AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

* * * * *

[Where no other name is mentioned, Geneva is to be understood as the

author’s place of residence.]

BERLIN, July 16. 1848.--There is but one thing needful--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--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.

BERLIN, July 20, 1848.--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’s life

or of a people’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.

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.

GENEVA, April 20, 1849.--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.

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!...

May 3, 1849.--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.

Put personal ambition away from you, and then you will find consolation

in living or in dying, whatever may happen to you.

May 27, 1849.--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--He

above all--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--this is duty.

June 3, 1849.--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--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!

October 1, 1849.--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.

I am astounded at the incredible amount of Judaism and formalism which

still exists nineteen centuries after the Redeemer’s proclamation,

“it is the letter which killeth”--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--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’s

translations in the _Lyra Germanica_.] I think, said, “the eye by which

I see God is the same eye by which He sees me.”

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 “ye are gods,” and

so would St. Paul, who tells us that we are of “the race of God.”

Our century wants a new theology--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.

* * * * *

Heroism is the brilliant triumph of the soul over the flesh--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.

* * * * *

Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive world

while at the same time detaching us from it.

* * * * *

December 30, 1850.--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: _Action is but

coarsened thought_; 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: [“What is rational is real; and what is real is rational;”] 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.

... 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’s sake. The author desires

to entertain as much as to teach, the thinker is also a _bel-esprit_,

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.

* * * * *

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.

Spite is anger which is afraid to show itself, it is an impotent fury

conscious of its impotence.

* * * * *

Nothing resembles pride so much as discouragement.

* * * * *

To repel one’s cross is to make it heavier.

* * * * *

In the conduct of life, habits count for more than maxims, because habit

is a living maxim, becomes flesh and instinct. To reform one’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.

* * * * *

February 17, 1851.--I have been reading, for six or seven hours without

stopping the _Pensées_ 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 _finesse_ 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, _on a

small scale_. 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.

February 20th.--I have almost finished these two volumes of _Pensées_

and the greater part of the _Correspondance_. 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’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 _clairvoyant_, 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.

February 27, 1851.--Read over the first book of _Emile_. 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, _hammering_ 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.

(_Same day._)--The _pensée_-writer is to the philosopher what the

_dilettante_ 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 _pensée_-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 _pensée_-writer. The _pensée_-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 _pensée_ 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 _pensées_; in

Germany, for ten such writers there have been twenty philosophers.

March 25, 1851.--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’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 _Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève_, of a university ceremonial

there in or about 1847, and of the effect produced on the student’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--Schelling, Alexander von Humboldt, Schlosser--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: “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.” 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, “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.”

April 6, 1851.--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.

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.

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 _Commandeur_. I

only act with regret, and almost by force.

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!

All that is necessary, providential, in short, _unimputable_, 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.

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.

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’s nature, even the best and most

spiritual? or in conquering it?

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’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.

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.

Alas! we must then re-climb a thousand times the peaks already scaled,

and reconquer the points of view already won, we must _fight the fight_!

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--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.

April 7, 1851.--Read a part of Ruge’s [Footnote: Arnold Ruge, born in

1803, died at Brighton in 1880, principal editor of the _Hallische_,

afterward the _Deutsche Jahrbücher_ (1838-43), in which Strauss, Bruno

Bauer, and Louis Feuerbach wrote. He was a member of the parliament of

Frankfort.] volume “_Die Academie_” (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

_philosophist_ 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.

_The cardinal question is that of sin._ 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 _amor

intellectualis_ 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. _To love is

virtually to know; to know is not virtually to love_; 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 _ego_ 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.

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--and by the

outside I understand also the intelligence relatively to the will--is an

error and danger. The negative part of the humanist’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 _becomes_ man only by

the intelligence, but he _is_ man only by the heart. Knowledge, love,

power--there is the complete life.

June 16, 1851.--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’s mere kindly

curiosity seems to bring with it a joy in living and in seeing others

live.

August 15, 1851.--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.

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.

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.

September 2, 1851.--Read the work of Tocqueville (“_De la Democratie

en Amérique_.”) 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.

September 6th.--Tocqueville’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 _mediocrity_ 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.

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.

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.

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 “I,” 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.

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.

September 7, 1851. (_Aix_).--It is ten o’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.

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,

“courage!” and you promise us rest.

November 9, 1851. (Sunday).--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 _cry_

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.

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 _human_, 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. “People of God, awake! Sow

in tears, that ye may reap in triumph!” 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.

November 18, 1851.--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: “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, 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.

December 2, 1851.--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--thought or feeling,

wakening in the depths of your being--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.

* * * * *

Kindness is the principle of tact, and respect for others the first

condition of _savoir-vivre_.

* * * * *

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--it is the terrible symptom which precedes death. To live, is

to achieve a perpetual triumph; it is to assert one’s self against

destruction, against sickness, against the annulling and dispersion of

one’s physical and moral being. It is to will without ceasing, or rather

to refresh one’s will day by day.

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

February 1, 1852. (Sunday).--Passed the afternoon in reading the

_Monologues_ 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.

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 _Ich_ 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 _Monologues_.

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 _ego_, 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’s lines:

“Where are the great, whom thou would’st wish to praise thee?

Where are the pure, whom thou would’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.”]

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 _Monologues_ 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 _ego_ 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 _Monologues_ is

neither a conquest by man nor a grace from heaven; it is rather a stroke

of good fortune.

February 2d.--Still the _Monologues_. 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 _man_ we too say to ourselves, let us also be men.

March 3, 1852.--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. “Be ye simple as the dove and prudent as the serpent,” are the

words of Jesus. Be careful of your reputation, not through vanity, but

that you may not harm your life’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.

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--all of them

helpful toward finding one’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’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.

April 2, 1852.--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. “Bathe, O disciple, thy thirsty soul in the dew of the dawn!”

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 “sad serenity of the azure vault,” 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.

April 26, 1852.--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’s work and its detail. Read a part of Krause’s book “_Urbild der

Menschheit_” [Footnote: Christian Frederick Krause, died 1832, Hegel’s

younger contemporary, and the author of a system which he called

_panentheism_--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.

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 _ennui_, 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 _vie de province_; 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’s dreams is heaven, and this suffering is

the eternal homesickness, the thirst for happiness.

“_In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister_,” says Goethe. _Mâle

résignation_, this also is the motto of those who are masters of the

art of life; “manly,” that is to say, courageous, active, resolute,

persevering, “resignation,” 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.

April 28, 1852. (Lancy.) [Footnote: A village near Geneva.]--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.

In these moments of _tête-à-tête_ 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....

Already I am falling back into the objective life of thought. It

delivers me from--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, _naïveté_, 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....

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.

_Afternoon_--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’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!

April 29 (Lancy).--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 _chorchorus_

