The most holy is the most
      Christian; this will always be the criterion which is least deceptive. &ldquo;By
      this ye shall know my disciples, if they have love one to another.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      As is the worth of the individual, so is the worth of his religion.
      Popular instinct and philosophic reason are at one on this point. Be good
      and pious, patient and heroic, faithful and devoted, humble and
      charitable; the catechism which has taught you these things is beyond the
      reach of blame. By religion we live in God; but all these quarrels lead to
      nothing but life with men or with cassocks. There is therefore no
      equivalence between the two points of view.
    </p>
    <p>
      Perfection as an end&mdash;a noble example for sustenance on the way&mdash;the
      divine proved by its own excellence, is not this the whole of
      Christianity? God manifest in all men, is not this its true goal and
      consummation?
    </p>
    <p>
      September 20, 1866.&mdash;My old friends are, I am afraid, disappointed in
      me; they think that I do nothing, that I have deceived their expectations
      and their hopes. I, too, am disappointed. All that would restore my
      self-respect and give me a right to be proud of myself, seems to me
      unattainable and impossible, and I fall back upon trivialities, gay talk,
      distractions. I am always equally lacking in hope, in faith, in
      resolution. The only difference is that my weakness takes sometimes the
      form of despairing melancholy and sometimes that of a cheerful quietism.
      And yet I read, I talk, I teach, I write, but to no effect; it is as
      though I were walking in my sleep. The Buddhist tendency in me blunts the
      faculty of free self-government and weakens the power of action;
      self-distrust kills all desire, and reduces me again and again to a
      fundamental skepticism. I care for nothing but the serious and the real,
      and I can take neither myself nor my circumstances seriously. I hold my
      own personality, my own aptitudes, my own aspirations, too cheap. I am
      forever making light of myself in the name of all that is beautiful and
      admirable. In a word, I bear within me a perpetual self-detractor, and
      this is what takes all spring out of my life. I have been passing the
      evening with Charles Heim, who, in his sincerity, has never paid me any
      literary compliment. As I love and respect him, he is forgiven. Self-love
      has nothing to do with it&mdash;and yet it would be sweet to be praised by
      so upright a friend! It is depressing to feel one&rsquo;s self silently
      disapproved of; I will try to satisfy him, and to think of a book which
      may please both him and Scherer.
    </p>
    <p>
      October 6, 1866.&mdash;I have just picked up on the stairs a little
      yellowish cat, ugly and pitiable. Now, curled up in a chair at my side, he
      seems perfectly happy, and as if he wanted nothing more. Far from being
      wild, nothing will induce him to leave me, and he has followed me from
      room to room all day. I have nothing at all that is eatable in the house,
      but what I have I give him&mdash;that is to say, a look and a caress&mdash;and
      that seems to be enough for him, at least for the moment. Small animals,
      small children, young lives&mdash;they are all the same as far as the need
      of protection and of gentleness is concerned.... People have sometimes
      said to me that weak and feeble creatures are happy with me. Perhaps such
      a fact has to do with some special gift or beneficent force which flows
      from one when one is in the sympathetic state. I have often a direct
      perception of such a force; but I am no ways proud of it, nor do I look
      upon it as anything belonging to me, but simply as a natural gift. It
      seems to me sometimes as though I could woo the birds to build in my beard
      as they do in the headgear of some cathedral saint! After all, this is the
      natural state and the true relation of man toward all inferior creatures.
      If man was what he ought to be he would be adored by the animals, of whom
      he is too often the capricious and sanguinary tyrant. The legend of Saint
      Francis of Assisi is not so legendary as we think; and it is not so
      certain that it was the wild beasts who attacked man first.... But to
      exaggerate nothing, let us leave on one side the beasts of prey, the
      carnivora, and those that live by rapine and slaughter. How many other
      species are there, by thousands and tens of thousands, who ask peace from
      us and with whom we persist in waging a brutal war? Our race is by far the
      most destructive, the most hurtful, and the most formidable, of all the
      species of the planet. It has even invented for its own use the right of
      the strongest&mdash;a divine right which quiets its conscience in the face
      of the conquered and the oppressed; we have outlawed all that lives except
      ourselves. Revolting and manifest abuse; notorious and contemptible breach
      of the law of justice! The bad faith and hypocrisy of it are renewed on a
      small scale by all successful usurpers. We are always making God our
      accomplice, that so we may legalize our own iniquities. Every successful
      massacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have never been
      wanting in benedictions for any victorious enormity. So that what, in the
      beginning, was the relation of man to the animal becomes that of people to
      people and man to man.
    </p>
    <p>
      If so, we have before us an expiation too seldom noticed but altogether
      just. All crime must be expiated, and slavery is the repetition among men
      of the sufferings brutally imposed by man upon other living beings; it is
      the theory bearing its fruits. The right of man over the animal seems to
      me to cease with the need of defense and of subsistence. So that all
      unnecessary murder and torture are cowardice and even crime. The animal
      renders a service of utility; man in return owes it a need of protection
      and of kindness. In a word, the animal has claims on man, and the man has
      duties to the animal. Buddhism, no doubt, exaggerates this truth, but the
      Westerns leave it out of count altogether. A day will come, however, when
      our standard will be higher, our humanity more exacting, than it is
      to-day. <i>Homo homini lupus</i>, said Hobbes: the time will come when man
      will be humane even for the wolf&mdash;<i>homo lupo homo</i>.
    </p>
    <p>
      December 30, 1866.&mdash;Skepticism pure and simple as the only safeguard
      of intellectual independence&mdash;such is the point of view of almost all
      our young men of talent. Absolute freedom from credulity seems to them the
      glory of man. My impression has always been that this excessive detachment
      of the individual from all received prejudices and opinions in reality
      does the work of tyranny. This evening, in listening to the conversation
      of some of our most cultivated men, I thought of the Renaissance, of the
      Ptolemies, of the reign of Louis XV., of all those times in which the
      exultant anarchy of the intellect has had despotic government for its
      correlative, and, on the other hand, of England, of Holland, of the United
      States, countries in which political liberty is bought at the price of
      necessary prejudices and <i>à priori</i> opinions.
    </p>
    <p>
      That society may hold together at all, we must have a principle of
      cohesion&mdash;that is to say, a common belief, principles recognized and
      undisputed, a series of practical axioms and institutions which are not at
      the mercy of every caprice of public opinion. By treating everything as if
      it were an open question, we endanger everything.
    </p>
    <p>
      Doubt is the accomplice of tyranny. &ldquo;If a people will not believe it must
      obey,&rdquo; said Tocqueville. All liberty implies dependence, and has its
      conditions; this is what negative and quarrelsome minds are apt to forget.
      They think they can do away with religion; they do not know that religion
      is indestructible, and that the question is simply, Which will you have?
      Voltaire plays the game of Loyola, and <i>vice versâ</i>. Between these
      two there is no peace, nor can there be any for the society which has once
      thrown itself into the dilemma. The only solution lies in a free religion,
      a religion of free choice and free adhesion.
    </p>
    <p>
      December 23, 1866.&mdash;It is raining over the whole sky&mdash;as far at
      least as I can see from my high point of observation. All is gray from the
      Salève to the Jura, and from the pavement to the clouds; everything that
      one sees or touches is gray; color, life, and gayety are dead&mdash;each
      living thing seems to lie hidden in its own particular shell. What are the
      birds doing in such weather as this? We who have food and shelter, fire on
      the hearth, books around us, portfolios of engravings close at hand, a
      nestful of dreams in the heart, and a whirlwind of thoughts ready to rise
      from the ink-bottle&mdash;we find nature ugly and <i>triste</i>, and turn
      away our eyes from it; but you, poor sparrows, what can you be doing?
      Bearing and hoping and waiting? After all, is not this the task of each
      one of us?
    </p>
    <p>
      I have just been reading over a volume of this Journal, and feel a little
      ashamed of the languid complaining tone of so much of it. These pages
      reproduce me very imperfectly, and there are many things in me of which I
      find no trace in them. I suppose it is because, in the first place,
      sadness takes up the pen more readily than joy; and in the next, because I
      depend so much upon surrounding circumstances. When there is no call upon
      me, and nothing to put me to the test, I fall back into melancholy; and so
      the practical man, the cheerful man, the literary man, does not appear in
      these pages. The portrait is lacking in proportion and breadth; it is
      one-sided, and wants a center; it has, as it were, been painted from too
      near.
    </p>
    <p>
      The true reason why we know ourselves so little lies in the difficulty we
      find in standing at a proper distance from ourselves, in taking up the
      right point of view, so that the details may help rather than hide the
      general effect. We must learn to look at ourselves socially and
      historically if we wish to have an exact idea of our relative worth, and
      to look at our life as a whole, or at least as one complete period of
      life, if we wish to know what we are and what we are not. The ant which
      crawls to and fro over a face, the fly perched upon the forehead of a
      maiden, touch them indeed, but do not see them, for they never embrace the
      whole at a glance.
    </p>
    <p>
      Is it wonderful that misunderstandings should play so great a part in the
      world, when one sees how difficult it is to produce a faithful portrait of
      a person whom one has been studying for more than twenty years? Still, the
      effort has not been altogether lost; its reward has been the sharpening of
      one&rsquo;s perceptions of the outer world. If I have any special power of
      appreciating different shades of mind, I owe it no doubt to the analysis I
      have so perpetually and unsuccessfully practiced on myself. In fact, I
      have always regarded myself as matter for study, and what has interested
      me most in myself has been the pleasure of having under my hand a man, a
      person, in whom, as an authentic specimen of human nature, I could follow,
      without importunity or indiscretion, all the metamorphoses, the secret
      thoughts, the heart-beats, and the temptations of humanity. My attention
      has been drawn to myself impersonally and philosophically. One uses what
      one has, and one must shape one&rsquo;s arrow out of one&rsquo;s own wood.
    </p>
    <p>
      To arrive at a faithful portrait, succession must be converted into
      simultaneousness, plurality into unity, and all the changing phenomena
      must be traced back to their essence. There are ten men in me, according
      to time, place, surrounding, and occasion; and in their restless diversity
      I am forever escaping myself. Therefore, whatever I may reveal of my past,
      of my Journal, or of myself, is of no use to him who is without the poetic
      intuition, and cannot recompose me as a whole, with or in spite of the
      elements which I confide to him.
    </p>
    <p>
      I feel myself a chameleon, a kaleidoscope, a Proteus; changeable in every
      way, open to every kind of polarization; fluid, virtual, and therefore
      latent&mdash;latent even in manifestation, and absent even in
      presentation. I am a spectator, so to speak, of the molecular whirlwind
      which men call individual life; I am conscious of an incessant
      metamorphosis, an irresistible movement of existence, which is going on
      within me. I am sensible of the flight, the revival, the modification, of
      all the atoms of my being, all the particles of my river, all the
      radiations of my special force.
    </p>
    <p>
      This phenomenology of myself serves both as the magic lantern of my own
      destiny, and as a window opened upon the mystery of the world. I am, or
      rather, my sensible consciousness is concentrated upon this ideal
      standing-point, this invisible threshold, as it were, whence one hears the
      impetuous passage of time, rushing and foaming as it flows out into the
      changeless ocean of eternity. After all the bewildering distractions of
      life, after having drowned myself in a multiplicity of trifles and in the
      caprices of this fugitive existence, yet without ever attaining to
      self-intoxication or self-delusion, I come again upon the fathomless
      abyss, the silent and melancholy cavern where dwell &ldquo;<i>Die Mütter</i>,&rdquo;
       [Footnote: &ldquo;<i>Die Mütter</i>&rdquo;&mdash;an allusion to a strange and
      enigmatical, but very effective conception in &ldquo;Faust&rdquo; (Part II. Act I.
      Scene v.) <i>Die Mütter</i> are the prototypes, the abstract forms, the
      generative ideas, of things. &ldquo;Sie sehn dich nicht, denn Schemen sehn sie
      nur.&rdquo; Goethe borrowed the term from a passage of Plutarch&rsquo;s, but he has
      made the idea half Platonic, half legendary. Amiel, however, seems rather
      to have in his mind Faust&rsquo;s speech in Scene vii. than the speech of
      Mephistopheles in Scene v:
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;In eurem Namen, Mütter, die ihr thront
  Im Gränzenlosen, ewig einsam wohnt,
  Und doch gesellig! Euer haupt umschweben
  Des Lebens Bilder, regsam, ohne Leben.&rdquo;]
</pre>
    <p>
      where sleeps that which neither lives nor dies, that which has neither
      movement, nor change, nor extension, nor form, and which lasts when all
      else passes away.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Dans l&rsquo;éternel azur de l&rsquo;insondable espace
  S&rsquo;enveloppe de paix notre globe agitée:
  Homme, enveloppe ainsi tes jours, rêve qui passe,
  Du calme firmament de ton éternité.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      (H. P. AMIEL, <i>Penseroso</i>.)
    </p>
    <p>
      Geneva, January 11, 1867.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, Labuntar anni....&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      I hear the drops of my life falling distinctly one by one into the
      devouring abyss of eternity. I feel my days flying before the pursuit of
      death. All that remains to me of weeks, or months, or years, in which I
      may drink in the light of the sun, seems to me no more than a single
      night, a summer night, which scarcely counts, because it will so soon be
      at an end.
    </p>
    <p>
      Death! Silence! Eternity! What mysteries, what names of terror to the
      being who longs for happiness, immortality, perfection! Where shall I be
      to-morrow&mdash;in a little while&mdash;when the breath of life has
      forsaken me? Where will those be whom I love? Whither are we all going?
      The eternal problems rise before us in their implacable solemnity. Mystery
      on all sides! And faith the only star in this darkness and uncertainty!
    </p>
    <p>
      No matter!&mdash;so long as the world is the work of eternal goodness, and
      so long as conscience has not deceived us. To give happiness and to do
      good, there is our only law, our anchor of salvation, our beacon light,
      our reason for existing. All religions may crumble away; so long as this
      survives we have still an ideal, and life is worth living.
    </p>
    <p>
      Nothing can lessen the dignity and value of humanity
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  Was einmal war, in allem Glanz und Schein,
  Es regt sich dort; denn es will ewig sein.
  Und ihr vertheilt es, allgewaltige Mächte,
  Zum Zelt des Tages, zum Gewölb&rsquo; der Nächte.
</pre>
    <p>
      so long as the religion of love, of unselfishness and devotion endures;
      and none can destroy the altars of this faith for us so long as we feel
      ourselves still capable of love.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 15,1867&mdash;(<i>Seven</i> A. M.).&mdash;Rain storms in the night&mdash;the
      weather is showing its April caprice. From the window one sees a gray and
      melancholy sky, and roofs glistering with rain. The spring is at its work.
      Yes, and the implacable flight of time is driving us toward the grave.
      Well&mdash;each has his turn!
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Allez, allez, ô jeunes filles,
  Cueillir des bleuets dans les blés!&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      I am overpowered with melancholy, languor, lassitude. A longing for the
      last great sleep has taken possession of me, combated, however, by a
      thirst for sacrifice&mdash;sacrifice heroic and long-sustained. Are not
      both simply ways of escape from one&rsquo;s self? &ldquo;Sleep, or self-surrender,
      that I may die to self!&rdquo;&mdash;such is the cry of the heart. Poor heart!
    </p>
    <p>
      April 17, 1867.&mdash;Awake, thou that sleepest, and rise from the dead.
    </p>
    <p>
      What needs perpetually refreshing and renewing in me is my store of
      courage. By nature I am so easily disgusted with life, I fall a prey so
      readily to despair and pessimism.
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;The happy man, as this century is able to produce him,&rdquo; according to
      Madame &mdash;&mdash;, is a <i>Weltmüde</i>, one who keeps a brave face
      before the world, and distracts himself as best he can from dwelling upon
      the thought which is hidden at his heart&mdash;a thought which has in it
      the sadness of death&mdash;the thought of the irreparable. The outward
      peace of such a man is but despair well masked; his gayety is the
      carelessness of a heart which has lost all its illusions, and has learned
      to acquiesce in an indefinite putting off of happiness. His wisdom is
      really acclimatization to sacrifice, his gentleness should be taken to
      mean privation patiently borne rather than resignation. In a word, he
      submits to an existence in which he feels no joy, and he cannot hide from
      himself that all the alleviations with which it is strewn cannot satisfy
      the soul. The thirst for the infinite is never appeased. God is wanting.
    </p>
    <p>
      To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed, pardoned, and
      sustained by a supreme power, to feel himself in the right road, at the
      point where God would have him be&mdash;in order with God and the
      universe. This faith gives strength and calm. I have not got it. All that
      is, seems to me arbitrary and fortuitous. It may as well not be, as be.
      Nothing in my own circumstances seems to me providential. All appears to
      me left to my own responsibility, and it is this thought which disgusts me
      with the government of my own life. I longed to give myself up wholly to
      some great love, some noble end; I would willingly have lived and died for
      the ideal&mdash;that is to say, for a holy cause. But once the
      impossibility of this made clear to me, I have never since taken a serious
      interest in anything, and have, as it were, but amused myself with a
      destiny of which I was no longer the dupe.
    </p>
    <p>
      Sybarite and dreamer, will you go on like this to the end&mdash;forever
      tossed backward and forward between duty and happiness, incapable of
      choice, of action? Is not life the test of our moral force, and all these
      inward waverings, are they not temptations of the soul?
    </p>
    <p>
      September 6, 1867, <i>Weissenstein</i>. [Footnote: Weissenstein is a high
      point in the Jura, above Soleure.] (<i>Ten o&rsquo;clock in the morning</i>).&mdash;A
      marvelous view of blinding and bewildering beauty. Above a milky sea of
      cloud, flooded with morning light, the rolling waves of which are beating
      up against the base of the wooded steeps of the Weissenstein, the vast
      circle of the Alps soars to a sublime height. The eastern side of the
      horizon is drowned in the splendors of the rising mists; but from the Tödi
      westward, the whole chain floats pure and clear between the milky plain
      and the pale blue sky. The giant assembly is sitting in council above the
      valleys and the lakes still submerged in vapor. The Clariden, the
      Spannörter, the Titlis, then the Bernese <i>colossi</i> from the
      Wetterhorn to the Diablerets, then the peaks of Vaud, Valais, and
      Fribourg, and beyond these high chains the two kings of the Alps, Mont
      Blanc, of a pale pink, and the bluish point of Monte Rosa, peering out
      through a cleft in the Doldenhorn&mdash;such is the composition of the
      great snowy amphitheatre. The outline of the horizon takes all possible
      forms: needles, ridges, battlements, pyramids, obelisks, teeth, fangs,
      pincers, horns, cupolas; the mountain profile sinks, rises again, twists
      and sharpens itself in a thousand ways, but always so as to maintain an
      angular and serrated line. Only the inferior and secondary groups of
      mountains show any large curves or sweeping undulations of form. The Alps
      are more than an upheaval; they are a tearing and gashing of the earth&rsquo;s
      surface. Their granite peaks bite into the sky instead of caressing it.
      The Jura, on the contrary, spreads its broad back complacently under the
      blue dome of air.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Eleven o&rsquo;clock</i>.&mdash;The sea of vapor has risen and attacked the
      mountains, which for a long time overlooked it like so many huge reefs.
      For awhile it surged in vain over the lower slopes of the Alps. Then
      rolling back upon itself, it made a more successful onslaught upon the
      Jura, and now we are enveloped in its moving waves. The milky sea has
      become one vast cloud, which has swallowed up the plain and the mountains,
      observatory and observer. Within this cloud one may hear the sheep-bells
      ringing, and see the sunlight darting hither and thither. Strange and
      fanciful sight!
    </p>
    <p>
      The Hanoverian pianist has gone; the family from Colmar has gone; a young
      girl and her brother have arrived. The girl is very pretty, and
      particularly dainty and elegant in all her ways; she seems to touch things
      only with the tips of her fingers; one compares her to an ermine, a
      gazelle. But at the same time she has no interests, does not know how to
      admire, and thinks of herself more than of anything else. This perhaps is
      a drawback inseparable from a beauty and a figure which attract all eyes.
      She is, besides, a townswoman to the core, and feels herself out of place
      in this great nature, which probably seems to her barbarous and ill-bred.
      At any rate she does not let it interfere with her in any way, and parades
      herself on the mountains with her little bonnet and her scarcely
      perceptible sunshade, as though she were on the boulevard. She belongs to
      that class of tourists so amusingly drawn by Töpffer. Character: <i>naïve</i>
      conceit. Country: France. Standard of life: fashion. Some cleverness but
      no sense of reality, no understanding of nature, no consciousness of the
      manifold diversities of the world and of the right of life to be what it
      is, and to follow its own way and not ours.
    </p>
    <p>
      This ridiculous element in her is connected with the same national
      prejudice which holds France to be the center point of the world, and
      leads Frenchmen to neglect geography and languages. The ordinary French
      townsman is really deliciously stupid in spite of all his natural
      cleverness, for he understands nothing but himself. His pole, his axis,
      his center, his all is Paris&mdash;or even less&mdash;Parisian manners,
      the taste of the day, fashion. Thanks to this organized fetishism, we have
      millions of copies of one single original pattern; a whole people moving
      together like bobbins in the same machine, or the legs of a single <i>corps
      d&rsquo;armée</i>. The result is wonderful but wearisome; wonderful in point of
      material strength, wearisome psychologically. A hundred thousand sheep are
      not more instructive than one sheep, but they furnish a hundred thousand
      times more wool, meat, and manure. This is all, you may say, that the
      shepherd&mdash;that is, the master&mdash;requires. Very well, but one can
      only maintain breeding-farms or monarchies on these principles. For a
      republic you must have men: it cannot get on without individualities.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Noon</i>.&mdash;An exquisite effect. A great herd of cattle are running
      across the meadows under my window, which is just illuminated by a furtive
      ray of sunshine. The picture has a ghostly suddenness and brilliancy; it
      pierces the mists which close upon it, like the slide of a magic lantern.
    </p>
    <p>
      What a pity I must leave this place now that everything is so bright!
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      The calm sea says more to the thoughtful soul than the same sea in storm
      and tumult. But we need the understanding of eternal things and the
      sentiment of the infinite to be able to feel this. The divine state <i>par
      excellence</i> is that of silence and repose, because all speech and all
      action are in themselves limited and fugitive. Napoleon with his arms
      crossed over his breast is more expressive than the furious Hercules
      beating the air with his athlete&rsquo;s fists. People of passionate temperament
      never understand this. They are only sensitive to the energy of
      succession; they know nothing of the energy of condensation. They can only
      be impressed by acts and effects, by noise and effort. They have no
      instinct of contemplation, no sense of the pure cause, the fixed source of
      all movement, the principle of all effects, the center of all light, which
      does not need to spend itself in order to be sure of its own wealth, nor
      to throw itself into violent motion to be certain of its own power. The
      art of passion is sure to please, but it is not the highest art; it is
      true, indeed, that under the rule of democracy, the serener and calmer
      forms of art become more and more difficult; the turbulent herd no longer
      knows the gods.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Minds accustomed to analysis never allow objections more than a
      half-value, because they appreciate the variable and relative elements
      which enter in.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      A well-governed mind learns in time to find pleasure in nothing but the
      true and the just.
    </p>
    <p>
      January 10, 1868. (<i>Eleven</i> P. M.).&mdash;We have had a philosophical
      meeting at the house of Edouard Claparède. [Footnote: Edouard Claparède, a
      Genevese naturalist, born 1832, died 1871.] The question on the order of
      the day was the nature of sensation. Claparède pronounced for the absolute
      subjectivity of all experience&mdash;in other words, for pure idealism&mdash;which
      is amusing, from a naturalist. According to him the <i>ego</i> alone
      exists, and the universe is but a projection of the <i>ego</i>, a
      phantasmagoria which we ourselves create without suspecting it, believing
      all the time that we are lookers-on. It is our noümenon which objectifies
      itself as phenomenon. The <i>ego</i>, according to him, is a radiating
      force which, modified without knowing what it is that modifies it,
      imagines it, by virtue of the principle of causality&mdash;that is to say,
      produces the great illusion of the objective world in order so to explain
      itself. Our waking life, therefore, is but a more connected dream. The
      self is an unknown which gives birth to an infinite number of unknowns, by
      a fatality of its nature. Science is summed up in the consciousness that
      nothing exists but consciousness. In other words, the intelligent issues
      from the unintelligible in order to return to it, or rather the ego
      explains itself by the hypothesis of the <i>non-ego</i>, while in reality
      it is but a dream, dreaming itself. We might say with Scarron:
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Et je vis l&rsquo;ombre d&rsquo;un esprit
  Qui traçait l&rsquo;ombre d&rsquo;um système
  Avec l&rsquo;ombre de l&rsquo;ombre même.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      This abolition of nature by natural science is logical, and it was, in
      fact, Schelling&rsquo;s starting-point. From the standpoint of physiology,
      nature is but a necessary illusion, a constitutional hallucination. We
      only escape from this bewitchment by the moral activity of the <i>ego</i>,
      which feels itself a cause and a free cause, and which by its
      responsibility breaks the spell and issues from the enchanted circle of
      Maïa.
    </p>
    <p>
      Maïa! Is she indeed the true goddess? Hindoo wisdom long ago regarded the
      world as the dream of Brahma. Must we hold with Fichte that it is the
      individual dream of each individual <i>ego</i>? Every fool would then be a
      cosmogonic poet producing the firework of the universe under the dome of
      the infinite. But why then give ourselves such gratuitous trouble to
      learn? In our dreams, at least, nightmare excepted, we endow ourselves
      with complete ubiquity, liberty and omniscience. Are we then less
      ingenious and inventive awake than asleep?
    </p>
    <p>
      January 25, 1868.&mdash;It is when the outer man begins to decay that it
      becomes vitally important to us to believe in immortality, and to feel
      with the apostle that the inner man is renewed from day to day. But for
      those who doubt it and have no hope of it? For them the remainder of life
      can only be the compulsory dismemberment of their small empire, the
      gradual dismantling of their being by inexorable destiny. How hard it is
      to bear&mdash;this long-drawn death, of which the stages are melancholy
      and the end inevitable! It is easy to see why it was that stoicism
      maintained the right of suicide. What is my real faith? Has the universal,
      or at any rate the very general and common doubt of science, invaded me in
      my turn? I have defended the cause of the immortality of the soul against
      those who questioned it, and yet when I have reduced them to silence, I
      have scarcely known whether at bottom I was not after all on their side. I
      try to do without hope; but it is possible that I have no longer the
      strength for it, and that, like other men, I must be sustained and
      consoled by a belief, by the belief in pardon and immortality&mdash;that
      is to say, by religious belief of the Christian type. Reason and thought
      grow tired, like muscles and nerves. They must have their sleep, and this
      sleep is the relapse into the tradition of childhood, into the common
      hope. It takes so much effort to maintain one&rsquo;s self in an exceptional
      point of view, that one falls back into prejudice by pure exhaustion, just
      as the man who stands indefinitely always ends by sinking to the ground
      and reassuming the horizontal position.
    </p>
    <p>
      What is to become of us when everything leaves us&mdash;health, joy,
      affections, the freshness of sensation, memory, capacity for work&mdash;when
      the sun seems to us to have lost its warmth, and life is stripped of all
      its charm? What is to become of us without hope? Must we either harden or
      forget? There is but one answer&mdash;keep close to duty. Never mind the
      future, if only you have peace of conscience, if you feel yourself
      reconciled, and in harmony with the order of things. Be what you ought to
      be; the rest is God&rsquo;s affair. It is for him to know what is best, to take
      care of his own glory, to ensure the happiness of what depends on him,
      whether by another life or by annihilation. And supposing that there were
      no good and holy God, nothing but universal being, the law of the all, an
      ideal without hypostasis or reality, duty would still be the key of the
      enigma, the pole-star of a wandering humanity.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      January 26, 1868.&mdash;Blessed be childhood, which brings down something
      of heaven into the midst of our rough earthliness. These eighty thousand
      daily births, of which statistics tell us, represent as it were an
      effusion of innocence and freshness, struggling not only against the death
      of the race, but against human corruption, and the universal gangrene of
      sin. All the good and wholesome feeling which is intertwined with
      childhood and the cradle is one of the secrets of the providential
      government of the world. Suppress this life-giving dew, and human society
      would be scorched and devastated by selfish passion. Supposing that
      humanity had been composed of a thousand millions of immortal beings,
      whose number could neither increase nor diminish, where should we be, and
      what should we be! A thousand times more learned, no doubt, but a thousand
      times more evil. There would have been a vast accumulation of science, but
      all the virtues engendered by suffering and devotion&mdash;that is to say,
      by the family and society&mdash;would have no existence. And for this
      there would be no compensation.
    </p>
    <p>
      Blessed be childhood for the good that it does, and for the good which it
      brings about carelessly and unconsciously by simply making us love it and
      letting itself be loved. What little of paradise we see still on earth is
      due to its presence among us. Without fatherhood, without motherhood, I
      think that love itself would not be enough to prevent men from devouring
      each other&mdash;men, that is to say, such as human passions have made
      them. The angels have no need of birth and death as foundations for their
      life, because their life is heavenly.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 16, 1868.&mdash;I have been finishing About&rsquo;s &ldquo;Mainfroy (Les
      Mariages de Province).&rdquo; What subtlety, what cleverness, what <i>verve</i>,
      what <i>aplomb</i>! About is a master of epithet, of quick, light-winged
      satire. For all his cavalier freedom of manner, his work is conceived at
      bottom in a spirit of the subtlest irony, and his detachment of mind is so
      great that he is able to make sport of everything, to mock at others and
      himself, while all the time amusing himself extremely with his own ideas
      and inventions. This is indeed the characteristic mark, the common
      signature, so to speak, of <i>esprit</i> like his.
    </p>
    <p>
      Irrepressible mischief, indefatigable elasticity, a power of luminous
      mockery, delight in the perpetual discharge of innumerable arrows from an
      inexhaustible quiver, the unquenchable laughter of some little earth-born
      demon, perpetual gayety, and a radiant force of epigram&mdash;there are
      all these in the true humorist. <i>Stulti sunt innumerabiles</i>, said
      Erasmus, the patron of all these dainty mockers. Folly, conceit, foppery,
      silliness, affectation, hypocrisy, attitudinizing and pedantry of all
      shades, and in all forms, everything that poses, prances, bridles, struts,
      bedizens, and plumes itself, everything that takes itself seriously and
      tries to impose itself on mankind&mdash;all this is the natural prey of
      the satirist, so many targets ready for his arrows, so many victims
      offered to his attack. And we all know how rich the world is in prey of
      this kind! An alderman&rsquo;s feast of folly is served up to him in perpetuity;
      the spectacle of society offers him an endless <i>noce de Gamache</i>.
      [Footnote: <i>Noce de Gamache</i>&mdash;&ldquo;repas très somptueux.&rdquo;&mdash;Littré.
      The allusion, of course, is to Don Quixote, Part II. chap. xx.&mdash;&ldquo;Donde
      se cuentan las bodas de Bamacho el rico, con el suceso de Basilio el
      pobre.&rdquo;] With what glee he raids through his domains, and what signs of
      destruction and massacre mark the path of the sportsman! His hand is
      infallible like his glance. The spirit of sarcasm lives and thrives in the
      midst of universal wreck; its balls are enchanted and itself invulnerable,
      and it braves retaliations and reprisals because itself is a mere flash, a
      bodiless and magical nothing.
    </p>
    <p>
      Clever men will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness; every
      authority rouses their ridicule, every superstition amuses them, every
      convention moves them to contradiction. Only force finds favor in their
      eyes, and they have no toleration for anything that is not purely natural
      and spontaneous. And yet ten clever men are not worth one man of talent,
      nor ten men of talent worth one man of genius. And in the individual,
      feeling is more than cleverness, reason is worth as much as feeling, and
      conscience has it over reason. If, then, the clever man is not <i>mockable</i>,
      he may at least be neither loved, nor considered, nor esteemed. He may
      make himself feared, it is true, and force others to respect his
      independence; but this negative advantage, which is the result of a
      negative superiority, brings no happiness with it. Cleverness is
      serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing.
    </p>
    <p>
      March 8, 1868.&mdash;Madame&mdash;&mdash;kept me to have tea with three
      young friends of hers&mdash;three sisters, I think. The two youngest are
      extremely pretty, the dark one as pretty as the blonde. Their fresh faces,
      radiant with the bloom of youth, were a perpetual delight to the eye. This
      electric force of beauty has a beneficent effect upon the man of letters;
      it acts as a real restorative. Sensitive, impressionable, absorbent as I
      am, the neighborhood of health, of beauty, of intelligence and of
      goodness, exercises a powerful influence upon my whole being; and in the
      same way I am troubled and affected just as easily by the presence near me
      of troubled lives or diseased souls. Madame &mdash;&mdash; said of me that
      I must be &ldquo;superlatively feminine&rdquo; in all my perceptions. This ready
      sympathy and sensitiveness is the reason of it. If I had but desired it
      ever so little, I should have had the magical clairvoyance of the
      somnambulist, and could have reproduced in myself a number of strange
      phenomena. I know it, but I have always been on my guard against it,
      whether from indifference or from prudence. When I think of the intuitions
      of every kind which have come to me since my youth, it seems to me that I
      have lived a multitude of lives. Every characteristic individuality shapes
      itself ideally in me, or rather molds me for the moment into its own
      image; and I have only to turn my attention upon myself at such a time to
      be able to understand a new mode of being, a new phase of human nature. In
      this way I have been, turn by turn, mathematician, musician, <i>savant</i>,
      monk, child, or mother. In these states of universal sympathy I have even
      seemed to myself sometimes to enter into the condition of the animal or
      the plant, and even of an individual animal, of a given plant. This
      faculty of ascending and descending metamorphosis, this power of
      simplifying or of adding to one&rsquo;s individuality, has sometimes astounded
      my friends, even the most subtle of them. It has to do no doubt with the
      extreme facility which I have for impersonal and objective thought, and
      this again accounts for the difficulty which I feel in realizing my own
      individuality, in being simply one man having his proper number and
      ticket. To withdraw within my own individual limits has always seemed to
      me a strange, arbitrary, and conventional process. I seem to myself to be
      a mere conjuror&rsquo;s apparatus, an instrument of vision and perception, a
      person without personality, a subject without any determined individuality&mdash;an
      instance, to speak technically, of pure &ldquo;determinability&rdquo; and
      &ldquo;formability,&rdquo; and therefore I can only resign myself with difficulty to
      play the purely arbitrary part of a private citizen, inscribed upon the
      roll of a particular town or a particular country. In action I feel myself
      out of place; my true <i>milieu</i> is contemplation. Pure virtuality and
      perfect equilibrium&mdash;in these I am most at home. There I feel myself
      free, disinterested, and sovereign. Is it a call or a temptation?
    </p>
    <p>
      It represents perhaps the oscillation between the two geniuses, the Greek
      and the Roman, the eastern and the western, the ancient and the Christian,
      or the struggle between the two ideals, that of liberty and that of
      holiness. Liberty raises us to the gods; holiness prostrates us on the
      ground. Action limits us; whereas in the state of contemplation we are
      endlessly expansive. Will localizes us; thought universalizes us. My soul
      wavers between half a dozen antagonistic general conceptions, because it
      is responsive to all the great instincts of human nature, and its
      aspiration is to the absolute, which is only to be reached through a
      succession of contraries. It has taken me a great deal of time to
      understand myself, and I frequently find myself beginning over again the
      study of the oft-solved problem, so difficult is it for us to maintain any
      fixed point within us. I love everything, and detest one thing only&mdash;the
      hopeless imprisonment of my being within a single arbitrary form, even
      were it chosen by myself. Liberty for the inner man is then the strongest
      of my passions&mdash;perhaps my only passion. Is such a passion lawful? It
      has been my habit to think so, but intermittently, by fits and starts. I
      am not perfectly sure of it.
    </p>
    <p>
      March 17, 1868.&mdash;Women wish to be loved without a why or a wherefore;
      not because they are pretty, or good, or well bred, or graceful, or
      intelligent, but because they are themselves. All analysis seems to them
      to imply a loss of consideration, a subordination of their personality to
      something which dominates and measures it. They will have none of it; and
      their instinct is just. As soon as we can give a reason for a feeling we
      are no longer under the spell of it; we appreciate, we weigh, we are free,
      at least in principle. Love must always remain a fascination, a witchery,
      if the empire of woman is to endure. Once the mystery gone, the power goes
      with it. Love must always seem to us indivisible, insoluble, superior to
      all analysis, if it is to preserve that appearance of infinity, of
      something supernatural and miraculous, which makes its chief beauty. The
      majority of beings despise what they understand, and bow only before the
      inexplicable. The feminine triumph <i>par excellence</i> is to convict of
      obscurity that virile intelligence which makes so much pretense to
      enlightenment. And when a woman inspires love, it is then especially that
      she enjoys this proud triumph. I admit that her exultation has its
      grounds. Still, it seems to me that love&mdash;true and profound love&mdash;should
      be a source of light and calm, a religion and a revelation, in which there
      is no place left for the lower victories of vanity. Great souls care only
      for what is great, and to the spirit which hovers in the sight of the
      Infinite, any sort of artifice seems a disgraceful puerility.
    </p>
    <p>
      March 19, 1868.&mdash;What we call little things are merely the causes of
      great things; they are the beginning, the embryo, and it is the point of
      departure which, generally speaking, decides the whole future of an
      existence. One single black speck may be the beginning of a gangrene, of a
      storm, of a revolution. From one insignificant misunderstanding hatred and
      separation may finally issue. An enormous avalanche begins by the
      displacement of one atom, and the conflagration of a town by the fall of a
      match. Almost everything comes from almost nothing, one might think. It is
      only the first crystallization which is the affair of mind; the ultimate
      aggregation is the affair of mass, of attraction, of acquired momentum, of
      mechanical acceleration. History, like nature, illustrates for us the
      application of the law of inertia and agglomeration which is put lightly
      in the proverb, &ldquo;Nothing succeeds like success.&rdquo; Find the right point at
      starting; strike straight, begin well; everything depends on it. Or more
      simply still, provide yourself with good luck&mdash;for accident plays a
      vast part in human affairs. Those who have succeeded most in this world
      (Napoleon or Bismarck) confess it; calculation is not without its uses,
      but chance makes mock of calculation, and the result of a planned
      combination is in no wise proportional to its merit. From the supernatural
      point of view people say: &ldquo;This chance, as you call it, is, in reality,
      the action of providence. Man may give himself what trouble he will&mdash;God
      leads him all the same.&rdquo; Only, unfortunately, this supposed intervention
      as often as not ends in the defeat of zeal, virtue, and devotion, and the
      success of crime, stupidity, and selfishness. Poor, sorely-tried Faith!
      She has but one way out of the difficulty&mdash;the word Mystery! It is in
      the origins of things that the great secret of destiny lies hidden,
      although the breathless sequence of after events has often many surprises
      for us too. So that at first sight history seems to us accident and
      confusion; looked at for the second time, it seems to us logical and
      necessary; looked at for the third time, it appears to us a mixture of
      necessity and liberty; on the fourth examination we scarcely know what to
      think of it, for if force is the source of right, and chance the origin of
      force, we come back to our first explanation, only with a heavier heart
      than when we began.
    </p>
    <p>
      Is Democritus right after all? Is chance the foundation of everything, all
      laws being but the imaginations of our reason, which, itself born of
      accident, has a certain power of self-deception and of inventing laws
      which it believes to be real and objective, just as a man who dreams of a
      meal thinks that he is eating, while in reality there is neither table,
      nor food, nor guest nor nourishment? Everything goes on as if there were
      order and reason and logic in the world, while in reality everything is
      fortuitous, accidental, and apparent. The universe is but the kaleidoscope
      which turns within the mind of the so-called thinking being, who is
      himself a curiosity without a cause, an accident conscious of the great
      accident around him, and who amuses himself with it so long as the
      phenomenon of his vision lasts. Science is a lucid madness occupied in
      tabulating its own necessary hallucinations. The philosopher laughs, for
      he alone escapes being duped, while he sees other men the victims of
      persistent illusion. He is like some mischievous spectator of a ball who
      has cleverly taken all the strings from the violins, and yet sees
      musicians and dancers moving and pirouetting before him as though the
      music were still going on. Such an experience would delight him as proving
      that the universal St. Vitus&rsquo; dance is also nothing but an aberration of
      the inner consciousness, and that the philosopher is in the right of it as
      against the general credulity. Is it not even enough simply to shut one&rsquo;s
      ears in a ballroom, to believe one&rsquo;s self in a madhouse?
    </p>
    <p>
      The multitude of religions on the earth must have very much the same
      effect upon the man who has killed the religious idea in himself. But it
      is a dangerous attempt, this repudiation of the common law of the race&mdash;this
      claim to be in the right, as against all the world.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is not often that the philosophic scoffers forget themselves for
      others. Why should they? Self-devotion is a serious thing, and seriousness
      would be inconsistent with their rôle of mockery. To be unselfish we must
      love; to love we must believe in the reality of what we love; we must know
      how to suffer, how to forget ourselves, how to yield ourselves up&mdash;in
      a word, how to be serious. A spirit of incessant mockery means absolute
      isolation; it is the sign of a thoroughgoing egotism. If we wish to do
      good to men we must pity and not despise them. We must learn to say of
      them, not &ldquo;What fools!&rdquo; but &ldquo;What unfortunates!&rdquo; The pessimist or the
      nihilist seems to me less cold and icy than the mocking atheist. He
      reminds me of the somber words of &ldquo;Ahasvérus:&rdquo;
     </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Vous qui manquez de charité,
  Tremblez à mon supplice étrange:
  Ce n&rsquo;est point sa divinité,
  C&rsquo;est l&rsquo;humanité que Dieu venge!&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      [Footnote: The quotation is from Quinet&rsquo;s &ldquo;Ahasvérus&rdquo; (first published
      1833), that strange <i>Welt-gedicht</i>, which the author himself
      described as &ldquo;l&rsquo;histoire du monde, de Dieu dans le monde, et enfin du
      doute dans le monde,&rdquo; and which, with Faust, probably suggested the
      unfinished but in many ways brilliant performance of the young Spaniard,
      Espronceda&mdash;<i>El Diablo Mundo</i>.]
    </p>
    <p>
      It is better to be lost than to be saved all alone; and it is a wrong to
      one&rsquo;s kind to wish to be wise without making others share our wisdom. It
      is, besides, an illusion to suppose that such a privilege is possible,
      when everything proves the solidarity of individuals, and when no one can
      think at all except by means of the general store of thought, accumulated
      and refined by centuries of cultivation and experience. Absolute
      individualism is an absurdity. A man may be isolated in his own particular
      and temporary <i>milieu</i>, but every one of our thoughts or feelings
      finds, has found, and will find, its echo in humanity. Such an echo is
      immense and far-resounding in the case of those representative men who
      have been adopted by great fractions of humanity as guides, revealers, and
      reformers; but it exists for everybody. Every sincere utterance of the
      soul, every testimony faithfully borne to a personal conviction, is of use
      to some one and some thing, even when you know it not, and when your mouth
      is stopped by violence, or the noose tightens round your neck. A word
      spoken to some one preserves an indestructible influence, just as any
      movement whatever may be metamorphosed, but not undone. Here, then, is a
      reason for not mocking, for not being silent, for affirming, for acting.
      We must have faith in truth; we must seek the true and spread it abroad;
      we must love men and serve them.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 9, 1868.&mdash;I have been spending three hours over Lotze&rsquo;s big
      volume (&ldquo;Geschichte der Aesthetikin Deutschland&rdquo;). It begins attractively,
      but the attraction wanes, and by the end I was very tired of it. Why?
      Because the noise of a mill-wheel sends one to sleep, and these pages
      without paragraphs, these interminable chapters, and this incessant,
      dialectical clatter, affect me as though I were listening to a word-mill.
      I end by yawning like any simple non-philosophical mortal in the face of
      all this heaviness and pedantry. Erudition, and even thought, are not
      everything. An occasional touch of esprit, a little sharpness of phrase, a
      little vivacity, imagination, and grace, would spoil neither. Do these
      pedantic books leave a single image or formula, a single new or striking
      fact behind them in the memory, when one puts them down? No; nothing but
      confusion and fatigue. Oh for clearness, terseness, brevity! Diderot,
      Voltaire, and even Galiani!
    </p>
    <p>
      A short article by Sainte-Beuve, Scherer, Renan, Victor Cherbuliez, gives
      one more pleasure, and makes one think and reflect more, than a thousand
      of these heavy German pages, stuffed to the brim, and showing rather the
      work itself than its results. The Germans gather fuel for the pile: it is
      the French who kindle it. For heaven&rsquo;s sake, spare me your lucubrations;
      give me facts or ideas. Keep your vats, your must, your dregs, in the
      background. What I ask is wine&mdash;wine which will sparkle in the glass,
      and stimulate intelligence instead of weighing it down.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 11, 1868. (<i>Mornex sur Salève</i>).&mdash;I left town in a great
      storm of wind, which was raising clouds of dust along the suburban roads,
      and two hours later I found myself safely installed among the mountains,
      just like last year. I think of staying a week here.... The sounds of the
      village are wafted to my open window, barkings of distant dogs, voices of
      women at the fountain, the songs of birds in the lower orchards. The green
      carpet of the plain is dappled by passing shadows thrown upon it by the
      clouds; the landscape has the charm of delicate tint and a sort of languid
      grace. Already I am full of a sense of well-being, I am tasting the joys
      of that contemplative state in which the soul, issuing from itself,
      becomes as it were the soul of a country or a landscape, and feels living
      within it a multitude of lives. Here is no more resistance, negation,
      blame; everything is affirmative; I feel myself in harmony with nature and
      with surroundings, of which I seem to myself the expression. The heart
      opens to the immensity of things. This is what I love! <i>Nam mihires, non
      me rebus submittere conor</i>. April 12, 1868. (<i>Easter Day</i>), <i>Mornex
      Eight</i> A. M.&mdash;The day has opened solemnly and religiously. There
      is a tinkling of bells from the valley: even the fields seem to be
      breathing forth a canticle of praise. Humanity must have a worship, and,
      all things considered, is not the Christian worship the best among those
      which have existed on a large scale? The religion of sin, of repentance,
      and reconciliation&mdash;the religion of the new birth and of eternal life&mdash;is
      not a religion to be ashamed of. In spite of all the aberrations of
      fanaticism, all the superstitions of formalism, all the ugly
      superstructures of hypocrisy, all the fantastic puerilities of theology,
      the gospel has modified the world and consoled mankind. Christian humanity
      is not much better than pagan humanity, but it would be much worse without
      a religion, and without this religion. Every religion proposes an ideal
      and a model; the Christian ideal is sublime, and its model of a divine
      beauty. We may hold aloof from the churches, and yet bow ourselves before
      Jesus. We may be suspicious of the clergy, and refuse to have anything to
      do with catechisms, and yet love the Holy and the Just, who came to save
      and not to curse. Jesus will always supply us with the best criticism of
      Christianity, and when Christianity has passed away the religion of Jesus
      will in all probability survive. After Jesus as God we shall come back to
      faith in the God of Jesus.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Five o&rsquo;clock</i> P. M.&mdash;I have been for a long walk through
      Cézargues, Eseri, and the Yves woods, returning by the Pont du Loup. The
      weather was cold and gray. A great popular merrymaking of some sort, with
      its multitude of blouses, and its drums and fifes, has been going on
      riotously for an hour under my window. The crowd has sung a number of
      songs, drinking songs, ballads, romances, but all more or less heavy and
      ugly. The muse has never touched our country people, and the Swiss race is
      not graceful even in its gayety. A bear in high spirits&mdash;this is what
      one thinks of. The poetry it produces, too, is desperately vulgar and
      commonplace. Why? In the first place, because, in spite of the pretenses
      of our democratic philosophies, the classes whose backs are bent with
      manual labor are aesthetically inferior to the others. In the next place,
      because our old rustic peasant poetry is dead, and the peasant, when he
      tries to share the music or the poetry of the cultivated classes, only
      succeeds in caricaturing it, and not in copying it. Democracy, by laying
      it down that there is but one class for all men, has in fact done a wrong
      to everything that is not first-rate. As we can no longer without offense
      judge men according to a certain recognized order, we can only compare
      them to the best that exists, and then they naturally seem to us more
      mediocre, more ugly, more deformed than before. If the passion for
      equality potentially raises the average, it <i>really</i> degrades
      nineteen-twentieths of individuals below their former place. There is a
      progress in the domain of law and a falling back in the domain of art. And
      meanwhile the artists see multiplying before them their <i>bête-noire</i>,
      the <i>bourgeois</i>, the Philistine, the presumptuous ignoramus, the
      quack who plays at science, and the feather-brain who thinks himself the
      equal of the intelligent.
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;Commonness will prevail,&rdquo; as De Candolle said in speaking of the
      graminaceous plants. The era of equality means the triumph of mediocrity.
      It is disappointing, but inevitable; for it is one of time&rsquo;s revenges.
      Humanity, after having organized itself on the basis of the dissimilarity
      of individuals, is now organizing itself on the basis of their similarity,
      and the one exclusive principle is about as true as the other. Art no
      doubt will lose, but justice will gain. Is not universal leveling-down the
      law of nature, and when all has been leveled will not all have been
      destroyed? So that the world is striving with all its force for the
      destruction of what it has itself brought forth. Life is the blind pursuit
      of its own negation; as has been said of the wicked, nature also works for
      her own disappointment, she labors at what she hates, she weaves her own
      shroud, and piles up the stones of her own tomb. God may well forgive us,
      for &ldquo;we know not what to do.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Just as the sum of force is always identical in the material universe, and
      presents a spectacle not of diminution nor of augmentation but simply of
      constant metamorphosis, so it is not impossible that the sum of good is in
      reality always the same, and that therefore all progress on one side is
      compensated inversely on another side. If this were so we ought never to
      say that period or a people is absolutely and as a whole superior to
      another time or another people, but only that there is superiority in
      certain points. The great difference between man and man would, on these
      principles, consist in the art of transforming vitality into spirituality,
      and latent power into useful energy. The same difference would hold good
      between nation and nation, so that the object of the simultaneous or
      successive competition of mankind in history would be the extraction of
      the maximum of humanity from a given amount of animality. Education,
      morals, and politics would be only variations of the same art, the art of
      living&mdash;that is to say, of disengaging the pure form and subtlest
      essence of our individual being.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 26, 1868. (<i>Sunday, Mid-day</i>).&mdash;A gloomy morning. On all
      sides a depressing outlook, and within, disgust with self.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Ten</i> P.M.&mdash;Visits and a walk. I have spent the evening alone.
      Many things to-day have taught me lessons of wisdom. I have seen the
      hawthorns covering themselves with blossom, and the whole valley springing
      up afresh under the breath of the spring. I have been the spectator of
      faults of conduct on the part of old men who will not grow old, and whose
      heart is in rebellion against the natural law. I have watched the working
      of marriage in its frivolous and commonplace forms, and listened to
      trivial preaching. I have been a witness of griefs without hope, of
      loneliness that claimed one&rsquo;s pity. I have listened to pleasantries on the
      subject of madness, and to the merry songs of the birds. And everything
      has had the same message for me: &ldquo;Place yourself once more in harmony with
      the universal law; accept the will of God; make a religious use of life;
      work while it is yet day; be at once serious and cheerful; know how to
      repeat with the apostle, &lsquo;I have learned in whatsoever state I am
      therewith to be content.&rsquo;&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      August 26, 1868.&mdash;After all the storms of feeling within and the
      organic disturbances without, which during these latter months have pinned
      me so closely to my own individual existence, shall I ever be able to
      reascend into the region of pure intelligence, to enter again upon the
      disinterested and impersonal life, to recover my old indifference toward
      subjective miseries, and regain a purely scientific and contemplative
      state of mind? Shall I ever succeed in forgetting all the needs which bind
      me to earth and to humanity? Shall I ever become pure spirit? Alas! I
      cannot persuade myself to believe it possible for an instant. I see
      infirmity and weakness close upon me, I feel I cannot do without
      affection, and I know that I have no ambition, and that my faculties are
      declining. I remember that I am forty-seven years old, and that all my
      brood of youthful hopes has flown away. So that there is no deceiving
      myself as to the fate which awaits me: increasing loneliness,
      mortification of spirit, long-continued regret, melancholy neither to be
      consoled nor confessed, a mournful old age, a slow decay, a death in the
      desert!
    </p>
    <p>
      Terrible dilemma! Whatever is still possible to me has lost its savor,
      while all that I could still desire escapes me, and will always escape me.
      Every impulse ends in weariness and disappointment. Discouragement,
      depression, weakness, apathy; there is the dismal series which must be
      forever begun and re-begun, while we are still rolling up the Sisyphean
      rock of life. Is it not simpler and shorter to plunge head-foremost into
      the gulf?
    </p>
    <p>
      No, rebel as we may, there is but one solution&mdash;to submit to the
      general order, to accept, to resign ourselves, and to do still what we
      can. It is our self-will, our aspirations, our dreams, that must be
      sacrificed. We must give up the hope of happiness once for all! Immolation
      of the self&mdash;death to self&mdash;this is the only suicide which is
      either useful or permitted. In my present mood of indifference and
      disinterestedness, there is some secret ill-humor, some wounded pride, a
      little rancor; there is selfishness in short, since a premature claim for
      rest is implied in it. Absolute disinterestedness is only reached in that
      perfect humility which tramples the self under foot for the glory of God.
    </p>
    <p>
      I have no more strength left, I wish for nothing; but that is not what is
      wanted. I must wish what God wishes; I must pass from indifference to
      sacrifice, and from sacrifice to self-devotion. The cup which I would fain
      put away from me is the misery of living, the shame of existing and
      suffering as a common creature who has missed his vocation; it is the
      bitter and increasing humiliation of declining power, of growing old under
      the weight of one&rsquo;s own disapproval, and the disappointment of one&rsquo;s
      friends! &ldquo;Wilt thou be healed?&rdquo; was the text of last Sunday&rsquo;s sermon.
      &ldquo;Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you
      rest.&rdquo; &ldquo;And if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      August 27, 1868.&mdash;To-day I took up the &ldquo;Penseroso&rdquo; [Footnote: &ldquo;II
      Penseroso,&rdquo; poésies-maximes par H. F. Amiel: Genève, 1858. This little
      book, which contains one hundred and thirty-three maxims, several of which
      are quoted in the <i>Journal Intime</i>, is prefaced by a motto translated
      from Shelley&mdash;&ldquo;Ce n&rsquo;est pas la science qui nous manque, à nous
      modernes; nous l&rsquo;avons surabondamment.... Mais ce que nous avons absorbé
      nous absorbe.... Ce qui nous manque c&rsquo;est la poésie de la vie.&rdquo;] again. I
      have often violated its maxims and forgotten its lessons. Still, this
      volume is a true son of my soul, and breathes the true spirit of the inner
      life. Whenever I wish to revive my consciousness of my own tradition, it
      is pleasant to me to read over this little gnomic collection which has had
      such scant justice done to it, and which, were it another&rsquo;s, I should
      often quote. I like to feel that in it I have attained to that relative
      truth which may be defined as consistency with self, the harmony of
      appearance with reality, of thought with expression&mdash;in other words,
      sincerity, ingenuousness, inwardness. It is personal experience in the
      strictest sense of the word.
    </p>
    <p>
      September 21, 1868. (<i>Villars</i>).&mdash;A lovely autumn effect.
      Everything was veiled in gloom this morning, and a gray mist of rain
      floated between us and the whole circle of mountains. Now the strip of
      blue sky which made its appearance at first behind the distant peaks has
      grown larger, has mounted to the zenith, and the dome of heaven, swept
      almost clear of cloud, sends streaming down upon us the pale rays of a
      convalescent sun. The day now promises kindly, and all is well that ends
      well.
    </p>
    <p>
      Thus after a season of tears a sober and softened joy may return to us.
      Say to yourself that you are entering upon the autumn of your life; that
      the graces of spring and the splendors of summer are irrevocably gone, but
      that autumn too has its beauties. The autumn weather is often darkened by
      rain, cloud, and mist, but the air is still soft, and the sun still
      delights the eyes, and touches the yellowing leaves caressingly; it is the
      time for fruit, for harvest, for the vintage, the moment for making
      provision for the winter. Here the herds of milch-cows have already come
      down to the level of the <i>châlet</i>, and next week they will be lower
      than we are. This living barometer is a warning to us that the time has
      come to say farewell to the mountains. There is nothing to gain, and
      everything to lose, by despising the example of nature, and making
      arbitrary rules of life for one&rsquo;s self. Our liberty, wisely understood, is
      but a voluntary obedience to the universal laws of life. My life has
      reached its month of September. May I recognize it in time, and suit
      thought and action to the fact!
    </p>
    <p>
      November 13, 1868.&mdash;I am reading part of two books by Charles
      Secrétan [Footnote: Charles Secrétan, a Lausanne professor, the friend of
      Vinet, born 1819. He published &ldquo;Leçons sur la Philosophie de Leibnitz,&rdquo;
       &ldquo;Philosophie de la Liberté,&rdquo; &ldquo;La Raison et le Christianisme,&rdquo; etc.]
      &ldquo;Recherches sur la Méthode,&rdquo; 1857; &ldquo;Précis élémentaire de Philosophie,&rdquo;
       1868. The philosophy of Secrétan is the philosophy of Christianity,
      considered as the one true religion. Subordination of nature to
      intelligence, of intelligence to will, and of will to dogmatic faith&mdash;such
      is its general framework. Unfortunately there are no signs of critical, or
      comparative, or historical study in it, and as an apologetic&mdash;in
      which satire is curiously mingled with glorification of the religion of
      love&mdash;it leaves upon one an impression of <i>parti pris</i>. A
      philosophy of religion, apart from the comparative science of religions,
      and apart also from a disinterested and general philosophy of history,
      must always be more or less arbitrary and factitious. It is only
      pseudo-scientific, this reduction of human life to three spheres&mdash;industry,
      law, and religion. The author seems to me to possess a vigorous and
      profound mind, rather than a free mind. Not only is he dogmatic, but he
      dogmatizes in favor of a given religion, to which his whole allegiance is
      pledged. Besides, Christianity being an X which each church defines in its
      own way, the author takes the same liberty, and defines the X in his way;
      so that he is at once too free and not free enough; too free in respect to
      historical Christianity, not free enough in respect to Christianity as a
      particular church. He does not satisfy the believing Anglican, Lutheran,
      Reformed Churchman, or Catholic; and he does not satisfy the freethinker.
      This Schellingian type of speculation, which consists in logically
      deducing a particular religion&mdash;that is to say, in making philosophy
      the servant of Christian theology&mdash;is a legacy from the Middle Ages.
    </p>
    <p>
      After belief comes judgment; but a believer is not a judge. A fish lives
      in the ocean, but it cannot see all around it; it cannot take a view of
      the whole; therefore it cannot judge what the ocean is. In order to
      understand Christianity we must put it in its historical place, in its
      proper framework; we must regard it as a part of the religious development
      of humanity, and so judge it, not from a Christian point of view, but from
      a human point of view, <i>sine ira nec studio</i>.
    </p>
    <p>
      December 16, 1868.&mdash;I am in the most painful state of anxiety as to
      my poor kind friend, Charles Heim.... Since the 30th of November I have
      had no letter from the dear invalid, who then said his last farewell to
      me. How long these two weeks have seemed to me&mdash;and how keenly I have
      realized that strong craving which many feel for the last words, the last
      looks, of those they love! Such words and looks are a kind of testament.
      They have a solemn and sacred character which is not merely an effect of
      our imagination. For that which is on the brink of death already
      participates to some extent in eternity. A dying man seems to speak to us
      from beyond the tomb; what he says has the effect upon us of a sentence,
      an oracle, an injunction; we look upon him as one endowed with second
      sight. Serious and solemn words come naturally to the man who feels life
      escaping him, and the grave opening before him. The depths of his nature
      are then revealed; the divine within him need no longer hide itself. Oh,
      do not let us wait to be just or pitiful or demonstrative toward those we
      love until they or we are struck down by illness or threatened with death!
      Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of
      those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh, be swift to love,
      make haste to be kind!
    </p>
    <p>
      December 26, 1868.&mdash;My dear friend died this morning at Hyères. A
      beautiful soul has returned to heaven. So he has ceased to suffer! Is he
      happy now?
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      If men are always more or less deceived on the subject of women, it is
      because they forget that they and women do not speak altogether the same
      language, and that words have not the same weight or the same meaning for
      them, especially in questions of feeling. Whether from shyness or
      precaution or artifice, a woman never speaks out her whole thought, and
      moreover what she herself knows of it is but a part of what it really is.
      Complete frankness seems to be impossible to her, and complete
      self-knowledge seems to be forbidden her. If she is a sphinx to us, it is
      because she is a riddle of doubtful meaning even to herself. She has no
      need of perfidy, for she is mystery itself. A woman is something fugitive,
      irrational, indeterminable, illogical, and contradictory. A great deal of
      forbearance ought to be shown her, and a good deal of prudence exercised
      with regard to her, for she may bring about innumerable evils without
      knowing It. Capable of all kinds of devotion, and of all kinds of treason,
      &ldquo;<i>monstre incompréhensible</i>,&rdquo; raised to the second power, she is at
      once the delight and the terror of man.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      The more a man loves, the more he suffers. The sum of possible grief for
      each soul is in proportion to its degree of perfection.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      He who is too much afraid of being duped has lost the power of being
      magnanimous.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Doubt of the reality of love ends by making us doubt everything. The final
      result of all deceptions and disappointments is atheism, which may not
      always yield up its name and secret, but which lurks, a masked specter,
      within the depths of thought, as the last supreme explainer. &ldquo;Man is what
      his love is,&rdquo; and follows the fortunes of his love.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      The beautiful souls of the world have an art of saintly alchemy, by which
      bitterness is converted into kindness, the gall of human experience into
      gentleness, ingratitude into benefits, insults into pardon. And the
      transformation ought to become so easy and habitual that the lookers-on
      may think it spontaneous, and nobody give us credit for it.
    </p>
    <p>
      January 27, 1869.&mdash;What, then, is the service rendered to the world
      by Christianity? The proclamation of &ldquo;good news.&rdquo; And what is this &ldquo;good
      news?&rdquo; The pardon of sin. The God of holiness loving the world and
      reconciling it to himself by Jesus, in order to establish the kingdom of
      God, the city of souls, the life of heaven upon earth&mdash;here you have
      the whole of it; but in this is a revolution. &ldquo;Love ye one another, as I
      have loved you;&rdquo; &ldquo;Be ye one with me, as I am one with the Father:&rdquo; for
      this is life eternal, here is perfection, salvation, joy. Faith in the
      fatherly love of God, who punishes and pardons for our good, and who
      desires not the death of the sinner, but his conversion and his life&mdash;here
      is the motive power of the redeemed.
    </p>
    <p>
      What we call Christianity is a vast ocean, into which flow a number of
      spiritual currents of distant and various origin; certain religions, that
      is to say, of Asia and of Europe, the great ideas of Greek wisdom, and
      especially those of Platonism. Neither its doctrine nor its morality, as
      they have been historically developed, are new or spontaneous. What is
      essential and original in it is the practical demonstration that the human
      and the divine nature may co-exist, may become fused into one sublime
      flame; that holiness and pity, justice and mercy, may meet together and
      become one, in man and in God. What is specific in Christianity is Jesus&mdash;the
      religious consciousness of Jesus. The sacred sense of his absolute union
      with God through perfect love and self-surrender, this profound,
      invincible, and tranquil faith of his, has become a religion; the faith of
      Jesus has become the faith of millions and millions of men. From this
      torch has sprung a vast conflagration. And such has been the brilliancy
      and the radiance both of revealer and revelation, that the astonished
      world has forgotten its justice in its admiration, and has referred to one
      single benefactor the whole of those benefits which are its heritage from
      the past.
    </p>
    <p>
      The conversion of ecclesiastical and confessional Christianity into
      historical Christianity is the work of biblical science. The conversion of
      historical Christianity into philosophical Christianity is an attempt
      which is to some extent an illusion, since faith cannot be entirely
      resolved into science. The transference, however, of Christianity from the
      region of history to the region of psychology is the great craving of our
      time. What we are trying to arrive at is the <i>eternal</i> gospel. But
      before we can reach it, the comparative history and philosophy of
      religions must assign to Christianity its true place, and must judge it.
      The religion, too, which Jesus professed must be disentangled from the
      religion which has taken Jesus for its object. And when at last we are
      able to point out the state of consciousness which is the primitive cell,
      the principle of the eternal gospel, we shall have reached our goal, for
      in it is the <i>punctum saliens</i> of pure religion.
    </p>
    <p>
      Perhaps the extraordinary will take the place of the supernatural, and the
      great geniuses of the world will come to be regarded as the messengers of
      God in history, as the providential revealers through whom the spirit of
      God works upon the human mass. What is perishing is not the admirable and
      the adorable; it is simply the arbitrary, the accidental, the miraculous.
      Just as the poor illuminations of a village <i>fête</i>, or the tapers of
      a procession, are put out by the great marvel of the sun, so the small
      local miracles, with their meanness and doubtfulness, will sink into
      insignificance beside the law of the world of spirits, the incomparable
      spectacle of human history, led by that all-powerful Dramaturgus whom we
      call God. <i>Utinam!</i>
    </p>
    <p>
      March 1, 1869.&mdash;Impartiality and objectivity are as rare as justice,
      of which they are but two special forms. Self-interest is an inexhaustible
      source of convenient illusions. The number of beings who wish to see truly
      is extraordinarily small. What governs men is the fear of truth, unless
      truth is useful to them, which is as much as to say that self-interest is
      the principle of the common philosophy or that truth is made for us but
      not we for truth. As this fact is humiliating, the majority of people will
      neither recognize nor admit it. And thus a prejudice of self-love protects
      all the prejudices of the understanding, which are themselves the result
      of a stratagem of the <i>ego</i>. Humanity has always slain or persecuted
      those who have disturbed this selfish repose of hers. She only improves in
      spite of herself. The only progress which she desires is an increase of
      enjoyments. All advances in justice, in morality, in holiness, have been
      imposed upon or forced from her by some noble violence. Sacrifice, which
      is the passion of great souls, has never been the law of societies. It is
      too often by employing one vice against another&mdash;for example, vanity
      against cupidity, greed against idleness&mdash;that the great agitators
      have broken through routine. In a word, the human world is almost entirely
      directed by the law of nature, and the law of the spirit, which is the
      leaven of its coarse paste, has but rarely succeeded in raising it into
      generous expansion.
    </p>
    <p>
      From the point of view of the ideal, humanity is <i>triste</i> and ugly.
      But if we compare it with its probable origins, we see that the human race
      has not altogether wasted its time. Hence there are three possible views
      of history: the view of the pessimist, who starts from the ideal; the view
      of the optimist, who compares the past with the present; and the view of
      the hero-worshiper, who sees that all progress whatever has cost oceans of
      blood and tears.
    </p>
    <p>
      European hypocrisy veils its face before the voluntary suicide of those
      Indian fanatics who throw themselves under the wheels of their goddess&rsquo; 
      triumphal car. And yet these sacrifices are but the symbol of what goes on
      in Europe as elsewhere, of that offering of their life which is made by
      the martyrs of all great causes. We may even say that the fierce and
      sanguinary goddess is humanity itself, which is only spurred to progress
      by remorse, and repents only when the measure of its crimes runs over. The
      fanatics who sacrifice themselves are an eternal protest against the
      universal selfishness. We have only overthrown those idols which are
      tangible and visible, but perpetual sacrifice still exists everywhere, and
      everywhere the <i>élite</i> of each generation suffers for the salvation
      of the multitude. It is the austere, bitter, and mysterious law of
      solidarity. Perdition and redemption in and through each other is the
      destiny of men.
    </p>
    <p>
      March 18, 1869 (<i>Thursday</i>).&mdash;Whenever I come back from a walk
      outside the town I am disgusted and repelled by this cell of mine. Out of
      doors, sunshine, birds, spring, beauty, and life; in here, ugliness, piles
      of paper, melancholy, and death. And yet my walk was one of the saddest
      possible. I wandered along the Rhone and the Arve, and all the memories of
      the past, all the disappointments of the present and all the anxieties of
      the future laid siege to my heart like a whirlwind of phantoms. I took
      account of my faults, and they ranged themselves in battle against me. The
      vulture of regret gnawed at my heart, and the sense of the irreparable
      choked me like the iron collar of the pillory. It seemed to me that I had
      failed in the task of life, and that now life was failing me. Ah! how
      terrible spring is to the lonely! All the needs which had been lulled to
      sleep start into life again, all the sorrows which had disappeared are
      reborn, and the old man which had been gagged and conquered rises once
      more and makes his groans heard. It is as though all the old wounds opened
      and bewailed themselves afresh. Just when one had ceased to think, when
      one had succeeded in deadening feeling by work or by amusement, all of a
      sudden the heart, solitary captive that it is, sends a cry from its prison
      depths, a cry which shakes to its foundations the whole surrounding
      edifice.
    </p>
    <p>
      Even supposing that one had freed one&rsquo;s self from all other fatalities,
      there is still one yoke left from which it is impossible to escape&mdash;that
      of Time. I have succeeded in avoiding all other servitudes, but I had
      reckoned without the last&mdash;the servitude of age. Age comes, and its
      weight is equal to that of all other oppressions taken together. Man,
      under his mortal aspect, is but a species of ephemera.
    </p>
    <p>
      As I looked at the banks of the Rhone, which have seen the river flowing
      past them some ten or twenty thousand years, or at the trees forming the
      avenue of the cemetery, which, for two centuries, have been the witnesses
      of so many funeral processions; as I recognized the walls, the dykes, the
      paths, which saw me playing as a child, and watched other children running
      over that grassy plain of Plain Palais which bore my own childish steps&mdash;I
      had the sharpest sense of the emptiness of life and the flight of things.
      I felt the shadow of the upas tree darkening over me. I gazed into the
      great implacable abyss in which are swallowed up all those phantoms which
      call themselves living beings. I saw that the living are but apparitions
      hovering for a moment over the earth, made out of the ashes of the dead,
      and swiftly re-absorbed by eternal night, as the will-o&rsquo;-the-wisp sinks
      into the marsh. The nothingness of our joys, the emptiness of our
      existence, and the futility of our ambitions, filled me with a quiet
      disgust. From regret to disenchantment I floated on to Buddhism, to
      universal weariness. Ah, the hope of a blessed immortality would be better
      worth having!
    </p>
    <p>
      With what different eyes one looks at life at ten, at twenty, at thirty,
      at sixty! Those who live alone are specially conscious of this
      psychological metamorphosis. Another thing, too, astonishes them; it is
      the universal conspiracy which exists for hiding the sadness of the world,
      for making men forget suffering, sickness, and death, for smothering the
      wails and sobs which issue from every house, for painting and beautifying
      the hideous face of reality. Is it out of tenderness for childhood and
      youth, or is it simply from fear, that we are thus careful to veil the
      sinister truth? Or is it from a sense of equity? and does life contain as
      much good as evil&mdash;perhaps more? However it may be, men feed
      themselves rather upon illusion than upon truth. Each one unwinds his own
      special reel of hope, and as soon as he has come to the end of it he sits
      him down to die, and lets his sons and his grandsons begin the same
      experience over again. We all pursue happiness, and happiness escapes the
      pursuit of all.
    </p>
    <p>
      The only <i>viaticum</i> which can help us in the journey of life is that
      furnished by a great duty and some serious affections. And even affections
      die, or at least their objects are mortal; a friend, a wife, a child, a
      country, a church, may precede us in the tomb; duty alone lasts as long as
      we.
    </p>
    <p>
      This maxim exorcises the spirits of revolt, of anger, discouragement,
      vengeance, indignation, and ambition, which rise one after another to
      tempt and trouble the heart, swelling with the sap of the spring. O all ye
      saints of the East, of antiquity, of Christianity, phalanx of heroes! Ye
      too drank deep of weariness and agony of soul, but ye triumphed over both.
      Ye who have come forth victors from the strife, shelter us under your
      palms, fortify us by your example!
    </p>
    <p>
      April 6, 1869.&mdash;Magnificent weather. The Alps are dazzling under
      their silver haze. Sensations of all kinds have been crowding upon me; the
      delights of a walk under the rising sun, the charms of a wonderful view,
      longing for travel, and thirst for joy, hunger for work, for emotion, for
      life, dreams of happiness and of love. A passionate wish to live, to feel,
      to express, stirred the depths of my heart. It was a sudden re-awakening
      of youth, a flash of poetry, a renewing of the soul, a fresh growth of the
      wings of desire&mdash;I was overpowered by a host of conquering, vagabond,
      adventurous aspirations. I forgot my age, my obligations, my duties, my
      vexations, and youth leaped within me as though life were beginning again.
      It was as though something explosive had caught fire, and one&rsquo;s soul were
      scattered to the four winds; in such a mood one would fain devour the
      whole world, experience everything, see everything. Faust&rsquo;s ambition
      enters into one, universal desire&mdash;a horror of one&rsquo;s own prison cell.
      One throws off one&rsquo;s hair shirt, and one would fain gather the whole of
      nature into one&rsquo;s arms and heart. O ye passions, a ray of sunshine is
      enough to rekindle you all! The cold black mountain is a volcano once
      more, and melts its snowy crown with one single gust of flaming breath. It
      is the spring which brings about these sudden and improbable
      resurrections, the spring which, sending a thrill and tumult of life
      through all that lives, is the parent of impetuous desires, of
      overpowering inclinations, of unforeseen and inextinguishable outbursts of
      passion. It breaks through the rigid bark of the trees, and rends the mask
      on the face of asceticism; it makes the monk tremble in the shadow of his
      convent, the maiden behind the curtains of her room, the child sitting on
      his school bench, the old man bowed under his rheumatism.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;O Hymen, Hymenae!&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      April 24, 1869.&mdash;Is Nemesis indeed more real than Providence, the
      jealous God more true than the good God? grief more certain than joy?
      darkness more secure of victory than light? Is it pessimism or optimism
      which is nearest the truth, and which&mdash;Leibnitz or Schopenhauer&mdash;has
      best understood the universe? Is it the healthy man or the sick man who
      sees best to the bottom of things? which is in the right?
    </p>
    <p>
      Ah! the problem of grief and evil is and will be always the greatest
      enigma of being, only second to the existence of being itself. The common
      faith of humanity has assumed the victory of good over evil. But if good
      consists not in the result of victory, but in victory itself, then good
      implies an incessant and infinite contest, interminable struggle, and a
      success forever threatened. And if this is life, is not Buddha right in
      regarding life as synonymous with evil since it means perpetual
      restlessness and endless war? Repose according to the Buddhist is only to
      be found in annihilation. The art of self-annihilation, of escaping the
      world&rsquo;s vast machinery of suffering, and the misery of renewed existence&mdash;the
      art of reaching Nirvâna, is to him the supreme art, the only means of
      deliverance. The Christian says to God: Deliver us from evil. The Buddhist
      adds: And to that end deliver us from finite existence, give us back to
      nothingness! The first believes that when he is enfranchised from the body
      he will enter upon eternal happiness; the second believes that
      individuality is the obstacle to all repose, and he longs for the
      dissolution of the soul itself. The dread of the first is the paradise of
      the second.
    </p>
    <p>
      One thing only is necessary&mdash;the committal of the soul to God. Look
      that thou thyself art in order, and leave to God the task of unraveling
      the skein of the world and of destiny. What do annihilation or immortality
      matter? What is to be, will be. And what will be, will be for the best.
      Faith in good&mdash;perhaps the individual wants nothing more for his
      passage through life. Only he must have taken sides with Socrates, Plato,
      Aristotle, and Zeno, against materialism, against the religion of accident
      and pessimism. Perhaps also he must make up his mind against the Buddhist
      nihilism, because a man&rsquo;s system of conduct is diametrically opposite
      according as he labors to increase his life or to lessen it, according as
      he aims at cultivating his faculties or at systematically deadening them.
    </p>
    <p>
      To employ one&rsquo;s individual efforts for the increase of good in the world&mdash;this
      modest ideal is enough for us. To help forward the victory of good has
      been the common aim of saints and sages. <i>Socii Dei sumus</i> was the
      word of Seneca, who had it from Cleanthus.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 30, 1869.&mdash;I have just finished Vacherot&rsquo;s [Footnote: Etienne
      Vacherot, a French philosophical writer, who owed his first successes in
      life to the friendship of Cousin, and was later brought very much into
      notice by his controversy with the Abbé Gratry, by the prosecution brought
      against him in consequence of his book, &ldquo;La Démocratie&rdquo; (1859), and by his
      rejection at the hands of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in
      1865, for the same kind of reasons which had brought about the exclusion
      of Littré in the preceding year. In 1868, however, he became a member of
      the Institute in succession to Cousin. A Liberal of the old school, he has
      separated himself from the republicans since the war, and has made himself
      felt as a severe critic of republican blunders in the <i>Revue des deux
      Mondes</i>. <i>La Religion</i>, which discusses the psychological origins
      of the religious sense, was published in 1868.] book &ldquo;La Religion,&rdquo; 1869,
      and it has set me thinking. I have a feeling that his notion of religion
      is not rigorous and exact, and that therefore his logic is subject to
      correction. If religion is a psychological stage, anterior to that of
      reason, it is clear that it will disappear in man, but if, on the
      contrary, it is a mode of the inner life, it may and must last, as long as
      the need of feeling, and alongside the need of thinking. The question is
      between theism and non-theism. If God is only the category of the ideal,
      religion will vanish, of course, like the illusions of youth. But if
      Universal Being can be felt and loved at the same time as conceived, the
      philosopher may be a religious man just as he may be an artist, an orator,
      or a citizen. He may attach himself to a worship or ritual without
      derogation. I myself incline to this solution. To me religion is life
      before God and in God.
    </p>
    <p>
      And even if God were defined as the universal life, so long as this life
      is positive and not negative, the soul penetrated with the sense of the
      infinite is in the religious state. Religion differs from philosophy as
      the simple and spontaneous self differs from the reflecting self, as
      synthetic intuition differs from intellectual analysis. We are initiated
      into the religious state by a sense of voluntary dependence on, and joyful
      submission to the principle of order and of goodness. Religious emotion
      makes man conscious of himself; he finds his own place within the infinite
      unity, and it is this perception which is sacred.
    </p>
    <p>
      But in spite of these reservations I am much impressed by the book, which
      is a fine piece of work, ripe and serious in all respects.
    </p>
    <p>
      May 13, 1869.&mdash;A break in the clouds, and through the blue
      interstices a bright sun throws flickering and uncertain rays. Storms,
      smiles, whims, anger, tears&mdash;it is May, and nature is in its feminine
      phase! She pleases our fancy, stirs our heart, and wears out our reason by
      the endless succession of her caprices and the unexpected violence of her
      whims.
    </p>
    <p>
      This recalls to me the 213th verse of the second book of the Laws of
      Manou. &ldquo;It is in the nature of the feminine sex to seek here below to
      corrupt men, and therefore wise men never abandon themselves to the
      seductions of women.&rdquo; The same code, however, says: &ldquo;Wherever women are
      honored the gods are satisfied.&rdquo; And again: &ldquo;In every family where the
      husband takes pleasure in his wife, and the wife in her husband, happiness
      is ensured.&rdquo; And again: &ldquo;One mother is more venerable than a thousand
      fathers.&rdquo; But knowing what stormy and irrational elements there are in
      this fragile and delightful creature, Manou concludes: &ldquo;At no age ought a
      woman to be allowed to govern herself as she pleases.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Up to the present day, in several contemporary and neighboring codes, a
      woman is a minor all her life. Why? Because of her dependence upon nature,
      and of her subjection to passions which are the diminutives of madness; in
      other words, because the soul of a woman has something obscure and
      mysterious in it, which lends itself to all superstitions and weakens the
      energies of man. To man belong law, justice, science, and philosophy, all
      that is disinterested, universal, and rational. Women, on the contrary,
      introduce into everything favor, exception, and personal prejudice. As
      soon as a man, a people, a literature, an epoch, become feminine in type,
      they sink in the scale of things. As soon as a woman quits the state of
      subordination in which her merits have free play, we see a rapid increase
      in her natural defects. Complete equality with man makes her quarrelsome;
      a position of supremacy makes her tyrannical. To honor her and to govern
      her will be for a long time yet the best solution. When education has
      formed strong, noble, and serious women in whom conscience and reason hold
      sway over the effervescence of fancy and sentimentality, then we shall be
      able not only to honor woman, but to make a serious end of gaining her
      consent and adhesion. Then she will be truly an equal, a work-fellow, a
      companion. At present she is so only in theory. The moderns are at work
      upon the problem, and have not solved it yet.
    </p>
    <p>
      June 15, 1869.&mdash;The great defect of liberal Christianity [Footnote:
      At this period the controversy between the orthodox party and &ldquo;Liberal
      Christianity&rdquo; was at its height, both in Geneva and throughout
      Switzerland.] is that its conception of holiness is a frivolous one, or,
      what comes to the same thing, its conception of sin is a superficial one.
      The defects of the baser sort of political liberalism recur in liberal
      Christianity; it is only half serious, and its theology is too much mixed
      with worldliness. The sincerely pious folk look upon the liberals as
      persons whose talk is rather profane, and who offend religious feelings by
      making sacred subjects a theme for rhetorical display. They shock the <i>convenances</i>
      of sentiment, and affront the delicacy of conscience by the indiscreet
      familiarities they take with the great mysteries of the inner life. They
      seem to be mere clever special pleaders, religious rhetoricians like the
      Greek sophists, rather than guides in the narrow road which leads to
      salvation.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is not to the clever folk, nor even to the scientific folk, that the
      empire over souls belongs, but to those who impress us as having conquered
      nature by grace, passed through the burning bush, and as speaking, not the
      language of human wisdom, but that of the divine will. In religious
      matters it is holiness which gives authority; it is love, or the power of
      devotion and sacrifice, which goes to the heart, which moves and
      persuades.
    </p>
    <p>
      What all religious, poetical, pure, and tender souls are least able to
      pardon is the diminution or degradation of their ideal. We must never
      rouse an ideal against us; our business is to point men to another ideal,
      purer, higher, more spiritual than the old, and so to raise behind a lofty
      summit one more lofty still. In this way no one is despoiled; we gain
      men&rsquo;s confidence, while at the same time forcing them to think, and
      enabling those minds which are already tending toward change to perceive
      new objects and goals for thought. Only that which is replaced is
      destroyed, and an ideal is only replaced by satisfying the conditions of
      the old with some advantages over.
    </p>
    <p>
      Let the liberal Protestants offer us a spectacle of Christian virtue of a
      holier, intenser, and more intimate kind than before; let us see it active
      in their persons and in their influence, and they will have furnished the
      proof demanded by the Master; the tree will be judged by its fruits.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      June 22, 1869 (<i>Nine</i> A. M).&mdash;Gray and lowering weather. A fly
      lies dead of cold on the page of my book, in full summer! What is life? I
      said to myself, as I looked at the tiny dead creature. It is a loan, as
      movement is. The universal life is a sum total, of which the units are
      visible here, there, and everywhere, just as an electric wheel throws off
      sparks along its whole surface. Life passes through us; we do not possess
      it. Hirn admits three ultimate principles: [Footnote: Gustave-Adolphe
      Hirn, a French physicist, born near Colmar, 1815, became a corresponding
      member of the Academy of Sciences in 1867. The book of his to which Amiel
      refers is no doubt <i>Conséquences philosophiques at métaphysiques de la
      thermodynamique, Analyse élémentaire de l&rsquo;univers</i> (1869).] the atom,
      the force, the soul; the force which acts upon atoms, the soul which acts
      upon force. Probably he distinguishes between anonymous souls and personal
      souls. Then my fly would be an anonymous soul.
    </p>
    <p>
      (<i>Same day</i>).&mdash;The national churches are all up in arms against
      so-called Liberal Christianity; Basle and Zurich began the fight, and now
      Geneva has entered the lists too. Gradually it is becoming plain that
      historical Protestantism has no longer a <i>raison d&rsquo;être</i> between pure
      liberty and pure authority. It is, in fact, a provisional stage, founded
      on the worship of the Bible&mdash;that is to say, on the idea of a written
      revelation, and of a book divinely inspired, and therefore authoritative.
      When once this thesis has been relegated to the rank of a fiction
      Protestantism crumbles away. There is nothing for it but to retire up on
      natural religion, or the religion of the moral consciousness. M.M.
      Réville, Conquerel, Fontanes, Buisson, [Footnote: The name of M. Albert
      Réville, the French Protestant theologian, is more or less familiar in
      England, especially since his delivery of the Hibbert lectures in 1884.
      Athanase Coquerel, born 1820, died 1876, the well-known champion of
      liberal ideas in the French Protestant Church, was suspended from his
      pastoral functions by the Consistory of Paris, on account of his review of
      M. Renan&rsquo;s &ldquo;Vie de Jésus&rdquo; in 1864. Ferdinand-Edouard Buisson, a liberal
      Protestant, originally a professor at Lausanne, was raised to the
      important function of Director of Primary Instruction by M. Ferry in 1879.
      He was denounced by Bishop Dupanloup, in the National Assembly of 1871, as
      the author of certain liberal pamphlets on the dangers connected with
      Scripture-teaching in schools, and, for the time, lost his employment
      under the Ministry of Education.] accept this logical outcome. They are
      the advance-guard of Protestantism and the laggards of free thought.
    </p>
    <p>
      Their mistake is not seeing that all institutions rest upon a legal
      fiction, and that every living thing involves a logical absurdity. It may
      be logical to demand a church based on free examination and absolute
      sincerity; but to realize it is a different matter. A church lives by what
      is positive, and this positive element necessarily limits investigation.
      People confound the right of the individual, which is to be free, with the
      duty of the institution, which is to be something. They take the principle
      of science to be the same as the principle of the church, which is a
      mistake. They will not see that religion is different from philosophy, and
      that the one seeks union by faith, while the other upholds the solitary
      independence of thought. That the bread should be good it must have
      leaven; but the leaven is not the bread. Liberty is the means whereby we
      arrive at an enlightened faith&mdash;granted; but an assembly of people
      agreeing only upon this criterion and this method could not possibly found
      a church, for they might differ completely as to the results of the
      method. Suppose a newspaper the writers of which were of all possible
      parties&mdash;it would no doubt be a curiosity in journalism, but it would
      have no opinions, no faith, no creed. A drawing-room filled with refined
      people, carrying on polite discussion, is not a church, and a dispute,
      however courteous, is not worship. It is a mere confusion of kinds.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 13, 1869.&mdash;Lamennais, Heine&mdash;the one the victim of a
      mistaken vocation, the other of a tormenting craving to astonish and
      mystify his kind. The first was wanting in common sense; the second was
      wanting in seriousness. The Frenchman was violent, arbitrary, domineering;
      the German was a jesting Mephistopheles, with a horror of Philistinism.
      The Breton was all passion and melancholy; the Hamburger all fancy and
      satire. Neither developed freely nor normally. Both of them, because of an
      initial mistake, threw themselves into an endless quarrel with the world.
      Both were revolutionists. They were not fighting for the good cause, for
      impersonal truth; both were rather the champions of their own pride. Both
      suffered greatly, and died isolated, repudiated, and reviled. Men of
      magnificent talents, both of them, but men of small wisdom, who did more
      harm than good to themselves and to others! It is a lamentable existence
      which wears itself out in maintaining a first antagonism, or a first
      blunder. The greater a man&rsquo;s intellectual power, the more dangerous is it
      for him to make a false start and to begin life badly.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 20, 1869.&mdash;I have been reading over again five or six chapters,
      here and there, of Renan&rsquo;s &ldquo;St. Paul.&rdquo; Analyzed to the bottom, the writer
      is a freethinker, but a free thinker whose flexible imagination still
      allows him the delicate epicurism of religious emotion. In his eyes the
      man who will not lend himself to these graceful fancies is vulgar, and the
      man who takes them seriously is prejudiced. He is entertained by the
      variations of conscience, but he is too clever to laugh at them. The true
      critic neither concludes nor excludes; his pleasure is to understand
      without believing, and to profit by the results of enthusiasm, while still
      maintaining a free mind, unembarrassed by illusion. Such a mode of
      proceeding has a look of dishonesty; it is nothing, however, but the
      good-tempered irony of a highly-cultivated mind, which will neither be
      ignorant of anything nor duped by anything. It is the dilettantism of the
      Renaissance in its perfection. At the same time what innumerable proofs of
      insight and of exultant scientific power!
    </p>
    <p>
      August 14, 1869.&mdash;In the name of heaven, who art thou? what wilt thou&mdash;wavering
      inconstant creature? What future lies before thee? What duty or what hope
      appeals to thee?
    </p>
    <p>
      My longing, my search is for love, for peace, for something to fill my
      heart; an idea to defend; a work to which I might devote the rest of my
      strength; an affection which might quench this inner thirst; a cause for
      which I might die with joy. But shall I ever find them? I long for all
      that is impossible and inaccessible: for true religion, serious sympathy,
      the ideal life; for paradise, immortality, holiness, faith, inspiration,
      and I know not what besides! What I really want is to die and to be born
      again, transformed myself, and in a different world. And I can neither
      stifle these aspirations nor deceive myself as to the possibility of
      satisfying them. I seem condemned to roll forever the rock of Sisyphus,
      and to feel that slow wearing away of the mind which befalls the man whose
      vocation and destiny are in perpetual conflict. &ldquo;A Christian heart and a
      pagan head,&rdquo; like Jacobi; tenderness and pride; width of mind and
      feebleness of will; the two men of St. Paul; a seething chaos of
      contrasts, antinomies, and contradictions; humility and pride; childish
      simplicity and boundless mistrust; analysis and intuition; patience and
      irritability; kindness and dryness of heart; carelessness and anxiety;
      enthusiasm and languor; indifference and passion; altogether a being
      incomprehensible and intolerable to myself and to others!
    </p>
    <p>
      Then from a state of conflict I fall back into the fluid, vague,
      indeterminate state, which feels all form to be a mere violence and
      disfigurement. All ideas, principles, acquirements, and habits are effaced
      in me like the ripples on a wave, like the convolutions of a cloud. My
      personality has the least possible admixture of individuality. I am to the
      great majority of men what the circle is to rectilinear figures; I am
      everywhere at home, because I have no particular and nominative self.
      Perhaps, on the whole, this defect has good in it. Though I am less of <i>a</i>
      man, I am perhaps nearer to <i>the</i> man; perhaps rather more <i>man</i>.
      There is less of the individual, but more of the species, in me. My
      nature, which is absolutely unsuited for practical life, shows great
      aptitude for psychological study. It prevents me from taking sides, but it
      allows me to understand all sides. It is not only indolence which prevents
      me from drawing conclusions; it is a sort of a secret aversion to all <i>intellectual
      proscription</i>. I have a feeling that something of everything is wanted
      to make a world, that all citizens have a right in the state, and that if
      every opinion is equally insignificant in itself, all opinions have some
      hold upon truth. To live and let live, think and let think, are maxims
      which are equally dear to me. My tendency is always to the whole, to the
      totality, to the general balance of things. What is difficult to me is to
      exclude, to condemn, to say no; except, indeed, in the presence of the
      exclusive. I am always fighting for the absent, for the defeated cause,
      for that portion of truth which seems to me neglected; my aim is to
      complete every thesis, to see round every problem, to study a thing from
      all its possible sides. Is this skepticism? Yes, in its result, but not in
      its purpose. It is rather the sense of the absolute and the infinite
      reducing to their proper value and relegating to their proper place the
      finite and the relative. But here, in the same way, my ambition is greater
      than my power; my philosophical perception is superior to my speculative
      gift. I have not the energy of my opinions; I have far greater width than
      inventiveness of thought, and, from timidity, I have allowed the critical
      intelligence in me to swallow up the creative genius. Is it indeed from
      timidity?
    </p>
    <p>
      Alas! with a little more ambition, or a little more good luck, a different
      man might have been made out of me, and such as my youth gave promise of.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 16, 1869.&mdash;I have been thinking over Schopenhauer. It has
      struck me and almost terrified me to see how well I represent
      Schopenhauer&rsquo;s typical man, for whom &ldquo;happiness is a chimera and suffering
      a reality,&rdquo; for whom &ldquo;the negation of will and of desire is the only road
      to deliverance,&rdquo; and &ldquo;the individual life is a misfortune from which
      impersonal contemplation is the only enfranchisement,&rdquo; etc. But the
      principle that life is an evil and annihilation a good lies at the root of
      the system, and this axiom I have never dared to enunciate in any general
      way, although I have admitted it here and there in individual cases. What
      I still like in the misanthrope of Frankfort, is his antipathy to current
      prejudice, to European hobbies, to western hypocrisies, to the successes
      of the day. Schopenhauer is a man of powerful mind, who has put away from
      him all illusions, who professes Buddhism in the full flow of modern
      Germany, and absolute detachment of mind In the very midst of the
      nineteenth-century orgie. His great defects are barrenness of soul, a
      proud and perfect selfishness, an adoration of genius which is combined
      with complete indifference to the rest of the world, in spite of all his
      teaching of resignation and sacrifice. He has no sympathy, no humanity, no
      love. And here I recognize the unlikeness between us. Pure intelligence
      and solitary labor might easily lead me to his point of view; but once
      appeal to the heart, and I feel the contemplative attitude untenable.
      Pity, goodness, charity, and devotion reclaim their rights, and insist
      even upon the first place.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 29, 1869.&mdash;Schopenhauer preaches impersonality, objectivity,
      pure contemplation, the negation of will, calmness, and disinterestedness,
      an aesthetic study of the world, detachment from life, the renunciation of
      all desire, solitary meditation, disdain of the crowd, and indifference to
      all that the vulgar covet. He approves all my defects, my childishness, my
      aversion to practical life, my antipathy to the utilitarians, my distrust
      of all desire. In a word, he flatters all my instincts; he caresses and
      justifies them.
    </p>
    <p>
      This pre-established harmony between the theory of Schopenhauer and my own
      natural man causes me pleasure mingled with terror. I might indulge myself
      in the pleasure, but that I fear to delude and stifle conscience. Besides,
      I feel that goodness has no tolerance for this contemplative indifference,
      and that virtue consists in self-conquest.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 30, 1869.&mdash;Still some chapters of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer
      believes in the unchangeableness of innate tendencies in the individual,
      and in the invariability of the primitive disposition. He refuses to
      believe in the new man, in any real progress toward perfection, or in any
      positive improvement in a human being. Only the appearances are refined;
      there is no change below the surface. Perhaps he confuses temperament,
      character, and individuality? I incline to think that individuality is
      fatal and primitive, that temperament reaches far back, but is alternable,
      and that character is more recent and susceptible of voluntary or
      involuntary modifications. Individuality is a matter of psychology,
      temperament, a matter of sensation or aesthetics; character alone is a
      matter of morals. Liberty and the use of it count for nothing in the first
      two elements of our being; character is a historical fruit, and the result
      of a man&rsquo;s biography. For Schopenhauer, character is identified with
      temperament just as will with passion. In short, he simplifies too much,
      and looks at man from that more elementary point of view which is only
      sufficient in the case of the animal. That spontaneity which is vital or
      merely chemical he already calls will. Analogy is not equation; a
      comparison is not reason; similes and parables are not exact language.
      Many of Schopenhauer&rsquo;s originalities evaporate when we come to translate
      them into a more close and precise terminology.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Later</i>.&mdash;One has merely to turn over the &ldquo;Lichtstrahlem&rdquo; of
      Herder to feel the difference between him and Schopenhauer. The latter is
      full of marked features and of observations which stand out from the page
      and leave a clear and vivid impression. Herder is much less of a writer;
      his ideas are entangled in his style, and he has no brilliant
      condensations, no jewels, no crystals. While he proceeds by streams and
      sheets of thought which have no definite or individual outline,
      Schopenhauer breaks the current of his speculation with islands, striking,
      original, and picturesque, which engrave themselves in the memory. It is
      the same difference as there is between Nicole and Pascal, between Bayle
      and Satin-Simon.
    </p>
    <p>
      What is the faculty which gives relief, brilliancy, and incisiveness to
      thought? Imagination. Under its influence expression becomes concentrated,
      colored, and strengthened, and by the power it has of individualizing all
      it touches, it gives life and permanence to the material on which it
      works. A writer of genius changes sand into glass and glass into crystal,
      ore into iron and iron into steel; he marks with his own stamp every idea
      he gets hold of. He borrows much from the common stock, and gives back
      nothing; but even his robberies are willingly reckoned to him as private
      property. He has, as it were, <i>carte blanche</i>, and public opinion
      allows him to take what he will.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 31, 1869.&mdash;I have finished Schopenhauer. My mind has been a
      tumult of opposing systems&mdash;Stoicism, Quietism, Buddhism,
      Christianity. Shall I never be at peace with myself? If impersonality is a
      good, why am I not consistent in the pursuit of it? and if it is a
      temptation, why return to it, after having judged and conquered it?
    </p>
    <p>
      Is happiness anything more than a conventional fiction? The deepest reason
      for my state of doubt is that the supreme end and aim of life seems to me
      a mere lure and deception. The individual is an eternal dupe, who never
      obtains what he seeks, and who is forever deceived by hope. My instinct is
      in harmony with the pessimism of Buddha and of Schopenhauer. It is a doubt
      which never leaves me even in my moments of religious fervor. Nature is
      indeed for me a Maïa; and I look at her, as it were, with the eyes of an
      artist. My intelligence remains skeptical. What, then, do I believe in? I
      do not know. And what is it I hope for? It would be difficult to say.
      Folly! I believe in goodness, and I hope that good will prevail. Deep
      within this ironical and disappointed being of mine there is a child
      hidden&mdash;a frank, sad, simple creature, who believes in the ideal, in
      love, in holiness, and all heavenly superstitions. A whole millennium of
      idylls sleeps in my heart; I am a pseudo-skeptic, a pseudo-scoffer.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Borné dans sa nature, infini dans ses voeux,
  L&rsquo;homme est un dieu tombé qui se souvient des cieux.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      October 14, 1869.&mdash;Yesterday, Wednesday, death of Sainte-Beuve. What
      a loss!
    </p>
    <p>
      October 16, 1869.&mdash;<i>Laboremus</i> seems to have been the motto of
      Sainte-Beuve, as it was that of Septimius Severus. He died in harness, and
      up to the evening before his last day he still wrote, overcoming the
      sufferings of the body by the energy of the mind. To-day, at this very
      moment, they are laying him in the bosom of mother earth. He refused the
      sacraments of the church; he never belonged to any confession; he was one
      of the &ldquo;great diocese&rdquo;&mdash;that of the independent seekers of truth, and
      he allowed himself no final moment of hypocrisy. He would have nothing to
      do with any one except God only&mdash;or rather the mysterious Isis beyond
      the veil. Being unmarried, he died in the arms of his secretary. He was
      sixty-five years old. His power of work and of memory was immense and
      intact. What is Scherer thinking about this life and this death?
    </p>
    <p>
      October 19, 1869.&mdash;An admirable article by Edmond Scherer on
      Sainte-Beuve in the <i>Temps</i>. He makes him the prince of French
      critics and the last representative of the epoch of literary taste, the
      future belonging to the bookmakers and the chatterers, to mediocrity and
      to violence. The article breathes a certain manly melancholy, befitting a
      funeral oration over one who was a master in the things of the mind. The
      fact is, that Sainte-Beuve leaves a greater void behind him than either
      Béranger or Lamartine; their greatness was already distant, historical; he
      was still helping us to think. The true critic acts as a fulcrum for all
      the world. He represents the public judgment, that is to say the public
      reason, the touchstone, the scales, the refining rod, which tests the
      value of every one and the merit of every work. Infallibility of judgment
      is perhaps rarer than anything else, so fine a balance of qualities does
      it demand&mdash;qualities both natural and acquired, qualities of mind and
      heart. What years of labor, what study and comparison, are needed to bring
      the critical judgment to maturity! Like Plato&rsquo;s sage, it is only at fifty
      that the critic rises to the true height of his literary priesthood, or,
      to put it less pompously, of his social function. By then only can he hope
      for insight into all the modes of being, and for mastery of all possible
      shades of appreciation. And Sainte-Beuve joined to this infinitely refined
      culture a prodigious memory, and an incredible multitude of facts and
      anecdotes stored up for the service of his thought.
    </p>
    <p>
      December 8, 1869.&mdash;Everything has chilled me this morning; the cold
      of the season, the physical immobility around me, but, above all,
      Hartman&rsquo;s &ldquo;Philosophy of the Unconscious.&rdquo; This book lays down the
      terrible thesis that creation is a mistake; being, such as it is, is not
      as good as non-being, and death is better than life.
    </p>
    <p>
      I felt the same mournful impression that Obermann left upon me in my
      youth. The black melancholy of Buddhism encompassed and overshadowed me.
      If, in fact, it is only illusion which hides from us the horror of
      existence and makes life tolerable to us, then existence is a snare and
      life an evil. Like the Greek Annikeris, we ought to counsel suicide, or
      rather with Buddha and Schopenhauer we ought to labor for the radical
      extirpation of hope and desire&mdash;the causes of life and resurrection.
      <i>Not</i> to rise again; there is the point, and there is the difficulty.
      Death is simply a beginning again, whereas it is annihilation that we have
      to aim at. Personal consciousness being the root of all our troubles, we
      ought to avoid the temptation to it and the possibility of it as
      diabolical and abominable. What blasphemy! And yet it is all logical; it
      is the philosophy of happiness carried to its farthest point. Epicurism
      must end in despair. The philosophy of duty is less depressing. But
      salvation lies in the conciliation of duty and happiness, in the union of
      the individual will with the divine will, and in the faith that this
      supreme will is directed by love.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      It is as true that real happiness is good, as that the good become better
      under the purification of trial. Those who have not suffered are still
      wanting in depth; but a man who has not got happiness cannot impart it. We
      can only give what we have. Happiness, grief, gayety, sadness, are by
      nature contagious. Bring your health and your strength to the weak and
      sickly, and so you will be of use to them. Give them, not your weakness,
      but your energy, so you will revive and lift them up. Life alone can
      rekindle life. What others claim from us is not our thirst and our hunger,
      but our bread and our gourd.
    </p>
    <p>
      The benefactors of humanity are those who have thought great thoughts
      about her; but her masters and her idols are those who have flattered and
      despised her, those who have muzzled and massacred her, inflamed her with
      fanaticism or used her for selfish purposes. Her benefactors are the
      poets, the artists, the inventors, the apostles and all pure hearts. Her
      masters are the Caesars, the Constantines, the Gregory VII.&lsquo;s, the
      Innocent III.&lsquo;s, the Borgias, the Napoleons.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Every civilization is, as it were, a dream of a thousand years, in which
      heaven and earth, nature and history, appear to men illumined by fantastic
      light and representing a drama which is nothing but a projection of the
      soul itself, influenced by some intoxication&mdash;I was going to say
      hallucination&mdash;or other. Those who are widest awake still see the
      real world across the dominant illusion of their race or time. And the
      reason is that the deceiving light starts from our own mind: the light is
      our religion. Everything changes with it. It is religion which gives to
      our kaleidoscope, if not the material of the figures, at least their
      color, their light and shade, and general aspect. Every religion makes men
      see the world and humanity under a special light; it is a mode of
      apperception, which can only be scientifically handled when we have cast
      it aside, and can only be judged when we have replaced it by a better.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      February 23, 1870.&mdash;There is in man an instinct of revolt, an enemy
      of all law, a rebel which will stoop to no yoke, not even that of reason,
      duty, and wisdom. This element in us is the root of all sin&mdash;<i>das
      radicale Böse</i> of Kant. The independence which is the condition of
      individuality is at the same time the eternal temptation of the
      individual. That which makes us beings makes us also sinners.
    </p>
    <p>
      Sin is, then, in our very marrow. It circulates in us like the blood in
      our veins, it is mingled with all our substance, [Footnote: This is one of
      the passages which rouses M. Renan&rsquo;s wonder: &ldquo;Voila la grande difference,&rdquo;
       he writes, &ldquo;entre l&rsquo;éducation catholique et l&rsquo;éducation protestante. Ceux
      qui comme moi ont reçu une éducation catholique en ont gardé de profonds
      vestiges. Mais ces vestiges ne sont pas des dogmes, ce sont des rêves. Une
      fois ce grand rideau de drap d&rsquo;or, bariolé de soie, d&rsquo;indienne et de
      calicot, par lequel le catholicisme nous masque la vue du monde, une fois,
      dis-je ce rideau déchiré, on voit l&rsquo;univers en sa splendeur infinie, la
      nature en sa haute et pleine majesté. Le protestant le plus libre garde
      souvent quelque chose de triste, un fond d&rsquo;austérité intellectuelle
      analogue au pessimisme slave.&rdquo;&mdash;(<i>Journal des Débats</i>, September
      30, 1884).
    </p>
    <p>
      One is reminded of Mr. Morley&rsquo;s criticism of Emerson. Emerson, he points
      out, has almost nothing to say of death, and &ldquo;little to say of that horrid
      burden and impediment on the soul which the churches call sin, and which,
      by whatever name we call it, is a very real catastrophe in the moral
      nature of man&mdash;the courses of nature, and the prodigious injustices
      of mail in society affect him with neither horror nor awe. He will see no
      monster if he can help it.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Here, then, we have the eternal difference between the two orders of
      temperament&mdash;the men whose overflowing energy forbids them to realize
      the ever-recurring defeat of the human spirit at the hands of
      circumstance, like Renan and Emerson, and the men for whom &ldquo;horror and
      awe&rdquo; are interwoven with experience, like Amiel.] Or rather I am wrong:
      temptation is our natural state, but sin is not necessary. Sin consists in
      the voluntary confusion of the independence which is good with the
      independence which is bad; it is caused by the half-indulgence granted to
      a first sophism. We shut our eyes to the beginnings of evil because they
      are small, and in this weakness is contained the germ of our defeat. <i>Principiis
      obsta</i>&mdash;this maxim dutifully followed would preserve us from
      almost all our catastrophes.
    </p>
    <p>
      We will have no other master but our caprice&mdash;that is to say, our
      evil self will have no God, and the foundation of our nature is seditious,
      impious, insolent, refractory, opposed to, and contemptuous of all that
      tries to rule it, and therefore contrary to order, ungovernable and
      negative. It is this foundation which Christianity calls the natural man.
      But the savage which is within us, and constitutes the primitive stuff of
      us, must be disciplined and civilized in order to produce a man. And the
      man must be patiently cultivated to produce a wise man, and the wise man
      must be tested and tried if he is to become righteous. And the righteous
      man must have substituted the will of God for his individual will, if he
      is to become a saint. And this new man, this regenerate being, is the
      spiritual man, the heavenly man, of which the Vedas speak as well as the
      gospel, and the Magi as well as the Neo-Platonists.
    </p>
    <p>
      March 17, 1870.&mdash;This morning the music of a brass band which had
      stopped under my windows moved me almost to tears. It exercised an
      indefinable, nostalgic power over me; it set me dreaming of another world,
      of infinite passion and supreme happiness. Such impressions are the echoes
      of paradise in the soul; memories of ideal spheres, whose sad sweetness
      ravishes and intoxicates the heart. O Plato! O Pythagoras! ages ago you
      heard these harmonies&mdash;surprised these moments of inward ecstacy&mdash;knew
      these divine transports! If music thus carries us to heaven, it is because
      music is harmony, harmony is perfection, perfection is our dream, and our
      dream is heaven. This world of quarrels and bitterness, of selfishness,
      ugliness, and misery, makes us long involuntarily for the eternal peace,
      for the adoration which has no limits, and the love which has no end. It
      is not so much the infinite as the beautiful that we yearn for. It is not
      being, or the limits of being, which weigh upon us; it is evil, in us and
      without us. It is not all necessary to be great, so long as we are in
      harmony with the order of the universe. Moral ambition has no pride; it
      only desires to fill its place, and make its note duly heard in the
      universal concert of the God of love.
    </p>
    <p>
      March 30, 1870.&mdash;Certainly, nature is unjust and shameless, without
      probity, and without faith. Her only alternatives are gratuitous favor or
      mad aversion, and her only way of redressing an injustice is to commit
      another. The happiness of the few is expiated by the misery of the greater
      number. It is useless to accuse a blind force.
    </p>
    <p>
      The human conscience, however, revolts against this law of nature, and to
      satisfy its own instinct of justice it has imagined two hypotheses, out of
      which it has made for itself a religion&mdash;the idea of an individual
      providence, and the hypothesis of another life.
    </p>
    <p>
      In these we have a protest against nature, which is thus declared immoral
      and scandalous to the moral sense. Man believes in good, and that he may
      ground himself on justice he maintains that the injustice all around him
      is but an appearance, a mystery, a cheat, and that justice <i>will</i> be
      done. <i>Fiat justitia, pereal mundus!</i>
    </p>
    <p>
      It is a great act of faith. And since humanity has not made itself, this
      protest has some chance of expressing a truth. If there is conflict
      between the natural world and the moral world, between reality and
      conscience, conscience must be right.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is by no means necessary that the universe should exist, but it is
      necessary that justice should be done, and atheism is bound to explain the
      fixed obstinacy of conscience on this point. Nature is not just; we are
      the products of nature: why are we always claiming and prophesying
      justice? why does the effect rise up against its cause? It is a singular
      phenomenon. Does the protest come from any puerile blindness of human
      vanity? No, it is the deepest cry of our being, and it is for the honor of
      God that the cry is uttered. Heaven and earth may pass away, but good <i>ought</i>
      to be, and injustice ought <i>not</i> to be. Such is the creed of the
      human race. Nature will be conquered by spirit; the eternal will triumph
      over time.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 1, 1870.&mdash;I am inclined to believe that for a woman love is the
      supreme authority&mdash;that which judges the rest and decides what is
      good or evil. For a man, love is subordinate to right. It is a great
      passion, but it is not the source of order, the synonym of reason, the
      criterion of excellence. It would seem, then, that a woman places her
      ideal in the perfection of love, and a man in the perfection of justice.
      It was in this sense that St. Paul was able to say, &ldquo;The woman is the
      glory of the man, and the man is the glory of God.&rdquo; Thus the woman who
      absorbs herself in the object of her love is, so to speak, in the line of
      nature; she is truly woman, she realizes her fundamental type. On the
      contrary, the man who should make life consist in conjugal adoration, and
      who should imagine that he has lived sufficiently when he has made himself
      the priest of a beloved woman, such a one is but half a man; he is
      despised by the world, and perhaps secretly disdained by women themselves.
      The woman who loves truly seeks to merge her own individuality in that of
      the man she loves. She desires that her love should make him greater,
      stronger, more masculine, and more active. Thus each sex plays its
      appointed part: the woman is first destined for man, and man is destined
      for society. Woman owes herself to one, man owes himself to all; and each
      obtains peace and happiness only when he or she has recognized this law
      and accepted this balance of things. The same thing may be a good in the
      woman and an evil in the man, may be strength in her, weakness in him.
    </p>
    <p>
      There is then a feminine and a masculine morality&mdash;preparatory
      chapters, as it were, to a general human morality. Below the virtue which
      is evangelical and sexless, there is a virtue of sex. And this virtue of
      sex is the occasion of mutual teaching, for each of the two incarnations
      of virtue makes it its business to convert the other, the first preaching
      love in the ears of justice, the second justice in the ears of love. And
      so there is produced an oscillation and an average which represent a
      social state, an epoch, sometimes a whole civilization.
    </p>
    <p>
      Such at least is our European idea of the harmony of the sexes in a
      graduated order of functions. America is on the road to revolutionize this
      ideal by the introduction of the democratic principle of the equality of
      individuals in a general equality of functions. Only, when there is
      nothing left but a multitude of equal individualities, neither young nor
      old, neither men nor women, neither benefited nor benefactors&mdash;all
      social difference will turn upon money. The whole hierarchy will rest upon
      the dollar, and the most brutal, the most hideous, the most inhuman of
      inequalities will be the fruit of the passion for equality. What a result!
      Plutolatry&mdash;the worship of wealth, the madness of gold&mdash;to it
      will be confided the task of chastising a false principle and its
      followers. And plutocracy will be in its turn executed by equality. It
      would be a strange end for it, if Anglo-Saxon individualism were
      ultimately swallowed up in Latin socialism.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is my prayer that the discovery of an equilibrium between the two
      principles may be made in time, before the social war, with all its terror
      and ruin, overtakes us. But it is scarcely likely. The masses are always
      ignorant and limited, and only advance by a succession of contrary errors.
      They reach good only by the exhaustion of evil. They discover the way out,
      only after having run their heads against all other possible issues.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 15, 1870.&mdash;<i>Crucifixion!</i> That is the word we have to
      meditate to-day. Is it not Good Friday?
    </p>
    <p>
      To curse grief is easier than to bless it, but to do so is to fall back
      into the point of view of the earthly, the carnal, the natural man. By
      what has Christianity subdued the world if not by the apotheosis of grief,
      by its marvelous transmutation of suffering into triumph, of the crown of
      thorns into the crown of glory, and of a gibbet into a symbol of
      salvation? What does the apotheosis of the Cross mean, if not the death of
      death, the defeat of sin, the beatification of martyrdom, the raising to
      the skies of voluntary sacrifice, the defiance of pain? &ldquo;O Death, where is
      thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory?&rdquo; By long brooding over this
      theme&mdash;the agony of the just, peace in the midst of agony, and the
      heavenly beauty of such peace&mdash;humanity came to understand that a new
      religion was born&mdash;a new mode, that is to say, of explaining life and
      of understanding suffering.
    </p>
    <p>
      Suffering was a curse from which man fled; now it becomes a purification
      of the soul, a sacred trial sent by eternal love, a divine dispensation
      meant to sanctify and ennoble us, an acceptable aid to faith, a strange
      initiation into happiness. O power of belief! All remains the same, and
      yet all is changed. A new certitude arises to deny the apparent and the
      tangible; it pierces through the mystery of things, it places an invisible
      Father behind visible nature, it shows us joy shining through tears, and
      makes of pain the beginning of joy.
    </p>
    <p>
      And so, for those who have believed, the tomb becomes heaven, and on the
      funeral pyre of life they sing the hosanna of immortality; a sacred
      madness has renewed the face of the world for them, and when they wish to
      explain what they feel, their ecstasy makes them incomprehensible; they
      speak with tongues. A wild intoxication of self-sacrifice, contempt for
      death, the thirst for eternity, the delirium of love&mdash;these are what
      the unalterable gentleness of the Crucified has had power to bring forth.
      By his pardon of his executioners, and by that unconquerable sense in him
      of an indissoluble union with God, Jesus, on his cross, kindled an
      inextinguishable fire and revolutionized the world. He proclaimed and
      realized salvation by faith in the infinite mercy, and in the pardon
      granted to simple repentance. By his saying, &ldquo;There is more joy in heaven
      over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine just persons who
      need no repentance,&rdquo; he made humility the gate of entrance into paradise.
    </p>
    <p>
      Crucify the rebellious self, mortify yourself wholly, give up all to God,
      and the peace which is not of this world will descend upon you. For
      eighteen centuries no grander word has been spoken; and although humanity
      is forever seeking after a more exact and complete application of justice,
      yet her secret faith is not in justice but in pardon, for pardon alone
      conciliates the spotless purity of perfection with the infinite pity due
      to weakness&mdash;that is to say, it alone preserves and defends the Idea
      of holiness, while it allows full scope to that of love. The gospel
      proclaims the ineffable consolation, the good news, which disarms all
      earthly griefs, and robs even death of its terrors&mdash;the news of
      irrevocable pardon, that is to say, of eternal life. The Cross is the
      guarantee of the gospel.
    </p>
    <p>
      Therefore it has been its standard.
    </p>
    <p>
      May 7, 1870.&mdash;The faith which clings to its idols and resists all
      innovation is a retarding and conservative force; but it is the property
      of all religion to serve as a curb to our lawless passion for freedom, and
      to steady and quiet our restlessness of temper. Curiosity is the expansive
      force, which, if it were allowed an unchecked action upon us, would
      disperse and volatilize us; belief represents the force of gravitation and
      cohesion which makes separate bodies and individuals of us. Society lives
      by faith, develops by science. Its basis then is the mysterious, the
      unknown, the intangible&mdash;religion&mdash;while the fermenting
      principle in it is the desire of knowledge. Its permanent substance is the
      uncomprehended or the divine; its changing form is the result of its
      intellectual labor. The unconscious adhesions, the confused intuitions,
      the obscure presentiments, which decide the first faith of a people, are
      then of capital importance in its history. All history moves between the
      religion which is the genial instinctive and fundamental philosophy of a
      race, and the philosophy which is the ultimate religion&mdash;the clear
      perception, that is to say, of those principles which have engendered the
      whole spiritual development of humanity.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is always the same thing which is, which was, and which will be; but
      this thing&mdash;the absolute&mdash;betrays with more or less transparency
      and profundity the law of its life and of its metamorphoses. In its fixed
      aspect it is called God; in its mobile aspect the world or nature. God is
      present in nature, but nature is not God; there is a nature in God, but it
      is not God himself. I am neither for immanence nor for transcendence taken
      alone.
    </p>
    <p>
      May 9, 1870.&mdash;Disraeli, in his new novel, &ldquo;Lothair,&rdquo; shows that the
      two great forces of the present are Revolution and Catholicism, and that
      the free nations are lost if either of these two forces triumphs. It is
      exactly my own idea. Only, while in France, in Belgium, in Italy, and in
      all Catholic societies, it is only by checking one of these forces by the
      other that the state and civilization can be maintained, the Protestant
      countries are better off; in them there is a third force, a middle faith
      between the two other idolatries, which enables them to regard liberty not
      as a neutralization of two contraries, but as a moral reality,
      self-subsistent, and possessing its own center of gravity and motive
      force. In the Catholic world religion and liberty exclude each other. In
      the Protestant world they accept each other, so that in the second case
      there is a smaller waste of force.
    </p>
    <p>
      Liberty is the lay, the philosophical principle. It expresses the
      juridical and social aspiration of the race. But as there is no society
      possible without regulation, without control, without limitations on
      individual liberty, above all without moral limitations, the peoples which
      are legally the freest do well to take their religious consciousness for
      check and ballast. In mixed states, Catholic or free-thinking, the limit
      of action, being a merely penal one, invites incessant contravention.
    </p>
    <p>
      The puerility of the freethinkers consists in believing that a free
      society can maintain itself and keep itself together without a common
      faith, without a religious prejudice of some kind. Where lies the will of
      God? Is it the common reason which expresses it, or rather, are a clergy
      or a church the depositories of it? So long as the response is ambiguous
      and equivocal in the eyes of half or the majority of consciences&mdash;and
      this is the case in all Catholic states&mdash;public peace is impossible,
      and public law is insecure. If there is a God, we must have him on our
      side, and if there is not a God, it would be necessary first of all to
      convert everybody to the same idea of the lawful and the useful, to
      reconstitute, that is to say, a lay religion, before anything politically
      solid could be built.
    </p>
    <p>
      Liberalism is merely feeding upon abstractions, when it persuades itself
      that liberty is possible without free individuals, and when it will not
      recognize that liberty in the individual is the fruit of a foregoing
      education, a moral education, which presupposes a liberating religion. To
      preach liberalism to a population jesuitized by education, is to press the
      pleasures of dancing upon a man who has lost a leg. How is it possible for
      a child who has never been out of swaddling clothes to walk? How can the
      abdication of individual conscience lead to the government of individual
      conscience? To be free, is to guide one&rsquo;s self, to have attained one&rsquo;s
      majority, to be emancipated, master of one&rsquo;s actions, and judge of good
      and evil; but ultramontane Catholicism never emancipates its disciples,
      who are bound to admit, to believe, and to obey, as they are told, because
      they are minors in perpetuity, and the clergy alone possess the law of
      right, the secret of justice, and the measure of truth. This is what men
      are landed in by the idea of an exterior revelation, cleverly made use of
      by a patient priesthood.
    </p>
    <p>
      But what astonishes me is the short-sight of the statesmen of the south,
      who do not see that the question of questions is the religious question,
      and even now do not recognize that a liberal state is wholly incompatible
      with an anti-liberal religion, and almost equally incompatible with the
      absence of religion. They confound accidental conquests and precarious
      progress with lasting results.
    </p>
    <p>
      There is some probability that all this noise which is made nowadays about
      liberty may end in the suppression of liberty; it is plain that the
      internationals, the irreconcilables, and the ultramontanes, are, all three
      of them, aiming at absolutism, at dictatorial omnipotence. Happily they
      are not one but many, and it will not be difficult to turn them against
      each other.
    </p>
    <p>
      If liberty is to be saved, it will not be by the doubters, the men of
      science, or the materialists; it will be by religious conviction, by the
      faith of individuals who believe that God wills man to be free but also
      pure; it will be by the seekers after holiness, by those old-fashioned
      pious persons who speak of immortality and eternal life, and prefer the
      soul to the whole world; it will be by the enfranchised children of the
      ancient faith of the human race.
    </p>
    <p>
      June 5, 1870.&mdash;The efficacy of religion lies precisely in that which
      is not rational, philosophic, nor external; its efficacy lies in the
      unforeseen, the miraculous, the extraordinary. Thus religion attracts more
      devotion in proportion as it demands more faith&mdash;that is to say, as
      it becomes more incredible to the profane mind. The philosopher aspires to
      explain away all mysteries, to dissolve them into light. It is mystery, on
      the other hand, which the religious instinct demands and pursues; it is
      mystery which constitutes the essence of worship, the power of
      proselytism. When the cross became the &ldquo;foolishness&rdquo; of the cross, it took
      possession of the masses. And in our own day, those who wish to get rid of
      the supernatural, to enlighten religion, to economize faith, find
      themselves deserted, like poets who should declaim against poetry, or
      women who should decry love. Faith consists in the acceptance of the
      incomprehensible, and even in the pursuit of the impossible, and is
      self-intoxicated with its own sacrifices, its own repeated extravagances.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is the forgetfulness of this psychological law which stultifies the
      so-called liberal Christianity. It is the realization of it which
      constitutes the strength of Catholicism.
    </p>
    <p>
      Apparently no positive religion can survive the supernatural element which
      is the reason for its existence. Natural religion seems to be the tomb of
      all historic cults. All concrete religions die eventually in the pure air
      of philosophy. So long then as the life of nations is in need of religion
      as a motive and sanction of morality, as food for faith, hope, and
      charity, so long will the masses turn away from pure reason and naked
      truth, so long will they adore mystery, so long&mdash;and rightly so&mdash;will
      they rest in faith, the only region where the ideal presents itself to
      them in an attractive form.
    </p>
    <p>
      June 9, 1870.&mdash;At bottom, everything depends upon the presence or
      absence of one single element in the soul&mdash;hope. All the activity of
      man, all his efforts and all his enterprises, presuppose a hope in him of
      attaining an end. Once kill this hope and his movements become senseless,
      spasmodic, and convulsive, like those of some one falling from a height.
      To struggle with the inevitable has something childish in it. To implore
      the law of gravitation to suspend its action would no doubt be a grotesque
      prayer. Very well! but when a man loses faith in the efficacy of his
      efforts, when he says to himself, &ldquo;You are incapable of realizing your
      ideal; happiness is a chimera, progress is an illusion, the passion for
      perfection is a snare; and supposing all your ambitions were gratified,
      everything would still be vanity,&rdquo; then he comes to see that a little
      blindness is necessary if life is to be carried on, and that illusion is
      the universal spring of movement. Complete disillusion would mean absolute
      immobility. He who has deciphered the secret and read the riddle of finite
      life escapes from the great wheel of existence; he has left the world of
      the living&mdash;he is already dead. Is this the meaning of the old belief
      that to raise the veil of Isis or to behold God face to face brought
      destruction upon the rash mortal who attempted it? Egypt and Judea had
      recorded the fact, Buddha gave the key to it; the individual life is a
      nothing ignorant of itself, and as soon as this nothing knows itself,
      individual life is abolished in principle. For as soon as the illusion
      vanishes, Nothingness resumes its eternal sway, the suffering of life is
      over, error has disappeared, time and form have ceased to be for this
      enfranchised individuality; the colored air-bubble has burst in the
      infinite space, and the misery of thought has sunk to rest in the
      changeless repose of all-embracing Nothing. The absolute, if it were
      spirit, would still be activity, and it is activity, the daughter of
      desire, which is incompatible with the absolute. The absolute, then, must
      be the zero of all determination, and the only manner of being suited to
      it is Non-being.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 2, 1870.&mdash;One of the vices of France is the frivolity which
      substitutes public conventions for truth, and absolutely ignores personal
      dignity and the majesty of conscience. The French are ignorant of the A B
      C of individual liberty, and still show an essentially catholic
      intolerance toward the ideas which have not attained universality or the
      adhesion of the majority. The nation is an army which can bring to bear
      mass, number, and force, but not an assembly of free men in which each
      individual depends for his value on himself. The eminent Frenchman depends
      upon others for his value; if he possess stripe, cross, scarf, sword, or
      robe&mdash;in a word, function and decoration&mdash;then he is held to be
      something, and he feels himself somebody. It is the symbol which
      establishes his merit, it is the public which raises him from nothing, as
      the sultan creates his viziers. These highly-trained and social races have
      an antipathy for individual independence; everything with them must be
      founded upon authority military, civil, or religious, and God himself is
      non-existent until he has been established by decree. Their fundamental
      dogma is that social omnipotence which treats the pretension of truth to
      be true without any official stamp, as a mere usurpation and sacrilege,
      and scouts the claim of the individual to possess either a separate
      conviction or a personal value.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 20, 1870 (<i>Bellalpe</i>).&mdash;A marvelous day. The panorama
      before me is of a grandiose splendor; it is a symphony of mountains, a
      cantata of sunny Alps.
    </p>
    <p>
      I am dazzled and oppressed by it. The feeling uppermost is one of delight
      in being able to admire, of joy, that is to say, in a recovered power of
      contemplation which is the result of physical relief, in being able at
      last to forget myself and surrender myself to things, as befits a man in
      my state of health. Gratitude is mingled with enthusiasm. I have just
      spent two hours of continuous delight at the foot of the Sparrenhorn, the
      peak behind us. A flood of sensations overpowered me. I could only look,
      feel, dream, and think.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Later</i>.&mdash;Ascent of the Sparrenhorn. The peak of it is not very
      easy to climb, because of the masses of loose stones and the steepness of
      the path, which runs between two abysses. But how great is one&rsquo;s reward!
    </p>
    <p>
      The view embraces the whole series of the Valais Alps from the Furka to
      the Combin; and even beyond the Furka one sees a few peaks of the Ticino
      and the Rhaetian Alps; while if you turn you see behind you a whole polar
      world of snowfields and glaciers forming the southern side of the enormous
      Bernese group of the Finsteraarahorn, the Mönch, and the Jungfrau. The
      near representative of the group is the Aletschhorn, whence diverge like
      so many ribbons the different Aletsch glaciers which wind about the peak
      from which I saw them. I could study the different zones, one above
      another&mdash;fields, woods, grassy Alps, bare rock and snow, and the
      principle types of mountain; the pagoda-shaped Mischabel, with its four <i>arêtes</i>
      as flying buttresses and its staff of nine clustered peaks; the cupola of
      the Fletchhorn, the dome of Monte Rosa, the pyramid of the Weisshorn, the
      obelisk of the Cervin.
    </p>
    <p>
      Bound me fluttered a multitude of butterflies and brilliant green-backed
      flies; but nothing grew except a few lichens. The deadness and emptiness
      of the upper Aletsch glacier, like some vast white street, called up the
      image of an icy Pompeii. All around boundless silence. On my way back I
      noticed some effects of sunshine&mdash;the close elastic mountain grass,
      starred with gentian, forget-me-not, and anemones, the mountain cattle
      standing out against the sky, the rocks just piercing the soil, various
      circular dips in the mountain side, stone waves petrified thousands of
      thousands of years ago, the undulating ground, the tender quiet of the
      evening; and I invoked the soul of the mountains and the spirit of the
      heights!
    </p>
    <p>
      July 22, 1870 (<i>Bellalpe</i>).&mdash;The sky, which was misty and
      overcast this morning, has become perfectly blue again, and the giants of
      the Valais are bathed in tranquil light.
    </p>
    <p>
      Whence this solemn melancholy which oppresses and pursues me? I have just
      read a series of scientific books (Bronn on the &ldquo;Laws of Palaeontology,&rdquo;
       Karl Ritter on the &ldquo;Law of Geographical Forms&rdquo;). Are they the cause of
      this depression? or is it the majesty of this immense landscape, the
      splendor of this setting sun, which brings the tears to my eyes?
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Créature d&rsquo;un jour qui t&rsquo;agites une heure,&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      what weighs upon thee&mdash;I know it well&mdash;is the sense of thine
      utter nothingness!... The names of great men hover before my eyes like a
      secret reproach, and this grand impassive nature tells me that to-morrow I
      shall have disappeared, butterfly that I am, without having lived. Or
      perhaps it is the breath of eternal things which stirs in me the shudder
      of Job. What is man&mdash;this weed which a sunbeam withers? What is our
      life in the infinite abyss? I feel a sort of sacred terror, not only for
      myself, but for my race, for all that is mortal. Like Buddha, I feel the
      great wheel turning&mdash;the wheel of universal illusion&mdash;and the
      dumb stupor which enwraps me is full of anguish. Isis lilts the corner of
      her veil, and he who perceives the great mystery beneath is struck with
      giddiness. I can scarcely breathe. It seems to me that I am hanging by a
      thread above the fathomless abyss of destiny. Is this the Infinite face to
      face, an intuition of the last great death?
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Créature d&rsquo;un jour qui t&rsquo;agites une heure,
  Ton âme est immortelle et tes pleurs vont finir.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      <i>Finir?</i> When depths of ineffable desire are opening in the heart, as
      vast, as yawning as the immensity which surrounds us? Genius,
      self-devotion, love&mdash;all these cravings quicken into life and torture
      me at once. Like the shipwrecked sailor about to sink under the waves, I
      am conscious of a mad clinging to life, and at the same time of a rush of
      despair and repentance, which forces from me a cry for pardon. And then
      all this hidden agony dissolves in wearied submission. &ldquo;Resign yourself to
      the inevitable! Shroud away out of sight the flattering delusions of
      youth! Live and die in the shade! Like the insects humming in the
      darkness, offer up your evening prayer. Be content to fade out of life
      without a murmur whenever the Master of life shall breathe upon your tiny
      flame! It is out of myriads of unknown lives that every clod of earth is
      built up. The infusoria do not count until they are millions upon
      millions. Accept your nothingness.&rdquo; Amen!
    </p>
    <p>
      But there is no peace except in order, in law. Am I in order? Alas, no! My
      changeable and restless nature will torment me to the end. I shall never
      see plainly what I ought to do. The love of the better will have stood
      between me and the good. Yearning for the ideal will have lost me reality.
      Vague aspiration and undefined desire will have been enough to make my
      talents useless, and to neutralize my powers. Unproductive nature that I
      am, tortured by the belief that production was required of me, may not my
      very remorse be a mistake and a superfluity?
    </p>
    <p>
      Scherer&rsquo;s phrase comes back to me, &ldquo;We must accept ourselves as we are.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      September 8, 1870 (<i>Zurich</i>).&mdash;All the exiles are returning to
      Paris&mdash;Edgar Quinet, Louis Blanc, Victor Hugo. By the help of their
      united experience will they succeed in maintaining the republic? It is to
      be hoped so. But the past makes it lawful to doubt. While the republic is
      in reality a fruit, the French look upon it as a seed-sowing. Elsewhere
      such a form of government presupposes free men; in France it is and must
      be an instrument of instruction and protection. France has once more
      placed sovereignty in the hands of universal suffrage, as though the
      multitude were already enlightened, judicious, and reasonable, and now her
      task is to train and discipline the force which, by a fiction, is master.
    </p>
    <p>
      The ambition of France is set upon self-government, but her capacity for
      it has still to be proved. For eighty years she has confounded revolution
      with liberty; will she now give proof of amendment and of wisdom? Such a
      change is not impossible. Let us wait for it with sympathy, but also with
      caution.
    </p>
    <p>
      September 12, 1870 (<i>Basle</i>).&mdash;The old Rhine is murmuring under
      my window. The wide gray stream rolls its great waves along and breaks
      against the arches of the bridge, just as it did ten years or twenty years
      ago; the red cathedral shoots its arrow-like spires toward heaven; the ivy
      on the terraces which fringe the left bank of the Rhine hangs over the
      walls like a green mantle; the indefatigable ferry-boat goes and comes as
      it did of yore; in a word, things seem to be eternal, while man&rsquo;s hair
      turns gray and his heart grows old. I came here first as a student, then
      as a professor. Now I return to it at the downward turn of middle age, and
      nothing in the landscape has changed except myself.
    </p>
    <p>
      The melancholy of memory may be commonplace and puerile&mdash;all the same
      it is true, it is inexhaustible, and the poets of all times have been open
      to its attacks.
    </p>
    <p>
      At bottom, what is individual life? A variation of an eternal theme&mdash;to
      be born, to live, to feel, to hope, to love, to suffer, to weep, to die.
      Some would add to these, to grow rich, to think, to conquer; but in fact,
      whatever frantic efforts one may make, however one may strain and excite
      one&rsquo;s self, one can but cause a greater or slighter undulation in the line
      of one&rsquo;s destiny. Supposing a man renders the series of fundamental
      phenomena a little more evident to others or a little more distinct to
      himself, what does it matter? The whole is still nothing but a fluttering
      of the infinitely little, the insignificant repetition of an invariable
      theme. In truth, whether the individual exists or no, the difference is so
      absolutely imperceptible in the whole of things that every complaint and
      every desire is ridiculous. Humanity in its entirety is but a flash in the
      duration of the planet, and the planet may return to the gaseous state
      without the sun&rsquo;s feeling it even for a second. The individual is the
      infinitesimal of nothing.
    </p>
    <p>
      What, then, is nature? Nature is Maïa&mdash;that is to say, an incessant,
      fugitive, indifferent series of phenomena, the manifestation of all
      possibilities, the inexhaustible play of all combinations.
    </p>
    <p>
      And is Maïa all the while performing for the amusement of somebody, of
      some spectator&mdash;Brahma? Or is Brahma working out some serious and
      unselfish end? From the theistic point of view, is it the purpose of God
      to make souls, to augment the sum of good and wisdom by the multiplication
      of himself in free beings&mdash;facets which may flash back to him his own
      holiness and beauty? This conception is far more attractive to the heart.
      But is it more true? The moral consciousness affirms it. If man is capable
      of conceiving goodness, the general principle of things, which cannot be
      inferior to man, must be good. The philosophy of labor, of duty, of
      effort, is surely superior to that of phenomena, chance, and universal
      indifference. If so, the whimsical Maïa would be subordinate to Brahma,
      the eternal thought, and Brahma would be in his turn subordinate to a holy
      God.
    </p>
    <p>
      October 25, 1870 (<i>Geneva</i>).&mdash;&ldquo;Each function to the most
      worthy:&rdquo; this maxim governs all constitutions, and serves to test them.
      Democracy is not forbidden to apply it, but democracy rarely does apply
      it, because she holds, for example, that the most worthy man is the man
      who pleases her, whereas he who pleases her is not always the most worthy,
      and because she supposes that reason guides the masses, whereas in reality
      they are most commonly led by passion. And in the end every falsehood has
      to be expiated, for truth always takes its revenge.
    </p>
    <p>
      Alas, whatever one may say or do, wisdom, justice, reason, and goodness
      will never be anything more than special cases and the heritage of a few
      elect souls. Moral and intellectual harmony, excellence in all its forms,
      will always be a rarity of great price, an isolated <i>chef d&rsquo;oeuvre</i>.
      All that can be expected from the most perfect institutions is that they
      should make it possible for individual excellence to develop itself, not
      that they should produce the excellent individual. Virtue and genius,
      grace and beauty, will always constitute a <i>noblesse</i> such as no form
      of government can manufacture. It is of no use, therefore, to excite one&rsquo;s
      self for or against revolutions which have only an importance of the
      second order&mdash;an importance which I do not wish either to diminish or
      to ignore, but an importance which, after all, is mostly negative. The
      political life is but the means of the true life.
    </p>
    <p>
      October 26, 1870.&mdash;Sirocco. A bluish sky. The leafy crowns of the
      trees have dropped at their feet; the finger of winter has touched them.
      The errand-woman has just brought me my letters. Poor little woman, what a
      life! She spends her nights in going backward and forward from her invalid
      husband to her sister, who is scarcely less helpless, and her days are
      passed in labor. Resigned and indefatigable, she goes on without
      complaining, till she drops.
    </p>
    <p>
      Lives such as hers prove something: that the true ignorance is moral
      ignorance, that labor and suffering are the lot of all men, and that
      classification according to a greater or less degree of folly is inferior
      to that which proceeds according to a greater or less degree of virtue.
      The kingdom of God belongs not to the most enlightened but to the best;
      and the best man is the most unselfish man. Humble, constant, voluntary
      self-sacrifice&mdash;this is what constitutes the true dignity of man. And
      therefore is it written, &ldquo;The last shall be first.&rdquo; Society rests upon
      conscience and not upon science. Civilization is first and foremost a
      moral thing. Without honesty, without respect for law, without the worship
      of duty, without the love of one&rsquo;s neighbor&mdash;in a word, without
      virtue&mdash;the whole is menaced and falls into decay, and neither
      letters nor art, neither luxury nor industry, nor rhetoric, nor the
      policeman, nor the custom-house officer, can maintain erect and whole an
      edifice of which the foundations are unsound.
    </p>
    <p>
      A state founded upon interest alone and cemented by fear is an ignoble and
      unsafe construction. The ultimate ground upon which every civilization
      rests is the average morality of the masses, and a sufficient amount of
      practical righteousness. Duty is what upholds all. So that those who
      humbly and unobtrusively fulfill it, and set a good example thereby, are
      the salvation and the sustenance of this brilliant world, which knows
      nothing about them. Ten righteous men would have saved Sodom, but
      thousands and thousands of good homely folk are needed to preserve a
      people from corruption and decay.
    </p>
    <p>
      If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be
      confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes.
      The modern separation of enlightenment and virtue, of thought and
      conscience, of the intellectual aristocracy from the honest and vulgar
      crowd, is the greatest danger that can threaten liberty. When any society
      produces an increasing number of literary exquisites, of satirists,
      skeptics, and <i>beaux esprits</i>, some chemical disorganization of
      fabric may be inferred. Take, for example, the century of Augustus, and
      that of Louis XV. Our cynics and railers are mere egotists, who stand
      aloof from the common duty, and in their indolent remoteness are of no
      service to society against any ill which may attack it. Their cultivation
      consists in having got rid of feeling. And thus they fall farther and
      farther away from true humanity, and approach nearer to the demoniacal
      nature. What was it that Mephistopheles lacked? Not intelligence
      certainly, but goodness.
    </p>
    <p>
      October 28, 1870.&mdash;It is strange to see how completely justice is
      forgotten in the presence of great international struggles. Even the great
      majority of the spectators are no longer capable of judging except as
      their own personal tastes, dislikes, fears, desires, interests, or
      passions may dictate&mdash;that is to say, their judgment is not a
      judgment at all. How many people are capable of delivering a fair verdict
      on the struggle now going on? Very few! This horror of equity, this
      antipathy to justice, this rage against a merciful neutrality, represents
      a kind of eruption of animal passion in man, a blind fierce passion, which
      is absurd enough to call itself a reason, whereas it is nothing but a
      force.
    </p>
    <p>
      November 16, 1870.&mdash;We are struck by something bewildering and
      ineffable when we look down into the depths of an abyss; and every soul is
      an abyss, a mystery of love and piety. A sort of sacred emotion descends
      upon me whenever I penetrate the recesses of this sanctuary of man, and
      hear the gentle murmur of the prayers, hymns, and supplications which rise
      from the hidden depths of the heart. These involuntary confidences fill me
      with a tender piety and a religious awe and shyness. The whole experience
      seems to me as wonderful as poetry, and divine with the divineness of
      birth and dawn. Speech fails me, I bow myself and adore. And, whenever I
      am able, I strive also to console and fortify.
    </p>
    <p>
      December 6, 1870.&mdash;&ldquo;Dauer im Wechsel&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;Persistence in change.&rdquo;
       This title of a poem by Goethe is the summing up of nature. Everything
      changes, but with such unequal rapidity that one existence appears eternal
      to another. A geological age, for instance, compared to the duration of
      any living being, the duration of a planet compared to a geological age,
      appear eternities&mdash;our life, too, compared to the thousand
      impressions which pass across us in an hour. Wherever one looks, one feels
      one&rsquo;s self overwhelmed by the infinity of infinites. The universe,
      seriously studied, rouses one&rsquo;s terror. Everything seems so relative that
      it is scarcely possible to distinguish whether anything has a real value.
    </p>
    <p>
      Where is the fixed point in this boundless and bottomless gulf? Must it
      not be that which perceives the relations of things&mdash;in other words,
      thought, infinite thought? The perception of ourselves within the infinite
      thought, the realization of ourselves in God, self-acceptance in him, the
      harmony of our will with his&mdash;in a word, religion&mdash;here alone is
      firm ground. Whether this thought be free or necessary, happiness lies in
      identifying one&rsquo;s self with it. Both the stoic and the Christian surrender
      themselves to the Being of beings, which the one calls sovereign wisdom
      and the other sovereign goodness. St. John says, &ldquo;God is Light,&rdquo; &ldquo;God is
      Love.&rdquo; The Brahmin says, &ldquo;God is the inexhaustible fount of poetry.&rdquo; Let
      us say, &ldquo;God is perfection.&rdquo; And man? Man, for all his inexpressible
      insignificance and frailty, may still apprehend the idea of perfection,
      may help forward the supreme will, and die with Hosanna on his lips!
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      All teaching depends upon a certain presentiment and preparation in the
      taught; we can only teach others profitably what they already virtually
      know; we can only give them what they had already. This principle of
      education is also a law of history. Nations can only be developed on the
      lines of their tendencies and aptitudes. Try them on any other and they
      are rebellious and incapable of improvement.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      By despising himself too much a man comes to be worthy of his own
      contempt.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Its way of suffering is the witness which a soul bears to itself.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      The beautiful is superior to the sublime because it lasts and does not
      satiate, while the sublime is relative, temporary and violent.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      February 4, 1871.&mdash;Perpetual effort is the characteristic of modern
      morality. A painful process has taken the place of the old harmony, the
      old equilibrium, the old joy and fullness of being. We are all so many
      fauns, satyrs, or Silenuses, aspiring to become angels; so many
      deformities laboring for our own embellishment; so many clumsy chrysalises
      each working painfully toward the development of the butterfly within him.
      Our ideal is no longer a serene beauty of soul; it is the agony of Laocoon
      struggling with the hydra of evil. The lot is cast irrevocably. There are
      no more happy whole-natured men among us, nothing but so many candidates
      for heaven, galley-slaves on earth.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Nous ramons notre vie en attendant le port.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      Molière said that reasoning banished reason. It is possible also that the
      progress toward perfection we are so proud of is only a pretentious
      imperfection. Duty seems now to be more negative than positive; it means
      lessening evil rather than actual good; it is a generous discontent, but
      not happiness; it is an incessant pursuit of an unattainable goal, a noble
      madness, but not reason; it is homesickness for the impossible&mdash;pathetic
      and pitiful, but still not wisdom.
    </p>
    <p>
      The being which has attained harmony, and every being may attain it, has
      found its place in the order of the universe, and represents the divine
      thought at least as clearly as a flower or a solar system. Harmony seeks
      nothing outside itself. It is what it ought to be; it is the expression of
      right, order, law, and truth; it is greater than time, and represents
      eternity.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 6,1871.&mdash;I am reading Juste Olivier&rsquo;s &ldquo;Chansons du Soir&rdquo;
       over again, and all the melancholy of the poet seems to pass into my
      veins. It is the revelation of a complete existence, and of a whole world
      of melancholy reverie.
    </p>
    <p>
      How much character there is in &ldquo;Musette,&rdquo; the &ldquo;Chanson de l&rsquo;Alouette,&rdquo; the
      &ldquo;Chant du Retour,&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Gaîté,&rdquo; and how much freshness in &ldquo;Lina,&rdquo; and
      &ldquo;A ma fille!&rdquo; But the best pieces of all are &ldquo;Au delà,&rdquo; &ldquo;Homunculus,&rdquo; &ldquo;La
      Trompeuse,&rdquo; and especially &ldquo;Frère Jacques,&rdquo; its author&rsquo;s masterpiece. To
      these may be added the &ldquo;Marionettes&rdquo; and the national song, &ldquo;Helvétie.&rdquo;
       Serious purpose and intention disguised in gentle gayety and childlike <i>badinage</i>,
      feeling hiding itself under a smile of satire, a resigned and pensive
      wisdom expressing itself in rustic round or ballad, the power of
      suggesting everything in a nothing&mdash;these are the points in which the
      Vaudois poet triumphs. On the reader&rsquo;s side there is emotion and surprise,
      and on the author&rsquo;s a sort of pleasant slyness which seems to delight in
      playing tricks upon you, only tricks of the most dainty and brilliant
      kind. Juste Olivier has the passion we might imagine a fairy to have for
      delicate mystification. He hides his gifts. He promises nothing and gives
      a great deal. His generosity, which is prodigal, has a surly air; his
      simplicity is really subtlety; his malice pure tenderness; and his whole
      talent is, as it were, the fine flower of the Vaudois mind in its sweetest
      and dreamiest form.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 10, 1871.&mdash;My reading for this morning has been some
      vigorous chapters of Taine&rsquo;s &ldquo;History of English Literature.&rdquo; Taine is a
      writer whose work always produces a disagreeable impression upon me, as
      though of a creaking of pulleys and a clicking of machinery; there is a
      smell of the laboratory about it. His style is the style of chemistry and
      technology. The science of it is inexorable; it is dry and forcible,
      penetrating and hard, strong and harsh, but altogether lacking in charm,
      humanity, nobility, and grace. The disagreeable effect which it makes on
      one&rsquo;s taste, ear, and heart, depends probably upon two things: upon the
      moral philosophy of the author and upon his literary principles. The
      profound contempt for humanity which characterizes the physiological
      school, and the intrusion of technology into literature inaugurated by
      Balzac and Stendhal, explain the underlying aridity of which one is
      sensible in these pages, and which seems to choke one like the gases from
      a manufactory of mineral products. The book is instructive in the highest
      degree, but instead of animating and stirring, it parches, corrodes, and
      saddens its reader. It excites no feeling whatever; it is simply a means
      of information. I imagine this kind of thing will be the literature of the
      future&mdash;a literature <i>à l&rsquo;Américaine</i>, as different as possible
      from Greek art, giving us algebra instead of life, the formula instead of
      the image, the exhalations of the crucible instead of the divine madness
      of Apollo. Cold vision will replace the joys of thought, and we shall see
      the death of poetry, flayed and dissected by science.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 15, 1871.&mdash;Without intending it, nations educate each other,
      while having apparently nothing in view but their own selfish interests.
      It was France who made the Germany of the present, by attempting its
      destruction during ten generations; it is Germany who will regenerate
      contemporary France, by the effort to crush her. Revolutionary France will
      teach equality to the Germans, who are by nature hierarchical. Germany
      will teach the French that rhetoric is not science, and that appearance is
      not as valuable as reality. The worship of prestige&mdash;that is to say,
      of falsehood; the passion for vainglory&mdash;that is to say, for smoke
      and noise; these are what must die in the interests of the world. It is a
      false religion which is being destroyed. I hope sincerely that this war
      will issue in a new balance of things better than any which has gone
      before&mdash;a new Europe, in which the government of the individual by
      himself will be the cardinal principle of society, in opposition to the
      Latin principle, which regards the individual as a thing, a means to an
      end, an instrument of the church or of the state.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the order and harmony which would result from free adhesion and
      voluntary submission to a common ideal, we should see the rise of a new
      moral world. It would be an equivalent, expressed in lay terms, to the
      idea of a universal priesthood. The model state ought to resemble a great
      musical society in which every one submits to be organized, subordinated,
      and disciplined for the sake of art, and for the sake of producing a
      masterpiece. Nobody is coerced, nobody is made use of for selfish
      purposes, nobody plays a hypocritical or selfish part. All bring their
      talent to the common stock, and contribute knowingly and gladly to the
      common wealth. Even self-love itself is obliged to help on the general
      action, under pain of rebuff should it make itself apparent.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 18, 1871.&mdash;It is in the novel that the average vulgarity of
      German society, and its inferiority to the societies of France and
      England, are most clearly visible. The notion of &ldquo;bad taste&rdquo; seems to have
      no place in German aesthetics. Their elegance has no grace in it; and they
      cannot understand the enormous difference there is between distinction
      (what is <i>gentlemanly</i>, <i>ladylike</i>), and their stiff <i>vornehmlichkeit</i>.
      Their imagination lacks style, training, education, and knowledge of the
      world; it has an ill-bred air even in its Sunday dress. The race is
      poetical and intelligent, but common and ill-mannered. Pliancy and
      gentleness, manners, wit, vivacity, taste, dignity, and charm, are
      qualities which belong to others.
    </p>
    <p>
      Will that inner freedom of soul, that profound harmony of all the
      faculties which I have so often observed among the best Germans, ever come
      to the surface? Will the conquerors of to-day ever learn to civilize and
      soften their forms of life? It is by their future novels that we shall be
      able to judge. As soon as they are capable of the novel of &ldquo;good society&rdquo;
       they will have excelled all rivals. Till then, finish, polish, the
      maturity of social culture, are beyond them; they may have humanity of
      feeling, but the delicacies, the little perfections of life, are unknown
      to them. They may be honest and well-meaning, but they are utterly without
      <i>savoir vivre</i>.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 22, 1871.&mdash;<i>Soirée</i> at the M&mdash;. About thirty
      people representing our best society were there, a happy mixture of sexes
      and ages. There were gray heads, young girls, bright faces&mdash;the whole
      framed in some Aubusson tapestries which made a charming background, and
      gave a soft air of distance to the brilliantly-dressed groups.
    </p>
    <p>
      In society people are expected to behave as if they lived on ambrosia and
      concerned themselves with nothing but the loftiest interests. Anxiety,
      need, passion, have no existence. All realism is suppressed as brutal. In
      a word, what we call &ldquo;society&rdquo; proceeds for the moment on the flattering
      illusory assumption that it is moving in an ethereal atmosphere and
      breathing the air of the gods. All vehemence, all natural expression, all
      real suffering, all careless familiarity, or any frank sign of passion,
      are startling and distasteful in this delicate <i>milieu</i>; they at once
      destroy the common work, the cloud palace, the magical architectural
      whole, which has been raised by the general consent and effort. It is like
      the sharp cock-crow which breaks the spell of all enchantments, and puts
      the fairies to flight. These select gatherings produce, without knowing
      it, a sort of concert for eyes and ears, an improvised work of art. By the
      instinctive collaboration of everybody concerned, intellect and taste hold
      festival, and the associations of reality are exchanged for the
      associations of imagination. So understood, society is a form of poetry;
      the cultivated classes deliberately recompose the idyll of the past and
      the buried world of Astrea. Paradox or no, I believe that these fugitive
      attempts to reconstruct a dream whose only end is beauty represent
      confused reminiscences of an age of gold haunting the human heart, or
      rather aspirations toward a harmony of things which every day reality
      denies to us, and of which art alone gives us a glimpse.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 28, 1871.&mdash;For a psychologist it is extremely interesting to be
      readily and directly conscious of the complications of one&rsquo;s own organism
      and the play of its several parts. It seems to me that the sutures of my
      being are becoming just loose enough to allow me at once a clear
      perception of myself as a whole and a distinct sense of my own
      brittleness. A feeling like this makes personal existence a perpetual
      astonishment and curiosity. Instead of only seeing the world which
      surrounds me, I analyze myself. Instead of being single, all of a piece, I
      become legion, multitude, a whirlwind&mdash;a very cosmos. Instead of
      living on the surface, I take possession of my inmost self, I apprehend
      myself, if not in my cells and atoms, at least so far as my groups of
      organs, almost my tissues, are concerned. In other words, the central
      monad isolates itself from all the subordinate monads, that it may
      consider them, and finds its harmony again in itself.
    </p>
    <p>
      Health is the perfect balance between our organism, with all its component
      parts, and the outer world; it serves us especially for acquiring a
      knowledge of that world. Organic disturbance obliges us to set up a fresh
      and more spiritual equilibrium, to withdraw within the soul. Thereupon our
      bodily constitution itself becomes the object of thought. It is no longer
      we, although it may belong to us; it is nothing more than the vessel in
      which we make the passage of life, a vessel of which we study the weak
      points and the structure without identifying it with our own
      individuality.
    </p>
    <p>
      Where is the ultimate residence of the self? In thought, or rather in
      consciousness. But below consciousness there is its germ, the <i>punctum
      saliens</i> of spontaneity; for consciousness is not primitive, it <i>becomes</i>.
      The question is, can the thinking monad return into its envelope, that is
      to say, into pure spontaneity, or even into the dark abyss of virtuality?
      I hope not. The kingdom passes; the king remains; or rather is it the
      royalty alone which subsists&mdash;that is to say, the idea&mdash;the
      personality begin in its turn merely the passing vesture of the permanent
      idea? Is Leibnitz or Hegel right? Is the individual immortal under the
      form of the spiritual body? Is he eternal under the form of the individual
      idea? Who saw most clearly, St. Paul or Plato? The theory of Leibnitz
      attracts me most because it opens to us an infinite of duration, of
      multitude, and evolution. For a monad, which is the virtual universe, a
      whole infinite of time is not too much to develop the infinite within it.
      Only one must admit exterior actions and influences which affect the
      evolution of the monad. Its independence must be a mobile and increasing
      quantity between zero and the infinite, without ever reaching either
      completeness or nullity, for the monad can be neither absolutely passive
      nor entirely free.
    </p>
    <p>
      June 21, 1871.&mdash;The international socialism of the <i>ouvriers</i>,
      ineffectually put down in Paris, is beginning to celebrate its approaching
      victory. For it there is neither country, nor memories, nor property, nor
      religion. There is nothing and nobody but itself. Its dogma is equality,
      its prophet is Mably, and Baboeuf is its god.
    </p>
    <p>
      [Footnote: Mably, the Abbé Mably, 1709-85, one of the precursors of the
      revolution, the professor of a cultivated and classical communism based on
      a study of antiquity, which Babeuf and others like him, in the following
      generation, translated into practical experiment. &ldquo;Caius Gracchus&rdquo; Babeuf,
      born 1764, and guillotined in 1797 for a conspiracy against the Directory,
      is sometimes called the first French socialist. Perhaps socialist
      doctrines, properly so called, may be said to make their first entry into
      the region of popular debate and practical agitation with his &ldquo;Manifeste
      des Égaux,&rdquo; issued April 1796.]
    </p>
    <p>
      How is the conflict to be solved, since there is no longer one single
      common principle between the partisans and the enemies of the existing
      form of society, between liberalism and the worship of equality? Their
      respective notions of man, duty, happiness&mdash;that is to say, of life
      and its end&mdash;differ radically. I suspect that the communism of the <i>Internationale</i>
      is merely the pioneer of Russian nihilism, which will be the common grave
      of the old races and the servile races, the Latins and the Slavs. If so,
      the salvation of humanity will depend upon individualism of the brutal
      American sort. I believe that the nations of the present are rather
      tempting chastisement than learning wisdom. Wisdom, which means balance
      and harmony, is only met within individuals. Democracy, which means the
      rule of the masses, gives preponderance to instinct, to nature, to the
      passions&mdash;that is to say, to blind impulse, to elemental gravitation,
      to generic fatality. Perpetual vacillation between contraries becomes its
      only mode of progress, because it represents that childish form of
      prejudice which falls in love and cools, adores, and curses, with the same
      haste and unreason. A succession of opposing follies gives an impression
      of change which the people readily identify with improvement, as though
      Enceladus was more at ease on his left side than on his right, the weight
      of the volcano remaining the same. The stupidity of Demos is only equaled
      by its presumption. It is like a youth with all his animal and none of his
      reasoning powers developed.
    </p>
    <p>
      Luther&rsquo;s comparison of humanity to a drunken peasant, always ready to fall
      from his horse on one side or the other, has always struck me as a
      particularly happy one. It is not that I deny the right of the democracy,
      but I have no sort of illusion as to the use it will make of its right, so
      long, at any rate, as wisdom is the exception and conceit the rule.
      Numbers make law, but goodness has nothing to do with figures. Every
      fiction is self-expiating, and democracy rests upon this legal fiction,
      that the majority has not only force but reason on its side&mdash;that it
      possesses not only the right to act but the wisdom necessary for action.
      The fiction is dangerous because of its flattery; the demagogues have
      always flattered the private feelings of the masses. The masses will
      always be below the average. Besides, the age of majority will be lowered,
      the barriers of sex will be swept away, and democracy will finally make
      itself absurd by handing over the decision of all that is greatest to all
      that is most incapable. Such an end will be the punishment of its abstract
      principle of equality, which dispenses the ignorant man from the necessity
      of self-training, the foolish man from that of self-judgment, and tells
      the child that there is no need for him to become a man, and the
      good-for-nothing that self-improvement is of no account. Public law,
      founded upon virtual equality, will destroy itself by its consequences. It
      will not recognize the inequalities of worth, of merit, and of experience;
      in a word, it ignores individual labor, and it will end in the triumph of
      platitude and the residuum. The <i>régime</i> of the Parisian Commune has
      shown us what kind of material comes to the top in these days of frantic
      vanity and universal suspicion.
    </p>
    <p>
      Still, humanity is tough, and survives all catastrophes. Only it makes one
      impatient to see the race always taking the longest road to an end, and
      exhausting all possible faults before it is able to accomplish one
      definite step toward improvement. These innumerable follies, that are to
      be and must be, have an irritating effect upon me. The more majestic is
      the history of science, the more intolerable is the history of politics
      and religion. The mode of progress in the moral world seems an abuse of
      the patience of God.
    </p>
    <p>
      Enough! There is no help in misanthropy and pessimism. If our race vexes
      us, let us keep a decent silence on the matter. We are imprisoned on the
      same ship, and we shall sink with it. Pay your own debt, and leave the
      rest to God. Sharer, as you inevitably are, in the sufferings of your
      kind, set a good example; that is all which is asked of you. Do all the
      good you can, and say all the truth you know or believe; and for the rest
      be patient, resigned, submissive. God does his business, do yours.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 29, 1871.&mdash;So long as a man is capable of self-renewal he is a
      living being. Goethe, Schleiermacher and Humboldt, were masters of the
      art. If we are to remain among the living there must be a perpetual
      revival of youth within us, brought about by inward change and by love of
      the Platonic sort. The soul must be forever recreating itself, trying all
      its various modes, vibrating in all its fibres, raising up new interests
      for itself....
    </p>
    <p>
      The &ldquo;Epistles&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Epigrams&rdquo; of Goethe which I have been reading
      to-day do not make one love him. Why? Because he has so little soul. His
      way of understanding love, religion, duty, and patriotism has something
      mean and repulsive in it. There is no ardor, no generosity in him. A
      secret barrenness, an ill-concealed egotism, makes itself felt through all
      the wealth and flexibility of his talent. It is true that the egotism of
      Goethe has at least this much that is excellent in it, that it respects
      the liberty of the individual, and is favorable to all originality. But it
      will go out of its way to help nobody; it will give itself no trouble for
      anybody; it will lighten nobody else&rsquo;s burden; in a word, it does away
      with charity, the great Christian virtue. Perfection for Goethe consists
      in personal nobility, not in love; his standard is aesthetic, not moral.
      He ignores holiness, and has never allowed himself to reflect on the dark
      problem of evil. A Spinozist to the core, he believes in individual luck,
      not in liberty, nor in responsibility. He is a Greek of the great time, to
      whom the inward crises of the religious consciousness are unknown. He
      represents, then, a state of soul earlier than or subsequent to
      Christianity, what the prudent critics of our time call the &ldquo;modern
      spirit;&rdquo; and only one tendency of the modern spirit&mdash;the worship of
      nature. For Goethe stands outside all the social and political aspirations
      of the generality of mankind; he takes no more interest than Nature
      herself in the disinherited, the feeble, and the oppressed....
    </p>
    <p>
      The restlessness of our time does not exist for Goethe and his school. It
      is explicable enough. The deaf have no sense of dissonance. The man who
      knows nothing of the voice of conscience, the voice of regret or remorse,
      cannot even guess at the troubles of those who live under two masters and
      two laws, and belong to two worlds&mdash;that of nature and that of
      liberty. For himself, his choice is made. But humanity cannot choose and
      exclude. All needs are vocal at once in the cry of her suffering. She
      hears the men of science, but she listens to those who talk to her of
      religion; pleasure attracts her, but sacrifice moves her; and she hardly
      knows whether she hates or whether she adores the crucifix.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Later</i>.&mdash;Still re-reading the sonnets and the miscellaneous
      poems of Goethe. The impression left by this part of the &ldquo;Gedichte&rdquo; is
      much more favorable than that made upon me by the &ldquo;Elegies&rdquo; and the
      &ldquo;Epigrams.&rdquo; The &ldquo;Water Spirits&rdquo; and &ldquo;The Divine&rdquo; are especially noble in
      feeling. One must never be too hasty in judging these complex natures.
      Completely lacking as he is in the sense of obligation and of sin, Goethe
      nevertheless finds his way to seriousness through dignity. Greek sculpture
      has been his school of virtue.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 15, 1871.&mdash;Re-read, for the second time, Renan&rsquo;s &ldquo;Vie de
      Jesus,&rdquo; in the sixteenth popular edition. The most characteristic feature
      of this analysis of Christianity is that sin plays no part at all in it.
      Now, if anything explains the success of the gospel among men, it is that
      it brought them deliverance from sin&mdash;in a word, salvation. A man,
      however, is bound to explain a religion seriously, and not to shirk the
      very center of his subject. This white-marble Christ is not the Christ who
      inspired the martyrs and has dried so many tears. The author lacks moral
      seriousness, and confounds nobility of character with holiness. He speaks
      as an artist conscious of a pathetic subject, but his moral sense is not
      interested in the question. It is not possible to mistake the epicureanism
      of the imagination, delighting itself in an aesthetic spectacle, for the
      struggles of a soul passionately in search of truth. In Renan there are
      still some remains of priestly <i>ruse</i>; he strangles with sacred
      cords. His tone of contemptuous indulgence toward a more or less captious
      clergy might be tolerated, but he should have shown a more respectful
      sincerity in dealing with the sincere and the spiritual. Laugh at
      Pharisaism as you will, but speak simply and plainly to honest folk.
      [Footnote: &ldquo;&lsquo;Persifflez les pharisaïsmes, mais parlez droit aux honnêtes
      gens&rsquo; me dit Amiel, avec une certaine aigreur. Mon Dieu, que les honnêtes
      gens sont souvent exposés à être des pharisiens sans le savoir!&rdquo;&mdash;(M.
      Renan&rsquo;s article, already quoted).]
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Later</i>.&mdash;To understand is to be conscious of the fundamental
      unity of the thing to be explained&mdash;that is to say, to conceive it in
      its entirety both of life and development, to be able to remake it by a
      mental process without making a mistake, without adding or omitting
      anything. It means, first, complete identification of the object, and then
      the power of making it clear to others by a full and just interpretation.
      To understand is more difficult than to judge, for understanding is the
      transference of the mind into the conditions of the object, whereas
      judgment is simply the enunciation of the individual opinion.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 25, 1871. (<i>Charnex-sur-Montreux</i>).&mdash;Magnificent weather.
      The morning seems bathed in happy peace, and a heavenly fragrance rises
      from mountain and shore; it is as though a benediction were laid upon us.
      No vulgar intrusive noise disturbs the religious quiet of the scene. One
      might believe one&rsquo;s self in a church&mdash;a vast temple in which every
      being and every natural beauty has its place. I dare not breathe for fear
      of putting the dream to flight&mdash;a dream traversed by angels.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Comme autrefois j&rsquo;entends dans l&rsquo;éther infini
  La musique du temps et l&rsquo;hosanna des mondes.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      In these heavenly moments the cry of Pauline rises to one&rsquo;s lips.
      [Footnote: &ldquo;Polyeuete,&rdquo; Act. V. Scene v.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Mon époux en mourant m&rsquo;a laissé ses lumiéres;
  Son sang dont tes bourreaux viennent de me couvrir
  M&rsquo;a dessillé les yeux et me les vient d&rsquo;ouvrir.
  Je vois, je sais, je crois&mdash;&mdash;&ldquo;]
</pre>
    <p>
      &ldquo;I feel! I believe! I see!&rdquo; All the miseries, the cares, the vexations of
      life, are forgotten; the universal joy absorbs us; we enter into the
      divine order, and into the blessedness of the Lord. Labor and tears, sin,
      pain, and death have passed away. To exist is to bless; life is happiness.
      In this sublime pause of things all dissonances have disappeared. It is as
      though creation were but one vast symphony, glorifying the God of goodness
      with an inexhaustible wealth of praise and harmony. We question no longer
      whether it is so or not. We have ourselves become notes in the great
      concert; and the soul breaks the silence of ecstasy only to vibrate in
      unison with the eternal joy.
    </p>
    <p>
      September 22, 1871. (<i>Charnex</i>).&mdash;Gray sky&mdash;a melancholy
      day. A friend has left me, the sun is unkind and capricious. Everything
      passes away, everything forsakes us. And in place of all we have lost, age
      and gray hairs! ... After dinner I walked to Chailly between two showers.
      A rainy landscape has a great charm for me; the dark tints become more
      velvety, the softer tones more ethereal. The country in rain is like a
      face with traces of tears upon it&mdash;less beautiful no doubt, but more
      expressive.
    </p>
    <p>
      Behind the beauty which is superficial, gladsome, radiant, and palpable,
      the aesthetic sense discovers another order of beauty altogether, hidden,
      veiled, secret and mysterious, akin to moral beauty. This sort of beauty
      only reveals itself to the initiated, and is all the more exquisite for
      that. It is a little like the refined joy of sacrifice, like the madness
      of faith, like the luxury of grief; it is not within the reach of all the
      world. Its attraction is peculiar, and affects one like some strange
      perfume, or bizarre melody. When once the taste for it is set up the mind
      takes a special and keen delight in it, for one finds in it
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Son bien premièrement, puis le dédain d&rsquo;autrui,&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      and it is pleasant to one&rsquo;s vanity not to be of the same opinion as the
      common herd. This, however, is not possible with things which are evident,
      and beauty which is incontestable. Charm, perhaps, is a better name for
      the esoteric and paradoxical beauty, which escapes the vulgar, and appeals
      to our dreamy, meditative side. Classical beauty belongs, so to speak, to
      all eyes; it has ceased to belong to itself. Esoteric beauty is shy and
      retiring. It only unveils itself to unsealed eyes, and bestows its favors
      only upon love.
    </p>
    <p>
      This is why my friend &mdash;&mdash;, who places herself immediately in
      relation with the souls of those she meets, does not see the ugliness of
      people when once she is interested in them. She likes and dislikes, and
      those she likes are beautiful, those she dislikes are ugly. There is
      nothing more complicated in it than that. For her, aesthetic
      considerations are lost in moral sympathy; she looks with her heart only;
      she passes by the chapter of the beautiful, and goes on to the chapter of
      charm. I can do the same; only it is by reflection and on second thoughts;
      my friend does it involuntarily and at once; she has not the artistic
      fiber. The craving for a perfect correspondence between the inside and the
      outside of things&mdash;between matter and form&mdash;is not in her
      nature. She does not suffer from ugliness, she scarcely perceives it. As
      for me, I can only forget what shocks me, I cannot help being shocked. All
      corporal defects irritate me, and the want of beauty in women, being
      something which ought not to exist, shocks me like a tear, a solecism, a
      dissonance, a spot of ink&mdash;in a word, like something out of order. On
      the other hand, beauty restores and fortifies me like some miraculous
      food, like Olympian ambrosia.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
 &ldquo;Que le bon soit toujours camarade du beau
  Dès demain je chercherai femme.
  Mais comme le divorce entre eux n&rsquo;est pas nouveau,
  Et que peu de beaux corps, hôtes d&rsquo;une belle âme,
  Assemblent l&rsquo;un et l&rsquo;autre point&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      I will not finish, for after all one must resign one&rsquo;s self, A beautiful
      soul in a healthy body is already a rare and blessed thing; and if one
      finds heart, common sense, intellect, and courage into the bargain, one
      may well do without that ravishing dainty which we call beauty, and almost
      without that delicious seasoning which we call grace. We do without&mdash;with
      a sigh, as one does without a luxury. Happy we, to possess what is
      necessary.
    </p>
    <p>
      December 29, 1871.&mdash;I have been reading Bahnsen (&ldquo;Critique de
      l&rsquo;évolutionisme de Hegel-Hartmann, au nom des principes de Schopenhauer&rdquo;).
      What a writer! Like a cuttle-fish in water, every movement produces a
      cloud of ink which shrouds his thought in darkness. And what a doctrine! A
      thoroughgoing pessimism, which regards the world as absurd, &ldquo;absolutely
      idiotic,&rdquo; and reproaches Hartmann for having allowed the evolution of the
      universe some little remains of logic, while, on the contrary, this
      evolution is eminently contradictory, and there is no reason anywhere
      except in the poor brain of the reasoner. Of all possible worlds that
      which exists is the worst. Its only excuse is that it tends of itself to
      destruction. The hope of the philosopher is that reasonable beings will
      shorten their agony and hasten the return of everything to nothing. It is
      the philosophy of a desperate Satanism, which has not even the resigned
      perspectives of Buddhism to offer to the disappointed and disillusioned
      soul. The individual can but protest and curse. This frantic Sivaism is
      developed from the conception which makes the world the product of blind
      will, the principle of everything.
    </p>
    <p>
      The acrid blasphemy of the doctrine naturally leads the writer to
      indulgence in epithets of bad taste which prevent our regarding his work
      as the mere challenge of a paradoxical theorist. We have really to do with
      a theophobist, whom faith in goodness rouses to a fury of contempt. In
      order to hasten the deliverance of the world, he kills all consolation,
      all hope, and all illusion in the germ, and substitutes for the love of
      humanity which inspired Çakyamouni, that Mephistophelian gall which
      defiles, withers, and corrodes everything it touches.
    </p>
    <p>
      Evolutionism, fatalism, pessimism, nihilism&mdash;how strange it is to see
      this desolate and terrible doctrine growing and expanding at the very
      moment when the German nation is celebrating its greatness and its
      triumphs! The contrast is so startling that it sets one thinking.
    </p>
    <p>
      This orgie of philosophic thought, identifying error with existence
      itself, and developing the axiom of Proudhon&mdash;&ldquo;Evil is God,&rdquo; will
      bring back the mass of mankind to the Christian theodicy, which is neither
      optimist nor pessimist, but simply declares that the felicity which
      Christianity calls eternal life is accessible to man.
    </p>
    <p>
      Self-mockery, starting from a horror of stupidity and hypocrisy, and
      standing in the way of all wholeness of mind and all true seriousness&mdash;this
      is the goal to which intellect brings us at last, unless conscience cries
      out.
    </p>
    <p>
      The mind must have for ballast the clear conception of duty, if it is not
      to fluctuate between levity and despair.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Before giving advice we must have secured its acceptance, or rather, have
      made it desired.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      If we begin by overrating the being we love, we shall end by treating it
      with wholesale injustice.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      It is dangerous to abandon one&rsquo;s self to the luxury of grief; it deprives
      one of courage, and even of the wish for recovery.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      We learn to recognize a mere blunting of the conscience in that incapacity
      for indignation which is not to be confounded with the gentleness of
      charity, or the reserve of humility.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 7, 1872.&mdash;Without faith a man can do nothing.
    </p>
    <p>
      But faith can stifle all science.
    </p>
    <p>
      What, then, is this Proteus, and whence?
    </p>
    <p>
      Faith is a certitude without proofs. Being a certitude, it is an energetic
      principle of action. Being without proof, it is the contrary of science.
      Hence its two aspects and its two effects. Is its point of departure
      intelligence? No. Thought may shake or strengthen faith; it cannot produce
      it. Is its origin in the will? No; good will may favor it, ill-will may
      hinder it, but no one believes by will, and faith is not a duty. Faith is
      a sentiment, for it is a hope; it is an instinct, for it precedes all
      outward instruction. Faith is the heritage of the individual at birth; it
      is that which binds him to the whole of being. The individual only
      detaches himself with difficulty from the maternal breast; he only
      isolates himself by an effort from the nature around him, from the love
      which enwraps him, the ideas in which he floats, the cradle in which he
      lies. He is born in union with humanity, with the world, and with God. The
      trace of this original union is faith. Faith is the reminiscence of that
      vague Eden whence our individuality issued, but which it inhabited in the
      somnambulist state anterior to the personal life.
    </p>
    <p>
      Our individual life consists in separating ourselves from our <i>milieu</i>;
      in so reacting upon it that we apprehend it consciously, and make
      ourselves spiritual personalities&mdash;that is to say, intelligent and
      free. Our primitive faith is nothing more than the neutral matter which
      our experience of life and things works up a fresh, and which may be so
      affected by our studies of every kind as to perish completely in its
      original form. We ourselves may die before we have been able to recover
      the harmony of a personal faith which may satisfy our mind and conscience
      as well as our hearts. But the need of faith never leaves us. It is the
      postulate of a higher truth which is to bring all things into harmony. It
      is the stimulus of research; it holds out to us the reward, it points us
      to the goal. Such at least is the true, the excellent faith. That which is
      a mere prejudice of childhood, which has never known doubt, which ignores
      science, which cannot respect or understand or tolerate different
      convictions&mdash;such a faith is a stupidity and a hatred, the mother of
      all fanaticisms. We may then repeat of faith what Aesop said of the tongue&mdash;
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Quid medius linguâ, linguâ quid pejus eadem?&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      To draw the poison-fangs of faith in ourselves, we must subordinate it to
      the love of truth. The supreme worship of the true is the only means of
      purification for all religions all confessions, all sects. Faith should
      only be allowed the second place, for faith has a judge&mdash;in truth.
      When she exalts herself to the position of supreme judge the world is
      enslaved: Christianity, from the fourth to the seventeenth century, is the
      proof of it... Will the enlightened faith ever conquer the vulgar faith?
      We must look forward in trust to a better future.
    </p>
    <p>
      The difficulty, however, is this. A narrow faith has much more energy than
      an enlightened faith; the world belongs to will much more than to wisdom.
      It is not then certain that liberty will triumph over fanaticism; and
      besides, independent thought will never have the force of prejudice. The
      solution is to be found in a division of labor. After those whose business
      it will have been to hold up to the world the ideal of a pure and free
      faith, will come the men of violence, who will bring the new creed within
      the circle of recognized interests, prejudices, and institutions. Is not
      this just what happened to Christianity? After the gentle Master, the
      impetuous Paul and the bitter Councils. It is true that this is what
      corrupted the gospel. But still Christianity has done more good than harm
      to humanity, and so the world advances, by the successive decay of
      gradually improved ideals.
    </p>
    <p>
      June 19, 1872.&mdash;The wrangle in the Paris Synod still goes on.
      [Footnote: A synod of the Reformed churches of France was then occupied in
      determining the constituent conditions of Protestant belief.] The
      supernatural is the stone of stumbling.
    </p>
    <p>
      It might be possible to agree on the idea of the divine; but no, that is
      not the question&mdash;the chaff must be separated from the good grain.
      The supernatural is miracle, and miracle is an objective phenomenon
      independent of all preceding casuality. Now, miracle thus understood
      cannot be proved experimentally; and besides, the subjective phenomena,
      far more important than all the rest, are left out of account in the
      definition. Men will not see that miracle is a perception of the soul; a
      vision of the divine behind nature; a psychical crisis, analogous to that
      of Aeneas on the last day of Troy, which reveals to us the heavenly powers
      prompting and directing human action. For the indifferent there are no
      miracles. It is only the religious souls who are capable of recognizing
      the finger of God in certain given facts.
    </p>
    <p>
      The minds which have reached the doctrine of immanence are
      incomprehensible to the fanatics of transcendence. They will never
      understand&mdash;these last&mdash;that the <i>panentheism</i> of Krause is
      ten times more religious than their dogmatic supernaturalism. Their
      passion for the facts which are objective, isolated, and past, prevents
      them from seeing the facts which are eternal and spiritual. They can only
      adore what comes to them from without. As soon as their dramaturgy is
      interpreted symbolically all seems to them lost. They must have their
      local prodigies&mdash;their vanished unverifiable miracles, because for
      them the divine is there and only there.
    </p>
    <p>
      This faith can hardly fail to conquer among the races pledged to the
      Cartesian dualism, who call the incomprehensible clear, and abhor what is
      profound. Women also will always find local miracle more easy to
      understand than universal miracle, and the visible objective intervention
      of God more probable than his psychological and inward action. The Latin
      world by its mental form is doomed to petrify its abstractions, and to
      remain forever outside the inmost sanctuary of life, that central hearth
      where ideas are still undivided, without shape or determination. The Latin
      mind makes everything objective, because it remains outside things, and
      outside itself. It is like the eye which only perceives what is exterior
      to it, and which cannot see itself except artificially, and from a
      distance, by means of the reflecting surface of a mirror.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 30, 1872.&mdash;<i>A priori</i> speculations weary me now as much
      as anybody. All the different scholasticisms make me doubtful of what they
      profess to demonstrate, because, instead of examining, they affirm from
      the beginning. Their object is to throw up entrenchments around a
      prejudice, and not to discover the truth. They accumulate that which
      darkens rather than that which enlightens. They are descended, all of
      them, from the Catholic procedure, which excludes comparison, information,
      and previous examination. Their object is to trick men into assent, to
      furnish faith with arguments, and to suppress free inquiry. But to
      persuade me, a man must have no <i>parti pris</i>, and must begin with
      showing a temper of critical sincerity; he must explain to me how the
      matter lies, point out to me the questions involved in it, their origin,
      their difficulties, the different solutions attempted, and their degree of
      probability. He must respect my reason, my conscience, and my liberty. All
      scholasticism is an attempt to take by storm; the authority pretends to
      explain itself, but only pretends, and its deference is merely illusory.
      The dice are loaded and the premises are pre-judged. The unknown is taken
      as known, and all the rest is deduced from it.
    </p>
    <p>
      Philosophy means the complete liberty of the mind, and therefore
      independence of all social, political, or religious prejudice. It is to
      begin with neither Christian nor pagan, neither monarchical nor
      democratic, neither socialist nor individualist; it is critical and
      impartial; it loves one thing only&mdash;truth. If it disturbs the
      ready-made opinions of the church or the state&mdash;of the historical
      medium&mdash;in which the philosopher happens to have been born, so much
      the worse, but there is no help for it.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Est ut est aut non est,&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      Philosophy means, first, doubt; and afterward the consciousness of what
      knowledge means, the consciousness of uncertainty and of ignorance, the
      consciousness of limit, shade, degree, possibility. The ordinary man
      doubts nothing and suspects nothing. The philosopher is more cautious, but
      he is thereby unfitted for action, because, although he sees the goal less
      dimly than others, he sees his own weakness too clearly, and has no
      illusions as to his chances of reaching it.
    </p>
    <p>
      The philosopher is like a man fasting in the midst of universal
      intoxication. He alone perceives the illusion of which all creatures are
      the willing playthings; he is less duped than his neighbor by his own
      nature. He judges more sanely, he sees things as they are. It is in this
      that his liberty consists&mdash;in the ability to see clearly and soberly,
      in the power of mental record. Philosophy has for its foundation critical
      lucidity. The end and climax of it would be the intuition of the universal
      law, of the first principle and the final aim of the universe. Not to be
      deceived is its first desire; to understand, its second. Emancipation from
      error is the condition of real knowledge. The philosopher is a skeptic
      seeking a plausible hypothesis, which may explain to him the whole of his
      experiences. When he imagines that he has found such a key to life he
      offers it to, but does not force it on his fellow men.
    </p>
    <p>
      October 9, 1872.&mdash;I have been taking tea at the M&rsquo;s. These English
      homes are very attractive. They are the recompense and the result of a
      long-lived civilization, and of an ideal untiringly pursued. What ideal?
      That of a moral order, founded on respect for self and for others, and on
      reverence for duty&mdash;in a word, upon personal worth and dignity. The
      master shows consideration to his guests, the children are deferential to
      their parents, and every one and everything has its place. They understand
      both how to command and how to obey. The little world is well governed,
      and seems to go of itself; duty is the <i>genius loci</i>&mdash;but duty
      tinged with a reserve and self-control which is the English
      characteristic. The children are the great test of this domestic system;
      they are happy, smiling, trustful, and yet no trouble. One feels that they
      know themselves to be loved, but that they know also that they must obey.
      <i>Our</i> children behave like masters of the house, and when any
      definite order comes to limit their encroachments they see in it an abuse
      of power, an arbitrary act. Why? Because it is their principle to believe
      that everything turns round them. Our children may be gentle and
      affectionate, but they are not grateful, and they know nothing of
      self-control.
    </p>
    <p>
      How do English mothers attain this result? By a rule which is impersonal,
      invariable, and firm; in other words, by law, which forms man for liberty,
      while arbitrary decree only leads to rebellion and attempts at
      emancipation. This method has the immense advantage of forming characters
      which are restive under arbitrary authority, and yet amenable to justice,
      conscious of what is due to them and what they owe to others, watchful
      over conscience, and practiced in self-government. In every English child
      one feels something of the national motto&mdash;&ldquo;God and my right,&rdquo; and in
      every English household one has a sense that the home is a citadel, or
      better still, a ship in which every one has his place. Naturally in such a
      world the value set on family life corresponds with the cost of producing
      it; it is sweet to those whose efforts maintain it.
    </p>
    <p>
      October 14, 1872.&mdash;The man who gives himself to contemplation looks
      on at, rather than directs his life, is rather a spectator than an actor,
      seeks rather to understand than to achieve. Is this mode of existence
      illegitimate, immoral? Is one bound to act? Is such detachment an
      idiosyncrasy to be respected or a sin to be fought against? I have always
      hesitated on this point, and I have wasted years in futile self-reproach
      and useless fits of activity. My western conscience, penetrated as it is
      with Christian morality, has always persecuted my oriental quietism and
      Buddhist tendencies. I have not dared to approve myself, I have not known
      how to correct myself. In this, as in all else, I have remained divided,
      and perplexed, wavering between two extremes. So equilibrium is somehow
      preserved, but the crystallization of action or thought becomes
      impossible.
    </p>
    <p>
      Having early a glimpse of the absolute, I have never had the indiscreet
      effrontery of individualism. What right have I to make a merit of a
      defect? I have never been able to see any necessity for imposing myself
      upon others, nor for succeeding. I have seen nothing clearly except my own
      deficiencies and the superiority of others. That is not the way to make a
      career. With varied aptitudes and a fair intelligence, I had no dominant
      tendency, no imperious faculty, so that while by virtue of capacity I felt
      myself free, yet when free I could not discover what was best. Equilibrium
      produced indecision, and indecision has rendered all my faculties barren.
    </p>
    <p>
      November 8, 1872. (<i>Friday</i>).&mdash;I have been turning over the
      &ldquo;Stoics&rdquo; again. Poor Louisa Siefert! [Footnote: Louise Siefert, a modern
      French poetess, died 1879. In addition to &ldquo;Les Stoïques,&rdquo; she published
      &ldquo;L&rsquo;Année Républicaine,&rdquo; Paris 1869, and other works.] Ah! we play the
      stoic, and all the while the poisoned arrow in the side pierces and
      wounds, <i>lethalis arundo</i>. What is it that, like all passionate
      souls, she really craves for? Two things which are contradictory&mdash;glory
      and happiness. She adores two incompatibles&mdash;the Reformation and the
      Revolution, France and the contrary of France; her talent itself is a
      combination of two opposing qualities, inwardness and brilliancy, noisy
      display and lyrical charm. She dislocates the rhythm of her verse, while
      at the same time she has a sensitive ear for rhyme. She is always wavering
      between Valmore and Baudelaire, between Leconte de Lisle and Sainte-Beuve&mdash;that
      is to say, her taste is a bringing together of extremes. She herself has
      described it:
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Toujours extrême en mes désirs,
  Jadis, enfant joyeuse et folle,
  Souvent une seule parole
  Bouleversait tous mes plaisirs.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      But what a fine instrument she possesses! what strength of soul! what
      wealth of imagination!
    </p>
    <p>
      December 3, 1872.&mdash;What a strange dream! I was under an illusion and
      yet not under it; I was playing a comedy to myself, deceiving my
      imagination without being able to deceive my consciousness. This power
      which dreams have of fusing incompatibles together, of uniting what is
      exclusive, of identifying yes and no, is what is most wonderful and most
      symbolical in them. In a dream our individuality is not shut up within
      itself; it envelops, so to speak, its surroundings; it is the landscape,
      and all that it contains, ourselves included. But if our imagination is
      not our own, if it is impersonal, then personality is but a special and
      limited case of its general functions. <i>A fortiori</i> it would be the
      same for thought. And if so, thought might exist without possessing itself
      individually, without embodying itself in an <i>ego</i>. In other words,
      dreams lead us to the idea of an imagination enfranchised from the limits
      of personality, and even of a thought which should be no longer conscious.
      The individual who dreams is on the way to become dissolved in the
      universal phantasmagoria of Maïa. Dreams are excursions into the limbo of
      things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison. The man who dreams is
      but the <i>locale</i> of various phenomena of which he is the spectator in
      spite of himself; he is passive and impersonal; he is the plaything of
      unknown vibrations and invisible sprites.
    </p>
    <p>
      The man who should never issue from the state of dream would have never
      attained humanity, properly so called, but the man who had never dreamed
      would only know the mind in its completed or manufactured state, and would
      not be able to understand the genesis of personality; he would be like a
      crystal, incapable of guessing what crystallization means. So that the
      waking life issues from the dream life, as dreams are an emanation from
      the nervous life, and this again is the fine flower of organic life.
      Thought is the highest point of a series of ascending metamorphoses, which
      is called nature. Personality by means of thought, recovers in inward
      profundity what it has lost in extension, and makes up for the rich
      accumulations of receptive passivity by the enormous privilege of that
      empire over self which is called liberty. Dreams, by confusing and
      suppressing all limits, make us feel, indeed, the severity of the
      conditions attached to the higher existence; but conscious and voluntary
      thought alone brings knowledge and allows us to act&mdash;that is to say,
      is alone capable of science and of perfection. Let us then take pleasure
      in dreaming for reasons of psychological curiosity and mental recreation;
      but let us never speak ill of thought, which is our strength and our
      dignity. Let us begin as Orientals, and end as Westerns, for these are the
      two halves of wisdom.
    </p>
    <p>
      December 11, 1872.&mdash;A deep and dreamless sleep and now I wake up to
      the gray, lowering, rainy sky, which has kept us company for so long. The
      air is mild, the general outlook depressing. I think that it is partly the
      fault of my windows, which are not very clean, and contribute by their
      dimness to this gloomy aspect of the outer world. Rain and smoke have
      besmeared them.
    </p>
    <p>
      Between us and things how many screens there are! Mood, health, the
      tissues of the eye, the window-panes of our cell, mist, smoke, rain, dust,
      and light itself&mdash;and all infinitely variable! Heraclitus said: &ldquo;No
      man bathes twice in the same river.&rdquo; I feel inclined to say; No one sees
      the same landscape twice over, for a window is one kaleidoscope, and the
      spectator another.
    </p>
    <p>
      What is madness? Illusion, raised to the second power. A sound mind
      establishes regular relations, a <i>modus vivendi</i>, between things,
      men, and itself, and it is under the delusion that it has got hold of
      stable truth and eternal fact. Madness does not even see what sanity sees,
      deceiving itself all the while by the belief that it sees better than
      sanity. The sane mind or common sense confounds the fact of experience
      with necessary fact, and assumes in good faith that what is, is the
      measure of what may be; while madness cannot perceive any difference
      between what is and what it imagines&mdash;it confounds its dreams with
      reality.
    </p>
    <p>
      Wisdom consists in rising superior both to madness and to common sense,
      and in lending one&rsquo;s self to the universal illusion without becoming its
      dupe. It is best, on the whole, for a man of taste who knows how to be gay
      with the gay, and serious with the serious, to enter into the game of
      Maïa, and to play his part with a good grace in the fantastic tragi-comedy
      which is called the Universe. It seems to me that here intellectualism
      reaches its limit. [Footnote: &ldquo;We all believe in duty,&rdquo; says M. Renan,
      &ldquo;and in the triumph of righteousness;&rdquo; but it is possible notwithstanding,
      &ldquo;que tout le contraire soit vrai&mdash;et que le monde ne soit qu&rsquo;une
      amusante féerie dont aucun dieu ne se soucie. Il faut donc nous arranger
      de maniere à ceque, dans le cas où le seconde hypothèse serait la vraie,
      nous n&rsquo;ayons pas été trop dupés.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      This strain of remark, which is developed at considerable length, is meant
      as a criticism of Amiel&rsquo;s want of sensitiveness to the irony of things.
      But in reality, as the passage in the text shows, M. Renan is only
      expressing a feeling with which Amiel was just as familiar as his critic.
      Only he is delivered from this last doubt of all by his habitual
      seriousness; by that sense of &ldquo;horror and awe&rdquo; which M. Renan puts away
      from him. Conscience saves him &ldquo;from the sorceries of Maïa.&rdquo;] The mind, in
      its intellectual capacity, arrives at the intuition that all reality is
      but the dream of a dream. What delivers us from the palace of dreams is
      pain, personal pain; it is also the sense of obligation, or that which
      combines the two, the pain of sin; and again it is love; in short, the
      moral order. What saves us from the sorceries of Maïa is conscience;
      conscience dissipates the narcotic vapors, the opium-like hallucinations,
      the placid stupor of contemplative indifference. It drives us into contact
      with the terrible wheels within wheels of human suffering and human
      responsibility; it is the bugle-call, the cockcrow, which puts the
      phantoms to flight; it is the armed archangel who chases man from an
      artificial paradise. Intellectualism may be described as an intoxication
      conscious of itself; the moral energy which replaces it, on the other
      hand, represents a state of fast, a famine and a sleepless thirst. Alas!
      Alas!
    </p>
    <p>
      Those who have the most frivolous idea of sin are just those who suppose
      that there is a fixed gulf between good people and others.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      The ideal which the wife and mother makes for herself, the manner in which
      she understands duty and life, contain the fate of the community. Her
      faith becomes the star of the conjugal ship, and her love the animating
      principle that fashions the future of all belonging to her. Woman is the
      salvation or destruction of the family. She carries its destinies in the
      folds of her mantle.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Perhaps it is not desirable that a woman should be free in mind; she would
      immediately abuse her freedom. She cannot become philosophical without
      losing her special gift, which is the worship of all that is individual,
      the defense of usage, manners, beliefs, traditions. Her rôle is to slacken
      the combustion of thought. It is analogous to that of azote in vital air.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past&mdash;a pious
      guardian of some affection, of which the object has disappeared.
    </p>
    <p>
      January 6, 1873.&mdash;I have been reading the seven tragedies of
      Aeschylus, in the translation of Leconte de Lisle. The &ldquo;Prometheus&rdquo; and
      the &ldquo;Eumenides&rdquo; are greatest where all is great; they have the sublimity
      of the old prophets. Both depict a religious revolution&mdash;a profound
      crisis in the life of humanity. In &ldquo;Prometheus&rdquo; it is civilization
      wrenched from the jealous hands of the gods; in the &ldquo;Eumenides&rdquo; it is the
      transformation of the idea of justice, and the substitution of atonement
      and pardon for the law of implacable revenge. &ldquo;Prometheus&rdquo; shows us the
      martyrdom which waits for all the saviors of men; the &ldquo;Eumenides&rdquo; is the
      glorification of Athens and the Areopagus&mdash;that is to say, of a truly
      human civilization. How magnificent it is as poetry, and how small the
      adventures of individual passion seem beside this colossal type of
      tragedy, of which the theme is the destinies of nations!
    </p>
    <p>
      March 31, 1873. (4 P. M.)&mdash;
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;En quel songe
  Se plonge
  Mon coeur, et que veut-il?&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      For an hour past I have been the prey of a vague anxiety; I recognize my
      old enemy.... It is a sense of void and anguish; a sense of something
      lacking: what? Love, peace&mdash;God perhaps. The feeling is one of pure
      want unmixed with hope, and there is anguish in it because I can clearly
      distinguish neither the evil nor its remedy.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;O printemps sans pitié, dans l&rsquo;âme endolorie,
  Avec tes chants d&rsquo;oiseaux, tes brises, ton azur,
  Tu creuses sourdement, conspirateur obscur,
  Le gouffre des langueurs et de la rêverie.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      Of all the hours of the day, in fine weather, the afternoon, about 3
      o&rsquo;clock, is the time which to me is most difficult to bear. I never feel
      more strongly than I do then, &ldquo;<i>le vide effrayant de la vie</i>,&rdquo; the
      stress of mental anxiety, or the painful thirst for happiness. This
      torture born of the sunlight is a strange phenomenon. Is it that the sun,
      just as it brings out the stain upon a garment, the wrinkles in a face, or
      the discoloration of the hair, so also it illumines with inexorable
      distinctness the scars and rents of the heart? Does it rouse in us a sort
      of shame of existence? In any case the bright hours of the day are capable
      of flooding the whole soul with melancholy, of kindling in us the passion
      for death, or suicide, or annihilation, or of driving us to that which is
      next akin to death, the deadening of the senses by the pursuit of
      pleasure. They rouse in the lonely man a horror of himself; they make him
      long to escape from his own misery and solitude&mdash;
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Le coeur trempé sept fois dans le néant divin.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      People talk of the temptations to crime connected with darkness, but the
      dumb sense of desolation which is often the product of the most brilliant
      moment of daylight must not be forgotten either. From the one, as from the
      other, God is absent; but in the first case a man follows his senses and
      the cry of his passion; in the second, he feels himself lost and
      bewildered, a creature forsaken by all the world.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;En nous sont deux instincts qui bravent la raison,
  C&rsquo;est l&rsquo;effroi du bonheur et la soif du poison.
  Coeur solitaire, à toi prends garde!&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      April 3, 1873.&mdash;I have been to see my friends &mdash;&mdash;. Their
      niece has just arrived with two of her children, and the conversation
      turned on Father Hyacinthe&rsquo;s lecture.
    </p>
    <p>
      Women of an enthusiastic temperament have a curious way of speaking of
      extempore preachers and orators. They imagine that inspiration radiates
      from a crowd as such, and that inspiration is all that is wanted. Could
      there be a more <i>naïf</i> and childish explanation of what is really a
      lecture in which nothing has been left to accident, neither the plan, nor
      the metaphors, nor even the length of the whole, and where everything has
      been prepared with the greatest care! But women, in their love of what is
      marvelous and miraculous, prefer to ignore all this. The meditation, the
      labor, the calculation of effects, the art, in a word, which have gone to
      the making of it, diminishes for them the value of the thing, and they
      prefer to believe it fallen from heaven, or sent down from on high. They
      ask for bread, but cannot bear the idea of a baker. The sex is
      superstitious, and hates to understand what it wishes to admire. It would
      vex it to be forced to give the smaller share to feeling, and the larger
      share to thought. It wishes to believe that imagination can do the work of
      reason, and feeling the work of science, and it never asks itself how it
      is that women, so rich in heart and imagination, have never distinguished
      themselves as orators&mdash;that is to say, have never known how to
      combine a multitude of facts, ideas, and impulses, into one complex unity.
      Enthusiastic women never even suspect the difference that there is between
      the excitement of a popular harangue, which is nothing but a mere
      passionate outburst, and the unfolding of a didactic process, the aim of
      which is to prove something and to convince its hearers. Therefore, for
      them, study, reflection, technique, count as nothing; the improvisatore
      mounts upon the tripod, Pallas all armed issues from his lips, and
      conquers the applause of the dazzled assembly.
    </p>
    <p>
      Evidently women divide orators into two groups; the artisans of speech,
      who manufacture their laborious discourses by the aid of the midnight
      lamp, and the inspired souls, who simply give themselves the trouble to be
      born. They will never understand the saying of Quintilian, &ldquo;<i>Fit orator,
      nascitur poeta.</i>&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      The enthusiasm which acts is perhaps an enlightening force, but the
      enthusiasm which accepts is very like blindness. For this latter
      enthusiasm confuses the value of things, ignores their shades of
      difference, and is an obstacle to all sensible criticism and all calm
      judgment. The &ldquo;Ewig-Weibliche&rdquo; favors exaggeration, mysticism,
      sentimentalism&mdash;all that excites and startles. It is the enemy of
      clearness, of a calm and rational view of things, the antipodes of
      criticism and of science. I have had only too much sympathy and weakness
      for the feminine nature. The very excess of my former indulgence toward it
      makes me now more conscious of its infirmity. Justice and science, law and
      reason, are virile things, and they come before imagination, feeling,
      reverie, and fancy. When one reflects that Catholic superstition is
      maintained by women, one feels how needful it is not to hand over the
      reins to the &ldquo;Eternal Womanly.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      May 23, 1873.&mdash;The fundamental error of France lies in her
      psychology. France has always believed that to say a thing is the same as
      to do it, as though speech were action, as though rhetoric were capable of
      modifying the tendencies, habits, and character of real beings, and as
      though verbiage were an efficient substitute for will, conscience, and
      education.
    </p>
    <p>
      France proceeds by bursts of eloquence, of cannonading, or of law-making;
      she thinks that so she can change the nature of things; and she produces
      only phrases and ruins. She has never understood the first line of
      Montesquieu: &ldquo;Laws are necessary relations, derived from the nature of
      things.&rdquo; She will not see that her incapacity to organize liberty comes
      from her own nature; from the notions which she has of the individual, of
      society, of religion, of law, of duty&mdash;from the manner in which she
      brings up children. Her way is to plant trees downward, and then she is
      astonished at the result! Universal suffrage, with a bad religion and a
      bad popular education, means perpetual wavering between anarchy and
      dictatorship, between the red and the black, between Danton and Loyola.
    </p>
    <p>
      How many scapegoats will Prance sacrifice before it occurs to her to beat
      her own breast in penitence?
    </p>
    <p>
      August 18, 1873. (<i>Scheveningen</i>).&mdash;Yesterday, Sunday, the
      landscape was clear and distinct, the air bracing, the sea bright and
      gleaming, and of an ashy-blue color. There were beautiful effects of
      beach, sea, and distance; and dazzling tracks of gold upon the waves,
      after the sun had sunk below the bands of vapor drawn across the middle
      sky, and before it had disappeared in the mists of the sea horizon. The
      place was very full. All Scheveningen and the Hague, the village and the
      capital, had streamed out on to the terrace, amusing themselves at
      innumerable tables, and swamping the strangers and the bathers. The
      orchestra played some Wagner, some Auber, and some waltzes. What was all
      the world doing? Simply enjoying life.
    </p>
    <p>
      A thousand thoughts wandered through my brain. I thought how much history
      it had taken to make what I saw possible; Judaea, Egypt, Greece, Germany,
      Gaul; all the centuries from Moses to Napoleon, and all the zones from
      Batavia to Guiana, had united in the formation of this gathering. The
      industry, the science, the art, the geography, the commerce, the religion
      of the whole human race, are repeated in every human combination; and what
      we see before our own eyes at any given moment is inexplicable without
      reference to all that has ever been. This interlacing of the ten thousand
      threads which necessity weaves into the production of one single
      phenomenon is a stupefying thought. One feels one&rsquo;s self in the presence
      of law itself&mdash;allowed a glimpse of the mysterious workshop of
      nature. The ephemeral perceives the eternal.
    </p>
    <p>
      What matters the brevity of the individual span, seeing that the
      generations, the centuries, and the worlds themselves are but occupied
      forever with the ceaseless reproduction of the hymn of life, in all the
      hundred thousand modes and variations which make up the universal
      symphony? The motive is always the same; the monad has but one law: all
      truths are but the variation of one single truth. The universe represents
      the infinite wealth of the Spirit seeking in vain to exhaust all
      possibilities, and the goodness of the Creator, who would fain share with
      the created all that sleeps within the limbo of Omnipotence.
    </p>
    <p>
      To contemplate and adore, to receive and give back, to have uttered one&rsquo;s
      note and moved one&rsquo;s grain of sand, is all which is expected from such
      insects as we are; it is enough to give motive and meaning to our fugitive
      apparition in existence....
    </p>
    <p>
      After the concert was over the paved esplanade behind the hotels and the
      two roads leading to the Hague were alive with people. One might have
      fancied one&rsquo;s self upon one of the great Parisian boulevards just when the
      theaters are emptying themselves&mdash;there were so many carriages,
      omnibuses, and cabs. Then, when the human tumult had disappeared, the
      peace of the starry heaven shone out resplendent, and the dreamy glimmer
      of the Milky Way was only answered by the distant murmur of the ocean.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Later</i>.&mdash;What is it which has always come between real life and
      me? What glass screen has, as it were, interposed itself between me and
      the enjoyment, the possession, the contact of things, leaving me only the
      role of the looker-on?
    </p>
    <p>
      False shame, no doubt. I have been ashamed to desire. Fatal result of
      timidity, aggravated by intellectual delusion! This renunciation
      beforehand of all natural ambitions, this systematic putting aside of all
      longings and all desires, has perhaps been false in idea; it has been too
      like a foolish, self-inflicted mutilation. Fear, too, has had a large
      share in it&mdash;
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;La peur de ce que j&rsquo;aime est ma fatalité.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      I very soon discovered that it was simpler for me to give up a wish than
      to satisfy it. Not being able to obtain all that my nature longed for, I
      renounced the whole <i>en bloc</i>, without even taking the trouble to
      determine in detail what might have attracted me; for what was the good of
      stirring up trouble in one&rsquo;s self and evoking images of inaccessible
      treasure?
    </p>
    <p>
      Thus I anticipated in spirit all possible disillusions, in the true
      stoical fashion. Only, with singular lack of logic, I have sometimes
      allowed regret to overtake me, and I have looked at conduct founded upon
      exceptional principles with the eyes of the ordinary man. I should have
      been ascetic to the end; contemplation ought to have been enough for me,
      especially now, when the hair begins to whiten. But, after all, I am a
      man, and not a theorem. A system cannot suffer, but I suffer. Logic makes
      only one demand&mdash;that of consequence; but life makes a thousand; the
      body wants health, the imagination cries out for beauty, and the heart for
      love; pride asks for consideration, the soul yearns for peace, the
      conscience for holiness; our whole being is athirst for happiness and for
      perfection; and we, tottering, mutilated, and incomplete, cannot always
      feign philosophic insensibility; we stretch out our arms toward life, and
      we say to it under our breath, &ldquo;Why&mdash;why&mdash;hast thou deceived
      me?&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      August 19,1873. (<i>Scheveningen</i>).&mdash;I have had a morning walk. It
      has been raining in the night. There are large clouds all round; the sea,
      veined with green and drab, has put on the serious air of labor. She is
      about her business, in no threatening but at the same time in no lingering
      mood. She is making her clouds, heaping up her sands, visiting her shores
      and bathing them with foam, gathering up her floods for the tide, carrying
      the ships to their destinations, and feeding the universal life. I found
      in a hidden nook a sheet of fine sand which the water had furrowed and
      folded like the pink palate of a kitten&rsquo;s mouth, or like a dappled sky.
      Everything repeats itself by analogy, and each little fraction of the
      earth reproduces in a smaller and individual form all the phenomena of the
      planet. Farther on I came across a bank of crumbling shells, and it was
      borne in upon me that the sea-sand itself might well be only the detritus
      of the organic life of preceding eras, a vast monument or pyramid of
      immemorial age, built up by countless generations of molluscs who have
      labored at the architecture of the shores like good workmen of God. If the
      dunes and the mountains are the dust of living creatures who have preceded
      us, how can we doubt but that our death will be as serviceable as our
      life, and that nothing which has been lent is lost? Mutual borrowing and
      temporary service seem to be the law of existence. Only, the strong prey
      upon and devour the weak, and the concrete inequality of lots within the
      abstract equality of destinies wounds and disquiets the sense of justice.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Same day</i>.&mdash;A new spirit governs and inspires the generation
      which will succeed me. It is a singular sensation to feel the grass
      growing under one&rsquo;s feet, to see one&rsquo;s self intellectually uprooted. One
      must address one&rsquo;s contemporaries. Younger men will not listen to you.
      Thought, like love, will not tolerate a gray hair. Knowledge herself loves
      the young, as Fortune used to do in olden days. Contemporary civilization
      does not know what to do with old age; in proportion as it defies physical
      experiment, it despises moral experience. One sees therein the triumph of
      Darwinism; it is a state of war, and war must have young soldiers; it can
      only put up with age in its leaders when they have the strength and the
      mettle of veterans.
    </p>
    <p>
      In point of fact, one must either be strong or disappear, either
      constantly rejuvenate one&rsquo;s self or perish. It is as though the humanity
      of our day had, like the migratory birds, an immense voyage to make across
      space; she can no longer support the weak or help on the laggards. The
      great assault upon the future makes her hard and pitiless to all who fall
      by the way. Her motto is, &ldquo;The devil take the hindmost.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      The worship of strength has never lacked altars, but it looks as though
      the more we talk of justice and humanity, the more that other god sees his
      kingdom widen.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 20, 1873. (<i>Scheveningen</i>).&mdash;I have now watched the sea
      which beats upon this shore under many different aspects. On the whole, I
      should class it with the Baltic. As far as color, effect, and landscape
      go, it is widely different from the Breton or Basque ocean, and, above
      all, from the Mediterranean. It never attains to the blue-green of the
      Atlantic, nor the indigo of the Ionian Sea. Its scale of color runs from
      flint to emerald, and when it turns to blue, the blue is a turquoise shade
      splashed with gray. The sea here is not amusing itself; it has a busy and
      serious air, like an Englishman or a Dutchman. Neither polyps nor
      jelly-fish, neither sea-weed nor crabs enliven the sands at low water; the
      sea life is poor and meagre. What is wonderful is the struggle of man
      against a miserly and formidable power. Nature has done little for him,
      but she allows herself to be managed. Stepmother though she be, she is
      accommodating, subject to the occasional destruction of a hundred thousand
      lives in a single inundation.
    </p>
    <p>
      The air inside the dune is altogether different from that outside it. The
      air of the sea is life-giving, bracing, oxydized; the air inland is soft,
      relaxing, and warm. In the same way there are two Hollands in every
      Dutchman: there is the man of the <i>polder</i>, heavy, pale, phlegmatic,
      slow, patient himself, and trying to the patience of others, and there is
      the man of the <i>dune</i>, of the harbor, the shore, the sea, who is
      tenacious, seasoned, persevering, sunburned, daring. Where the two agree
      is in calculating prudence, and in methodical persistency of effort.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 22, 1873. (<i>Scheveningen</i>).&mdash;The weather is rainy, the
      whole atmosphere gray; it is a time favorable to thought and meditation. I
      have a liking for such days as these; they revive one&rsquo;s converse with
      one&rsquo;s self and make it possible to live the inner life; they are quiet and
      peaceful, like a song in a minor key. We are nothing but thought, but we
      feel our life to its very center. Our very sensations turn to reverie. It
      is a strange state of mind; it is like those silences in worship which are
      not the empty moments of devotion, but the full moments, and which are so
      because at such times the soul, instead of being polarized, dispersed,
      localized, in a single impression or thought, feels her own totality and
      is conscious of herself. She tastes her own substance. She is no longer
      played upon, colored, set in motion, affected, from without; she is in
      equilibrium and at rest. Openness and self-surrender become possible to
      her; she contemplates and she adores. She sees the changeless and the
      eternal enwrapping all the phenomena of time. She is in the religious
      state, in harmony with the general order, or at least in intellectual
      harmony. For <i>holiness</i>, indeed, more is wanted&mdash;a harmony of
      will, a perfect self-devotion, death to self and absolute submission.
    </p>
    <p>
      Psychological peace&mdash;that harmony which is perfect but virtual&mdash;is
      but the zero, the potentiality of all numbers; it is not that moral peace
      which is victorious over all ills, which is real, positive, tried by
      experience, and able to face whatever fresh storms may assail it.
    </p>
    <p>
      The peace of fact is not the peace of principle. There are indeed two
      happinesses, that of nature and that of conquest&mdash;two equilibria,
      that of Greece and that of Nazareth&mdash;two kingdoms, that of the
      natural man and that of the regenerate man.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Later</i>. (<i>Scheveningen</i>).&mdash;Why do doctors so often make
      mistakes? Because they are not sufficiently individual in their diagnoses
      or their treatment. They class a sick man under some given department of
      their nosology, whereas every invalid is really a special case, a unique
      example. How is it possible that so coarse a method of sifting should
      produce judicious therapeutics? Every illness is a factor simple or
      complex, which is multiplied by a second factor, invariably complex&mdash;the
      individual, that is to say, who is suffering from it, so that the result
      is a special problem, demanding a special solution, the more so the
      greater the remoteness of the patient from childhood or from country life.
    </p>
    <p>
      The principal grievance which I have against the doctors is that they
      neglect the real problem, which is to seize the unity of the individual
      who claims their care. Their methods of investigation are far too
      elementary; a doctor who does not read you to the bottom is ignorant of
      essentials. To me the ideal doctor would be a man endowed with profound
      knowledge of life and of the soul, intuitively divining any suffering or
      disorder of whatever kind, and restoring peace by his mere presence. Such
      a doctor is possible, but the greater number of them lack the higher and
      inner life, they know nothing of the transcendent laboratories of nature;
      they seem to me superficial, profane, strangers to divine things,
      destitute of intuition and sympathy. The model doctor should be at once a
      genius, a saint, a man of God.
    </p>
    <p>
      September 11, 1873. (<i>Amsterdam</i>).&mdash;The doctor has just gone. He
      says I have fever about me, and does not think that I can start for
      another three days without imprudence. I dare not write to my Genevese
      friends and tell them that I am coming back from the sea in a radically
      worse state of strength and throat than when I went there, and that I have
      only wasted my time, my trouble, my money, and my hopes....
    </p>
    <p>
      This contradictory double fact&mdash;on the one side an eager hopefulness
      springing up afresh after all disappointments, and on the other an
      experience almost invariably unfavorable&mdash;can be explained like all
      illusions by the whim of nature, which either wills us to be deceived or
      wills us to act as if we were so.
    </p>
    <p>
      Skepticism is the wiser course, but in delivering us from error it tends
      to paralyze life. Maturity of mind consists in taking part in the
      prescribed game as seriously as though one believed in it. Good-humored
      compliance, tempered by a smile, is, on the whole, the best line to take;
      one lends one&rsquo;s self to an optical illusion, and the voluntary concession
      has an air of liberty. Once imprisoned in existence, we must submit to its
      laws with a good grace; to rebel against it only ends in impotent rage,
      when once we have denied ourselves the solution of suicide.
    </p>
    <p>
      Humility and submission, or the religious point of view; clear-eyed
      indulgence with a touch of irony, or the point of view of worldly wisdom&mdash;these
      two attitudes are possible. The second is sufficient for the minor ills of
      life, the other is perhaps necessary in the greater ones. The pessimism of
      Schopenhauer supposes at least health and intellect as means of enduring
      the rest of life. But optimism either of the stoical or the Christian sort
      is needed to make it possible for us to bear the worst sufferings of
      flesh, heart and soul. If we are to escape the grip of despair, we must
      believe either that the whole of things at least is good, or that grief is
      a fatherly grace, a purifying trial.
    </p>
    <p>
      There can be no doubt that the idea of a happy immortality, serving as a
      harbor of refuge from the tempests of this mortal existence, and rewarding
      the fidelity, the patience, the submission, and the courage of the
      travelers on life&rsquo;s sea&mdash;there can be no doubt that this idea, the
      strength of so many generations, and the faith of the church, carries with
      it inexpressible consolation to those who are wearied, burdened, and
      tormented by pain and suffering. To feel one&rsquo;s self individually cared for
      and protected by God gives a special dignity and beauty to life.
      Monotheism lightens the struggle for existence. But does the study of
      nature allow of the maintenance of those local revelations which are
      called Mosaism, Christianity, Islamism? These religions founded upon an
      infantine cosmogony, and upon a chimerical history of humanity, can they
      bear confronting with modern astronomy and geology? The present mode of
      escape, which consists in trying to satisfy the claims of both science and
      faith&mdash;of the science which contradicts all the ancient beliefs, and
      the faith which, in the case of things that are beyond nature and
      incapable of verification, affirms them on her own responsibility only&mdash;this
      mode of escape cannot last forever. Every fresh cosmical conception
      demands a religion which corresponds to it. Our age of transition stands
      bewildered between the two incompatible methods, the scientific method and
      the religious method, and between the two certitudes, which contradict
      each other.
    </p>
    <p>
      Surely the reconciliation of the two must be sought for in the moral law,
      which is also a fact, and every step of which requires for its explanation
      another cosmos than the cosmos of necessity. Who knows if necessity is not
      a particular case of liberty, and its condition? Who knows if nature is
      not a laboratory for the fabrication of thinking beings who are ultimately
      to become free creatures? Biology protests, and indeed the supposed
      existence of souls, independently of time, space, and matter, is a fiction
      of faith, less logical than the Platonic dogma. But the question remains
      open. We may eliminate the idea of purpose from nature, yet, as the
      guiding conception of the highest being of our planet, it is a fact, and a
      fact which postulates a meaning in the history of the universe.
    </p>
    <p>
      My thought is straying in vague paths: why? because I have no creed. All
      my studies end in notes of interrogation, and that I may not draw
      premature or arbitrary conclusions I draw none.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Later on</i>.&mdash;My creed has melted away, but I believe in good, in
      the moral order, and in salvation; religion for me is to live and die in
      God, in complete abandonment to the holy will which is at the root of
      nature and destiny. I believe even in the gospel, the good news&mdash;that
      is to say, in the reconciliation of the sinner with God, by faith in the
      love of a pardoning Father.
    </p>
    <p>
      October 4, 1873. (<i>Geneva</i>).&mdash;I have been dreaming a long while
      in the moonlight, which floods my room with a radiance, full of vague
      mystery. The state of mind induced in us by this fantastic light is itself
      so dim and ghost-like that analysis loses its way in it, and arrives at
      nothing articulate. It is something indefinite and intangible, like the
      noise of waves which is made up of a thousand fused and mingled sounds. It
      is the reverberation of all the unsatisfied desires of the soul, of all
      the stifled sorrows of the heart, mingling in a vague sonorous whole, and
      dying away in cloudy murmurs. All those imperceptible regrets, which never
      individually reach the consciousness, accumulate at last into a definite
      result; they become the voice of a feeling of emptiness and aspiration;
      their tone is melancholy itself. In youth the tone of these Aeolian
      vibrations of the heart is all hope&mdash;a proof that these thousands of
      indistinguishable accents make up indeed the fundamental note of our
      being, and reveal the tone of our whole situation. Tell me what you feel
      in your solitary room when the full moon is shining in upon you and your
      lamp is dying out, and I will tell you how old you are, and I shall know
      if you are happy.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      The best path through life is the high road, which initiates us at the
      right moment into all experience. Exceptional itineraries are suspicious,
      and matter for anxiety. What is normal is at once most convenient, most
      honest, and most wholesome. Cross roads may tempt us for one reason or
      another, but it is very seldom that we do not come to regret having taken
      them.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Each man begins the world afresh, and not one fault of the first man has
      been avoided by his remotest descendant. The collective experience of the
      race accumulates, but individual experience dies with the individual, and
      the result is that institutions become wiser and knowledge as such
      increases; but the young man, although more cultivated, is just as
      presumptuous, and not less fallible to-day than he ever was. So that
      absolutely there is progress, and relatively there is none. Circumstances
      improve, but merit remains the same. The whole is better, perhaps, but man
      is not positively better&mdash;he is only different. His defects and his
      virtues change their form, but the total balance does not show him to be
      the richer. A thousand things advance, nine hundred and ninety-eight fall
      back, this is progress. There is nothing in it to be proud of, but
      something, after all, to console one.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 4, 1874.&mdash;I am still reading the &ldquo;Origines du Christianisme&rdquo;
       by Ernest Havet. [Footnote: Ernest Havet, born 1813, a distinguished
      French scholar and professor. He became professor of Latin oratory at the
      Collège de France in 1855, and a member of the Institute in January, 1880.
      His admirable edition of the &ldquo;Pensées de Pascal&rdquo; is well-known. &ldquo;Le
      Christianisme et ses Origines,&rdquo; an important book, in four volumes, was
      developed from a series of articles in the <i>Revue des deux Mondes</i>,
      and the <i>Revue Contemporaine</i>.] I like the book and I dislike it. I
      like it for its independence and courage; I dislike it for the
      insufficiency of its fundamental ideas, and the imperfection of its
      categories.
    </p>
    <p>
      The author, for instance, has no clear idea of religion; and his
      philosophy of history is superficial. He is a Jacobin. &ldquo;The Republic and
      Free Thought&rdquo;&mdash;he cannot get beyond that. This curt and narrow school
      of opinion is the refuge of men of independent mind, who have been
      scandalized by the colossal fraud of ultramontanism; but it leads rather
      to cursing history than to understanding it. It is the criticism of the
      eighteenth century, of which the general result is purely negative. But
      Voltairianism is only the half of the philosophic mind. Hegel frees
      thought in a very different way.
    </p>
    <p>
      Havet, too, makes another mistake. He regards Christianity as synonymous
      with Roman Catholicism and with the church. I know very well that the
      Roman Church does the same, and that with her the assimilation is a matter
      of sound tactics; but scientifically it is inexact. We ought not even to
      identify Christianity with the gospel, nor the gospel with religion in
      general. It is the business of critical precision to clear away these
      perpetual confusions in which Christian practice and Christian preaching
      abound. To disentangle ideas, to distinguish and limit them, to fit them
      into their true place and order, is the first duty of science whenever it
      lays hands upon such chaotic and complex things as manners, idioms, or
      beliefs. Entanglement is the condition of life; order and clearness are
      the signs of serious and successful thought.
    </p>
    <p>
      Formerly it was the ideas of nature which were a tissue of errors and
      incoherent fancies; now it is the turn of moral and psychological ideas.
      The best issue from the present Babel would be the formation or the
      sketching out of a truly scientific science of man.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 16, 1874.&mdash;The multitude, who already possess force, and
      even, according to the Republican view, right, have always been persuaded
      by the Cleons of the day that enlightenment, wisdom, thought, and reason,
      are also theirs. The game of these conjurors and quacks of universal
      suffrage has always been to flatter the crowd in order to make an
      instrument of it. They pretend to adore the puppet of which they pull the
      threads.
    </p>
    <p>
      The theory of radicalism is a piece of juggling, for it supposes premises
      of which it knows the falsity; it manufactures the oracle whose
      revelations it pretends to adore; it proclaims that the multitude creates
      a brain for itself, while all the time it is the clever man who is the
      brain of the multitude, and suggests to it what it is supposed to invent.
      To reign by flattery has been the common practice of the courtiers of all
      despotisms, the favorites of all tyrants; it is an old and trite method,
      but none the less odious for that.
    </p>
    <p>
      The honest politician should worship nothing but reason and justice, and
      it is his business to preach them to the masses, who represent, on an
      average, the age of childhood and not that of maturity. We corrupt
      childhood if we tell it that it cannot be mistaken, and that it knows more
      than its elders. We corrupt the masses when we tell them that they are
      wise and far-seeing and possess the gift of infallibility.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is one of Montesquieu&rsquo;s subtle remarks, that the more wise men you heap
      together the less wisdom you will obtain. Radicalism pretends that the
      greater number of illiterate, passionate, thoughtless&mdash;above all,
      young people, you heap together, the greater will be the enlightenment
      resulting. The second thesis is no doubt the repartee to the first, but
      the joke is a bad one. All that can be got from a crowd is instinct or
      passion; the instinct may be good, but the passion may be bad, and neither
      is the instinct capable of producing a clear idea, nor the passion of
      leading to a just resolution.
    </p>
    <p>
      A crowd is a material force, and the support of numbers gives a
      proposition the force of law; but that wise and ripened temper of mind
      which takes everything into account, and therefore tends to truth, is
      never engendered by the impetuosity of the masses. The masses are the
      material of democracy, but its form&mdash;that is to say, the laws which
      express the general reason, justice, and utility&mdash;can only be rightly
      shaped by wisdom, which is by no means a universal property. The
      fundamental error of the radical theory is to confound the right to do
      good with good itself, and universal suffrage with universal wisdom. It
      rests upon a legal fiction, which assumes a real equality of enlightenment
      and merit among those whom it declares electors. It is quite possible,
      however, that these electors may not desire the public good, and that even
      if they do, they may be deceived as to the manner of realizing it.
      Universal suffrage is not a dogma&mdash;it is an instrument; and according
      to the population in whose hands it is placed, the instrument is
      serviceable or deadly to the proprietor.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 27, 1874.&mdash;Among the peoples, in whom the social gifts are
      the strongest, the individual fears ridicule above all things, and
      ridicule is the certain result of originality. No one, therefore, wishes
      to make a party of his own; every one wishes to be on the side of all the
      world. &ldquo;All the world&rdquo; is the greatest of powers; it is sovereign, and
      calls itself <i>we</i>. <i>We</i> dress, <i>we</i> dine, <i>we</i> walk,
      <i>we</i> go out, <i>we</i> come in, like this, and not like that. This <i>we</i>
      is always right, whatever it does. The subjects of <i>We</i> are more
      prostrate than the slaves of the East before the Padishah. The good
      pleasure of the sovereign decides every appeal; his caprice is law. What
      <i>we</i> does or says is called custom, what it thinks is called opinion,
      what it believes to be beautiful or good is called fashion. Among such
      nations as these <i>we</i> is the brain, the conscience, the reason, the
      taste, and the judgment of all. The individual finds everything decided
      for him without his troubling about it. He is dispensed from the task of
      finding out anything whatever. Provided that he imitates, copies, and
      repeats the models furnished by <i>we</i>, he has nothing more to fear. He
      knows all that he need know, and has entered into salvation.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 29, 1874.&mdash;Strange reminiscence! At the end of the terrace of
      La Treille, on the eastern side, as I looked down the slope, it seemed to
      me that I saw once more in imagination a little path which existed there
      when I was a child, and ran through the bushy underwood, which was thicker
      then than it is now. It is at least forty years since this impression
      disappeared from my mind. The revival of an image so dead and so forgotten
      set me thinking. Consciousness seems to be like a book, in which the
      leaves turned by life successively cover and hide each other in spite of
      their semi-transparency; but although the book may be open at the page of
      the present, the wind, for a few seconds, may blow back the first pages
      into view.
    </p>
    <p>
      And at death will these leaves cease to hide each other, and shall we see
      all our past at once? Is death the passage from the successive to the
      simultaneous&mdash;that is to say, from time to eternity? Shall we then
      understand, in its unity, the poem or mysterious episode of our existence,
      which till then we have spelled out phrase by phrase? And is this the
      secret of that glory which so often enwraps the brow and countenance of
      those who are newly dead? If so, death would be like the arrival of a
      traveler at the top of a great mountain, whence he sees spread out before
      him the whole configuration of the country, of which till then he had had
      but passing glimpses. To be able to overlook one&rsquo;s own history, to divine
      its meaning in the general concert and in the divine plan, would be the
      beginning of eternal felicity. Till then we had sacrificed ourselves to
      the universal order, but then we should understand and appreciate the
      beauty of that order. We had toiled and labored under the conductor of the
      orchestra; and we should find ourselves become surprised and delighted
      hearers. We had seen nothing but our own little path in the mist; and
      suddenly a marvelous panorama and boundless distances would open before
      our dazzled eyes. Why not?
    </p>
    <p>
      May 31, 1874.&mdash;I have been reading the philosophical poems of Madame
      Ackermann. She has rendered in fine verse that sense of desolation which
      has been so often stirred in me by the philosophy of Schopenhauer, of
      Hartmann, Comte, and Darwin. What tragic force and power! What thought and
      passion! She has courage for everything, and attacks the most tremendous
      subjects.
    </p>
    <p>
      Science is implacable; will it suppress all religions? All those which
      start from a false conception of nature, certainly. But if the scientific
      conception of nature proves incapable of bringing harmony and peace to
      man, what will happen? Despair is not a durable situation. We shall have
      to build a moral city without God, without an immortality of the soul,
      without hope. Buddhism and stoicism present themselves as possible
      alternatives.
    </p>
    <p>
      But even if we suppose that there is no finality in the cosmos, it is
      certain that man has ends at which he aims, and if so the notion of end or
      purpose is a real phenomenon, although a limited one. Physical science may
      very well be limited by moral science, and <i>vice versâ</i>. But if these
      two conceptions of the world are in opposition, which must give way?
    </p>
    <p>
      I still incline to believe that nature is the virtuality of mind&mdash;that
      the soul is the fruit of life, and liberty the flower of necessity&mdash;that
      all is bound together, and that nothing can be done without. Our modern
      philosophy has returned to the point of view of the Ionians, the [Greek:
      <i>physikoi</i>], or naturalist thinkers. But it will have to pass once
      more through Plato and through Aristotle, through the philosophy of
      &ldquo;goodness&rdquo; and &ldquo;purpose,&rdquo; through the science of mind.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 3, 1874.&mdash;Rebellion against common sense is a piece of
      childishness of which I am quite capable. But it does not last long. I am
      soon brought back to the advantages and obligations of my situation; I
      return to a calmer self-consciousness. It is disagreeable to me, no doubt,
      to realize all that is hopelessly lost to me, all that is now and will be
      forever denied to me; but I reckon up my privileges as well as my losses&mdash;I
      lay stress on what I have, and not only on what I want. And so I escape
      from that terrible dilemma of &ldquo;all or nothing,&rdquo; which for me always ends
      in the adoption of the second alternative. It seems to me at such times
      that a man may without shame content himself with being <i>some</i> thing
      and <i>some</i> one&mdash;
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Ni si haut, ni si bas....&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      These brusque lapses into the formless, indeterminate state, are the price
      of my critical faculty. All my former habits become suddenly fluid; it
      seems to me that I am beginning life over again, and that all my acquired
      capital has disappeared at a stroke. I am forever new-born; I am a mind
      which has never taken to itself a body, a country, an avocation, a sex, a
      species. Am I even quite sure of being a man, a European, an inhabitant of
      this earth? It seems to me so easy to be something else, that to be what I
      am appears to me a mere piece of arbitrary choice. I cannot possibly take
      an accidental structure of which the value is purely relative, seriously.
      When once a man has touched the absolute, all that might be other than
      what it is seems to him indifferent. All these ants pursuing their private
      ends excite his mirth. He looks down from the moon upon his hovel; he
      beholds the earth from the heights of the sun; he considers his life from
      the point of view of the Hindoo pondering the days of Brahma; he sees the
      finite from the distance of the infinite, and thenceforward the
      insignificance of all those things which men hold to be important makes
      effort ridiculous, passion burlesque, and prejudice absurd.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 7, 1874. (<i>Clarens</i>).&mdash;A day perfectly beautiful,
      luminous, limpid, brilliant.
    </p>
    <p>
      I passed the morning in the churchyard; the &ldquo;Oasis&rdquo; was delightful.
      Innumerable sensations, sweet and serious, peaceful and solemn, passed
      over me.... Around me Russians, English, Swedes, Germans, were sleeping
      their last sleep under the shadow of the Cubly. The landscape was one vast
      splendor; the woods were deep and mysterious, the roses full blown; all
      around me were butterflies&mdash;a noise of wings&mdash;the murmur of
      birds. I caught glimpses through the trees of distant mists, of soaring
      mountains, of the tender blue of the lake.... A little conjunction of
      things struck me. Two ladies were tending and watering a grave; two nurses
      were suckling their children. This double protest against death had
      something touching and poetical in it. &ldquo;Sleep, you who are dead; we, the
      living, are thinking of you, or at least carrying on the pilgrimage of the
      race!&rdquo; such seemed to me the words in my ear. It was clear to me that the
      Oasis of Clarens is the spot in which I should like to rest. Here I am
      surrounded with memories; here death is like a sleep&mdash;a sleep
      instinct with hope.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Hope is not forbidden us, but peace and submission are the essentials.
    </p>
    <p>
      September 1, 1874. (<i>Clarens</i>).&mdash;On waking it seemed to me that
      I was staring into the future with wide startled eyes. Is it indeed to <i>me</i>
      that these things apply. [Footnote: Amiel had just received at the hands
      of his doctor the medical verdict, which was his <i>arrêt de mort</i>.]
      Incessant and growing humiliation, my slavery becoming heavier, my circle
      of action steadily narrower!... What is hateful in my situation is that
      deliverance can never be hoped for, and that one misery will succeed
      another in such a way as to leave me no breathing space, not even in the
      future, not even in hope. All possibilities are closed to me, one by one.
      It is difficult for the natural man to escape from a dumb rage against
      inevitable agony.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Noon</i>.&mdash;An indifferent nature? A Satanic principle of things? A
      good and just God? Three points of view. The second is improbable and
      horrible. The first appeals to our stoicism. My organic combination has
      never been anything but mediocre; it has lasted as long as it could. Every
      man has his turn, and all must submit. To die quickly is a privilege; I
      shall die by inches. Well, submit. Rebellion would be useless and
      senseless. After all, I belong to the better-endowed half of human-kind,
      and my lot is superior to the average.
    </p>
    <p>
      But the third point of view alone can give joy. Only is it tenable? Is
      there a particular Providence directing all the circumstances of our life,
      and therefore imposing all our trials upon us for educational ends? Is
      this heroic faith compatible with our actual knowledge of the laws of
      nature? Scarcely; But what this faith makes objective we may hold as
      subjective truth. The moral being may moralize his sufferings by using
      natural facts for his own inner education. What he cannot change he calls
      the will of God, and to will what God wills brings him peace.
    </p>
    <p>
      To nature both our continued existence and our morality are equally
      indifferent. But God, on the other hand, if God is, desires our
      sanctification; and if suffering purifies us, then we may console
      ourselves or suffering. This is what makes the great advantage of the
      Christian faith; it is the triumph over pain, the victory over death.
      There is but one thing necessary&mdash;death unto sin, the immolation of
      our selfish will, the filial sacrifice of our desires. Evil consists in
      living for <i>self</i>&mdash;that is to say, for one&rsquo;s own vanity, pride,
      sensuality, or even health. Righteousness consists in willingly accepting
      one&rsquo;s lot, in submitting to, and espousing the destiny assigned us, in
      willing what God commands, in renouncing what he forbids us, in consenting
      to what he takes from us or refuses us.
    </p>
    <p>
      In my own particular case, what has been taken from me is health&mdash;that
      is to say, the surest basis of all independence; but friendship and
      material comfort are still left to me; I am neither called upon to bear
      the slavery of poverty nor the hell of absolute isolation.
    </p>
    <p>
      Health cut off, means marriage, travel, study, and work forbidden or
      endangered. It means life reduced in attractiveness and utility by
      five-sixths.
    </p>
    <p>
      Thy will be done!
    </p>
    <p>
      September 14, 1874. (<i>Charnex</i>).&mdash;A long walk and conversation
      with&mdash;&mdash;. We followed a high mountain path. Seated on the turf,
      and talking with open heart, our eyes wandered over the blue immensity
      below us, and the smiling outlines of the shore. All was friendly,
      azure-tinted, caressing, to the sight. The soul I was reading was profound
      and pure. Such an experience is like a flight into paradise. A few light
      clouds climbed the broad spaces of the sky, steamers made long tracks upon
      the water at our feet, white sails were dotted over the vast distance of
      the lake, and sea-gulls like gigantic butterflies quivered above its
      rippling surface.
    </p>
    <p>
      September 21, 1874. (<i>Charnex</i>).&mdash;A wonderful day! Never has the
      lake been bluer, or the landscape softer. It was enchanting. But tragedy
      is hidden under the eclogue; the serpent crawls under the flowers. All the
      future is dark. The phantoms which for three or four weeks I have been
      able to keep at bay, wait for me behind the door, as the Eumenides waited
      for Orestes. Hemmed in on all sides!
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;On ne croit plus à son étoile,
   On sent que derrière la toile
   Sont le deuil, les maux et la mort.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      For a fortnight I have been happy, and now this happiness is going.
    </p>
    <p>
      There are no more birds, but a few white or blue butterflies are still
      left. Flowers are becoming rare&mdash;a few daisies in the fields, some
      blue or yellow chicories and colchicums, some wild geraniums growing among
      fragments of old walls, and the brown berries of the privet&mdash;this is
      all we were able to find. In the fields they are digging potatoes, beating
      down the nuts, and beginning the apple harvest. The leaves are thinning
      and changing color; I watch them turning red on the pear-trees, gray on
      the plums, yellow on the walnut-trees, and tinging the thickly-strewn turf
      with shades of reddish-brown. We are nearing the end of the fine weather;
      the coloring is the coloring of late autumn; there is no need now to keep
      out of the sun. Everything is soberer, more measured, more fugitive, less
      emphatic. Energy is gone, youth is past, prodigality at an end, the summer
      over. The year is on the wane and tends toward winter; it is once more in
      harmony with my own age and position, and next Sunday it will keep my
      birthday. All these different consonances form a melancholy harmony.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      The distinguishing mark of religion is not so much liberty as obedience,
      and its value is measured by the sacrifices which it can extract from the
      individual.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      A young girl&rsquo;s love is a kind of piety. We must approach it with adoration
      if we are not to profane it, and with poetry if we are to understand it.
      If there is anything in the world which gives us a sweet, ineffable
      impression, of the ideal, it is this trembling modest love. To deceive it
      would be a crime. Merely to watch its unfolding life is bliss to the
      beholder; he sees in it the birth of a divine marvel. When the garland of
      youth fades on our brow, let us try at least to have the virtues of
      maturity; may we grow better, gentler, graver, like the fruit of the vine,
      while its leaf withers and falls.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most
      difficult chapters in the great art of living.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      He who asks of life nothing but the improvement of his own nature, and a
      continuous moral progress toward inward contentment and religious
      submission, is less liable than any one else to miss and waste life.
    </p>
    <p>
      January 2, 1875. (<i>Hyères</i>.)&mdash;In spite of my sleeping draught I
      have had a bad night. Once it seemed as if I must choke, for I could
      breathe neither way.
    </p>
    <p>
      Could I be more fragile, more sensitive, more vulnerable! People talk to
      me as if there were still a career before me, while all the time I know
      that the ground is slipping from under me, and that the defense of my
      health is already a hopeless task. At bottom, I am only living on out of
      complaisance and without a shadow of self-delusion. I know that not one of
      my desires will be realized, and for a long time I have had no desires at
      all. I simply accept what comes to me as though it were a bird perching on
      my window. I smile at it, but I know very well that my visitor has wings
      and will not stay long. The resignation which comes from despair has a
      kind of melancholy sweetness. It looks at life as a man sees it from his
      death-bed, and judges it without bitterness and without vain regrets.
    </p>
    <p>
      I no longer hope to get well, or to be useful, or to be happy. I hope that
      those who have loved me will love me to the end; I should wish to have
      done them some good, and to leave them a tender memory of myself. I wish
      to die without rebellion and without weakness; that is about all. Is this
      relic of hope and of desire still too much? Let all be as God will. I
      resign myself into his hands.
    </p>
    <p>
      January 22, 1875. (<i>Hyères</i>).&mdash;The French mind, according to
      Gioberti, apprehends only the outward form of truth, and exaggerates it by
      isolating it, so that it acts as a solvent upon the realities with which
      it works. It takes the shadow for the substance, the word for the thing,
      appearance for reality, and abstract formula for truth. It lives in a
      world of intellectual <i>assignats</i>. If you talk to a Frenchman of art,
      of language, of religion, of the state, of duty, of the family, you feel
      in his way of speaking that his thought remains outside the subject, that
      he never penetrates into its substance, its inmost core. He is not
      striving to understand it in its essence, but only to say something
      plausible about it. On his lips the noblest words become thin and empty;
      for example&mdash;mind, idea, religion. The French mind is superficial and
      yet not comprehensive; it has an extraordinarily fine edge, and yet no
      penetrating power. Its desire is to enjoy its own resources by the help of
      things, but it has none of the respect, the disinterestedness, the
      patience, and the self-forgetfulness, which, are indispensable if we wish
      to see things as they are. Far from being the philosophic mind, it is a
      mere counterfeit of it, for it does not enable a man to solve any problem
      whatever, and remains incapable of understanding all that is living,
      complex, and concrete. Abstraction is its original sin, presumption its
      incurable defect, and plausibility its fatal limit.
    </p>
    <p>
      The French language has no power of expressing truths of birth and
      germination; it paints effects, results, the <i>caput mortuum</i>, but not
      the cause, the motive power, the native force the development of any
      phenomenon whatever. It is analytic and descriptive, but it explains
      nothing, for it avoids all beginnings and processes of formation. With it
      crystallization is not the mysterious act itself by which a substance
      passes from the fluid state to the solid state. It is the product of that
      act.
    </p>
    <p>
      The thirst for truth is not a French passion. In everything appearance is
      preferred to reality, the outside to the inside, the fashion to the
      material, that which shines to that which profits, opinion to conscience.
      That is to say, the Frenchman&rsquo;s center of gravity is always outside him&mdash;he
      is always thinking of others, playing to the gallery. To him individuals
      are so many zeros; the unit which turns them into a number must be added
      from outside; it may be royalty, the writer of the day, the favorite
      newspaper, or any other temporary master of fashion. All this is probably
      the result of an exaggerated sociability, which weakens the soul&rsquo;s forces
      of resistance, destroys its capacity for investigation and personal
      conviction, and kills in it the worship of the ideal.
    </p>
    <p>
      January 27, 1875. (<i>Hyères</i>).&mdash;The whole atmosphere has a
      luminous serenity, a limpid clearness. The islands are like swans swimming
      in a golden stream. Peace, splendor, boundless space!... And I meanwhile
      look quietly on while the soft hours glide away. I long to catch the wild
      bird, happiness, and tame it. Above all, I long to share it with others.
      These delicious mornings impress me indescribably. They intoxicate me,
      they carry me away. I feel beguiled out of myself, dissolved in sunbeams,
      breezes, perfumes, and sudden impulses of joy. And yet all the time I pine
      for I know not what intangible Eden.
    </p>
    <p>
      Lamartine in the &ldquo;Préludes&rdquo; has admirably described this oppressive effect
      of happiness on fragile human nature. I suspect that the reason for it is
      that the finite creature feels itself invaded by the infinite, and the
      invasion produces dizziness, a kind of vertigo, a longing to fling one&rsquo;s
      self into the great gulf of being. To feel life too intensely is to yearn
      for death; and for man, to die means to become like unto the gods&mdash;to
      be initiated into the great mystery. Pathetic and beautiful illusion.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Ten o&rsquo;clock in the evening</i>.&mdash;From one end to the other the day
      has been perfect, and my walk this afternoon to Beau Vallon was one long
      delight. It was like an expedition into Arcadia. Here was a wild and
      woodland corner, which would have made a fit setting for a dance of
      nymphs, and there an ilex overshadowing a rock, which reminded me of an
      ode of Horace or a drawing of Tibur. I felt a kind of certainty that the
      landscape had much that was Greek in it. And what made the sense of
      resemblance the more striking was the sea, which one feels to be always
      near, though one may not see it, and which any turn of the valley may
      bring into view. We found out a little tower with an overgrown garden, of
      which the owner might have been taken for a husbandman of the Odyssey. He
      could scarcely speak any French, but was not without a certain grave
      dignity. I translated to him the inscription on his sun-dial, &ldquo;<i>Hora est
      benefaciendi</i>,&rdquo; which is beautiful, and pleased him greatly. It would
      be an inspiring place to write a novel in. Only I do not know whether the
      little den would have a decent room, and one would certainly have to live
      upon eggs, milk, and figs, like Philemon. February 15, 1875. (<i>Hyères</i>).&mdash;I
      have just been reading the two last &ldquo;Discours&rdquo; at the French Academy,
      lingering over every word and weighing every idea. This kind of writing is
      a sort of intellectual dainty, for it is the art &ldquo;of expressing truth with
      all the courtesy and finesse possible;&rdquo; the art of appearing perfectly at
      ease without the smallest loss of manners; of being gracefully sincere,
      and of making criticism itself a pleasure to the person criticized. Legacy
      as it is from the monarchical tradition, this particular kind of eloquence
      is the distinguishing mark of those men of the world who are also men of
      breeding, and those men of letters who are also gentlemen. Democracy could
      never have invented it, and in this delicate <i>genre</i> of literature
      France may give points to all rival peoples, for it is the fruit of that
      refined and yet vigorous social sense which is produced by court and
      drawing-room life, by literature and good company, by means of a mutual
      education continued for centuries. This complicated product is as original
      in its way as Athenian eloquence, but it is less healthy and less durable.
      If ever France becomes Americanized this <i>genre</i> at least will
      perish, without hope of revival.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 16, 1875. (<i>Hyères</i>).&mdash;I have already gone through the
      various emotions of leave-taking. I have been wandering slowly through the
      streets and up the castle hill, gathering a harvest of images and
      recollections. Already I am full of regret that I have not made a better
      study of the country, in which I have now spent four months and more. It
      is like what happens when a friend dies; we accuse ourselves of having
      loved him too little, or loved him ill; or it is like our own death, when
      we look back upon life and feel that it has been misspent.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 16,1875.&mdash;Life is but a daily oscillation between revolt and
      submission, between the instinct of the <i>ego</i>, which is to expand, to
      take delight in its own tranquil sense of inviolability, if not to triumph
      in its own sovereignty, and the instinct of the soul, which is to obey the
      universal order, to accept the will of God.
    </p>
    <p>
      The cold renunciation of disillusioned reason brings no real peace. Peace
      is only to be found in reconciliation with destiny, when destiny seems, in
      the religious sense of the word, <i>good</i>; that is to say, when man
      feels himself directly in the presence of God. Then, and then only, does
      the will acquiesce. Nay more, it only completely acquiesces when it
      adores. The soul only submits to the hardness of fate by virtue of its
      discovery of a sublime compensation&mdash;the loving kindness of the
      Almighty. That is to say, it cannot resign itself to lack or famine, it
      shrinks from the void around it, and the happiness either of hope or faith
      is essential to it. It may very well vary its objects, but some object it
      must have. It may renounce its former idols, but it will demand another
      cult. The soul hungers and thirsts after happiness, and it is in vain that
      everything deserts it&mdash;it will never submit to its abandonment.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 28, 1875. (<i>Geneva</i>).&mdash;A word used by Sainte-Beuve à
      propos of Benjamin Constant has struck me: it is the word <i>consideration</i>.
      To possess or not to possess <i>consideration</i> was to Madame de Staël a
      matter of supreme importance&mdash;the loss of it an irreparable evil, the
      acquirement of it a pressing necessity. What, then, is this good thing?
      The esteem of the public. And how is it gained? By honorable character and
      life, combined with a certain aggregate of services rendered and of
      successes obtained. It is not exactly a good conscience, but it is
      something like it, for it is the witness from without, if not the witness
      from within. <i>Consideration</i> is not reputation, still less celebrity,
      fame, or glory; it has nothing to do with <i>savoir faire</i>, and is not
      always the attendant of talent or genius. It is the reward given to
      constancy in duty, to probity of conduct. It is the homage rendered to a
      life held to be irreproachable. It is a little more than esteem, and a
      little less than admiration. To enjoy public consideration is at once a
      happiness and a power. The loss of it is a misfortune and a source of
      daily suffering. Here am I, at the age of fifty-three, without ever having
      given this idea the smallest place in my life. It is curious, but the
      desire for consideration has been to me so little of a motive that I have
      not even been conscious of such an idea at all. The fact shows, I suppose,
      that for me the audience, the gallery, the public, has never had more than
      a negative importance. I have neither asked nor expected anything from it,
      not even justice; and to be a dependent upon it, to solicit its suffrages
      and its good graces, has always seemed to me an act of homage and
      flunkeyism against which my pride has instinctively rebelled. I have never
      even tried to gain the good will of a <i>côterìe</i> or a newspaper, nor
      so much as the vote of an elector. And yet it would have been a joy to me
      to be smiled upon, loved, encouraged, welcomed, and to obtain what I was
      so ready to give, kindness and good will. But to hunt down consideration
      and reputation&mdash;to force the esteem of others&mdash;seemed to me an
      effort unworthy of myself, almost a degradation. I have never even thought
      of it.
    </p>
    <p>
      Perhaps I have lost consideration by my indifference to it. Probably I
      have disappointed public expectation by thus allowing an over-sensitive
      and irritable consciousness to lead me into isolation and retreat. I know
      that the world, which is only eager to silence you when you do speak, is
      angry with your silence as soon as its own action has killed in you the
      wish to speak. No doubt, to be silent with a perfectly clear conscience a
      man must not hold a public office. I now indeed say to myself that a
      professor is morally bound to justify his position by publication; that
      students, authorities, and public are placed thereby in a healthier
      relation toward him; that it is necessary for his good repute in the
      world, and for the proper maintenance of his position. But this point of
      view has not been a familiar one to me. I have endeavored to give
      conscientious lectures, and I have discharged all the subsidiary duties of
      my post to the best of my ability; but I have never been able to bend
      myself to a struggle with hostile opinion, for all the while my heart has
      been full of sadness and disappointment, and I have known and felt that I
      have been systematically and deliberately isolated. Premature despair and
      the deepest discouragement have been my constant portion. Incapable of
      taking any interest in my talents for my own sake, I let everything slip
      as soon as the hope of being loved for them and by them had forsaken me. A
      hermit against my will, I have not even found peace in solitude, because
      my inmost conscience has not been any better satisfied than my heart.
    </p>
    <p>
      Does not all this make up a melancholy lot, a barren failure of a life?
      What use have I made of my gifts, of my special circumstances, of my
      half-century of existence? What have I paid back to my country? Are all
      the documents I have produced, taken together, my correspondence, these
      thousands of journal pages, my lectures, my articles, my poems, my notes
      of different kinds, anything better than withered leaves? To whom and to
      what have I been useful? Will my name survive me a single day, and will it
      ever mean anything to anybody? A life of no account! A great many comings
      and goings, a great many scrawls&mdash;for nothing. When all is added up&mdash;nothing!
      And worst of all, it has not been a life used up in the service of some
      adored object, or sacrificed to any future hope. Its sufferings will have
      been vain, its renunciations useless, its sacrifices gratuitous, its
      dreariness without reward.... No, I am wrong; it will have had its secret
      treasure, its sweetness, its reward. It will have inspired a few
      affections of great price; it will have given joy to a few souls; its
      hidden existence will have had some value. Besides, if in itself it has
      been nothing, it has understood much. If it has not been in harmony with
      the great order, still it has loved it. If it has missed happiness and
      duty, it has at least felt its own nothingness, and implored its pardon.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Later on.</i>&mdash;There is a great affinity in me with the Hindoo
      genius&mdash;that mind, vast, imaginative, loving, dreamy, and
      speculative, but destitute of ambition, personality, and will. Pantheistic
      disinterestedness, the effacement of the self in the great whole, womanish
      gentleness, a horror of slaughter, antipathy to action&mdash;these are all
      present in my nature, in the nature at least which has been developed by
      years and circumstances. Still the West has also had its part in me. What
      I have found difficult is to keep up a prejudice in favor of any form,
      nationality, or individuality whatever. Hence my indifference to my own
      person, my own usefulness, interest, or opinions of the moment. What does
      it all matter? <i>Omnis determinatio est negatio</i>. Grief localizes us,
      love particularizes us, but thought delivers us from personality.... To be
      a man is a poor thing, to be a man is well; to be <i>the</i> man&mdash;man
      in essence and in principle&mdash;that alone is to be desired.
    </p>
    <p>
      Yes, but in these Brahmanic aspirations what becomes of the subordination
      of the individual to duty? Pleasure may lie in ceasing to be individual,
      but duty lies in performing the microscopic task allotted to us. The
      problem set before us is to bring our daily task into the temple of
      contemplation and ply it there, to act as in the presence of God, to
      interfuse one&rsquo;s little part with religion. So only can we inform the
      detail of life, all that is passing, temporary, and insignificant, with
      beauty and nobility. So may we dignify and consecrate the meanest of
      occupations. So may we feel that we are paying our tribute to the
      universal work and the eternal will. So are we reconciled with life and
      delivered from the fear of death. So are we in order and at peace.
    </p>
    <p>
      September 1, 1875.&mdash;I have been working for some hours at my article
      on Mme. de Staël, but with what labor, what painful effort! When I write
      for publication every word is misery, and my pen stumbles at every line,
      so anxious am I to find the ideally best expression, and so great is the
      number of possibilities which open before me at every step.
    </p>
    <p>
      Composition demands a concentration, decision, and pliancy which I no
      longer possess. I cannot fuse together materials and ideas. If we are to
      give anything a form, we must, so to speak, be the tyrants of it.
      [Footnote: Compare this paragraph from the &ldquo;Pensées of a new writer, M.
      Joseph Roux, a country curé, living in a remote part of the <i>Bas
      Limousin</i>, whose thoughts have been edited and published this year by
      M. Paul Mariéton (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre):
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;Le verbe ne souffre et ne connait que la volonté qui le dompte, et
      n&rsquo;emporte loin sans péril que l&rsquo;intelligence qui lui ménage avec empire
      l&rsquo;éperon et le frein.&rdquo;]
    </p>
    <p>
      We must treat our subject brutally, and not be always trembling lest we
      are doing it a wrong. We must be able to transmute and absorb it into our
      own substance. This sort of confident effrontery is beyond me: my whole
      nature tends to that impersonality which respects and subordinates itself
      to the object; it is love of truth which holds me back from concluding and
      deciding. And then I am always retracing my steps: instead of going
      forward I work in a circle: I am afraid of having forgotten a point, of
      having exaggerated an expression, of having used a word out of place,
      while all the time I ought to have been thinking of essentials and aiming
      at breadth of treatment. I do not know how to sacrifice anything, how to
      give up anything whatever. Hurtful timidity, unprofitable
      conscientiousness, fatal slavery to detail!
    </p>
    <p>
      In reality I have never given much thought to the art of writing, to the
      best way of making an article, an essay, a book, nor have I ever
      methodically undergone the writer&rsquo;s apprenticeship; it would have been
      useful to me, and I was always ashamed of what was useful. I have felt, as
      it were, a scruple against trying to surprise the secret of the masters of
      literature, against picking <i>chef-d&rsquo;oeuvres</i> to pieces. When I think
      that I have always postponed the serious study of the art of writing, from
      a sort of awe of it, and a secret love of its beauty, I am furious with my
      own stupidity, and with my own respect. Practice and routine would have
      given me that ease, lightness, and assurance, without which the natural
      gift and impulse dies away. But on the contrary, I have developed two
      opposed habits of mind, the habit of scientific analysis which exhausts
      the material offered to it, and the habit of immediate notation of passing
      impressions. The art of composition lies between the two; you want for it
      both the living unity of the thing and the sustained operation of thought.
    </p>
    <p>
      October 25, 1875.&mdash;I have been listening to M. Taine&rsquo;s first lecture
      (on the &ldquo;Ancien Régime&rdquo;) delivered in the university hall. It was an
      extremely substantial piece of work&mdash;clear, instructive, compact, and
      full of matter. As a writer he shows great skill in the French method of
      simplifying his subject by massing it in large striking divisions; his
      great defect is a constant straining after points; his principal merit is
      the sense he has of historical reality, his desire to see things as they
      are. For the rest, he has extreme openness of mind, freedom of thought,
      and precision of language. The hall was crowded.
    </p>
    <p>
      October 26, 1875.&mdash;All origins are secret; the principle of every
      individual or collective life is a mystery&mdash;that is to say, something
      irrational, inexplicable, not to be defined. We may even go farther and
      say, Every individuality is an insoluble enigma, and no beginning explains
      it. In fact, all that has <i>become</i> may be explained retrospectively,
      but the beginning of anything whatever did not <i>become</i>. It
      represents always the &ldquo;<i>fiat lux</i>,&rdquo; the initial miracle, the act of
      creation; for it is the consequence of nothing else, it simply appears
      among anterior things which make a <i>milieu</i>, an occasion, a
      surrounding for it, but which are witnesses of its appearance without
      understanding whence it comes.
    </p>
    <p>
      Perhaps also there are no true individuals, and, if so, no beginning but
      one only, the primordial impulse, the first movement. All men on this
      hypothesis would be but <i>man</i> in two sexes; man again might be
      reduced to the animal, the animal to the plant, and the only individuality
      left would be a living nature, reduced to a living matter, to the
      hylozoism of Thales. However, even upon this hypothesis, if there were but
      one absolute beginning, relative beginnings would still remain to us as
      multiple symbols of the absolute. Every life, called individual for
      convenience sake and by analogy, would represent in miniature the history
      of the world, and would be to the eye of the philosopher a microscopic
      compendium of it.
    </p>
    <p>
      The history of the formation of ideas is what, frees the mind.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      A philosophic truth does not become popular until some eloquent soul has
      humanized it or some gifted personality has translated and embodied it.
      Pure truth cannot be assimilated by the crowd; it must be communicated by
      contagion.
    </p>
    <p>
      January 30, 1876.&mdash;After dinner I went two steps off, to Marc
      Monnier&rsquo;s, to hear the &ldquo;Luthier de Crémone,&rdquo; a one-act comedy in verse,
      read by the author, François Coppée.
    </p>
    <p>
      It was a feast of fine sensations, of literary dainties. For the little
      piece is a pearl. It is steeped in poetry, and every line is a fresh
      pleasure to one&rsquo;s taste.
    </p>
    <p>
      This young <i>maestro</i> is like the violin he writes about, vibrating
      and passionate; he has, besides delicacy, point, grace, all that a writer
      wants to make what is simple, naïve, heartfelt, and out of the beaten
      track, acceptable to a cultivated society.
    </p>
    <p>
      How to return to nature through art: there is the problem of all highly
      composite literatures like our own. Rousseau himself attacked letters with
      all the resources of the art of writing, and boasted the delights of
      savage life with a skill and adroitness developed only by the most
      advanced civilization. And it is indeed this marriage of contraries which
      charms us; this spiced gentleness, this learned innocence, this calculated
      simplicity, this yes and no, this foolish wisdom. It is the supreme irony
      of such combinations which tickles the taste of advanced and artificial
      epochs, epochs when men ask for two sensations at once, like the contrary
      meanings fused by the smile of La Gioconda. And our satisfaction, too, in
      work of this kind is best expressed by that ambiguous curve of the lip
      which says: I feel your charm, but I am not your dupe; I see the illusion
      both from within and from without; I yield to you, but I understand you; I
      am complaisant, but I am proud; I am open to sensations, yet not the slave
      of any; you have talent, I have subtlety of perception; we are quits, and
      we understand each other.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 1, 1876.&mdash;This evening we talked of the infinitely great and
      the infinitely small. The great things of the universe are for&mdash;&mdash;so
      much easier to understand than the small, because all greatness is a
      multiple of herself, whereas she is incapable of analyzing what requires a
      different sort of measurement.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is possible for the thinking being to place himself in all points of
      view, and to teach his soul to live under the most different modes of
      being. But it must be confessed that very few profit by the possibility.
      Men are in general imprisoned, held in a vice by their circumstances
      almost as the animals are, but they have very little suspicion of it
      because they have so little faculty of self-judgment. It is only the
      critic and the philosopher who can penetrate into all states of being, and
      realize their life from within.
    </p>
    <p>
      When the imagination shrinks in fear from the phantoms which it creates,
      it may be excused because it is imagination. But when the intellect allows
      itself to be tyrannized over or terrified by the categories to which
      itself gives birth, it is in the wrong, for it is not allowed to intellect&mdash;the
      critical power of man&mdash;to be the dupe of anything.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now, in the superstition of size the mind is merely the dupe of itself,
      for it creates the notion of space. The created is not more than the
      creator, the son not more than the father. The point of view wants
      rectifying. The mind has to free itself from space, which gives it a false
      notion of itself, but it can only attain this freedom by reversing things
      and by learning to see space in the mind instead of the mind in space. How
      can it do this? Simply by reducing space to its virtuality. Space is
      dispersion; mind is concentration.
    </p>
    <p>
      And that is why God is present everywhere, without taking up a thousand
      millions of cube leagues, nor a hundred times more nor a hundred times
      less.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the state of thought the universe occupies but a single point; but in
      the state of dispersion and analysis this thought requires the heaven of
      heavens for its expansion.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the same way, time and number are contained in the mind. Man, as mind,
      is not their inferior, but their superior.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is true that before he can reach this state of freedom his own body
      must appear to him at will either speck or world&mdash;that is to say, he
      must be independent of it. So long as the self still feels itself spatial,
      dispersed, corporeal, it is but a soul, it is not a mind; it is conscious
      of itself only as the animal is, the impressionable, affectionate, active
      and restless animal.
    </p>
    <p>
      The mind being the subject of phenomena cannot be itself phenomenal; the
      mirror of an image, if it was an image, could not be a mirror. There can
      be no echo without a noise. Consciousness means some one who experiences
      something. And all the somethings together cannot take the place of the
      some one. The phenomenon exists only for a point which is not itself, and
      for which it is an object. The perceptible supposes the perceiver.
    </p>
    <p>
      May 15, 1876.&mdash;This morning I corrected the proofs of the
      &ldquo;Etrangères.&rdquo; [Footnote: <i>Les Etrangères: Poésies traduites de diverses
      littératures</i>, par H. F. Amiel, 1876.] Here at least is one thing off
      my hands. The piece of prose theorizing which ends the volume pleased and
      satisfied me a good deal more than my new meters. The book, as a whole,
      may be regarded as an attempt to solve the problem of French
      verse-translation considered as a special art. It is science applied to
      poetry. It ought not, I think, to do any discredit to a philosopher, for,
      after all, it is nothing but applied psychology.
    </p>
    <p>
      Do I feel any relief, any joy, pride, hope? Hardly. It seems to me that I
      feel nothing at all, or at least my feeling is so vague and doubtful that
      I cannot analyze it. On the whole, I am rather tempted to say to myself,
      how much labor for how small a result&mdash;<i>Much ado about nothing!</i>
      And yet the work in itself is good, is successful. But what does
      verse-translation matter? Already my interest in it is fading; my mind and
      my energies clamor for something else.
    </p>
    <p>
      What will Edmond Scherer say to the volume?
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      To the inmost self of me this literary attempt is quite indifferent&mdash;a
      Lilliputian affair. In comparing my work with other work of the same kind,
      I find a sort of relative satisfaction; but I see the intrinsic futility
      of it, and the insignificance of its success or failure. I do not believe
      in the public; I do not believe in my own work; I have no ambition,
      properly speaking, and I blow soap-bubbles for want of something to do.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Car le néant peut seul bien cacher l&rsquo;infini.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      Self-satire, disillusion, absence of prejudice, may be freedom, but they
      are not strength.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 12, 1876.&mdash;Trouble on trouble. My cough has been worse than
      ever. I cannot see that the fine weather or the holidays have made any
      change for the better in my state of health. On the contrary, the process
      of demolition seems more rapid. It is a painful experience, this premature
      decay!... &ldquo;<i>Après tant de malheurs, que vous reste-t-il? Moi.</i>&rdquo; This
      <i>&ldquo;moi&rdquo;</i> is the central consciousness, the trunk of all the branches
      which have been cut away, that which bears every successive mutilation.
      Soon I shall have nothing else left than bare intellect. Death reduces us
      to the mathematical &ldquo;point;&rdquo; the destruction which precedes it forces us
      back, as it were, by a series of ever-narrowing concentric circles to this
      last inaccessible refuge. Already I have a foretaste of that zero in which
      all forms and all modes are extinguished. I see how we return into the
      night, and inversely I understand how we issue from it. Life is but a
      meteor, of which the whole brief course is before me. Birth, life, death
      assume a fresh meaning to us at each phase of our existence. To see one&rsquo;s
      self as a firework in the darkness&mdash;to become a witness of one&rsquo;s own
      fugitive phenomenon&mdash;this is practical psychology. I prefer indeed
      the spectacle of the world, which is a vaster and more splendid firework;
      but when illness narrows my horizon and makes me dwell perforce upon my
      own miseries, these miseries are still capable of supplying food for my
      psychological curiosity. What interests me in myself, in spite of my
      repulsions is, that I find in my own case a genuine example of human
      nature, and therefore a specimen of general value. The sample enables me
      to understand a multitude of similar situations, and numbers of my
      fellow-men.
    </p>
    <p>
      To enter consciously into all possible modes of being would be sufficient
      occupation for hundreds of centuries&mdash;at least for our finite
      intelligences, which are conditioned by time. The progressive happiness of
      the process, indeed may be easily poisoned and embittered by the ambition
      which asks for everything at once, and clamors to reach the absolute at a
      bound. But it may be answered that aspirations are necessarily prophetic,
      for they could only have come into being under the action of the same
      cause which will enable them to reach their goal. The soul can only
      imagine the absolute because the absolute exists; our consciousness of a
      possible perfection is the guarantee that perfection will be realized.
    </p>
    <p>
      Thought itself is eternal. It is the consciousness of thought which is
      gradually achieved through the long succession of ages, races, and
      humanities. Such is the doctrine of Hegel. The history of the mind is,
      according to him one of approximation to the absolute, and the absolute
      differs at the two ends of the story. It <i>was</i> at the beginning; it
      <i>knows itself</i> at the end. Or rather it advances in the possession of
      itself with the gradual unfolding of creation. Such also was the
      conception of Aristotle.
    </p>
    <p>
      If the history of the mind and of consciousness is the very marrow and
      essence of being, then to be driven back on psychology, even personal
      psychology, is to be still occupied with the main question of things, to
      keep to the subject, to feel one&rsquo;s self in the center of the universal
      drama. There is comfort in the idea. Everything else may be taken away
      from us, but if thought remains we are still connected by a magic thread
      with the axis of the world. But we may lose thought and speech. Then
      nothing remains but simple feeling, the sense of the presence of God and
      of death in God&mdash;the last relic of the human privilege, which is to
      participate in the whole, to commune with the absolute.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Ta vie est un éclair qui meurt dans son nuage,
   Mais l&rsquo;éclair t&rsquo;a sauvé s&rsquo;il t&rsquo;a fait voir le ciel.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      July 26, 1876.&mdash;A private journal is a friend to idleness. It frees
      us from the necessity of looking all round a subject, it puts up with
      every kind of repetition, it accompanies all the caprices and meanderings
      of the inner life, and proposes to itself no definite end. This journal of
      mine represents the material of a good many volumes: what prodigious waste
      of time, of thought, of strength! It will be useful to nobody, and even
      for myself&mdash;it has rather helped me to shirk life than to practice
      it. A journal takes the place of a confidant, that is, of friend or wife;
      it becomes a substitute for production, a substitute for country and
      public. It is a grief-cheating device, a mode of escape and withdrawal;
      but, factotum as it is, though it takes the place of everything, properly
      speaking it represents nothing at all....
    </p>
    <p>
      What is it which makes the history of a soul? It is the stratification of
      its different stages of progress, the story of its acquisitions and of the
      general course of its destiny. Before my history can teach anybody
      anything, or even interest myself, it must be disentangled from its
      materials, distilled and simplified. These thousands of pages are but the
      pile of leaves and bark from which the essence has still to be extracted.
      A whole forest of cinchonas are worth but one cask of quinine. A whole
      Smyrna rose-garden goes to produce one vial of perfume.
    </p>
    <p>
      This mass of written talk, the work of twenty-nine years, may in the end
      be worth nothing at all; for each is only interested in his own romance,
      his own individual life. Even I perhaps shall never have time to read them
      over myself. So&mdash;so what? I shall have lived my life, and life
      consists in repeating the human type, and the burden of the human song, as
      myriads of my kindred have done, are doing, and will do, century after
      century. To rise to consciousness of this burden and this type is
      something, and we can scarcely achieve anything further. The realization
      of the type is more complete, and the burden a more joyous one, if
      circumstances are kind and propitious, but whether the puppets have done
      this or that&mdash;
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Trois p&rsquo;tits tours et puis s&rsquo;en vont!&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      everything falls into the same gulf at last, and comes to very much the
      same thing.
    </p>
    <p>
      To rebel against fate&mdash;to try to escape the inevitable issue&mdash;is
      almost puerile. When the duration of a centenarian and that of an insect
      are quantities sensibly equivalent&mdash;and geology and astronomy enable
      us to regard such durations from this point of view&mdash;what is the
      meaning of all our tiny efforts and cries, the value of our anger, our
      ambition, our hope? For the dream of a dream it is absurd to raise these
      make-believe tempests. The forty millions of infusoria which make up a
      cube-inch of chalk&mdash;do they matter much to us? and do the forty
      millions of men who make up France matter any more to an inhabitant of the
      moon or Jupiter?
    </p>
    <p>
      To be a conscious monad&mdash;a nothing which knows itself to be the
      microscopic phantom of the universe: this is all we can ever attain to.
    </p>
    <p>
      September 12, 1876.&mdash;What is your own particular absurdity? Why,
      simply that you exhaust yourself in trying to understand wisdom without
      practicing it, that you are always making preparations for nothing, that
      you live without living. Contemplation which has not the courage to be
      purely contemplative, renunciation which does not renounce completely,
      chronic contradiction&mdash;there is your case. Inconsistent skepticism,
      irresolution, not convinced but incorrigible, weakness which will not
      accept itself and cannot transform itself into strength&mdash;there is
      your misery.
    </p>
    <p>
      The comic side of it lies in capacity to direct others, becoming
      incapacity to direct one&rsquo;s self, in the dream of the infinitely great
      stopped short by the infinitely little, in what seems to be the utter
      uselessness of talent. To arrive at immobility by excess of motion, at
      zero from abundance of numbers, is a strange farce, a sad comedy; the
      poorest gossip can laugh at its absurdity.
    </p>
    <p>
      September 19, 1876.&mdash;My reading to-day has been Doudan&rsquo;s &ldquo;Lettres et
      Mélanges.&rdquo; [Footnote: Ximénès Doudan, born in 1800, died 1872, the
      brilliant friend and tutor of the De Broglie family, whose conversation
      was so much sought after in life, and whose letters have been so eagerly
      read in France since his death. Compare M. Scherer&rsquo;s two articles on
      Doudan&rsquo;s &ldquo;Lettres&rdquo; and &ldquo;Pensées&rdquo; in his last published volume of essays.]
      A fascinating book! Wit, grace, subtlety, imagination, thought&mdash;these
      letters possess them all. How much I regret that I never knew the man
      himself. He was a Frenchman of the best type, <i>un délicat né sublime</i>,
      to quote Sainte-Beuve&rsquo;s expression. Fastidiousness of temper, and a too
      keen love of perfection, led him to withhold his talent from the public,
      but while still living, and within his own circle, he was the recognized
      equal of the best. He scarcely lacked anything except that fraction of
      ambition, of brutality and material force which are necessary to success
      in this world; but he was appreciated by the best society of Paris, and he
      cared for nothing else. He reminds me of Joubert.
    </p>
    <p>
      September 20th.&mdash;To be witty is to satisfy another&rsquo;s wits by the
      bestowal on him of two pleasures, that of understanding one thing and that
      of guessing another, and so achieving a double stroke.
    </p>
    <p>
      Thus Doudan scarcely ever speaks out his thought directly; he disguises
      and suggests it by imagery, allusion, hyperbole; he overlays it with light
      irony and feigned anger, with gentle mischief and assumed humility. The
      more the thing to be guessed differs from the thing said, the more
      pleasant surprise there is for the interlocutor or the correspondent
      concerned. These charming and delicate ways of expression allow a man to
      teach what he will without pedantry, and to venture what he will without
      offense. There is something Attic and aerial in them; they mingle grave
      and gay, fiction and truth, with a light grace of touch such as neither La
      Fontaine nor Alcibiades would have been ashamed of. Socratic <i>badinage</i>
      like this presupposes a free and equal mind, victorious over physical ill
      and inward discontents. Such delicate playfulness is the exclusive
      heritage of those rare natures in whom subtlety is the disguise of
      superiority, and taste its revelation. &ldquo;What balance of faculties and
      cultivation it requires! What personal distinction it shows! Perhaps only
      a valetudinarian would have been capable of this <i>morbidezza</i> of
      touch, this marriage of virile thought and feminine caprice. If there is
      excess anywhere, it lies perhaps in a certain effeminacy of sentiment.
      Doudan can put up with nothing but what is perfect&mdash;nothing but what
      is absolutely harmonious; all that is rough, harsh, powerful, brutal, and
      unexpected, throws him into convulsions. Audacity&mdash;boldness of all
      kinds&mdash;repels him. This Athenian of the Roman time is a true disciple
      of Epicurus in all matters of sight, hearing, and intelligence&mdash;a
      crumpled rose-leaf disturbs him.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Une ombre, un souffle, un rien, tout lui donnait la fièvre.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      What all this softness wants is strength, creative and muscular force. His
      range is not as wide as I thought it at first. The classical world and the
      Renaissance&mdash;that is to say, the horizon of La Fontaine&mdash;is his
      horizon. He is out of his element in the German or Slav literatures. He
      knows nothing of Asia. Humanity for him is not much larger than France,
      and he has never made a bible of Nature. In music and painting he is more
      or less exclusive. In philosophy he stops at Kant. To sum up: he is a man
      of exquisite and ingenious taste, but he is not a first-rate critic, still
      less a poet, philosopher, or artist. He was an admirable talker, a
      delightful letter writer, who might have become an author had he chosen to
      concentrate himself. I must wait for the second volume in order to review
      and correct this preliminary impression.
    </p>
    <p>
      Midday.&mdash;I have now gone once more through the whole volume,
      lingering over the Attic charm of it, and meditating on the originality
      and distinction of the man&rsquo;s organization. Doudan was a keen penetrating
      psychologist, a diviner of aptitudes, a trainer of minds, a man of
      infinite taste and talent, capable of every <i>nuance</i> and of every
      delicacy; but his defect was a want of persevering energy of thought, a
      lack of patience in execution. Timidity, unworldliness, indolence,
      indifference, confined him to the role of the literary counsellor and made
      him judge of the field in which he ought rather to have fought. But do I
      mean to blame him?&mdash;no indeed! In the first place, it would be to
      fire on my allies; in the second, very likely he chose the better part.
    </p>
    <p>
      Was it not Goethe who remarked that in the neighborhood of all famous men
      we find men who never achieve fame, and yet were esteemed by those who
      did, as their equals or superiors? Descartes, I think, said the same
      thing. Fame will not run after the men who are afraid of her. She makes
      mock of those trembling and respectful lovers who deserve but cannot force
      her favors. The public is won by the bold, imperious talents&mdash;by the
      enterprising and the skillful. It does not believe in modesty, which it
      regards as a device of impotence. The golden book contains but a section
      of the true geniuses; it names those only who have taken glory by storm.
    </p>
    <p>
      November 15, 1876.&mdash;I have been reading &ldquo;L&rsquo;Avenir Religieux des
      Peuples Civilisés,&rdquo; by Emile de Laveleye. The theory of this writer is
      that the gospel, in its pure form, is capable of providing the religion of
      the future, and that the abolition of all religious principle, which is
      what the socialism of the present moment demands, is as much to be feared
      as Catholic superstition. The Protestant method, according to him, is the
      means of transition whereby sacerdotal Christianity passes into the pure
      religion of the gospel. Laveleye does not think that civilization can last
      without the belief in God and in another life. Perhaps he forgets that
      Japan and China prove the contrary. But it is enough to determine him
      against atheism if it can be shown that a general atheism would bring
      about a lowering of the moral average. After all, however, this is nothing
      but a religion of utilitarianism. A belief is not true because it is
      useful. And it is truth alone&mdash;scientific, established, proved, and
      rational truth&mdash;which is capable of satisfying nowadays the awakened
      minds of all classes. We may still say perhaps, &ldquo;faith governs the world&rdquo;&mdash;but
      the faith of the present is no longer in revelation or in the priest&mdash;it
      is in reason and in science. Is there a science of goodness and happiness?&mdash;that
      is the question. Do justice and goodness depend upon any particular
      religion? How are men to be made free, honest, just, and good?&mdash;there
      is the point.
    </p>
    <p>
      On my way through the book I perceived many new applications of my law of
      irony. Every epoch has two contradictory aspirations which are logically
      antagonistic and practically associated. Thus the philosophic materialism
      of the last century was the champion of liberty. And at the present moment
      we find Darwinians in love with equality, while Darwinism itself is based
      on the right of the stronger. Absurdity is interwoven with life: real
      beings are animated contradictions, absurdities brought into action.
      Harmony with self would mean peace, repose, and perhaps immobility By far
      the greater number of human beings can only conceive action, or practice
      it, under the form of war&mdash;a war of competition at home, a bloody war
      of nations abroad, and finally war with self. So that life is a perpetual
      combat; it wills that which it wills not, and wills not that it wills.
      Hence what I call the law of irony&mdash;that is to say, the refutation of
      the self by itself, the concrete realization of the absurd.
    </p>
    <p>
      Is such a result inevitable? I think not. Struggle is the caricature of
      harmony, and harmony, which is the association of contraries, is also a
      principle of movement. War is a brutal and fierce means of pacification;
      it means the suppression of resistance by the destruction or enslavement
      of the conquered. Mutual respect would be a better way out of
      difficulties. Conflict is the result of the selfishness which will
      acknowledge no other limit than that of external force. The laws of
      animality govern almost the whole of history. The history of man is
      essentially zoological; it becomes human late in the day, and then only in
      the beautiful souls, the souls alive to justice, goodness, enthusiasm, and
      devotion. The angel shows itself rarely and with difficulty through the
      highly-organized brute. The divine aureole plays only with a dim and
      fugitive light around the brows of the world&rsquo;s governing race.
    </p>
    <p>
      The Christian nations offer many illustrations of the law of irony. They
      profess the citizenship of heaven, the exclusive worship of eternal good;
      and never has the hungry pursuit of perishable joys, the love of this
      world, or the thirst for conquest, been stronger or more active than among
      these nations. Their official motto is exactly the reverse of their real
      aspiration. Under a false flag they play the smuggler with a droll ease of
      conscience. Is the fraud a conscious one? No&mdash;it is but an
      application of the law of irony. The deception is so common a one that the
      delinquent becomes unconscious of it. Every nation gives itself the lie in
      the course of its daily life, and not one feels the ridicule of its
      position. A man must be a Japanese to perceive the burlesque
      contradictions of the Christian civilization. He must be a native of the
      moon to understand the stupidity of man and his state of constant
      delusion. The philosopher himself falls under the law of irony, for after
      having mentally stripped himself of all prejudice&mdash;having, that is to
      say, wholly laid aside his own personality, he finds himself slipping back
      perforce into the rags he had taken off, obliged to eat and drink, to be
      hungry, cold, thirsty, and to behave like all other mortals, after having
      for a moment behaved like no other. This is the point where the comic
      poets are lying in wait for him; the animal needs revenge themselves for
      his flight into the Empyrean, and mock him by their cry: <i>Thou art dust,
      thou art nothing, than art man</i>!
    </p>
    <p>
      November 26, 1876.&mdash;I have just finished a novel of Cherbuliez, &ldquo;Le
      fiancé de Mademoiselle de St. Maur.&rdquo; It is a jeweled mosaic of precious
      stones, sparkling with a thousand lights. But the heart gets little from
      it. The Mephistophelian type of novel leaves one sad. This subtle, refined
      world is strangely near to corruption; these artificial women have an air
      of the Lower Empire. There is not a character who is not witty, and
      neither is there one who has not bartered conscience for cleverness. The
      elegance of the whole is but a mask of immorality. These stories of
      feeling in which there is no feeling make a strange and painful impression
      upon me.
    </p>
    <p>
      December 4, 1876.&mdash;I have been thinking a great deal of Victor
      Cherbuliez. Perhaps his novels make up the most disputable part of his
      work&mdash;they are so much wanting in simplicity, feeling, reality. And
      yet what knowledge, style, wit, and subtlety&mdash;how much thought
      everywhere, and what mastery of language! He astonishes one; I cannot but
      admire him.
    </p>
    <p>
      Cherbuliez&rsquo;s mind is of immense range, clear-sighted, keen, full of
      resource; he is an Alexandrian exquisite, substituting for the feeling
      which makes men earnest the irony which leaves them free. Pascal would say
      of him&mdash;&ldquo;He has never risen from the order of thought to the order of
      charity.&rdquo; But we must not be ungrateful. A Lucian is not worth an
      Augustine, but still he is Lucian. Those who enfranchise the mind render
      service to man as well as those who persuade the heart. After the leaders
      come the liberators, and the negative and critical minds have their place
      and function beside the men of affirmation, the convinced and inspired
      souls. The positive element in Victor Cherbuliez&rsquo;s work is beauty, not
      goodness, not moral or religious life. Aesthetically he is serious; what
      he respects is style. And therefore he has found his vocation; for he is
      first and foremost a writer&mdash;a consummate, exquisite, and model
      writer. He does not win our love, but he claims our homage.
    </p>
    <p>
      In every union there is a mystery&mdash;a certain invisible bond which
      must not be disturbed. This vital bond in the filial relation is respect;
      in friendship, esteem; in marriage, confidence; in the collective life,
      patriotism; in the religious life, faith. Such points are best left
      untouched by speech, for to touch them is almost to profane them.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Men of genius supply the substance of history, while the mass of men are
      but the critical filter, the limiting, slackening, passive force needed
      for the modification of the ideas supplied by genius. Stupidity is
      dynamically the necessary balance of intellect. To make an atmosphere
      which human life can breathe, oxygen must be combined with a great deal&mdash;with
      three-fourths&mdash;of azote. And so, to make history, there must be a
      great deal of resistance to conquer and of weight to drag.
    </p>
    <p>
      January 5, 1877.&mdash;This morning I am altogether miserable,
      half-stifled by bronchitis&mdash;walking a difficulty&mdash;the brain weak&mdash;this
      last the worst misery of all, for thought is my only weapon against my
      other ills. Rapid deterioration of all the bodily powers, a dull
      continuous waste of vital organs, brain decay: this is the trial laid upon
      me, a trial that no one suspects! Men pity you for growing old outwardly;
      but what does that matter?&mdash;nothing, so long as the faculties are
      intact. This boon of mental soundness to the last has been granted to so
      many students that I hoped for it a little. Alas, must I sacrifice that
      too? Sacrifice is almost easy when we believe it laid upon us, asked of
      us, rather, by a fatherly God and a watchful Providence; but I know
      nothing of this religious joy. The mutilation of the self which is going
      on in me lowers and lessens me without doing good to anybody. Supposing I
      became blind, who would be the gainer? Only one motive remains to me&mdash;that
      of manly resignation to the inevitable&mdash;the wish to set an example to
      others&mdash;the stoic view of morals pure and simple.
    </p>
    <p>
      This moral education of the individual soul&mdash;is it then wasted? When
      our planet has accomplished the cycle of its destinies, of what use will
      it have been to any one or anything in the universe? Well, it will have
      sounded its note in the symphony of creation. And for us, individual
      atoms, seeing monads, we appropriate a momentary consciousness of the
      whole and the unchangeable, and then we disappear. Is not this enough? No,
      it is not enough, for if there is not progress, increase, profit, there is
      nothing but a mere chemical play and balance of combinations. Brahma,
      after having created, draws his creation back into the gulf. If we are a
      laboratory of the universal mind, may that mind at least profit and grow
      by us! If we realize the supreme will, may God have the joy of it! If the
      trustful humility of the soul rejoices him more than the greatness of
      intellect, let us enter into his plan, his intention. This, in theological
      language, is to live to the glory of God. Religion consists in the filial
      acceptation of the divine will whatever it be, provided we see it
      distinctly. Well, can we doubt that decay, sickness, death, are in the
      programme of our existence? Is not destiny the inevitable? And is not
      destiny the anonymous title of him or of that which the religions call
      God? To descend without murmuring the stream of destiny, to pass without
      revolt through loss after loss, and diminution after diminution, with no
      other limit than zero before us&mdash;this is what is demanded of us.
      Involution is as natural as evolution. We sink gradually back into the
      darkness, just as we issued gradually from it. The play of faculties and
      organs, the grandiose apparatus of life, is put back bit by bit into the
      box. We begin by instinct; at the end comes a clearness of vision which we
      must learn to bear with and to employ without murmuring upon our own
      failure and decay. A musical theme once exhausted, finds its due refuge
      and repose in silence.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 6, 1877.&mdash;I spent the evening with the &mdash;&mdash;, and
      we talked of the anarchy of ideas, of the general want of culture, of what
      it is which keeps the world going, and of the assured march of science in
      the midst of universal passion and superstition.
    </p>
    <p>
      What is rarest in the world is fair-mindedness, method, the critical view,
      the sense of proportion, the capacity for distinguishing. The common state
      of human thought is one of confusion, incoherence, and presumption, and
      the common state of human hearts is a state of passion, in which equity,
      impartiality, and openness to impressions are unattainable. Men&rsquo;s wills
      are always in advance of their intelligence, their desires ahead of their
      will, and accident the source of their desires; so that they express
      merely fortuitous opinions which are not worth the trouble of taking
      seriously, and which have no other account to give of themselves than this
      childish one: I am, because I am. The art of finding truth is very little
      practiced; it scarcely exists, because there is no personal humility, nor
      even any love of truth among us. We are covetous enough of such knowledge
      as may furnish weapons to our hand or tongue, as may serve our vanity or
      gratify our craving for power; but self-knowledge, the criticism of our
      own appetites and prejudices, is unwelcome and disagreeable to us.
    </p>
    <p>
      Man is a willful and covetous animal, who makes use of his intellect to
      satisfy his inclinations, but who cares nothing for truth, who rebels
      against personal discipline, who hates disinterested thought and the idea
      of self-education. Wisdom offends him, because it rouses in him
      disturbance and confusion, and because he will not see himself as he is.
    </p>
    <p>
      The great majority of men are but tangled skeins, imperfect keyboards, so
      many specimens of restless or stagnant chaos&mdash;and what makes their
      situation almost hopeless is the fact that they take pleasure in it. There
      is no curing a sick man who believes himself in health.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 5, 1877.&mdash;I have been thinking over the pleasant evening of
      yesterday, an experience in which the sweets of friendship, the charm of
      mutual understanding, aesthetic pleasure, and a general sense of comfort,
      were happily combined and intermingled. There was not a crease in the
      rose-leaf. Why? Because &ldquo;all that is pure, all that is honest, all that is
      excellent, all that is lovely and of good report,&rdquo; was there gathered
      together. &ldquo;The incorruptibility of a gentle and quiet spirit,&rdquo; innocent
      mirth, faithfulness to duty, fine taste and sympathetic imagination, form
      an attractive and wholesome <i>milieu</i> in which the soul may rest.
    </p>
    <p>
      The party&mdash;which celebrated the last day of vacation&mdash;gave much
      pleasure, and not to me only. Is not making others happy the best
      happiness? To illuminate for an instant the depths of a deep soul, to
      cheer those who bear by sympathy the burdens of so many sorrow-laden
      hearts and suffering lives, is to me a blessing and a precious privilege.
      There is a sort of religious joy in helping to renew the strength and
      courage of noble minds. We are surprised to find ourselves the possessors
      of a power of which we are not worthy, and we long to exercise it purely
      and seriously.
    </p>
    <p>
      I feel most strongly that man, in all that he does or can do which is
      beautiful, great, or good is but the organ and the vehicle of something or
      some one higher than himself. This feeling is religion. The religious man
      takes part with a tremor of sacred joy in these phenomena of which he is
      the intermediary but not the source, of which he is the scene, but not the
      author, or rather, the poet. He lends them voice, and will, and help, but
      he is respectfully careful to efface himself, that he may alter as little
      as possible the higher work of the genius who is making a momentary use of
      him. A pure emotion deprives him of personality and annihilates the self
      in him. Self must perforce disappear when it is the Holy Spirit who
      speaks, when it is God who acts. This is the mood in which the prophet
      hears the call, the young mother feels the movement of the child within,
      the preacher watches the tears of his audience. So long as we are
      conscious of self we are limited, selfish, held in bondage; when we are in
      harmony with the universal order, when we vibrate in unison with God, self
      disappears. Thus, in a perfectly harmonious choir, the individual cannot
      hear himself unless he makes a false note. The religious state is one of
      deep enthusiasm, of moved contemplation, of tranquil ecstasy. But how rare
      a state it is for us poor creatures harassed by duty, by necessity, by the
      wicked world, by sin, by illness! It is the state which produces inward
      happiness; but alas! the foundation of existence, the common texture of
      our days, is made up of action, effort, struggle, and therefore
      dissonance. Perpetual conflict, interrupted by short and threatened truces&mdash;there
      is a true picture of our human condition.
    </p>
    <p>
      Let us hail, then, as an echo from heaven, as the foretaste of a more
      blessed economy, these brief moments of perfect harmony, these halts
      between two storms. Peace is not in itself a dream, but we know it only as
      the result of a momentary equilibrium&mdash;an accident. &ldquo;Happy are the
      peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      April 26, 1877.&mdash;I have been turning over again the &ldquo;Paris&rdquo; of Victor
      Hugo (1867). For ten years event after event has given the lie to the
      prophet, but the confidence of the prophet in his own imaginings is not
      therefore a whit diminished. Humility and common sense are only fit for
      Lilliputians. Victor Hugo superbly ignores everything that he has not
      foreseen. He does not see that pride is a limitation of the mind, and that
      a pride without limitations is a littleness of soul. If he could but learn
      to compare himself with other men, and France with other nations, he would
      see things more truly, and would not fall into these mad exaggerations,
      these extravagant judgments. But proportion and fairness will never be
      among the strings at his command. He is vowed to the Titanic; his gold is
      always mixed with lead, his insight with childishness, his reason with
      madness. He cannot be simple; the only light he has to give blinds you
      like that of a fire. He astonishes a reader and provokes him, he moves him
      and annoys him. There is always some falsity of note in him, which
      accounts for the <i>malaise</i> he so constantly excites in me. The great
      poet in him cannot shake off the charlatan.
    </p>
    <p>
      A few shafts of Voltairean irony would have shriveled the inflation of his
      genius and made it stronger by making it saner. It is a public misfortune
      that the most powerful poet of a nation should not have better understood
      his role, and that, unlike those Hebrew prophets who scourged because they
      loved, he should devote himself proudly and systematically to the flattery
      of his countrymen. France is the world; Paris is France; Hugo is Paris;
      peoples, bow down!
    </p>
    <p>
      May 2, 1877.&mdash;Which nation is best worth belonging to? There is not
      one in which the good is not counterbalanced by evil. Each is a caricature
      of man, a proof that no one among them deserves to crush the others, and
      that all have something to learn from all. I am alternately struck with
      the qualities and with the defects of each, which is perhaps lucky for a
      critic. I am conscious of no preference for the defects of north or south,
      of west or east; and I should find a difficulty in stating my own
      predilections. Indeed I myself am wholly indifferent in the matter, for to
      me the question is not one of liking or of blaming, but of understanding.
      My point of view is philosophical&mdash;that is to say, impartial and
      impersonal. The only type which pleases me is perfection&mdash;<i>man</i>,
      in short, the ideal man. As for the national man, I bear with and study
      him, but I have no admiration for him. I can only admire the fine
      specimens of the race, the great men, the geniuses, the lofty characters
      and noble souls, and specimens of these are to be found in all the
      ethnographical divisions. The &ldquo;country of my choice&rdquo; (to quote Madame de
      Staël) is with the chosen souls. I feel no greater inclination toward the
      French, the Germans, the Swiss, the English, the Poles, the Italians, than
      toward the Brazilians or the Chinese. The illusions of patriotism, of
      Chauvinist, family, or professional feeling, do not exist for me. My
      tendency, on the contrary, is to feel with increased force the lacunas,
      deformities, and imperfections of the group to which I belong. My
      inclination is to see things as they are, abstracting my own
      individuality, and suppressing all personal will and desire; so that I
      feel antipathy, not toward this or that, but toward error, prejudice,
      stupidity, exclusiveness, exaggeration. I love only justice and fairness.
      Anger and annoyance are with me merely superficial; the fundamental
      tendency is toward impartiality and detachment. Inward liberty and
      aspiration toward the true&mdash;these are what I care for and take
      pleasure in.
    </p>
    <p>
      June 4, 1877.&mdash;I have just heard the &ldquo;Romeo and Juliet&rdquo; of Hector
      Berlioz. The work is entitled &ldquo;Dramatic symphony for orchestra, with
      choruses.&rdquo; The execution was extremely good. The work is interesting,
      careful, curious, and suggestive, but it leaves one cold. When I come to
      reason out my impression I explain it in this way. To subordinate man to
      things&mdash;to annex the human voice, as a mere supplement, to the
      orchestra&mdash;is false in idea. To make simple narrative out of dramatic
      material, is a derogation, a piece of levity. A Romeo and Juliet in which
      there is no Romeo and no Juliet is an absurdity. To substitute the
      inferior, the obscure, the vague, for the higher and the clear, is a
      challenge to common sense. It is a violation of that natural hierarchy of
      things which is never violated with impunity. The musician has put
      together a series of symphonic pictures, without any inner connection, a
      string of riddles, to which a prose text alone supplies meaning and unity.
      The only intelligible voice which is allowed to appear in the work is that
      of Friar Laurence: his sermon could not be expressed in chords, and is
      therefore plainly sung. But the moral of a play is not the play, and the
      play itself has been elbowed out by recitative.
    </p>
    <p>
      The musician of the present day, not being able to give us what is
      beautiful, torments himself to give us what is new. False originality,
      false grandeur, false genius! This labored art is wholly antipathetic to
      me. Science simulating genius is but a form of quackery.
    </p>
    <p>
      Berlioz as a critic is cleverness itself; as a musician he is learned,
      inventive, and ingenious, but he is trying to achieve the greater when he
      cannot compass the lesser.
    </p>
    <p>
      Thirty years ago, at Berlin, the same impression was left upon me by his
      &ldquo;Infancy of Christ,&rdquo; which I heard him conduct himself. His art seems to
      me neither fruitful nor wholesome; there is no true and solid beauty in
      it.
    </p>
    <p>
      I ought to say, however, that the audience, which was a fairly full one,
      seemed very well satisfied.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 17, 1877.&mdash;Yesterday I went through my La Fontaine, and noticed
      the omissions in him. He has neither butterfly nor rose. He utilizes
      neither the crane, nor the quail, nor the dromedary, nor the lizard. There
      is not a single echo of chivalry in him. For him, the history of France
      dates from Louis XIV. His geography only ranges, in reality, over a few
      square miles, and touches neither the Rhine nor the Loire, neither the
      mountains nor the sea. He never invents his subjects, but indolently takes
      them ready-made from elsewhere. But with all this what an adorable writer,
      what a painter, what an observer, what a humorist, what a story-teller! I
      am never tired of reading him, though I know half his fables by heart. In
      the matter of vocabulary, turns, tones, phrases, idioms, his style is
      perhaps the richest of the great period, for it combines, in the most
      skillful way, archaism and classic finish, the Gallic and the French
      elements. Variety, satire, <i>finesse</i>, feeling, movement, terseness,
      suavity, grace, gayety, at times even nobleness, gravity, grandeur&mdash;everything&mdash;is
      to be found in him. And then the happiness of the epithets, the piquancy
      of the sayings, the felicity of his rapid sketches and unforeseen
      audacities, and the unforgettable sharpness of phrase! His defects are
      eclipsed by his immense variety of different aptitudes.
    </p>
    <p>
      One has only to compare his &ldquo;Woodcutter and Death&rdquo; with that of Boileau in
      order to estimate the enormous difference between the artist and the
      critic who found fault with his work. La Fontaine gives you a picture of
      the poor peasant under the monarchy; Boileau shows you nothing but a man
      perspiring under a heavy load. The first is a historical witness, the
      second a mere academic rhymer. From La Fontaine it is possible to
      reconstruct the whole society of his epoch, and the old Champenois with
      his beasts remains the only Homer France has ever possessed. He has as
      many portraits of men and women as La Bruyère, and Molière is not more
      humorous.
    </p>
    <p>
      His weak side is his epicureanism, with its tinge of grossness. This, no
      doubt, was what made Lamartine dislike him. The religious note is absent
      from his lyre; there is nothing in him which shows any contact with
      Christianity, any knowledge of the sublimer tragedies of the soul. Kind
      nature is his goddess, Horace his prophet, and Montaigne his gospel. In
      other words, his horizon is that of the Renaissance. This pagan island in
      the full Catholic stream is very curious; the paganism of it is so
      perfectly sincere and naïve. But indeed, Reblais, Molière, Saint Evremond,
      are much more pagan than Voltaire. It is as though, for the genuine
      Frenchman, Christianity was a mere pose or costume&mdash;something which
      has nothing to do with the heart, with the real man, or his deeper nature.
      This division of things is common in Italy too. It is the natural effect
      of political religions: the priest becomes separated from the layman, the
      believer from the man, worship from sincerity.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 18, 1877.&mdash;I have just come across a character in a novel with a
      passion for synonyms, and I said to myself: Take care&mdash;that is your
      weakness too. In your search for close and delicate expression, you run
      through the whole gamut of synonyms, and your pen works too often in
      series of three. Beware! Avoid mannerisms and tricks; they are signs of
      weakness. Subject and occasion only must govern the use of words.
      Procedure by single epithet gives strength; the doubling of a word gives
      clearness, because it supplies the two extremities of the series; the
      trebling of it gives completeness by suggesting at once the beginning,
      middle, and end of the idea; while a quadruple phrase may enrich by force
      of enumeration.
    </p>
    <p>
      Indecision being my principal defect, I am fond of a plurality of phrases
      which are but so many successive approximations and corrections. I am
      especially fond of them in this journal, where I write as it comes. In
      serious composition <i>two</i> is, on the whole, my category. But it would
      be well to practice one&rsquo;s self in the use of the single word&mdash;of the
      shaft delivered promptly and once for all. I should have indeed to cure
      myself of hesitation first. I see too many ways of saying things; a more
      decided mind hits on the right way at once. Singleness of phrase implies
      courage, self-confidence, clear-sightedness. To attain it there must be no
      doubting, and I am always doubting. And yet&mdash;
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Quiconque est loup agisse en loup;
  C&rsquo;est le plus certain de beaucoup.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      I wonder whether I should gain anything by the attempt to assume a
      character which is not mine. My wavering manner, born of doubt and
      scruple, has at least the advantage of rendering all the different shades
      of my thought, and of being sincere. If it were to become terse,
      affirmative, resolute, would it not be a mere imitation?
    </p>
    <p>
      A private journal, which is but a vehicle for meditation and reverie,
      beats about the bush as it pleases without being hound to make for any
      definite end. Conversation with self is a gradual process of
      thought-clearing. Hence all these synonyms, these waverings, these
      repetitions and returns upon one&rsquo;s self. Affirmation maybe brief; inquiry
      takes time; and the line which thought follows is necessarily an irregular
      one.
    </p>
    <p>
      I am conscious indeed that at bottom there is but one right expression;
      [Footnote: Compare La Bruyère:
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;Entre toutes les differentes expressions qui peuvent rendre une seule de
      nos pensées il n&rsquo;y en a qu&rsquo;une qui soit la bonne; on ne la rencontre pas
      toujours en parlant ou en écrivant: il est vray néanmoins qu&rsquo;elle existe,
      que tout ce qui ne l&rsquo;est point est foible, et ne satisfait point un homme
      d&rsquo;esprit qui veut se faire entendre.&rdquo;] but in order to find it I wish to
      make my choice among all that are like it; and my mind instinctively goes
      through a series of verbal modulations in search of that shade which may
      most accurately render the idea. Or sometimes it is the idea itself which
      has to be turned over and over, that I may know it and apprehend it
      better. I think, pen in hand; it is like the disentanglement, the
      winding-off of a skein. Evidently the corresponding form of style cannot
      have the qualities which belong to thought which is already sure of
      itself, and only seeks to communicate itself to others. The function of
      the private journal is one of observation, experiment, analysis,
      contemplation; that of the essay or article is to provoke reflection; that
      of the book is to demonstrate.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 21, 1877.&mdash;A superb night&mdash;a starry sky&mdash;Jupiter and
      Phoebe holding converse before my windows. Grandiose effects of light and
      shade over the courtyard. A sonata rose from the black gulf of shadow like
      a repentant prayer wafted from purgatory. The picturesque was lost in
      poetry, and admiration in feeling.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 30, 1877.&mdash; ... makes a very true remark about Renan, <i>a
      propos</i> of the volume of &ldquo;Les Evangiles.&rdquo; He brings out the
      contradiction between the literary taste of the artist, which is delicate,
      individual, and true, and the opinions of the critic, which are borrowed,
      old-fashioned and wavering. This hesitancy of choice between the beautiful
      and the true, between poetry and prose, between art and learning, is, in
      fact, characteristic. Renan has a keen love for science, but he has a
      still keener love for good writing, and, if necessary, he will sacrifice
      the exact phrase to the beautiful phrase. Science is his material rather
      than his object; his object is style. A fine passage is ten times more
      precious in his eyes than the discovery of a fact or the rectification of
      a date. And on this point I am very much with him, for a beautiful piece
      of writing is beautiful by virtue of a kind of truth which is truer than
      any mere record of authentic facts. Rousseau also thought the same. A
      chronicler may be able to correct Tacitus, but Tacitus survives all the
      chroniclers. I know well that the aesthetic temptation is the French
      temptation; I have often bewailed it, and yet, if I desired anything, it
      would be to be a writer, a great writer. Te leave a monument behind, <i>aere
      perennius</i>, an imperishable work which might stir the thoughts, the
      feelings, the dreams of men, generation after generation&mdash;this is the
      only glory which I could wish for, if I were not weaned even from this
      wish also. A book would be my ambition, if ambition were not vanity and
      vanity of vanities.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 11, 1877.&mdash;The growing triumph of Darwinism&mdash;that is to
      say of materialism, or of force&mdash;threatens the conception of justice.
      But justice will have its turn. The higher human law cannot be the
      offspring of animality. Justice is the right to the maximum of individual
      independence compatible with the same liberty for others; in other words,
      it is respect for man, for the immature, the small, the feeble; it is the
      guarantee of those human collectivities, associations, states,
      nationalities&mdash;those voluntary or involuntary unions&mdash;the object
      of which is to increase the sum of happiness, and to satisfy the
      aspiration of the individual. That some should make use of others for
      their own purposes is an injury to justice. The right of the stronger is
      not a right, but a simple fact, which obtains only so long as there is
      neither protest nor resistance. It is like cold, darkness, weight, which
      tyrannize over man until he has invented artificial warmth, artificial
      light, and machinery. Human industry is throughout an emancipation from
      brute nature, and the advances made by justice are in the same way a
      series of rebuffs inflicted upon the tyranny of the stronger. As the
      medical art consists in the conquest of disease, so goodness consists in
      the conquest of the blind ferocities and untamed appetites of the human
      animal. I see the same law throughout&mdash;increasing emancipation of the
      individual, a continuous ascent of being toward life, happiness, justice,
      and wisdom. Greed and gluttony are the starting-point, intelligence and
      generosity the goal.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 21, 1877. (<i>Baths of Ems</i>).&mdash;In the <i>salon</i> there
      has been a performance in chorus of &ldquo;Lorelei&rdquo; and other popular airs. What
      in our country is only done for worship is done also in Germany for poetry
      and music. Voices blend together; art shares the privilege of religion. It
      is a trait which is neither French nor English, nor, I think, Italian. The
      spirit of artistic devotion, of impersonal combination, of common,
      harmonious, disinterested action, is specially German; it makes a welcome
      balance to certain clumsy and prosaic elements in the race.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Later</i>.&mdash;Perhaps the craving for independence of thought&mdash;the
      tendency to go back to first principles&mdash;is really proper to the
      Germanic mind only. The Slavs and the Latins are governed rather by the
      collective wisdom of the community, by tradition, usage, prejudice,
      fashion; or, if they break through these, they are like slaves in revolt,
      without any real living apprehension of the law inherent in things&mdash;the
      true law, which is neither written, nor arbitrary, nor imposed. The German
      wishes to get at nature; the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Russian, stop at
      conventions. The root of the problem is in the question of the relations
      between God and the world. Immanence or transcendence&mdash;that, step by
      step, decides the meaning of everything else. If the mind is radically
      external to things, it is not called upon to conform to them. If the mind
      is destitute of native truth, it must get its truth from outside, by
      revelations. And so you get thought despising nature, and in bondage to
      the church&mdash;so you have the Latin world!
    </p>
    <p>
      November 6, 1877. (<i>Geneva</i>).&mdash;We talk of love many years before
      we know anything about it, and we think we know it because we talk of it,
      or because we repeat what other people say of it, or what books tell us
      about it. So that there are ignorances of different degrees, and degrees
      of knowledge which are quite deceptive. One of the worst plagues of
      society is this thoughtless inexhaustible verbosity, this careless use of
      words, this pretense of knowing a thing because we talk about it&mdash;these
      counterfeits of belief, thought, love, or earnestness, which all the while
      are mere babble. The worst of it is, that as self-love is behind the
      babble, these ignorances of society are in general ferociously
      affirmative; chatter mistakes itself for opinion, prejudice poses as
      principle. Parrots behave as though they were thinking beings; imitations
      give themselves out as originals; and politeness demands the acceptance of
      the convention. It is very wearisome.
    </p>
    <p>
      Language is the vehicle of this confusion, the instrument of this
      unconscious fraud, and all evils of the kind are enormously increased by
      universal education, by the periodical press, and by all the other
      processes of vulgarization in use at the present time. Every one deals in
      paper money; few have ever handled gold. We live on symbols, and even on
      the symbols of symbols; we have never grasped or verified things for
      ourselves; we judge everything, and we know nothing.
    </p>
    <p>
      How seldom we meet with originality, individuality, sincerity, nowadays!&mdash;with
      men who are worth the trouble of listening to! The true self in the
      majority is lost in the borrowed self. How few are anything else than a
      bundle of inclinations&mdash;anything more than animals&mdash;whose
      language and whose gait alone recall to us the highest rank in nature!
    </p>
    <p>
      The immense majority of our species are candidates for humanity, and
      nothing more. Virtually we are men; we might be, we ought to be, men; but
      practically we do not succeed in realizing the type of our race.
      Semblances and counterfeits of men fill up the habitable earth, people the
      islands and the continents, the country and the town. If we wish to
      respect men we must forget what they are, and think of the ideal which
      they carry hidden within them, of the just man and the noble, the man of
      intelligence and goodness, inspiration and creative force, who is loyal
      and true, faithful and trustworthy, of the higher man, in short, and that
      divine thing we call a soul. The only men who deserve the name are the
      heroes, the geniuses, the saints, the harmonious, puissant, and perfect
      samples of the race.
    </p>
    <p>
      Very few individuals deserve to be listened to, but all deserve that our
      curiosity with regard to them should be a pitiful curiosity&mdash;that the
      insight we bring to bear on them should be charged with humility. Are we
      not all shipwrecked, diseased, condemned to death? Let each work out his
      own salvation, and blame no one but himself; so the lot of all will be
      bettered. Whatever impatience we may feel toward our neighbor, and
      whatever indignation our race may rouse in us, we are chained one to
      another, and, companions in labor and misfortune, have everything to lose
      by mutual recrimination and reproach. Let us be silent as to each other&rsquo;s
      weakness, helpful, tolerant, nay, tender toward each other! Or, if we
      cannot feel tenderness, may we at least feel pity! May we put away from us
      the satire which scourges and the anger which brands; the oil and wine of
      the good Samaritan are of more avail. We may make the ideal a reason for
      contempt; but it is more beautiful to make it a reason for tenderness.
    </p>
    <p>
      December 9, 1877.&mdash;The modern haunters of Parnassus [Footnote:
      Amiel&rsquo;s expression is <i>Les Parnassieus</i>, an old name revived, which
      nowadays describes the younger school of French poetry represented by such
      names as Théophile Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Bauville, and
      Baudelaire. The modern use of the word dates from the publication of &ldquo;La
      Parnasse Contemporain&rdquo; (Lemerre, 1866).] carve urns of agate and of onyx,
      but inside the urns what is there?&mdash;ashes. Their work lacks feeling,
      seriousness, sincerity, and pathos&mdash;in a word, soul and moral life. I
      cannot bring myself to sympathize with such a way of understanding poetry.
      The talent shown is astonishing, but stuff and matter are wanting. It is
      an effort of the imagination to stand alone&mdash;a substitute for
      everything else. We find metaphors, rhymes, music, color, but not man, not
      humanity. Poetry of this factitious kind may beguile one at twenty, but
      what can one make of it at fifty? It reminds me of Pergamos, of
      Alexandria, of all the epochs of decadence when beauty of form hid poverty
      of thought and exhaustion of feeling. I strongly share the repugnance
      which this poetical school arouses in simple people. It is as though it
      only cared to please the world-worn, the over-subtle, the corrupted, while
      it ignores all normal healthy life, virtuous habits, pure affections,
      steady labor, honesty, and duty. It is an affectation, and because it is
      an affectation the school is struck with sterility. The reader desires in
      the poet something better than a juggler in rhyme, or a conjurer in verse;
      he looks to find in him a painter of life, a being who thinks, loves, and
      has a conscience, who feels passion and repentance.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Composition is a process of combination, in which thought puts together
      complementary truths, and talent fuses into harmony the most contrary
      qualities of style.
    </p>
    <p>
      So that there is no composition without effort, without pain even, as in
      all bringing forth. The reward is the giving birth to something living&mdash;something,
      that is to say, which, by a kind of magic, makes a living unity out of
      such opposed attributes as orderliness and spontaneity, thought and
      imagination, solidity and charm.
    </p>
    <p>
      The true critic strives for a clear vision of things as they are&mdash;for
      justice and fairness; his effort is to get free from himself, so that he
      may in no way disfigure that which he wishes to understand or reproduce.
      His superiority to the common herd lies in this effort, even when its
      success is only partial. He distrusts his own senses, he sifts his own
      impressions, by returning upon them from different sides and at different
      times, by comparing, moderating, shading, distinguishing, and so
      endeavoring to approach more and more nearly to the formula which
      represents the maximum of truth.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Is it not the sad natures who are most tolerant of gayety? They know that
      gayety means impulse and vigor, that generally speaking it is disguised
      kindliness, and that if it were a mere affair of temperament and mood,
      still it is a blessing.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      The art which is grand and yet simple is that which presupposes the
      greatest elevation both in artist and in public.
    </p>
    <p>
      How much folly is compatible with ultimate wisdom and prudence? It is
      difficult to say. The cleverest folk are those who discover soonest how to
      utilize their neighbor&rsquo;s experience, and so get rid in good time of their
      natural presumption.
    </p>
    <p>
      We must try to grasp the spirit of things, to see correctly, to speak to
      the point, to give practicable advice, to act on the spot, to arrive at
      the proper moment, to stop in time. Tact, measure, occasion&mdash;all
      these deserve our cultivation and respect.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      April 22, 1878.&mdash;Letter from my cousin Julia. These kind old
      relations find it very difficult to understand a man&rsquo;s life, especially a
      student&rsquo;s life. The hermits of reverie are scared by the busy world, and
      feel themselves out of place in action. But after all, we do not change at
      seventy, and a good, pious old lady, half-blind and living in a village,
      can no longer extend her point of view, nor form any idea of existences
      which have no relation with her own.
    </p>
    <p>
      What is the link by which these souls, shut in and encompassed as they are
      by the details of daily life, lay hold on the ideal? The link of religious
      aspiration. Faith is the plank which saves them. They know the meaning of
      the higher life; their soul is athirst for heaven. Their opinions are
      defective, but their moral experience is great; their intellect is full of
      darkness but their souls is full of light. We scarcely know how to talk to
      them about the things of earth, but they are ripe and mature in the things
      of the heart. If they cannot understand us, it is for us to make advances
      to them, to speak their language, to enter into their range of ideas,
      their modes of feeling. We must approach them on their noble side, and,
      that we may show them the more respect, induce them to open to us the
      casket of their most treasured thoughts. There is always some grain of
      gold at the bottom of every honorable old age. Let it be our business to
      give it an opportunity of showing itself to affectionate eyes.
    </p>
    <p>
      May 10, 1878.&mdash;I have just come back from a solitary walk. I heard
      nightingales, saw white lilac and orchard trees in bloom. My heart is full
      of impressions showered upon it by the chaffinches, the golden orioles,
      the grasshoppers, the hawthorns, and the primroses. A dull, gray, fleecy
      sky brooded with a certain melancholy over the nuptial splendors of
      vegetation. Many painful memories stirred afresh in me; at Pré l&rsquo;Evèque,
      at Jargonnant, at Villereuse, a score of phantoms&mdash;phantoms of youth&mdash;rose
      with sad eyes to greet me. The walls had changed, and roads which were
      once shady and dreamy I found now waste and treeless. But at the first
      trills of the nightingale a flood of tender feeling filled my heart. I
      felt myself soothed, grateful, melted; a mood of serenity and
      contemplation took possession of me. A certain little path, a very kingdom
      of green, with fountain, thickets, gentle ups and downs, and an abundance
      of singing-birds, delighted me, and did me inexpressible good. Its
      peaceful remoteness brought back the bloom of feeling. I had need of it.
    </p>
    <p>
      May 19, 1878.&mdash;Criticism is above all a gift, an intuition, a matter
      of tact and <i>flair</i>; it cannot be taught or demonstrated&mdash;it is
      an art. Critical genius means an aptitude for discerning truth under
      appearances or in disguises which conceal it; for discovering it in spite
      of the errors of testimony, the frauds of tradition, the dust of time, the
      loss or alteration of texts. It is the sagacity of the hunter whom nothing
      deceives for long, and whom no ruse can throw off the trail. It is the
      talent of the <i>Juge d&rsquo;Instruction</i>, who knows how to interrogate
      circumstances, and to extract an unknown secret from a thousand
      falsehoods. The true critic can understand everything, but he will be the
      dupe of nothing, and to no convention will he sacrifice his duty, which is
      to find out and proclaim truth. Competent learning, general cultivation,
      absolute probity, accuracy of general view, human sympathy and technical
      capacity&mdash;how many things are necessary to the critic, without
      reckoning grace, delicacy, <i>savoir vivre</i>, and the gift of happy
      phrase-making!
    </p>
    <p>
      July 26, 1878.&mdash;Every morning I wake up with the same sense of vain
      struggle against a mountain tide which is about to overwhelm me. I shall
      die by suffocation, and the suffocation has begun; the progress it has
      already made stimulates it to go on.
    </p>
    <p>
      How can one make any plans when every day brings with it some fresh
      misery? I cannot even decide on a line of action in a situation so full of
      confusion and uncertainty in which I look forward to the worst, while yet
      all is doubtful. Have I still a few years before me or only a few months?
      Will death be slow or will it come upon me as a sudden catastrophe? How am
      I to bear the days as they come? how am I to fill them? How am I to die
      with calmness and dignity? I know not. Everything I do for the first time
      I do badly; but here everything is new; there can be no help from
      experience; the end must be a chance! How mortifying for one who has set
      so great a price upon independence&mdash;to depend upon a thousand
      unforeseen contingencies! He knows not how he will act or what he will
      become; he would fain speak of these things with a friend of good sense
      and good counsel&mdash;but who? He dares not alarm the affections which
      are most his own, and he is almost sure that any others would try to
      distract his attention, and would refuse to see the position as it is.
    </p>
    <p>
      And while I wait (wait for what?&mdash;certainty?) the weeks flow by like
      water, and strength wastes away like a smoking candle....
    </p>
    <p>
      Is one free to let one&rsquo;s self drift into death without resistance? Is
      self-preservation a duty? Do we owe it to those who love us to prolong
      this desperate struggle to its utmost limit? I think so, but it is one
      fetter the more. For we must then feign a hope which we do not feel, and
      hide the absolute discouragement of which the heart is really full. Well,
      why not? Those who succumb are bound in generosity not to cool the ardor
      of those who are still battling, still enjoying.
    </p>
    <p>
      Two parallel roads lead to the same result; meditation paralyzes me,
      physiology condemns me. My soul is dying, my body is dying. In every
      direction the end is closing upon me. My own melancholy anticipates and
      endorses the medical judgment which says, &ldquo;Your journey is done.&rdquo; The two
      verdicts point to the same result&mdash;that I have no longer a future.
      And yet there is a side of me which says, &ldquo;Absurd!&rdquo; which is incredulous,
      and inclined to regard it all as a bad dream. In vain the reason asserts
      it; the mind&rsquo;s inward assent is still refused. Another contradiction!
    </p>
    <p>
      I have not the strength to hope, and I have not the strength to submit. I
      believe no longer, and I believe still. I feel that I am dying, and yet I
      cannot realize that I am dying. Is it madness already? No, it is human
      nature taken in the act; it is life itself which is a contradiction, for
      life means an incessant death and a daily resurrection; it affirms and it
      denies, it destroys and constructs, it gathers and scatters, it humbles
      and exalts at the same time. To live is to die partially&mdash;to feel
      one&rsquo;s self in the heart of a whirlwind of opposing forces&mdash;to be an
      enigma.
    </p>
    <p>
      If the invisible type molded by these two contradictory currents&mdash;if
      this form which presides over all my changes of being&mdash;has itself
      general and original value, what does it matter whether it carries on the
      game a few months or years longer, or not? It has done what it had to do,
      it has represented a certain unique combination, one particular expression
      of the race. These types are shadows&mdash;<i>manes</i>. Century after
      century employs itself in fashioning them. Glory&mdash;fame&mdash;is the
      proof that one type has seemed to the other types newer, rarer, and more
      beautiful than the rest. The common types are souls too, only they have no
      interest except for the Creator, and for a small number of individuals.
    </p>
    <p>
      To feel one&rsquo;s own fragility is well, but to be indifferent to it is
      better. To take the measure of one&rsquo;s own misery is profitable, but to
      understand its <i>raison d&rsquo;être</i> is still more profitable. To mourn for
      one&rsquo;s self is a last sign of vanity; we ought only to regret that which
      has real values, and to regret one&rsquo;s self, is to furnish involuntary
      evidence that one had attached importance to one&rsquo;s self. At the same time
      it is a proof of ignorance of our true worth and function. It is not
      necessary to live, but it is necessary to preserve one&rsquo;s type unharmed, to
      remain faithful to one&rsquo;s idea, to protect one&rsquo;s monad against alteration
      and degradation.
    </p>
    <p>
      November 7, 1878.&mdash;To-day we have been talking of realism in
      painting, and, in connection with it, of that poetical and artistic
      illusion which does not aim at being confounded with reality itself.
      Realism wishes to entrap sensation; the object of true art is only to
      charm the imagination, not to deceive the eye. When we see a good portrait
      we say, &ldquo;It is alive!&rdquo;&mdash;in other words, our imagination lends it
      life. On the other hand, a wax figure produces a sort of terror in us; its
      frozen life-likeness makes a deathlike impression on us, and we say, &ldquo;It
      is a ghost!&rdquo; In the one case we see what is lacking, and demand it; in the
      other we see what is given us, and we give on our side. Art, then,
      addresses itself to the imagination; everything that appeals to sensation
      only is below art, almost outside art. A work of art ought to set the
      poetical faculty in us to work, it ought to stir us to imagine, to
      complete our perception of a thing. And we can only do this when the
      artist leads the way. Mere copyist&rsquo;s painting, realistic reproduction,
      pure imitation, leave us cold because their author is a machine, a mirror,
      an iodized plate, and not a soul.
    </p>
    <p>
      Art lives by appearances, but these appearances are spiritual visions,
      fixed dreams. Poetry represents to us nature become con-substantial with
      the soul, because in it nature is only a reminiscence touched with
      emotion, an image vibrating with our own life, a form without weight&mdash;in
      short, a mode of the soul. The poetry which is most real and objective is
      the expression of a soul which throws itself into things, and forgets
      itself in their presence more readily than others; but still, it is the
      expression of the soul, and hence what we call style. Style may be only
      collective, hieratic, national, so long as the artist is still the
      interpreter of the community; it tends to become personal in proportion as
      society makes room for individuality and favors its expansion.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      There is a way of killing truth by truths. Under the pretense that we want
      to study it more in detail we pulverize the statue&mdash;it is an
      absurdity of which our pedantry is constantly guilty. Those who can only
      see the fragments of a thing are to me <i>esprits faux</i>, just as much
      as those who disfigure the fragments. The good critic ought to be master
      of the three capacities, the three modes of seeing men and things&mdash;he
      should be able simultaneously to see them as they are, as they might be,
      and as they ought to be.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Modern culture is a delicate electuary made up of varied savors and subtle
      colors, which can be more easily felt than measured or defined. Its very
      superiority consists in the complexity, the association of contraries, the
      skillful combination it implies. The man of to-day, fashioned by the
      historical and geographical influences of twenty countries and of thirty
      centuries, trained and modified by all the sciences and all the arts, the
      supple recipient of all literatures, is an entirely new product. He finds
      affinities, relationships, analogies everywhere, but at the same time he
      condenses and sums up what is elsewhere scattered. He is like the smile of
      La Gioconda, which seems to reveal a soul to the spectator only to leave
      him the more certainly under a final impression of mystery, so many
      different things are expressed in it at once.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      To understand things we must have been once in them and then have come out
      of them; so that first there must be captivity and then deliverance,
      illusion followed by disillusion, enthusiasm by disappointment. He who is
      still under the spell, and he who has never felt the spell, are equally
      incompetent. We only know well what we have first believed, then judged.
      To understand we must be free, yet not have been always free. The same
      truth holds, whether it is a question of love, of art, of religion, or of
      patriotism. Sympathy is a first condition of criticism; reason and justice
      presuppose, at their origin, emotion.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      What is an intelligent man? A man who enters with ease and completeness
      into the spirit of things and the intention of persons, and who arrives at
      an end by the shortest route. Lucidity and suppleness of thought, critical
      delicacy and inventive resource, these are his attributes.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and
      germinates no more.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      January 3, 1879.&mdash;Letter from&mdash;&mdash;. This kind friend of mine
      has no pity.... I have been trying to quiet his over-delicate
      susceptibilities.... It is difficult to write perfectly easy letters when
      one finds them studied with a magnifying glass, and treated like
      monumental inscriptions, in which each character has been deliberately
      engraved with a view to an eternity of life. Such disproportion between
      the word and its commentary, between the playfulness of the writer and the
      analytical temper of the reader, is not favorable to ease of style. One
      dares not be one&rsquo;s natural self with these serious folk who attach
      importance to everything; it is difficult to write open-heartedly if one
      must weigh every phrase and every word.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Esprit</i> means taking things in the sense which they are meant to
      have, entering into the tone of other people, being able to place one&rsquo;s
      self on the required level; <i>esprit</i> is that just and accurate sense
      which divines, appreciates, and weighs quickly, lightly, and well. The
      mind must have its play, the Muse is winged&mdash;the Greeks knew it, and
      Socrates.
    </p>
    <p>
      January 13, 1879.&mdash;It is impossible for me to remember what letters I
      wrote yesterday. A single night digs a gulf between the self of yesterday
      and the self of to-day. My life is without unity of action, because my
      actions themselves are escaping from the control of memory. My mental
      power, occupied in gaining possession of itself under the form of
      consciousness, seems to be letting go its hold on all that generally
      peoples the understanding, as the glacier throws off the stones and
      fragments fallen into its crevasses, that it may remain pure crystal. The
      philosophic mind is both to overweight itself with too many material facts
      or trivial memories. Thought clings only to thought&mdash;that is to say,
      to itself, to the psychological process. The mind&rsquo;s only ambition is for
      an enriched experience. It finds its pleasure in studying the play of its
      own facilities, and the study passes easily into an aptitude and habit.
      Reflection becomes nothing more than an apparatus for the registration of
      the impressions, emotions, and ideas which pass across the mind. The whole
      moulting process is carried on so energetically that the mind is not only
      unclothed, but stripped of itself, and, so to speak, <i>de-substantiated</i>.
      The wheel turns so quickly that it melts around the mathematical axis,
      which alone remains cold because it is impalpable, and has no thickness.
      All this is natural enough, but very dangerous.
    </p>
    <p>
      So long as one is numbered among the living&mdash;so long, that is to say,
      as one is still plunged in the world of men, a sharer of their interests,
      conflicts, vanities, passions, and duties, one is bound to deny one&rsquo;s self
      this subtle state of consciousness; one must consent to be a separate
      individual, having one&rsquo;s special name, position, age, and sphere of
      activity. In spite of all the temptations of impersonality, one must
      resume the position of a being imprisoned within certain limits of time
      and space, an individual with special surroundings, friends, enemies,
      profession, country, bound to house and feed himself, to make up his
      accounts and look after his affairs; in short, one must behave like all
      the world. There are days when all these details seem to me a dream&mdash;when
      I wonder at the desk under my hand, at my body itself&mdash;when I ask
      myself if there is a street before my house, and if all this geographical
      and topographical phantasmagoria is indeed real. Time and space become
      then mere specks; I become a sharer in a purely spiritual existence; I see
      myself <i>sub specie oeternitatis</i>.
    </p>
    <p>
      Is not mind simply that which enables us to merge finite reality in the
      infinite possibility around it? Or, to put it differently, is not mind the
      universal virtuality, the universe latent? If so, its zero would be the
      germ of the infinite, which is expressed mathematically by the double zero
      (00).
    </p>
    <p>
      Deduction: that the mind may experience the infinite in itself; that in
      the human individual there arises sometimes the divine spark which reveals
      to him the existence of the original, fundamental, principal Being, within
      which all is contained like a series within its generating formula. The
      universe is but a radiation of mind; and the radiations of the Divine mind
      are for us more than appearances; they have a reality parallel to our own.
      The radiations of our mind are imperfect reflections from the great show
      of fireworks set in motion by Brahma, and great art is great only because
      of its conformities with the Divine order&mdash;with that which is.
    </p>
    <p>
      Ideal conceptions are the mind&rsquo;s anticipation of such an order. The mind
      is capable of them because it is mind, and, as such, perceives the
      Eternal. The real, on the contrary, is fragmentary and passing. Law alone
      is eternal. The ideal is then the imperishable hope of something better&mdash;the
      mind&rsquo;s involuntary protest against the present, the leaven of the future
      working in it. It is the supernatural in us, or rather the super-animal,
      and the ground of human progress. He who has no ideal contents himself
      with what is; he has no quarrel with facts, which for him are identical
      with the just, the good, and the beautiful.
    </p>
    <p>
      But why is the divine radiation imperfect? Because it is still going on.
      Our planet, for example, is in the mid-course of its experience. Its flora
      and fauna are still changing. The evolution of humanity is nearer its
      origin than its close. The complete spiritualization of the animal element
      in nature seems to be singularly difficult, and it is the task of our
      species. Its performance is hindered by error, evil, selfishness, and
      death, without counting telluric catastrophes. The edifice of a common
      happiness, a common science of morality and justice, is sketched, but only
      sketched. A thousand retarding and perturbing causes hinder this giant&rsquo;s
      task, in which nations, races, and continents take part. At the present
      moment humanity is not yet constituted as a physical unity, and its
      general education is not yet begun. All our attempts at order as yet have
      been local crystallizations. Now, indeed, the different possibilities are
      beginning to combine (union of posts and telegraphs, universal
      exhibitions, voyages round the globes, international congresses, etc.).
      Science and common interest are binding together the great fractions of
      humanity, which religion and language have kept apart. A year in which
      there has been talk of a network of African railways, running from the
      coast to the center and bringing the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the
      Indian Ocean into communication with each other&mdash;such a year is
      enough to mark a new epoch. The fantastic has become the conceivable, the
      possible tends to become the real; the earth becomes the garden of man.
      Man&rsquo;s chief problem is how to make the cohabitation of the individuals of
      his species possible; how, that is to say, to secure for each successive
      epoch the law, the order, the equilibrium which befits it. Division of
      labor allows him to explore in every direction at once; industry, science,
      art, law, education, morals, religion, politics, and economical relations&mdash;all
      are in process of birth.
    </p>
    <p>
      Thus everything may be brought back to zero by the mind, but it is a
      fruitful zero&mdash;a zero which contains the universe and, in particular,
      humanity. The mind has no more difficulty in tracking the real within the
      innumerable than in apprehending infinite possibility. 00 may issue from
      0, or may return to it.
    </p>
    <p>
      January 19, 1879.&mdash;Charity&mdash;goodness&mdash;places a voluntary
      curb on acuteness of perception; it screens and softens the rays of a too
      vivid insight; it refuses to see too clearly the ugliness and misery of
      the great intellectual hospital around it. True goodness is loth to
      recognize any privilege in itself; it prefers to be humble and charitable;
      it tries not to see what stares it in the face&mdash;that is to say, the
      imperfections, infirmities, and errors of humankind; its pity puts on airs
      of approval and encouragement. It triumphs over its own repulsions that it
      may help and raise.
    </p>
    <p>
      It has often been remarked that Vinet praised weak things. If so, it was
      not from any failure in his own critical sense; it was from charity.
      &ldquo;Quench not the smoking flax,&rdquo;&mdash;to which I add, &ldquo;Never give
      unnecessary pain.&rdquo; The cricket is not the nightingale; why tell him so?
      Throw yourself into the mind of the cricket&mdash;the process is newer and
      more ingenious; and it is what charity commands.
    </p>
    <p>
      Intellect is aristocratic, charity is democratic. In a democracy the
      general equality of pretensions, combined with the inequality of merits,
      creates considerable practical difficulty; some get out of it by making
      their prudence a muzzle on their frankness; others, by using kindness as a
      corrective of perspicacity. On the whole, kindness is safer than reserve;
      it inflicts no wound, and kills nothing.
    </p>
    <p>
      Charity is generous; it runs a risk willingly, and in spite of a hundred
      successive experiences, it thinks no evil at the hundred-and-first. We
      cannot be at the same time kind and wary, nor can we serve two masters&mdash;love
      and selfishness. We must be knowingly rash, that we may not be like the
      clever ones of the world, who never forget their own interests. We must be
      able to submit to being deceived; it is the sacrifice which interest and
      self-love owe to conscience. The claims of the soul must be satisfied
      first if we are to be the children of God.
    </p>
    <p>
      Was it not Bossuet who said, &ldquo;It is only the great souls who know all the
      grandeur there is in charity?&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      January 21, 1879.&mdash;At first religion holds the place of science and
      philosophy; afterward she has to learn to confine herself to her own
      domain&mdash;which is in the inmost depths of conscience, in the secret
      recesses of the soul, where life communes with the Divine will and the
      universal order. Piety is the daily renewing of the ideal, the steadying
      of our inner being, agitated, troubled, and embittered by the common
      accidents of existence. Prayer is the spiritual balm, the precious cordial
      which restores to us peace and courage. It reminds us of pardon and of
      duty. It says to us, &ldquo;Thou art loved&mdash;love; thou hast received&mdash;give;
      thou must die&mdash;labor while thou canst; overcome anger by kindness;
      overcome evil with good. What does the blindness of opinion matter, or
      misunderstanding, or ingratitude? Thou art neither bound to follow the
      common example nor to succeed. <i>Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra</i>.
      Thou hast a witness in thy conscience; and thy conscience is God speaking
      to thee!&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      March 3, 1879.&mdash;The sensible politician is governed by considerations
      of social utility, the public good, the greatest attainable good; the
      political windbag starts from the idea of the rights of the individual&mdash;abstract
      rights, of which the extent is affirmed, not demonstrated, for the
      political right of the individual is precisely what is in question. The
      revolutionary school always forgets that right apart from duty is a
      compass with one leg. The notion of right inflates the individual fills
      him with thoughts of self and of what others owe him, while it ignores the
      other side of the question, and extinguishes his capacity for devoting
      himself to a common cause. The state becomes a shop with self-interest for
      a principle&mdash;or rather an arena, in which every combatant fights for
      his own hand only. In either case self is the motive power.
    </p>
    <p>
      Church and state ought to provide two opposite careers for the individual;
      in the state he should be called on to give proof of merit&mdash;that is
      to say, he should earn his rights by services rendered; in the church his
      task should be to do good while suppressing his own merits, by a voluntary
      act of humility.
    </p>
    <p>
      Extreme individualism dissipates the moral substance of the individual. It
      leads him to subordinate everything to himself, and to think the world;
      society, the state, made for him. I am chilled by its lack of gratitude,
      of the spirit of deference, of the instinct of solidarity. It is an ideal
      without beauty and without grandeur.
    </p>
    <p>
      But, as a consolation, the modern zeal for equality makes a counterpoise
      for Darwinism, just as one wolf holds another wolf in check. Neither,
      indeed, acknowledges the claim of duty. The fanatic for equality affirms
      his right not to be eaten by his neighbor; the Darwinian states the fact
      that the big devour the little, and adds&mdash;so much the better. Neither
      the one nor the other has a word to say of love, of eternity, of kindness,
      of piety, of voluntary submission, of self-surrender.
    </p>
    <p>
      All forces and all principles are brought into action at once in this
      world. The result is, on the whole, good. But the struggle itself is
      hateful because it dislocates truth and shows us nothing but error pitted
      against error, party against party; that is to say, mere halves and
      fragments of being&mdash;monsters against monsters. A nature in love with
      beauty cannot reconcile itself to the sight; it longs for harmony, for
      something else than perpetual dissonance. The common condition of human
      society must indeed be accepted; tumult, hatred, fraud, crime, the
      ferocity of self-interest, the tenacity of prejudice, are perennial; but
      the philosopher sighs over it; his heart is not in it; his ambition is to
      see human history from a height; his ear is set to catch the music of the
      eternal spheres.
    </p>
    <p>
      March 15, 1879.&mdash;I have been turning over &ldquo;Les histories de mon
      Parrain&rdquo; by Stahl, and a few chapters of &ldquo;Nos Fils et nos Filles&rdquo; by
      Legouvé. These writers press wit, grace, gayety, and charm into the
      service of goodness; their desire is to show that virtue is not so dull
      nor common sense so tiresome as people believe. They are persuasive
      moralists, captivating story-tellers; they rouse the appetite for good.
      This pretty manner of theirs, however, has its dangers. A moral wrapped up
      in sugar goes down certainly, but it may be feared that it only goes down
      because of its sugar. The Sybarites of to-day will tolerate a sermon which
      is delicate enough to flatter their literary sensuality; but it is their
      taste which is charmed, not their conscience which is awakened; their
      principle of conduct escapes untouched.
    </p>
    <p>
      Amusement, instruction, morals, are distinct <i>genres</i>. They may no
      doubt be mingled and combined, but if we wish to obtain direct and simple
      effects, we shall do best to keep them apart. The well-disposed child,
      besides, does not like mixtures which have something of artifice and
      deception in them. Duty claims obedience; study requires application; for
      amusement, nothing is wanted but good temper. To convert obedience and
      application into means of amusement is to weaken the will and the
      intelligence. These efforts to make virtue the fashion are praiseworthy
      enough, but if they do honor to the writers, on the other hand they prove
      the moral anaemia of society. When the digestion is unspoiled, so much
      persuading is not necessary to give it a taste for bread.
    </p>
    <p>
      May 22,1879. (Ascension Day).&mdash;Wonderful and delicious weather. Soft,
      caressing sunlight&mdash;the air a limpid blue&mdash;twitterings of birds;
      even the distant voices of the city have something young and springlike in
      them. It is indeed a new birth. The ascension of the Saviour of men is
      symbolized by this expansion, this heavenward yearning of nature.... I
      feel myself born again; all the windows of the soul are clear. Forms,
      lines, tints, reflections, sounds, contrasts, and harmonies, the general
      play and interchange of things&mdash;it is all enchanting! The atmosphere
      is steeped in joy. May is in full beauty.
    </p>
    <p>
      In my courtyard the ivy is green again, the chestnut tree is full of leaf,
      the Persian lilac beside the little fountain is flushed with red, and just
      about to flower; through the wide openings to the right and left of the
      old College of Calvin I see the Salève above the trees of St. Antoine, the
      Voiron above the hill of Cologny; while the three flights of steps which,
      from landing to landing, lead between two high walls from the Rue Verdaine
      to the terrace of the Tranchées, recall to one&rsquo;s imagination some old city
      of the south, a glimpse of Perugia or of Malaga.
    </p>
    <p>
      All the bells are ringing. It is the hour of worship. A historical and
      religious impression mingles with the picturesque, the musical, the
      poetical impressions of the scene. All the peoples of Christendom&mdash;all
      the churches scattered over the globe&mdash;are celebrating at this moment
      the glory of the Crucified.
    </p>
    <p>
      And what are those many nations doing who have other prophets, and honor
      the Divinity in other ways?&mdash;the Jews, the Mussulmans, the Buddhists,
      the Vishnuists, the Guebers? They have other sacred days, other rites,
      other solemnities, other beliefs. But all have some religion, some ideal
      end for life&mdash;all aim at raising man above the sorrows and
      smallnesses of the present, and of the individual existence. All have
      faith in something greater than themselves, all pray, all bow, all adore;
      all see beyond nature, Spirit, and beyond evil, Good. All bear witness to
      the Invisible. Here we have the link which binds all peoples together. All
      men are equally creatures of sorrow and desire, of hope and fear. All long
      to recover some lost harmony with the great order of things, and to feel
      themselves approved and blessed by the Author of the universe. All know
      what suffering is, and yearn for happiness. All know what sin is, and feel
      the need of pardon.
    </p>
    <p>
      Christianity reduced to its original simplicity is the reconciliation of
      the sinner with God, by means of the certainty that God loves in spite of
      everything, and that he chastises because he loves. Christianity furnished
      a new motive and a new strength for the achievement of moral perfection.
      It made holiness attractive by giving to it the air of filial gratitude.
    </p>
    <p>
      June 28, 1879.&mdash;Last lecture of the term and of the academic year. I
      finished the exposition of modern philosophy, and wound up my course with
      the precision I wished. The circle has returned upon itself. In order to
      do this I have divided my hour into minutes, calculated my material, and
      counted every stitch and point. This, however, is but a very small part of
      the professorial science, It is a more difficult matter to divide one&rsquo;s
      whole material into a given number of lectures, to determine the right
      proportions of the different parts, and the normal speed of delivery to be
      attained. The ordinary lecturer may achieve a series of complete <i>séances</i>&mdash;the
      unity being the <i>séance</i>. But a scientific course ought to aim at
      something more&mdash;at a general unity of subject and of exposition.
    </p>
    <p>
      Has this concise, substantial, closely-reasoned kind of work been useful
      to my class? I cannot tell. Have my students liked me this year? I am not
      sure, but I hope so. It seems to me they have. Only, if I have pleased
      them, it cannot have been in any case more than a <i>succès d&rsquo;estime</i>;
      I have never aimed at any oratorical success. My only object is to light
      up for them a complicated and difficult subject. I respect myself too
      much, and I respect my class too much, to attempt rhetoric. My rôle is to
      help them to understand. Scientific lecturing ought to be, above all
      things, clear, instructive, well put together, and convincing. A lecturer
      has nothing to do with paying court to the scholars, or with showing off
      the master; his business is one of serious study and impersonal
      exposition. To yield anything on this point would seem to me a piece of
      mean utilitarianism. I hate everything that savors of cajoling and
      coaxing. All such ways are mere attempts to throw dust in men&rsquo;s eyes, mere
      forms of coquetry and stratagem. A professor is the priest of his subject;
      he should do the honors of it gravely and with dignity.
    </p>
    <p>
      September 9, 1879.&mdash;&ldquo;Non-being is perfect. Being, imperfect:&rdquo; this
      horrible sophism becomes beautiful only in the Platonic system, because
      there Non-being is replaced by the Idea, which is, and which is divine.
    </p>
    <p>
      The ideal, the chimerical, the vacant, should not be allowed to claim so
      great a superiority to the Real, which, on its side, has the incomparable
      advantage of existing. The Ideal kills enjoyment and content by
      disparaging the present and actual. It is the voice which says No, like
      Mephistopheles. No, you have not succeeded; no, your work is not good; no,
      you are not happy; no, you shall not find rest&mdash;all that you see and
      all that you do is insufficient, insignificant, overdone, badly done,
      imperfect. The thirst for the ideal is like the goad of Siva, which only
      quickens life to hasten death. Incurable longing that it is, it lies at
      the root both of individual suffering and of the progress of the race. It
      destroys happiness in the name of dignity.
    </p>
    <p>
      The only positive good is order, the return therefore to order and to a
      state of equilibrium. Thought without action is an evil, and so is action
      without thought. The ideal is a poison unless it be fused with the real,
      and the real becomes corrupt without the perfume of the ideal. Nothing is
      good singly without its complement and its contrary. Self-examination is
      dangerous if it encroaches upon self-devotion; reverie is hurtful when it
      stupefies the will; gentleness is an evil when it lessens strength;
      contemplation is fatal when it destroys character. &ldquo;Too much&rdquo; and &ldquo;too
      little&rdquo; sin equally against wisdom. Excess is one evil, apathy another.
      Duty may be defined as energy tempered by moderation; happiness, as
      inclination calmed and tempered by self-control.
    </p>
    <p>
      Just as life is only lent us for a few years, but is not inherent in us,
      so the good which is in us is not our own. It is not difficult to think of
      one&rsquo;s self in this detached spirit. It only needs a little self-knowledge,
      a little intuitive preception of the ideal, a little religion. There is
      even much sweetness in this conception that we are nothing of ourselves,
      and that yet it is granted to us to summon each other to life, joy, poetry
      and holiness.
    </p>
    <p>
      Another application of the law of irony: Zeno, a fatalist by theory, makes
      his disciples heroes; Epicurus, the upholder of liberty, makes his
      disciples languid and effeminate. The ideal pursued is the decisive point;
      the stoical ideal is duty, whereas the Epicureans make an ideal out of an
      interest. Two tendencies, two systems of morals, two worlds. In the same
      way the Jansenists, and before them the great reformers, are for
      predestination, the Jesuits for free-will&mdash;and yet the first founded
      liberty, the second slavery of conscience. What matters then is not the
      theoretical principle; it is the secret tendency, the aspiration, the aim,
      which is the essential thing.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      At every epoch there lies, beyond the domain of what man knows, the domain
      of the unknown, in which faith has its dwelling. Faith has no proofs, but
      only itself, to offer. It is born spontaneously in certain commanding
      souls; it spreads its empire among the rest by imitation and contagion. A
      great faith is but a great hope which becomes certitude as we move farther
      and farther from the founder of it; time and distance strengthen it, until
      at last the passion for knowledge seizes upon it, questions, and examines
      it. Then all which had once made its strength becomes its weakness; the
      impossibility of verification, exaltation of feeling, distance.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      At what age is our view clearest, our eye truest? Surely in old age,
      before the infirmities come which weaken or embitter. The ancients were
      right. The old man who is at once sympathetic and disinterested,
      necessarily develops the spirit of contemplation, and it is given to the
      spirit of contemplation to see things most truly, because it alone
      perceives them in their relative and proportional value.
    </p>
    <p>
      January 2, 1880.&mdash;A sense of rest, of deep quiet even. Silence within
      and without. A quietly-burning fire. A sense of comfort. The portrait of
      my mother seems to smile upon me. I am not dazed or stupid, but only happy
      in this peaceful morning. Whatever may be the charm of emotion, I do not
      know whether it equals the sweetness of those hours of silent meditation,
      in which we have a glimpse and foretaste of the contemplative joys of
      paradise. Desire and fear, sadness and care, are done away. Existence is
      reduced to the simplest form, the most ethereal mode of being, that is, to
      pure self-consciousness. It is a state of harmony, without tension and
      without disturbance, the dominical state of the soul, perhaps the state
      which awaits it beyond the grave. It is happiness as the orientals
      understand it, the happiness of the anchorite, who neither struggles nor
      wishes any more, but simply adores and enjoys. It is difficult to find
      words in which to express this moral situation, for our languages can only
      render the particular and localized vibrations of life; they are incapable
      of expressing this motionless concentration, this divine quietude, this
      state of the resting ocean, which reflects the sky, and is master of its
      own profundities. Things are then re-absorbed into their principles;
      memories are swallowed up in memory; the soul is only soul, and is no
      longer conscious of itself in its individuality and separateness. It is
      something which feels the universal life, a sensible atom of the Divine,
      of God. It no longer appropriates anything to itself, it is conscious of
      no void. Only the Yogis and Soufis perhaps have known in its profundity
      this humble and yet voluptuous state, which combines the joys of being and
      of non-being, which is neither reflection nor will, which is above both
      the moral existence and the intellectual existence, which is the return to
      unity, to the pleroma, the vision of Plotinus and of Proclus&mdash;Nirvana
      in its most attractive form.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is clear that the western nations in general, and especially the
      Americans, know very little of this state of feeling. For them life is
      devouring and incessant activity. They are eager for gold, for power, for
      dominion; their aim is to crush men and to enslave nature. They show an
      obstinate interest in means, and have not a thought for the end. They
      confound being with individual being, and the expansion of the self with
      happiness&mdash;that is to say, they do not live by the soul; they ignore
      the unchangeable and the eternal; they live at the periphery of their
      being, because they are unable to penetrate to its axis. They are excited,
      ardent, positive, because they are superficial. Why so much effort, noise,
      struggle, and greed?&mdash;it is all a mere stunning and deafening of the
      self. When death comes they recognize that it is so&mdash;why not then
      admit it sooner? Activity is only beautiful when it is holy&mdash;that is
      to say, when it is spent in the service of that which passeth not away.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 6, 1880.&mdash;A feeling article by Edmond Scherer on the death
      of Bersot, the director of the &ldquo;Ecole Normale,&rdquo; a philosopher who bore
      like a stoic a terrible disease, and who labored to the last without a
      complaint.... I have just read the four orations delivered over his grave.
      They have brought the tears to my eyes. In the last days of this brave man
      everything was manly, noble, moral, and spiritual. Each of the speakers
      paid homage to the character, the devotion, the constancy, and the
      intellectual elevation of the dead. &ldquo;Let us learn from him how to live and
      how to die.&rdquo; The whole funeral ceremony had an antique dignity.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 7, 1880.&mdash;Hoar-frost and fog, but the general aspect is
      bright and fairylike, and has nothing in common with the gloom in Paris
      and London, of which the newspapers tell us.
    </p>
    <p>
      This silvery landscape has a dreamy grace, a fanciful charm, which are
      unknown both to the countries of the sun and to those of coal-smoke. The
      trees seem to belong to another creation, in which white has taken the
      place of green. As one gazes at these alleys, these clumps, these groves
      and arcades, these lace-like garlands and festoons, one feels no wish for
      anything else; their beauty is original and self-sufficing, all the more
      because the ground powdered with snow, the sky dimmed with mist, and the
      smooth soft distances, combine to form a general scale of color, and a
      harmonious whole, which charms the eye. No harshness anywhere&mdash;all is
      velvet. My enchantment beguiled me out both before and after dinner. The
      impression is that of a <i>fête</i>, and the subdued tints are, or seem to
      be, a mere coquetry of winter which has set itself to paint something
      without sunshine, and yet to charm the spectator.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 9, 1880,&mdash;Life rushes on&mdash;so much the worse for the
      weak and the stragglers. As soon as a man&rsquo;s <i>tendo Achillis</i> gives
      way he finds himself trampled under foot by the young, the eager, the
      voracious. &ldquo;<i>Vae victis, vae debilibus!</i>&rdquo; yells the crowd, which in
      its turn is storming the goods of this world. Every man is always in some
      other man&rsquo;s way, since, however small he may make himself, he still
      occupies some space, and however little he may envy or possess, he is
      still sure to be envied and his goods coveted by some one else. Mean
      world!&mdash;peopled by a mean race! To console ourselves we must think of
      the exceptions&mdash;of the noble and generous souls. There are such. What
      do the rest matter! The traveler crossing the desert feels himself
      surrounded by creatures thirsting for his blood; by day vultures fly about
      his head; by night scorpions creep into his tent, jackals prowl around his
      camp-fire, mosquitoes prick and torture him with their greedy sting;
      everywhere menace, enmity, ferocity. But far beyond the horizon, and the
      barren sands peopled by these hostile hordes, the wayfarer pictures to
      himself a few loved faces and kind looks, a few true hearts which follow
      him in their dreams&mdash;and smiles. When all is said, indeed, we defend
      ourselves a greater or lesser number of years, but we are always conquered
      and devoured in the end; there is no escaping the grave and its worm.
      Destruction is our destiny, and oblivion our portion....
    </p>
    <p>
      How near is the great gulf! My skiff is thin as a nutshell, or even more
      fragile still. Let the leak but widen a little and all is over for the
      navigator. A mere nothing separates me from idiocy, from madness, from
      death. The slightest breach is enough to endanger all this frail,
      ingenious edifice, which calls itself my being and my life.
    </p>
    <p>
      Not even the dragonfly symbol is enough to express its frailty; the
      soap-bubble is the best poetical translation of all this illusory
      magnificence, this fugitive apparition of the tiny self, which is we, and
      we it.
    </p>
    <p>
      ... A miserable night enough. Awakened three or four times by my
      bronchitis. Sadness&mdash;restlessness. One of these winter nights,
      possibly, suffocation will come. I realize that it would be well to keep
      myself ready, to put everything in order.... To begin with, let me wipe
      out all personal grievances and bitternesses; forgive all, judge no one;
      in enmity and ill-will, see only misunderstanding. &ldquo;As much as lieth in
      you, be at peace with all men.&rdquo; On the bed of death the soul should have
      no eyes but for eternal things. All the littlenesses of life disappear.
      The fight is over. There should be nothing left now but remembrance of
      past blessings&mdash;adoration of the ways of God. Our natural instinct
      leads us back to Christian humility and pity. &ldquo;Father, forgive us our
      trespasses, as we forgive them who trespass against us.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Prepare thyself as though the coming Easter were thy last, for thy days
      henceforward shall be few and evil.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 11, 1880.&mdash;Victor de Laprade [Footnote: Victor de Laprade,
      born 1812, first a disciple and imitator of Edgar Quinet, then the friend
      of Lamartine, Lamennais, George Sand, Victor Hugo; admitted to the Academy
      in 1857 in succession to Alfred de Musset. He wrote &ldquo;Parfums de
      Madeleine,&rdquo; 1839; &ldquo;Odes et Poèmes,&rdquo; 1843; &ldquo;Poèmes Evangéliques,&rdquo; 1852;
      &ldquo;Idylles Héroiques,&rdquo; 1858, etc. etc.] has elevation, grandeur, nobility,
      and harmony. What is it, then, that he lacks? Ease, and perhaps humor.
      Hence the monotonous solemnity, the excess of emphasis, the
      over-intensity, the inspired air, the statue-like gait, which annoy one in
      him. His is a muse which never lays aside the <i>cothurnus</i>, and a
      royalty which never puts off its crown, even in sleep. The total absence
      in him of playfulness, simplicity, familiarity, is a great defect. De
      Laprade is to the ancients as the French tragedy is to that of Euripides,
      or as the wig of Louis XIV. to the locks of Apollo. His majestic airs are
      wearisome and factitious. If there is not exactly affectation in them,
      there is at least a kind of theatrical and sacerdotal posing, a sort of
      professional attitudinizing. Truth is not as fine as this, but it is more
      living, more pathetic, more varied. Marble images are cold. Was it not
      Musset who said, &ldquo;If De Laprade is a poet, then I am not one?&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      February 27, 1880.&mdash;I have finished translating twelve or fourteen
      little poems by Petöfi. They have a strange kind of savor. There is
      something of the Steppe, of the East, of Mazeppa, of madness, in these
      songs, which seem to go to the beat of a riding-whip. What force and
      passion, what savage brilliancy, what wild and grandiose images, there are
      in them! One feels that the Magyar is a kind of Centaur, and that he is
      only Christian and European by accident. The Hun in him tends toward the
      Arab.
    </p>
    <p>
      March 20, 1880.&mdash;I have been reading &ldquo;La Bannière Bleue&rdquo;&mdash;a
      history of the world at the time of Genghis Khan, under the form of
      memoirs. It is a Turk, Ouïgour, who tells the story. He shows us
      civilization from the wrong side, or the other side, and the Asiatic
      nomads appear as the scavengers of its corruptions.
    </p>
    <p>
      Genghis proclaimed himself the scourge of God, and he did in fact realize
      the vastest empire known to history, stretching from the Blue Sea to the
      Baltic, and from the vast plains of Siberia to the banks of the sacred
      Ganges. The most solid empires of the ancient world were overthrown by the
      tramp of his horsemen and the shafts of his archers. From the tumult into
      which he threw the western continent there issued certain vast results:
      the fall of the Byzantine empire, involving the Renaissance, the voyages
      of discovery in Asia, undertaken from both sides of the globe&mdash;that
      is to say, Gama and Columbus; the formation of the Turkish empire; and the
      preparation of the Russian empire. This tremendous hurricane, starting
      from the high Asiatic tablelands, felled the decaying oaks and worm-eaten
      buildings of the whole ancient world. The descent of the yellow,
      flat-nosed Mongols upon Europe is a historical cyclone which devastated
      and purified our thirteenth century, and broke, at the two ends of the
      known world, through two great Chinese walls&mdash;that which protected
      the ancient empire of the Center, and that which made a barrier of
      ignorance and superstition round the little world of Christendom. Attila,
      Genghis, Tamerlane, ought to range in the memory of men with Caesar,
      Charlemagne, and Napoleon. They roused whole peoples into action, and
      stirred the depths of human life, they powerfully affected ethnography,
      they let loose rivers of blood, and renewed the face of things. The
      Quakers will not see that there is a law of tempests in history as in
      nature. The revilers of war are like the revilers of thunder, storms, and
      volcanoes; they know not what they do. Civilization tends to corrupt men,
      as large towns tend to vitiate the air.
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;Nos patimur longae pacis mala.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Catastrophes bring about a violent restoration of equilibrium; they put
      the world brutally to rights. Evil chastises itself, and the tendency to
      ruin in human things supplies the place of the regulator who has not yet
      been discovered. No civilization can bear more than a certain proportion
      of abuses, injustice, corruption, shame, and crime. When this proportion
      has been reached, the boiler bursts, the palace falls, the scaffolding
      breaks down; institutions, cities, states, empires, sink into ruin. The
      evil contained in an organism is a virus which preys upon it, and if it is
      not eliminated ends by destroying it. And as nothing is perfect, nothing
      can escape death.
    </p>
    <p>
      May 19, 1880.&mdash;<i>Inadaptibility</i>, due either to mysticism or
      stiffness, delicacy or disdain, is the misfortune or at all events the
      characteristic of my life. I have not been able to fit myself to anything,
      to content myself with anything. I have never had the quantum of illusion
      necessary for risking the irreparable. I have made use of the ideal itself
      to keep me from any kind of bondage. It was thus with marriage: only
      perfection would have satisfied me; and, on the other hand, I was not
      worthy of perfection.... So that, finding no satisfaction in things, I
      tried to extirpate desire, by which things enslave us. Independence has
      been my refuge; detachment my stronghold. I have lived the impersonal life&mdash;in
      the world, yet not in it, thinking much, desiring nothing. It is a state
      of mind which corresponds with what in women is called a broken heart; and
      it is in fact like it, since the characteristic common to both is despair.
      When one knows that one will never possess what one could have loved, and
      that one can be content with nothing less, one has, so to speak, left the
      world, one has cut the golden hair, parted with all that makes human life&mdash;that
      is to say, illusion&mdash;the incessant effort toward an apparently
      attainable end. May 31, 1880.&mdash;Let us not be over-ingenious. There is
      no help to be got out of subtleties. Besides, one must live. It is best
      and simplest not to quarrel with any illusion, and to accept the
      inevitable good-temperedly. Plunged as we are in human existence, we must
      take it as it comes, not too bitterly, nor too tragically, without horror
      and without sarcasm, without misplaced petulance or a too exacting
      expectation; cheerfulness, serenity, and patience, these are best&mdash;let
      us aim at these. Our business is to treat life as the grandfather treats
      his granddaughter, or the grandmother her grandson; to enter into the
      pretenses of childhood and the fictions of youth, even when we ourselves
      have long passed beyond them. It is probable that God himself looks kindly
      upon the illusions of the human race, so long as they are innocent. There
      is nothing evil but sin&mdash;that is, egotism and revolt. And as for
      error, man changes his errors frequently, but error of some sort is always
      with him. Travel as one may, one is always somewhere, and one&rsquo;s mind rests
      on some point of truth, as one&rsquo;s feet rest upon some point of the globe.
    </p>
    <p>
      Society alone represents a more or less complete unity. The individual
      must content himself with being a stone in the building, a wheel in the
      immense machine, a word in the poem. He is a part of the family, of the
      state, of humanity, of all the special fragments formed by human
      interests, beliefs, aspirations, and labors. The loftiest souls are those
      who are conscious of the universal symphony, and who give their full and
      willing collaboration to this vast and complicated concert which we call
      civilization.
    </p>
    <p>
      In principle the mind is capable of suppressing all the limits which it
      discovers in itself, limits of language, nationality, religion, race, or
      epoch. But it must be admitted that the more the mind spiritualizes and
      generalizes itself, the less hold it has on other minds, which no longer
      understand it or know what to do with it. Influence belongs to men of
      action, and for purposes of action nothing is more useful than narrowness
      of thought combined with energy of will.
    </p>
    <p>
      The forms of dreamland are gigantic, those of action are small and
      dwarfed. To the minds imprisoned in things, belong success, fame, profit;
      a great deal no doubt; but they know nothing of the pleasures of liberty
      or the joy of penetrating the infinite. However, I do not mean to put one
      class before another; for every man is happy according to his nature.
      History is made by combatants and specialists; only it is perhaps not a
      bad thing that in the midst of the devouring activities of the western
      world, there should be a few Brahmanizing souls.
    </p>
    <p>
      ... This soliloquy means&mdash;what? That reverie turns upon itself as
      dreams do; that impressions added together do not always produce a fair
      judgment; that a private journal is like a good king, and permits
      repetitions, outpourings, complaint.... These unseen effusions are the
      conversation of thought with itself the arpeggios involuntary but not
      unconscious, of that aeolian harp we bear within us. Its vibrations
      compose no piece, exhaust no theme, achieve no melody, carry out no
      programme, but they express the innermost life of man.
    </p>
    <p>
      June 1, 1880.&mdash;Stendhal&rsquo;s &ldquo;La Chartreuse de Parme.&rdquo; A remarkable
      book. It is even typical, the first of a class. Stendhal opens the series
      of naturalist novels, which suppress the intervention of the moral sense,
      and scoff at the claim of free-will. Individuals are irresponsible; they
      are governed by their passions, and the play of human passions is the
      observer&rsquo;s joy, the artist&rsquo;s material. Stendhal is a novelist after
      Taine&rsquo;s heart, a faithful painter who is neither touched nor angry, and
      whom everything amuses&mdash;the knave and the adventuress as well as
      honest men and women, but who has neither faith, nor preference, nor
      ideal. In him literature is subordinated to natural history, to science.
      It no longer forms part of the humanities, it no longer gives man the
      honor of a separate rank. It classes him with the ant, the beaver, and the
      monkey. And this moral indifference to morality leads direct to
      immorality.
    </p>
    <p>
      The vice of the whole school is cynicism, contempt for man, whom they
      degrade to the level of the brute; it is the worship of strength,
      disregard of the soul, a want of generosity, of reverence, of nobility,
      which shows itself in spite of all protestations to the contrary; in a
      word, it is <i>inhumanity</i>. No man can be a naturalist with impunity:
      he will be coarse even with the most refined culture. A free mind is a
      great thing no doubt, but loftiness of heart, belief in goodness, capacity
      for enthusiasm and devotion, the thirst after perfection and holiness, are
      greater things still.
    </p>
    <p>
      June 7, 1880.&mdash;I am reading Madame Necker de Saussure [Footnote:
      Madame Necker de Saussure was the daughter of the famous geologist, De
      Saussure; she married a nephew of Jacques Necker, and was therefore cousin
      by marriage of Madame de Staël. She is often supposed to be the original
      of Madame de Cerlebe in &ldquo;Delphine,&rdquo; and the <i>Notice sur le Caractère et
      les Écrits de Mdme. de Staël</i>, prefixed to the authoritative edition of
      Madame de Staël&rsquo;s collected works, is by her. Philanthropy and education
      were her two main interests, but she had also a very large amount of
      general literary cultivation, as was proved by her translation of
      Schlegel&rsquo;s &ldquo;Lectures on Dramatic Literature.&rdquo;] again. &ldquo;L&rsquo;Education
      progressive&rdquo; is an admirable book. What moderation and fairness of view,
      what reasonableness and dignity of manner! Everything in it is of high
      quality&mdash;observation, thought, and style. The reconciliation of
      science with the ideal, of philosophy with religion, of psychology with
      morals, which the book attempts, is sound and beneficent. It is a fine
      book&mdash;a classic&mdash;and Geneva may be proud of a piece of work
      which shows such high cultivation and so much solid wisdom. Here we have
      the true Genevese literature, the central tradition of the country.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Later</i>.&mdash;I have finished the third volume of Madame Necker. The
      elevation and delicacy, the sense and seriousness, the beauty and
      perfection of the whole are astonishing. A few harshnesses or inaccuracies
      of language do not matter. I feel for the author a respect mingled with
      emotion. How rare it is to find a book in which everything is sincere and
      everything is true!
    </p>
    <p>
      June 26, 1880.&mdash;Democracy exists; it is mere loss of time to dwell
      upon its absurdities and defects. Every <i>régime</i> has its weaknesses,
      and this <i>régime</i> is a lesser evil than others. On things its effect
      is unfavorable, but on the other hand men profit by it, for it develops
      the individual by obliging every one to take interest in a multitude of
      questions. It makes bad work, but it produces citizens. This is its
      excuse, and a more than tolerable one; in the eyes of the philanthropist,
      indeed, it is a serious title to respect, for, after all, social
      institutions are made for man, and not <i>vice versâ</i>.
    </p>
    <p>
      June 27, 1880.&mdash;I paid a visit to my friends&mdash;, and we resumed
      the conversation of yesterday. We talked of the ills which threaten
      democracy and which are derived from the legal fiction at the root of it.
      Surely the remedy consists in insisting everywhere upon the truth which
      democracy systematically forgets, and which is its proper makeweight&mdash;on
      the inequalities of talent, of virtue, and merit, and on the respect due
      to age, to capacity, to services rendered. Juvenile arrogance and jealous
      ingratitude must be resisted all the more strenuously because social forms
      are in their favor; and when the institutions of a country lay stress only
      on the rights of the individual, it is the business of the citizen to lay
      all the more stress on duty. There must be a constant effort to correct
      the prevailing tendency of things. All this, it is true, is nothing but
      palliative, but in human society one cannot hope for more.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Later</i>.&mdash;Alfred de Vigny is a sympathetic writer, with a
      meditative turn of thought, a strong and supple talent. He possesses
      elevation, independence, seriousness, originality, boldness and grace; he
      has something of everything. He paints, describes, and judges well; he
      thinks, and has the courage of his opinions. His defect lies in an excess
      of self-respect, in a British pride and reserve which give him a horror of
      familiarity and a terror of letting himself go. This tendency has
      naturally injured his popularity as a writer with a public whom he holds
      at arm&rsquo;s length as one might a troublesome crowd. The French race has
      never cared much about the inviolability of personal conscience; it does
      not like stoics shut up in their own dignity as in a tower, and
      recognizing no master but God, duty or faith. Such strictness annoys and
      irritates it; it is merely piqued and made impatient by anything solemn.
      It repudiated Protestantism for this very reason, and in all crises it has
      crushed those who have not yielded to the passionate current of opinion.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 1, 1880. (<i>Three o&rsquo;clock</i>).&mdash;The temperature is oppressive;
      I ought to be looking over my notes, and thinking of to-morrow&rsquo;s
      examinations. Inward distaste&mdash;emptiness&mdash;discontent. Is it
      trouble of conscience, or sorrow of heart? or the soul preying upon
      itself? or merely a sense of strength decaying and time running to waste?
      Is sadness&mdash;or regret&mdash;or fear&mdash;at the root of it? I do not
      know; but this dull sense of misery has danger in it; it leads to rash
      efforts and mad decisions. Oh, for escape from self, for something to
      stifle the importunate voice of want and yearning! Discontent is the
      father of temptation. How can we gorge the invisible serpent hidden at the
      bottom of our well&mdash;gorge it so that it may sleep?
    </p>
    <p>
      At the heart of all this rage and vain rebellion there lies&mdash;what?
      Aspiration, yearning! We are athirst for the infinite&mdash;for love&mdash;for
      I know not what. It is the instinct of happiness, which, like some wild
      animal, is restless for its prey. It is God calling-God avenging himself.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 4, 1880. (<i>Sunday, half-past eight in the morning</i>).&mdash;The
      sun has come out after heavy rain. May one take it as an omen on this
      solemn day? The great voice of Clémence has just been sounding in our
      ears. The bell&rsquo;s deep vibrations went to my heart. For a quarter of an
      hour the pathetic appeal went on&mdash;&ldquo;Geneva, Geneva, remember! I am
      called <i>Clémence</i>&mdash;I am the voice of church and of country.
      People of Geneva, serve God and be at peace together.&rdquo; [Footnote: A law to
      bring about separation between Church and State, adopted by the Great
      Council, was on this day submitted to the vote of the Genevese people. It
      was rejected by a large majority (9,306 against 4,044).&mdash;[S.]]
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Seven o&rsquo;clock in the evening</i>.&mdash;<i>Clémence</i> has been
      ringing again, during the last half-hour of the <i>scrutin</i>. Now that
      she has stopped, the silence has a terrible seriousness, like that which
      weighs upon a crowd when it is waiting for the return of the judge and the
      delivery of the death sentence. The fate of the Genevese church and
      country is now in the voting box.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Eleven o&rsquo;clock in the evening</i>.&mdash;Victory along the whole line.
      The Ayes have carried little more than two-sevenths of the vote. At my
      friend&mdash;&mdash;&lsquo;s house I found them all full of excitement,
      gratitude, and joy.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 5, 1880.&mdash;There are some words which have still a magical virtue
      with the mass of the people: those of State, Republic, Country, Nation,
      Flag, and even, I think, Church. Our skeptical and mocking culture knows
      nothing of the emotion, the exaltation, the delirium, which these words
      awaken in simple people. The blasés of the world have no idea how the
      popular mind vibrates to these appeals, by which they themselves are
      untouched. It is their punishment; it is also their infirmity. Their
      temper is satirical and separatist; they live in isolation and sterility.
    </p>
    <p>
      I feel again what I felt at the time of the Rousseau centenary; my feeling
      and imagination are chilled and repelled by those Pharisaical people who
      think themselves too good to associate with the crowd.
    </p>
    <p>
      At the same time, I suffer from an inward contradiction, from a two-fold,
      instinctive repugnance&mdash;an aesthetic repugnance toward vulgarity of
      every kind, a moral repugnance toward barrenness and coldness of heart.
    </p>
    <p>
      So that personally I am only attracted by the individuals of cultivation
      and eminence, while on the other hand nothing is sweeter to me than to
      feel myself vibrating in sympathy with the national spirit, with the
      feeling of the masses. I only care for the two extremes, and it is this
      which separates me from each of them.
    </p>
    <p>
      Our everyday life, split up as it is into clashing parties and opposed
      opinions, and harassed by perpetual disorder and discussion, is painful
      and almost hateful to me. A thousand things irritate and provoke me. But
      perhaps it would be the same elsewhere. Very likely it is the inevitable
      way of the world which displeases me&mdash;the sight of what succeeds, of
      what men approve or blame, of what they excuse or accuse. I need to
      admire, to feel myself in sympathy and in harmony with my neighbor, with
      the march of things, and the tendencies of those around me, and almost
      always I have had to give up the hope of it. I take refuge in retreat, to
      avoid discord. But solitude is only a <i>pis-aller</i>.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 6, 1880.&mdash;Magnificent weather. The college prize-day. [Footnote:
      The prize-giving at the College of Geneva is made the occasion of a
      national festival.] Toward evening I went with our three ladies to the
      plain of Plainpalais. There was an immense crowd, and I was struck with
      the bright look of the faces. The festival wound up with the traditional
      fireworks, under a calm and starry sky. Here we have the republic indeed,
      I thought as I came in. For a whole week this people has been
      out-of-doors, camping, like the Athenians on the Agora. Since Wednesday
      lectures and public meetings have followed one another without
      intermission; at home there are pamphlets and the newspapers to be read;
      while speech-making goes on at the clubs. On Sunday, <i>plebiscite</i>;
      Monday, public procession, service at St. Pierre, speeches on the Molard,
      festival for the adults. Tuesday, the college fête-day. Wednesday, the
      fête-day of the primary schools.
    </p>
    <p>
      Geneva is a caldron always at boiling-point, a furnace of which the fires
      are never extinguished. Vulcan had more than one forge, and Geneva is
      certainly one of those world-anvils on which the greatest number of
      projects have been hammered out. When one thinks that the martyrs of all
      causes have been at work here, the mystery is explained a little; but the
      truest explanation is that Geneva&mdash;republican, protestant,
      democratic, learned, and enterprising Geneva&mdash;has for centuries
      depended on herself alone for the solution of her own difficulties. Since
      the Reformation she has been always on the alert, marching with a lantern
      in her left hand and a sword in her right. It pleases me to see that she
      has not yet become a mere copy of anything, and that she is still capable
      of deciding for herself. Those who say to her, &ldquo;Do as they do at New York,
      at Paris, at Rome, at Berlin,&rdquo; are still in the minority. The <i>doctrinaires</i>
      who would split her up and destroy her unity waste their breath upon her.
      She divines the snare laid for her and turns away. I like this proof of
      vitality. Only that which is original has a sufficient reason for
      existence. A country in which the word of command comes from elsewhere is
      nothing more than a province. This is what our Jacobins and our
      Ultramontanes never will recognize. Neither of them understand the meaning
      of self-government, and neither of them have any idea of the dignity of a
      historical state and an independent people.
    </p>
    <p>
      Our small nationalities are ruined by the hollow cosmopolitan formulae
      which have an equally disastrous effect upon art and letters. The modern
      <i>isms</i> are so many acids which dissolve everything living and
      concrete. No one achieves a masterpiece, nor even a decent piece of work,
      by the help of realism, liberalism, or romanticism. Separatism has even
      less virtue than any of the other <i>isms</i>, for it is the abstraction
      of a negation, the shadow of a shadow. The various <i>isms</i> of the
      present are not fruitful principles: they are hardly even explanatory
      formulae. They are rather names of disease, for they express some element
      in excess, some dangerous and abusive exaggeration. Examples: empiricism,
      idealism, radicalism. What is best among things and most perfect among
      beings slips through these categories. The man who is perfectly well is
      neither sanguineous&mdash;[to use the old medical term]&mdash;nor bilious
      nor nervous. A normal republic contains opposing parties and points of
      view, but it contains them, as it were, in a state of chemical
      combination. All the colors are contained in a ray of light, while red
      alone does not contain a sixth part of the perfect ray.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 8, 1880.&mdash;It is thirty years since I read Waagen&rsquo;s book on
      &ldquo;Museums,&rdquo; which my friend &mdash;&mdash; is now reading. It was in 1842
      that I was wild for pictures; in 1845 that I was studying Krause&rsquo;s
      philosophy; in 1850 that I became professor of aesthetics. &mdash;&mdash;
      may be the same age as I am; it is none the less true that when a
      particular stage has become to me a matter of history, he is just arriving
      at it. This impression of distance and remoteness is a strange one. I
      begin to realize that my memory is a great catacomb, and that below my
      actual standing-ground there is layer after layer of historical ashes.
    </p>
    <p>
      Is the life of mind something like that of great trees of immemorial
      growth? Is the living layer of consciousness super-imposed upon hundreds
      of dead layers? <i>Dead?</i> No doubt this is too much to say, but still,
      when memory is slack the past becomes almost as though it had never been.
      To remember that we did know once is not a sign of possession but a sign
      of loss; it is like the number of an engraving which is no longer on its
      nail, the title of a volume no longer to be found on its shelf. My mind is
      the empty frame of a thousand vanished images. Sharpened by incessant
      training, it is all culture, but it has retained hardly anything in its
      meshes. It is without matter, and is only form. It no longer has
      knowledge; it has become method. It is etherealized, algebraicized. Life
      has treated it as death treats other minds; it has already prepared it for
      a further metamorphosis. Since the age of sixteen onward I have been able
      to look at things with the eyes of a blind man recently operated upon&mdash;that
      is to say, I have been able to suppress in myself the results of the long
      education of sight, and to abolish distances; and now I find myself
      regarding existence as though from beyond the tomb, from another world;
      all is strange to me; I am, as it were, outside my own body and
      individuality; I am <i>depersonalized</i>, detached, cut adrift. Is this
      madness? No. Madness means the impossibility of recovering one&rsquo;s normal
      balance after the mind has thus played truant among alien forms of being,
      and followed Dante to invisible worlds. Madness means incapacity for
      self-judgment and self-control. Whereas it seems to me that my mental
      transformations are but philosophical experiences. I am tied to none. I am
      but making psychological investigations. At the same time I do not hide
      from myself that such experiences weaken the hold of common sense, because
      they act as solvents of all personal interests and prejudices. I can only
      defend myself against them by returning to the common life of men, and by
      bracing and fortifying the will.
    </p>
    <p>
      July 14, 1880.&mdash;What is the book which, of all Genevese literature, I
      would soonest have written? Perhaps that of Madame Necker de Saussure, or
      Madame de Staël&rsquo;s &ldquo;L&rsquo;Allemagne.&rdquo; To a Genevese, moral philosophy is still
      the most congenial and remunerative of studies. Intellectual seriousness
      is what suits us least ill. History, politics, economical science,
      education, practical philosophy&mdash;these are our subjects. We have
      everything to lose in the attempt to make ourselves mere Frenchified
      copies of the Parisians: by so doing we are merely carrying water to the
      Seine. Independent criticism is perhaps easier at Geneva than at Paris,
      and Geneva ought to remain faithful to her own special line, which, as
      compared with that of France, is one of greater freedom from the tyranny
      of taste and fashion on the one hand, and the tyranny of ruling opinion on
      the other&mdash;of Catholicism or Jacobinism. Geneva should be to <i>La
      Grande Nation</i> what Diogenes was to Alexander; her role is to represent
      the independent thought and the free speech which is not dazzled by
      prestige, and does not blink the truth. It is true that the rôle is an
      ungrateful one, that it lends itself to sarcasm and misrepresentation&mdash;but
      what matter?
    </p>
    <p>
      July 28, 1880.&mdash;This afternoon I have had a walk in the sunshine, and
      have just come back rejoicing in a renewed communion with nature. The
      waters of the Rhone and the Arve, the murmur of the river, the austerity
      of its banks, the brilliancy of the foliage, the play of the leaves, the
      splendor of the July sunlight, the rich fertility of the fields, the
      lucidity of the distant mountains, the whiteness of the glaciers under the
      azure serenity of the sky, the sparkle and foam of the mingling rivers,
      the leafy masses of the La Bâtie woods&mdash;all and everything delighted
      me. It seemed to me as though the years of strength had come back to me. I
      was overwhelmed with sensations. I was surprised and grateful. The
      universal life carried me on its breast; the summer&rsquo;s caress went to my
      heart. Once more my eyes beheld the vast horizons, the soaring peaks, the
      blue lakes, the winding valleys, and all the free outlets of old days. And
      yet there was no painful sense of longing. The scene left upon me an
      indefinable impression, which was neither hope, nor desire, nor regret,
      but rather a sense of emotion, of passionate impulse, mingled with
      admiration and anxiety. I am conscious at once of joy and of want; beyond
      what I possess I see the impossible and the unattainable; I gauge my own
      wealth and poverty; in a word, I am and I am not&mdash;my inner state is
      one of contradiction, because it is one of transition. The ambiguity of it
      is characteristic of human nature, which is ambiguous, because it is flesh
      becoming spirit, space changing into thought, the Finite looking dimly out
      upon the Infinite, intelligence working its way through love and pain.
    </p>
    <p>
      Man is the <i>sensorium commune</i> of nature, the point at which all
      values are interchanged. Mind is the plastic medium, the principle, and
      the result of all; at once material and laboratory, product and formula,
      sensation, expression, and law; that which is, that which does, that which
      knows. All is not mind, but mind is in all, and contains all. It is the
      consciousness of being&mdash;that is, Being raised to the second power. If
      the universe subsists, it is because the Eternal mind loves to perceive
      its own content, in all its wealth and expansion&mdash;especially in its
      stages of preparation. Not that God is an egotist. He allows myriads upon
      myriads of suns to disport themselves in his shadow; he grants life and
      consciousness to innumerable multitudes of creatures who thus participate
      in being and in nature; and all these animated monads multiply, so to
      speak, his divinity.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 4, 1880.&mdash;I have read a few numbers of the <i>Feuille Centrale
      de Zofingen</i>. [Footnote: The journal of a students&rsquo; society, drawn from
      the different cantons of Switzerland, which meets every year in the little
      town of Zofingen] It is one of those perpetual new beginnings of youth
      which thinks it is producing something fresh when it is only repeating the
      old.
    </p>
    <p>
      Nature is governed by continuity&mdash;the continuity of repetition; it is
      like an oft-told tale, or the recurring burden of a song. The rose-trees
      are never tired of rose-bearing, the birds of nest-building, young hearts
      of loving, or young voices of singing the thoughts and feelings which have
      served their predecessors a hundred thousand times before. Profound
      monotony in universal movement&mdash;there is the simplest formula
      furnished by the spectacle of the world. All circles are alike, and every
      existence tends to trace its circle.
    </p>
    <p>
      How, then, is <i>fastidium</i> to be avoided? By shutting our eyes to the
      general uniformity, by laying stress upon the small differences which
      exist, and then by learning to enjoy repetition. What to the intellect is
      old and worn-out is perennially young and fresh to the heart; curiosity is
      insatiable, but love is never tired. The natural preservative against
      satiety, too, is work. What we do may weary others, but the personal
      effort is at least useful to its author. Where every one works, the
      general life is sure to possess charm and savor, even though it repeat
      forever the same song, the same aspirations, the same prejudices, and the
      same sighs. &ldquo;To every man his turn,&rdquo; is the motto of mortal beings. If
      what they do is old, they themselves are new; when they imitate, they
      think they are inventing. They have received, and they transmit. <i>E
      sempre bene!</i>
    </p>
    <p>
      August 24, 1880.&mdash;As years go on I love the beautiful more than the
      sublime, the smooth more than the rough, the calm nobility of Plato more
      than the fierce holiness of the world&rsquo;s Jeremiahs. The vehement barbarian
      is to me the inferior of the mild and playful Socrates. My taste is for
      the well-balanced soul and the well-trained heart&mdash;for a liberty
      which is not harsh and insolent, like that of the newly enfranchised
      slave, but lovable. The temperament which charms me is that in which one
      virtue leads naturally to another. All exclusive and sharply-marked
      qualities are but so many signs of imperfection.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 29, 1880.&mdash;To-day I am conscious of improvement. I am taking
      advantage of it to go back to my neglected work and my interrupted habits;
      but in a week I have grown several months older&mdash;that is easy to see.
      The affection of those around me makes them pretend not to see it; but the
      looking-glass tells the truth. The fact does not take away from the
      pleasure of convalescence; but still one hears in it the shuttle of
      destiny, and death seems to be nearing rapidly, in spite of the halts and
      truces which are granted one. The most beautiful existence, it seems to
      me, would be that of a river which should get through all its rapids and
      waterfalls not far from its rising, and should then in its widening course
      form a succession of rich valleys, and in each of them a lake equally but
      diversely beautiful, to end, after the plains of age were past, in the
      ocean where all that is weary and heavy-laden comes to seek for rest. How
      few there are of these full, fruitful, gentle lives! What is the use of
      wishing for or regretting them? It is Wiser and harder to see in one&rsquo;s own
      lot the best one could have had, and to say to one&rsquo;s self that after all
      the cleverest tailor cannot make us a coat to fit us more closely than our
      skin.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Le vrai nom du bonheur est le contentement.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      ... The essential thing, for every one is to accept his destiny. Fate has
      deceived you; you have sometimes grumbled at your lot; well, no more
      mutual reproaches; go to sleep in peace.
    </p>
    <p>
      August 30, 1880. (<i>Two o&rsquo;clock</i>).&mdash;Rumblings of a grave and
      distant thunder. The sky is gray but rainless; the sharp little cries of
      the birds show agitation and fear; one might imagine it the prelude to a
      symphony or a catastrophe.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Quel éclair te traverse, ô mon coeur soucieux?&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      Strange&mdash;all the business of the immediate neighborhood is going on;
      there is even more movement than usual; and yet all these noises are, as
      it were, held suspended in the silence&mdash;in a soft, positive silence,
      which they cannot disguise&mdash;silence akin to that which, in every
      town, on one day of the week, replaces the vague murmur of the laboring
      hive. Such silence at such an hour is extraordinary. There is something
      expectant, contemplative, almost anxious in it. Are there days on which
      &ldquo;the little breath&rdquo; of Job produces more effect than tempest? on which a
      dull rumbling on the distant horizon is enough to suspend the concert of
      voices, like the roaring of a desert lion at the fall of night?
    </p>
    <p>
      September 9, 1880.&mdash;It seems to me that with the decline of my active
      force I am becoming more purely spirit; everything is growing transparent
      to me. I see the types, the foundation of beings, the sense of things.
    </p>
    <p>
      All personal events, all particular experiences, are to me texts for
      meditation, facts to be generalized into laws, realities to be reduced to
      ideas. Life is only a document to be interpreted, matter to be
      spiritualized. Such is the life of the thinker. Every day he strips
      himself more and more of personality. If he consents to act and to feel,
      it is that he may the better understand; if he wills, it is that he may
      know what will is. Although it is sweet to him to be loved, and he knows
      nothing else so sweet, yet there also he seems to himself to be the
      occasion of the phenomenon rather than its end. He contemplates the
      spectacle of love, and love for him remains a spectacle. He does not even
      believe his body his own; he feels the vital whirlwind passing through him&mdash;lent
      to him, as it were, for a moment, in order that he may perceive the cosmic
      vibrations. He is a mere thinking subject; he retains only the form of
      things; he attributes to himself the material possession of nothing
      whatsoever; he asks nothing from life but wisdom. This temper of mind
      makes him incomprehensible to all that loves enjoyment, dominion,
      possession. He is fluid as a phantom that we see but cannot grasp; he
      resembles a man, as the <i>manes</i> of Achilles or the shade of Creusa
      resembled the living. Without having died, I am a ghost. Other men are
      dreams to me, and I am a dream to them.
    </p>
    <p>
      <i>Later</i>&mdash;Consciousness in me takes no account of the category of
      time, and therefore all the partitions which tend to make of life a palace
      with a thousand rooms, do not exist in my case; I am still in the
      primitive unicellular state. I possess myself only as Monad and as Ego,
      and I feel my faculties themselves reabsorbed into the substance which
      they have individualized. All the endowment of animality is, so to speak,
      repudiated; all the produce of study and of cultivation is in the same way
      annulled; the whole crystallization is redissolved into fluid; the whole
      rainbow is withdrawn within the dewdrop; consequences return to the
      principle, effects to the cause, the bird to the egg, the organism to its
      germ.
    </p>
    <p>
      This psychological reinvolution is an anticipation of death; it represents
      the life beyond the grave, the return to school, the soul fading into the
      world of ghosts, or descending into the region of <i>Die Mütter</i>; it
      implies the simplification of the individual who, allowing all the
      accidents of personality to evaporate, exists henceforward only in the
      indivisible state, the state of point, of potentiality, of pregnant
      nothingness. Is not this the true definition of mind? Is not mind,
      dissociated from space and time, just this? Its development, past or
      future, is contained in it just as a curve is contained in its algebraical
      formula. This nothing is an all. This <i>punctum</i> without dimensions is
      a <i>punctum saliens</i>. What is the acorn but the oak which has lost its
      branches, its leaves, its trunk, and its roots&mdash;that is to say, all
      its apparatus, its forms, its particularities&mdash;but which is still
      present in concentration, in essence, in a force which contains the
      possibility of complete revival?
    </p>
    <p>
      This impoverishment, then, is only superficially a loss, a reduction. To
      be reduced to those elements in one which are eternal, is indeed to die
      but not to be annihilated: it is simply to become virtual again.
    </p>
    <p>
      October 9, 1880. (<i>Clarens</i>).&mdash;A walk. Deep feeling and
      admiration. Nature was so beautiful, so caressing, so poetical, so
      maternal. The sunlight, the leaves, the sky, the bells, all said to me&mdash;&ldquo;Be
      of good strength and courage, poor bruised one. This is nature&rsquo;s kindly
      season; here is forgetfulness, calm, and rest. Faults and troubles,
      anxieties and regrets, cares and wrongs, are but one and the same burden.
      We make no distinctions; we comfort all sorrows, we bring peace, and with
      us is consolation. Salvation to the weary, salvation to the afflicted,
      salvation to the sick, to sinners, to all that suffer in heart, in
      conscience, and in body. We are the fountain of blessing; drink and live!
      God maketh his sun to rise upon the just and upon the unjust. There is
      nothing grudging in his munificence; he does not weigh his gifts like a
      moneychanger, or number them like a cashier. Come&mdash;there is enough
      for all!&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      October 29, 1880. (<i>Geneva</i>).&mdash;The ideal which a man professes
      may itself be only a matter of appearance&mdash;a device for misleading
      his neighbor, or deluding himself. The individual is always ready to claim
      for himself the merits of the badge under which he fights; whereas,
      generally speaking, it is the contrary which happens. The nobler the
      badge, the less estimable is the wearer of it. Such at least is the
      presumption. It is extremely dangerous to pride one&rsquo;s self on any moral or
      religious specialty whatever. Tell me what you pique yourself upon, and I
      will tell you what you are not.
    </p>
    <p>
      But how are we to know what an individual is? First of all by his acts;
      but by something else too&mdash;something which is only perceived by
      intuition. Soul judges soul by elective affinity, reaching through and
      beyond both words and silence, looks and actions.
    </p>
    <p>
      The criterion is subjective, I allow, and liable to error; but in the
      first place there is no safer one, and in the next, the accuracy of the
      judgment is in proportion to the moral culture of the judge. Courage is an
      authority on courage, goodness on goodness, nobleness on nobleness,
      loyalty on uprightness. We only truly know what we have, or what we have
      lost and regret, as, for example, childish innocence, virginal purity, or
      stainless honor. The truest and best judge, then, is Infinite Goodness,
      and next to it, the regenerated sinner or the saint, the man tried by
      experience or the sage. Naturally, the touchstone in us becomes finer and
      truer the better we are.
    </p>
    <p>
      November 3, 1880.&mdash;What impression has the story I have just read
      made upon me? A mixed one. The imagination gets no pleasure out of it,
      although the intellect is amused. Why? Because the author&rsquo;s mood is one of
      incessant irony and <i>persiflage</i>. The Voltairean tradition has been
      his guide&mdash;a great deal of wit and satire, very little feeling, no
      simplicity. It is a combination of qualities which serves eminently well
      for satire, for journalism, and for paper warfare of all kinds, but which
      is much less suitable to the novel or short story, for cleverness is not
      poetry, and the novel is still within the domain of poetry, although on
      the frontier. The vague discomfort aroused in one by these epigrammatic
      productions is due probably to a confusion of kinds. Ambiguity of style
      keeps one in a perpetual state of tension and self-defense; we ought not
      to be left in doubt whether the speaker is jesting or serious, mocking or
      tender. Moreover, banter is not humor, and never will be. I think, indeed,
      that the professional wit finds a difficulty in being genuinely comic, for
      want of depth and disinterested feeling. To laugh at things and people is
      not really a joy; it is at best but a cold pleasure. Buffoonery is
      wholesomer, because it is a little more kindly. The reason why continuous
      sarcasm repels us is that it lacks two things&mdash;humanity and
      seriousness. Sarcasm implies pride, since it means putting one&rsquo;s self
      above others&mdash;and levity, because conscience is allowed no voice in
      controlling it. In short, we read satirical books, but we only love and
      cling to the books in which there is <i>heart</i>.
    </p>
    <p>
      November 22, 1880.&mdash;How is ill-nature to be met and overcome? First,
      by humility: when a man knows his own weaknesses, why should he be angry
      with others for pointing them out? No doubt it is not very amiable of them
      to do so, but still, truth is on their side. Secondly, by reflection:
      after all we are what we are, and if we have been thinking too much of
      ourselves, it is only an opinion to be modified; the incivility of our
      neighbor leaves us what we were before. Above all, by pardon: there is
      only one way of not hating those who do us wrong, and that is by doing
      them good; anger is best conquered by kindness. Such a victory over
      feeling may not indeed affect those who have wronged us, but it is a
      valuable piece of self-discipline. It is vulgar to be angry on one&rsquo;s own
      account; we ought only to be angry for great causes. Besides, the poisoned
      dart can only be extracted from the wound by the balm of a silent and
      thoughtful charity. Why do we let human malignity embitter us? why should
      ingratitude, jealousy&mdash;perfidy even&mdash;enrage us? There is no end
      to recriminations, complaints, or reprisals. The simplest plan is to blot
      everything out. Anger, rancor, bitterness, trouble the soul. Every man is
      a dispenser of justice; but there is one wrong that he is not bound to
      punish&mdash;that of which he himself is the victim. Such a wrong is to be
      healed, not avenged. Fire purifies all.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Mon âme est comme un feu qui dévore et parfume
  Ce qu&rsquo;on jette pour le ternir.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      December 27, 1880&mdash;In an article I have just read, Biedermann
      reproaches Strauss with being too negative, and with having broken with
      Christianity. The object to be pursued, according to him, should be the
      freeing of religion from the mythological element, and the substitution of
      another point of view for the antiquated dualism of orthodoxy&mdash;this
      other point of view to be the victory over the world, produced by the
      sense of divine sonship.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is true that another question arises: has not a religion which has
      separated itself from special miracle, from local interventions of the
      supernatural, and from mystery, lost its savor and its efficacy? For the
      sake of satisfying a thinking and instructed public, is it wise to
      sacrifice the influence of religion over the multitude? Answer. A pious
      fiction is still a fiction. Truth has the highest claim. It is for the
      world to accommodate itself to truth, and not <i>vice versâ</i>.
      Copernicus upset the astronomy of the Middle Ages&mdash;so much the worse
      for it! The Eternal Gospel revolutionizes modern churches&mdash;what
      matter! When symbols become transparent, they have no further binding
      force. We see in them a poem, an allegory, a metaphor; but we believe in
      them no longer. Yes, but still a certain esotericism is inevitable, since
      critical, scientific, and philosophical culture is only attainable by a
      minority. The new faith must have its symbols too. At present the effect
      it produces on pious souls is a more or less profane one; it has a
      disrespectful, incredulous, frivolous look, and it seems to free a man
      from traditional dogma at the cost of seriousness of conscience. How are
      sensitiveness of feeling, the sense of sin, the desire for pardon, the
      thirst for holiness, to be preserved among us, when the errors which have
      served them so long for support and food have been eliminated? Is not
      illusion indispensable? is it not the divine process of education?
    </p>
    <p>
      Perhaps the best way is to draw a deep distinction between opinion and
      belief, and between belief and science. The mind which discerns these
      different degrees may allow itself imagination and faith, and still remain
      within the lines of progress.
    </p>
    <p>
      December 28, 1880.&mdash;There are two modes of classing the people we
      know: the first is utilitarian&mdash;it starts from ourselves, divides our
      friends from our enemies, and distinguishes those who are antipathetic to
      us, those who are indifferent, those who can serve or harm us; the second
      is disinterested&mdash;it classes men according to their intrinsic value,
      their own qualities and defects, apart from the feelings which they have
      for us, or we for them.
    </p>
    <p>
      My tendency is to the second kind of classification. I appreciate men less
      by the special affection which they show to me than by their personal
      excellence, and I cannot confuse gratitude with esteem. It is a happy
      thing for us when the two feelings can be combined; and nothing is more
      painful than to owe gratitude where yet we can feel neither respect nor
      confidence.
    </p>
    <p>
      I am not very willing to believe in the permanence of accidental states.
      The generosity of a miser, the good nature of an egotist, the gentleness
      of a passionate temperament, the tenderness of a barren nature, the piety
      of a dull heart, the humility of an excitable self-love, interest me as
      phenomena&mdash;nay, even touch me if I am the object of them, but they
      inspire me with very little confidence. I foresee the end of them too
      clearly. Every exception tends to disappear and to return to the rule. All
      privilege is temporary, and besides, I am less flattered than anxious when
      I find myself the object of a privilege.
    </p>
    <p>
      A man&rsquo;s primitive character may be covered over by alluvial deposits of
      culture and acquisition&mdash;none the less is it sure to come to the
      surface when years have worn away all that is accessory and adventitious.
      I admit indeed the possibility of great moral crises which sometimes
      revolutionize the soul, but I dare not reckon on them. It is a possibility&mdash;not
      a probability. In choosing one&rsquo;s friends we must choose those whose
      qualities are inborn, and their virtues virtues of temperament. To lay the
      foundations of friendship on borrowed or added virtues is to build on an
      artificial soil; we run too many risks by it.
    </p>
    <p>
      Exceptions are snares, and we ought above all to distrust them when they
      charm our vanity. To catch and fix a fickle heart is a task which tempts
      all women; and a man finds something intoxicating in the tears of
      tenderness and joy which he alone has had the power to draw from a proud
      woman. But attractions of this kind are deceptive. Affinity of nature
      founded on worship of the same ideal, and perfect in proportion to
      perfectness of soul, is the only affinity which is worth anything. True
      love is that which ennobles the personality, fortifies the heart, and
      sanctifies the existence. And the being we love must not be mysterious and
      sphinx-like, but clear and limpid as a diamond; so that admiration and
      attachment may grow with knowledge.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Jealousy is a terrible thing. It resembles love, only it is precisely
      love&rsquo;s contrary. Instead of wishing for the welfare of the object loved,
      it desires the dependence of that object upon itself, and its own triumph.
      Love is the forgetfulness of self; jealousy is the most passionate form of
      egotism, the glorification of a despotic, exacting, and vain <i>ego</i>,
      which can neither forget nor subordinate itself. The contrast is perfect.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Austerity in women is sometimes the accompaniment of a rare power of
      loving. And when it is so their attachment is strong as death; their
      fidelity as resisting as the diamond; they are hungry for devotion and
      athirst for sacrifice. Their love is a piety, their tenderness a religion,
      and they triple the energy of love by giving to it the sanctity of duty.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      To the spectator over fifty, the world certainly presents a good deal that
      is new, but a great deal more which is only the old furbished up&mdash;mere
      plagiarism and modification, rather than amelioration. Almost everything
      is a copy of a copy, a reflection of a reflection, and the perfect being
      is as rare now as he ever was. Let us not complain of it; it is the reason
      why the world lasts. Humanity improves but slowly; that is why history
      goes on.
    </p>
    <p>
      Is not progress the goad of Siva? It excites the torch to burn itself
      away; it hastens the approach of death. Societies which change rapidly
      only reach their final catastrophe the sooner. Children who are too
      precocious never reach maturity. Progress should be the aroma of life, not
      its substance.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Man is a passion which brings a will into play, which works an
      intelligence&mdash;and thus the organs which seem to be in the service of
      intelligence, are in reality only the agents of passion. For all the
      commoner sorts of being, determinism is true: inward liberty exists only
      as an exception and as the result of self-conquest. And even he who has
      tasted liberty is only free intermittently and by moments. True liberty,
      then, is not a continuous state; it is not an indefeasible and invariable
      quality. We are free only so far as we are not dupes of ourselves, our
      pretexts, our instincts, our temperament. We are freed by energy and the
      critical spirit&mdash;that is to say, by detachment of soul, by
      self-government. So that we are enslaved, but susceptible of freedom; we
      are bound, but capable of shaking off our bonds. The soul is caged, but it
      has power to flutter within its cage.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Material results are but the tardy sign of invisible activities. The
      bullet has started long before the noise of the report has reached us. The
      decisive events of the world take place in the intellect.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Sorrow is the most tremendous of all realities in the sensible world, but
      the transfiguration of sorrow after the manner of Christ is a more
      beautiful solution of the problem than the extirpation of sorrow, after
      the method of Çakyamouni.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Life should be a giving birth to the soul, the development of a higher
      mode of reality. The animal must be humanized; flesh must be made spirit;
      physiological activity must be transmuted into intellect and conscience,
      into reason, justice, and generosity, as the torch is transmuted into life
      and warmth. The blind, greedy, selfish nature of man must put on beauty
      and nobleness. This heavenly alchemy is what justifies our presence on the
      earth: it is our mission and our glory.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      To renounce happiness and think only of duty, to put conscience in the
      place of feeling&mdash;this voluntary martyrdom has its nobility. The
      natural man in us flinches, but the better self submits. To hope for
      justice in the world is a sign of sickly sensibility; we must be able to
      do without it. True manliness consists in such independence. Let the world
      think what it will of us, it is its own affair. If it will not give us the
      place which is lawfully ours until after our death, or perhaps not at all,
      it is but acting within its right. It is our business to behave as though
      our country were grateful, as though the world were equitable, as though
      opinion were clear-sighted, as though life were just, as though men were
      good.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Death itself may become matter of consent, and therefore a moral act. The
      animal expires; man surrenders his soul to the author of the soul.
    </p>
    <p>
      [With the year 1881, beginning with the month of January, we enter upon
      the last period of Amiel&rsquo;s illness. Although he continued to attend to his
      professional duties, and never spoke of his forebodings, he felt himself
      mortally ill, as we shall see by the following extracts from the Journal.
      Amiel wrote up to the end, doing little else, however, toward the last
      than record the progress of his disease, and the proofs of interest and
      kindliness which he received. After weeks of suffering and pain a state of
      extreme weakness gradually gained upon him. His last lines are dated the
      29th of April; it was on the 11th of May that he succumbed, without a
      struggle, to the complicated disease from which he suffered.&mdash;S.]
    </p>
    <p>
      January 5, 1881.&mdash;I think I fear shame more than death. Tacitus said:
      <i>Omnia serviliter pro dominatione</i>. My tendency is just the contrary.
      Even when it is voluntary, dependence is a burden to me. I should blush to
      find myself determined by interest, submitting to constraint, or becoming
      the slave of any will whatever. To me vanity is slavery, self-love
      degrading, and utilitarianism meanness. I detest the ambition which makes
      you the liege man of something or some-one&mdash;I desire to be simply my
      own master.
    </p>
    <p>
      If I had health I should be the freest man I know. Although perhaps a
      little hardness of heart would be desirable to make me still more
      independent.
    </p>
    <p>
      Let me exaggerate nothing. My liberty is only negative. Nobody has any
      hold over me, but many things have become impossible to me, and if I were
      so foolish as to wish for them, the limits of my liberty would soon become
      apparent. Therefore I take care not to wish for them, and not to let my
      thoughts dwell on them. I only desire what I am able for, and in this way
      I run my head against no wall, I cease even to be conscious of the
      boundaries which enclose me. I take care to wish for rather less than is
      in my power, that I may not even be reminded of the obstacles in my way.
      Renunciation is the safeguard of dignity. Let us strip ourselves if we
      would not be stripped. He who has freely given up his life may look death
      in the face: what more can it take away from him? Do away with desire and
      practice charity&mdash;there you have the whole method of Buddha, the
      whole secret of the great Deliverance....
    </p>
    <p>
      It is snowing, and my chest is troublesome. So that I depend on nature and
      on God. But I do not depend on human caprice; this is the point to be
      insisted on. It is true that my chemist may make a blunder and poison me,
      my banker may reduce me to pauperism, just as an earthquake may destroy my
      house without hope of redress. Absolute independence, therefore, is a pure
      chimera. But I do possess relative independence&mdash;that of the stoic
      who withdraws into the fortress of his will, and shuts the gates behind
      him.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Jurons, excepté Dieu, de n&rsquo;avoir point de maître.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      This oath of old Geneva remains my motto still.
    </p>
    <p>
      January 10, 1881.&mdash;To let one&rsquo;s self be troubled by the ill-will, the
      ingratitude, the indifference, of others, is a weakness to which I am very
      much inclined. It is painful to me to be misunderstood, ill-judged. I am
      wanting in manly hardihood, and the heart in me is more vulnerable than it
      ought to be. It seems to me, however, that I have grown tougher in this
      respect than I used to be. The malignity of the world troubles me less
      than it did. Is it the result of philosophy, or an effect of age, or
      simply caused by the many proofs of respect and attachment that I have
      received? These proofs were just what were wanting to inspire me with some
      self-respect. Otherwise I should have so easily believed in my own nullity
      and in the insignificance of all my efforts. Success is necessary for the
      timid, praise is a moral stimulus, and admiration a strengthening elixir.
      We think we know ourselves, but as long as we are ignorant of our
      comparative value, our place in the social assessment, we do not know
      ourselves well enough. If we are to act with effect, we must count for
      something with our fellow-men; we must feel ourselves possessed of some
      weight and credit with them, so that our effort may be rightly
      proportioned to the resistance which has to be overcome. As long as we
      despise opinion we are without a standard by which to measure ourselves;
      we do not know our relative power. I have despised opinion too much, while
      yet I have been too sensitive to injustice. These two faults have cost me
      dear. I longed for kindness, sympathy, and equity, but my pride forbade me
      to ask for them, or to employ any address or calculation to obtain
      them.... I do not think I have been wrong altogether, for all through I
      have been in harmony with my best self, but my want of adaptability has
      worn me out, to no purpose. Now, indeed, I am at peace within, but my
      career is over, my strength is running out, and my life is near its end.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Il n&rsquo;est plus temps pour rien excepté pour mourir.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      This is why I can look at it all historically.
    </p>
    <p>
      January 23, 1881.&mdash;A tolerable night, but this morning the cough has
      been frightful. Beautiful weather, the windows ablaze with sunshine. With
      my feet on the fender I have just finished the newspaper.
    </p>
    <p>
      At this moment I feel well, and it seems strange to me that my doom should
      be so near. Life has no sense of kinship with death. This is why, no
      doubt, a sort of mechanical instinctive hope is forever springing up
      afresh in us, troubling our reason, and casting doubt on the verdict of
      science. All life is tenacious and persistent. It is like the parrot in
      the fable, who, at the very moment when its neck is being wrung, still
      repeats with its last breath:
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Cela, cela, ne sera rien.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      The intellect puts the matter at its worst, but the animal protests. It
      will not believe in the evil till it comes. Ought one to regret it?
      Probably not. It is nature&rsquo;s will that life should defend itself against
      death; hope is only the love of life; it is an organic impulse which
      religion has taken under its protection. Who knows? God may save us, may
      work a miracle. Besides, are we ever sure that there is no remedy?
      Uncertainty is the refuge of hope. We reckon the doubtful among the
      chances in our favor. Mortal frailty clings to every support. How be angry
      with it for so doing? Even with all possible aids it hardly ever escapes
      desolation and distress. The supreme solution is, and always will be, to
      see in necessity the fatherly will of God, and so to submit ourselves and
      bear our cross bravely, as an offering to the Arbiter of human destiny.
      The soldier does not dispute the order given him: he obeys and dies
      without murmuring. If he waited to understand the use of his sacrifice,
      where would his submission be?
    </p>
    <p>
      It occurred to me this morning how little we know of each other&rsquo;s physical
      troubles; even those nearest and dearest to us know nothing of our
      conversations with the King of Terrors. There are thoughts which brook no
      confidant: there are griefs which cannot be shared. Consideration for
      others even bids us conceal them. We dream alone, we suffer alone, we die
      alone, we inhabit the last resting-place alone. But there is nothing to
      prevent us from opening our solitude to God. And so what was an austere
      monologue becomes dialogue, reluctance becomes docility, renunciation
      passes into peace, and the sense of painful defeat is lost in the sense of
      recovered liberty.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Vouloir ce que Dieu veut est la seule science
  Qui nous met en repos.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      None of us can escape the play of contrary impulse; but as soon as the
      soul has once recognized the order of things and submitted itself thereto,
      then all is well.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Comme un sage mourant puissions nous dire en paix:
  J&rsquo;ai trop longtemps erré, cherché; je me trompais:
  Tout est bien, mon Dieu m&rsquo;enveloppe.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      January 28, 1881.&mdash;A terrible night. For three or four hours I
      struggled against suffocation and looked death in the face.... It is clear
      that what awaits me is suffocation&mdash;asphyxia. I shall die by choking.
    </p>
    <p>
      I should not have chosen such a death; but when there is no option, one
      must simply resign one&rsquo;s self, and at once.... Spinoza expired in the
      presence of the doctor whom he had sent for. I must familiarize myself
      with the idea of dying unexpectedly, some fine night, strangled by
      laryngitis. The last sigh of a patriarch surrounded by his kneeling family
      is more beautiful: my fate indeed lacks beauty, grandeur, poetry; but
      stoicism consists in renunciation. <i>Abstine et sustine</i>.
    </p>
    <p>
      I must remember besides that I have faithful friends; it is better not to
      torment them. The last journey is only made more painful by scenes and
      lamentations: one word is worth all others&mdash;&ldquo;Thy will, not mine, be
      done!&rdquo; Leibnitz was accompanied to the grave by his servant only. The
      loneliness of the deathbed and the tomb is not an evil. The great mystery
      cannot be shared. The dialogue between the soul and the King of Terrors
      needs no witnesses. It is the living who cling to the thought of last
      greetings. And, after all, no one knows exactly what is reserved for him.
      What will be will be. We have but to say, &ldquo;Amen.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      February 4, 1881.&mdash;It is a strange sensation that of laying one&rsquo;s
      self down to rest with the thought that perhaps one will never see the
      morrow. Yesterday I felt it strongly, and yet here I am. Humility is made
      easy by the sense of excessive frailty, but it cuts away all ambition.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Quittez le long espoir et les vastes pensées.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      A long piece of work seems absurd&mdash;one lives but from day to day.
    </p>
    <p>
      When a man can no longer look forward in imagination to five years, a
      year, a month, of free activity&mdash;when he is reduced to counting the
      hours, and to seeing in the coming night the threat of an unknown fate&mdash;it
      is plain that he must give up art, science, and politics, and that he must
      be content to hold converse with himself, the one possibility which is his
      till the end. Inward soliloquy is the only resource of the condemned man
      whose execution is delayed. He withdraws upon the fastnesses of
      conscience. His spiritual force no longer radiates outwardly; it is
      consumed in self-study. Action is cut off&mdash;only contemplation
      remains. He still writes to those who have claims upon him, but he bids
      farewell to the public, and retreats into himself. Like the hare, he comes
      back to die in his form, and this form is his consciousness, his intellect&mdash;the
      journal, too, which has been the companion of his inner life. As long as
      he can hold a pen, as long as he has a moment of solitude, this echo of
      himself still claims his meditation, still represents to him his converse
      with his God.
    </p>
    <p>
      In all this, however, there is nothing akin to self-examination: it is not
      an act of contrition, or a cry for help. It is simply an Amen of
      submission&mdash;&ldquo;My child, give me thy heart!&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Renunciation and acquiescence are less difficult to me than to others, for
      I desire nothing. I could only wish not to suffer, but Jesus on
      Gethesemane allowed himself to make the same prayer; let us add to it the
      words that he did: &ldquo;Nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done,&rdquo;&mdash;and
      wait.
    </p>
    <p>
      ... For many years past the immanent God has been more real to me than the
      transcendent God, and the religion of Jacob has been more alien to me than
      that of Kant, or even Spinoza. The whole Semitic dramaturgy has come to
      seem to me a work of the imagination. The apostolic documents have changed
      in value and meaning to my eyes. Belief and truth have become distinct to
      me with a growing distinctness. Religious psychology has become a simple
      phenomenon, and has lost its fixed and absolute value. The apologetics of
      Pascal, of Leibnitz, of Secrétan, are to me no more convincing than those
      of the Middle Ages, for they presuppose what is really in question&mdash;a
      revealed doctrine, a definite and unchangeable Christianity. It seems to
      me that what remains to me from all my studies is a new phenomenology of
      mind, an intuition of universal metamorphosis. All particular convictions,
      all definite principles, all clear-cut formulas and fixed ideas, are but
      prejudices, useful in practice, but still narrownesses of the mind. The
      absolute in detail is absurd and contradictory. All political, religious,
      aesthetic, or literary parties are protuberances, misgrowths of thought.
      Every special belief represents a stiffening and thickening of thought; a
      stiffening, however, which is necessary in its time and place. Our monad,
      in its thinking capacity, overleaps the boundaries of time and space and
      of its own historical surroundings; but in its individual capacity, and
      for purposes of action, it adapts itself to current illusions, and puts
      before itself a definite end. It is lawful to be <i>man</i>, but it is
      needful also to be <i>a</i> man, to be an individual. Our rôle is thus a
      double one. Only, the philosopher is specially authorized to develop the
      first rôle, which the vast majority of humankind neglects.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 7, 1881.&mdash;Beautiful sunshine to-day. But I have scarcely
      spring enough left in me to notice it. Admiration, joy, presuppose a
      little relief from pain. Whereas my neck is tired with the weight of my
      head, and my heart is wearied with the weight of life; this is not the
      aesthetic state.
    </p>
    <p>
      I have been thinking over different things which I might have written. But
      generally speaking we let what is most original and best in us be wasted.
      We reserve ourselves for a future which never comes. <i>Omnis mortar</i>.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 14, 1881.&mdash;Supposing that my weeks are numbered, what duties
      still remain to me to fulfill, that I may leave all in order? I must give
      every one his due; justice, prudence, kindness must be satisfied; the last
      memories must be sweet ones. Try to forget nothing useful, nor anybody who
      has a claim upon thee! February 15, 1881.&mdash;I have, very reluctantly,
      given up my lecture at the university, and sent for my doctor. On my
      chimney-piece are the flowers which &mdash;&mdash; has sent me. Letters
      from London, Paris, Lausanne, Neuchatel ... They seem to me like wreaths
      thrown into a grave.
    </p>
    <p>
      Mentally I say farewell to all the distant friends whom I shall never see
      again.
    </p>
    <p>
      February 18, 1881.&mdash;Misty weather. A fairly good night. Still, the
      emaciation goes on. That is to say, the vulture allows me some respite,
      but he still hovers over his prey. The possibility of resuming my official
      work seems like a dream to me.
    </p>
    <p>
      Although just now the sense of ghostly remoteness from life which I so
      often have is absent, I feel myself a prisoner for good, a hopeless
      invalid. This vague intermediate state, which is neither death nor life,
      has its sweetness, because if it implies renunciation, still it allows of
      thought. It is a reverie without pain, peaceful and meditative. Surrounded
      with affection and with books, I float down the stream of time, as once I
      glided over the Dutch canals, smoothly and noiselessly. It is as though I
      were once more on board the <i>Treckschute</i>. Scarcely can one hear even
      the soft ripple of the water furrowed by the barge, or the hoof of the
      towing horse trotting along the sandy path. A journey under these
      conditions has something fantastic in it. One is not sure whether one
      still exists, still belongs to earth. It is like the <i>manes</i>, the
      shadows, flitting through the twilight of the <i>inania regna</i>.
      Existence has become fluid. From the standpoint of complete personal
      renunciation I watch the passage of my impressions, my dreams, thoughts,
      and memories.... It is a mood of fixed contemplation akin to that which we
      attribute to the seraphim. It takes no interest in the individual self,
      but only in the specimen monad, the sample of the general history of mind.
      Everything is in everything, and the consciousness examines what it has
      before it. Nothing is either great or small. The mind adopts all modes,
      and everything is acceptable to it. In this state its relations with the
      body, with the outer world, and with other individuals, fade out of sight.
      <i>Selbst-bewusstsein</i> becomes once more impersonal <i>Bewusstsein</i>,
      and before personality can be reacquired, pain, duty, and will must be
      brought into action.
    </p>
    <p>
      Are these oscillations between the personal and the impersonal, between
      pantheism and theism, between Spinoza and Leibnitz, to be regretted? No,
      for it is the one state which makes us conscious of the other. And as man
      is capable of ranging the two domains, why should he mutilate himself?
    </p>
    <p>
      February 22, 1881.&mdash;The march of mind finds its typical expression in
      astronomy&mdash;no pause, but no hurry; orbits, cycles, energy, but at the
      same time harmony; movement and yet order; everything has its own weight
      and its relative weight, receives and gives forth light. Cannot this
      cosmic and divine become oars? Is the war of all against all, the preying
      of man upon man, a higher type of balanced action? I shrink form believing
      it. Some theorists imagine that the phase of selfish brutality is the last
      phase of all. They must be wrong. Justice will prevail, and justice is not
      selfishness. Independence of intellect, combined with goodness of heart,
      will be the agents of a result, which will be the compromise required.
    </p>
    <p>
      March 1, 1881.&mdash;I have just been glancing over the affairs of the
      world in the newspaper. What a Babel it is! But it is very pleasant to be
      able to make the tour of the planet and review the human race in an hour.
      It gives one a sense of ubiquity. A newspaper in the twentieth century
      will be composed of eight or ten daily bulletins&mdash;political,
      religious, scientific, literary, artistic, commercial, meteorological,
      military, economical, social, legal, and financial; and will be divided
      into two parts only&mdash;<i>Urbs</i> and <i>Orbis</i>. The need of
      totalizing, of simplifying, will bring about the general use of such
      graphic methods as permit of series and comparisons. We shall end by
      feeling the pulse of the race and the globe as easily as that of a sick
      man, and we shall count the palpitations of the universal life, just as we
      shall hear the grass growing, or the sunspots clashing, and catch the
      first stirrings of volcanic disturbances. Activity will become
      consciousness; the earth will see herself. Then will be the time for her
      to blush for her disorders, her hideousness, her misery, her crime and to
      throw herself at last with energy and perseverance into the pursuit of
      justice. When humanity has cut its wisdom-teeth, then perhaps it will have
      the grace to reform itself, and the will to attempt a systematic reduction
      of the share of the evil in the world. The <i>Weltgeist</i> will pass from
      the state of instinct to the moral state. War, hatred, selfishness, fraud,
      the right of the stronger, will be held to be old-world barbarisms, mere
      diseases of growth. The pretenses of modern civilization will be replaced
      by real virtues. Men will be brothers, peoples will be friends, races will
      sympathize one with another, and mankind will draw from love a principle
      of emulation, of invention, and of zeal, as powerful as any furnished by
      the vulgar stimulant of interest. This millennium&mdash;will it ever be?
      It is at least an act of piety to believe in it.
    </p>
    <p>
      March 14, 1881.&mdash;I have finished Mérimée&rsquo;s letters to Panizzi.
      Mérimée died of the disease which torments me&mdash;&ldquo;<i>Je tousse, et
      j&rsquo;étouffe</i>.&rdquo; Bronchitis and asthma, whence defective assimilation, and
      finally exhaustion. He, too, tried arsenic, wintering at Cannes,
      compressed air. All was useless. Suffocation and inanition carried off the
      author of &ldquo;Colomba.&rdquo; <i>Hic tua res agitur</i>. The gray, heavy sky is of
      the same color as my thoughts. And yet the irrevocable has its own
      sweetness and serenity. The fluctuations of illusion, the uncertainties of
      desire, the leaps and bounds of hope, give place to tranquil resignation.
      One feels as though one were already beyond the grave. It is this very
      week, too, I remember, that my corner of ground in the Oasis is to be
      bought. Everything draws toward the end. <i>Festinat ad eventum</i>.
    </p>
    <p>
      March 15, 1881.&mdash;The &ldquo;Journal&rdquo; is full of details of the horrible
      affair at Petersburg. How clear it is that such catastrophes as this, in
      which the innocent suffer, are the product of a long accumulation of
      iniquities. Historical justice is, generally speaking, tardy&mdash;so
      tardy that it becomes unjust. The Providential theory is really based on
      human solidarity. Louis XVI. pays for Louis XV., Alexander II. for
      Nicholas. We expiate the sins of our fathers, and our grandchildren will
      be punished for ours. A double injustice! cries the individual. And he is
      right if the individualist principle is true. But is it true? That is the
      point. It seems as though the individual part of each man&rsquo;s destiny were
      but one section of that destiny. Morally we are responsible for what we
      ourselves have willed, but socially, our happiness and unhappiness depend
      on causes outside our will. Religion answers&mdash;&ldquo;Mystery, obscurity,
      submission, faith. Do your duty; leave the rest to God.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      March 16, 1881.&mdash;A wretched night. A melancholy morning.... The two
      stand-bys of the doctor, digitalis and bromide, seem to have lost their
      power over me. Wearily and painfully I watch the tedious progress of my
      own decay. What efforts to keep one&rsquo;s self from dying! I am worn out with
      the struggle.
    </p>
    <p>
      Useless and incessant struggle is a humiliation to one&rsquo;s manhood. The lion
      finds the gnat the most intolerable of his foes. The natural man feels the
      same. But the spiritual man must learn the lesson of gentleness and
      long-suffering. The inevitable is the will of God. We might have preferred
      something else, but it is our business to accept the lot assigned us....
      One thing only is necessary&mdash;
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Garde en mon coeur la foi dans ta volonté sainte,
  Et de moi fais, ô Dieu, tout ce que tu voudras.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      <i>Later</i>.&mdash;One of my students has just brought me a sympathetic
      message from my class. My sister sends me a pot of azaleas, rich in
      flowers and buds;&mdash;&mdash;sends roses and violets: every one spoils
      me, which proves that I am ill.
    </p>
    <p>
      March 19, 1881.&mdash;Distaste&mdash;discouragement. My heart is growing
      cold. And yet what affectionate care, what tenderness, surrounds me!...
      But without health, what can one do with all the rest? What is the good of
      it all to me? What was the good of Job&rsquo;s trials? They ripened his
      patience; they exercised his submission.
    </p>
    <p>
      Come, let me forget myself, let me shake off this melancholy, this
      weariness. Let me think, not of all that is lost, but of all that I might
      still lose. I will reckon up my privileges; I will try to be worthy of my
      blessings.
    </p>
    <p>
      March 21, 1881.&mdash;This invalid life is too Epicurean. For five or six
      weeks now I have done nothing else but wait, nurse myself, and amuse
      myself, and how weary one gets of it! What I want is work. It is work
      which gives flavor to life. Mere existence without object and without
      effort is a poor thing. Idleness leads to languor, and languor to disgust.
      Besides, here is the spring again, the season of vague desires, of dull
      discomforts, of dim aspirations, of sighs without a cause. We dream
      wide-awake. We search darkly for we know not what; invoking the while
      something which has no name, unless it be happiness or death.
    </p>
    <p>
      March 28, 1881.&mdash;I cannot work; I find it difficult to exist. One may
      be glad to let one&rsquo;s friends spoil one for a few months; it is an
      experience which is good for us all; but afterward? How much better to
      make room for the living, the active, the productive.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Tircis, voici le temps de prendre sa retraite.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      Is it that I care so much to go on living? I think not. It is health that
      I long for&mdash;freedom from suffering.
    </p>
    <p>
      And this desire being vain, I can find no savor in anything else. Satiety.
      Lassitude. Renunciation. Abdication. &ldquo;In your patience possess ye your
      souls.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      April 10, 1881. (<i>Sunday</i>).&mdash;Visit to &mdash;&mdash;. She read
      over to me letters of 1844 to 1845&mdash;letters of mine. So much promise
      to end in so meager a result! What creatures we are! I shall end like the
      Rhine, lost among the sands, and the hour is close by when my thread of
      water will have disappeared.
    </p>
    <p>
      Afterward I had a little walk in the sunset. There was an effect of
      scattered rays and stormy clouds; a green haze envelops all the trees&mdash;
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Et tout renaît, et déjà l&rsquo;aubépine
  A vu l&rsquo;abeille accourir à ses fleurs,&rdquo;
 &mdash;but to me it all seems strange already.
</pre>
    <p>
      <i>Later</i>.&mdash;What dupes we are of our own desires!... Destiny has
      two ways of crushing us&mdash;by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling
      them. But he who only wills what God wills escapes both catastrophes. &ldquo;All
      things work together for his good.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      April 14, 1881.&mdash;Frightful night; the fourteenth running, in which I
      have been consumed by sleeplessness....
    </p>
    <p>
      April 15, 1881.&mdash;To-morrow is Good Friday, the festival of pain. I
      know what it is to spend days of anguish and nights of agony. Let me bear
      my cross humbly.... I have no more future. My duty is to satisfy the
      claims of the present, and to leave everything in order. Let me try to end
      well, seeing that to undertake and even to continue, are closed to me.
    </p>
    <p>
      April 19, 1881.&mdash;A terrible sense of oppression. My flesh and my
      heart fail me.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Que vivre est difficile, ô mon coeur fatigué!&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <div style="height: 6em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>







<pre>





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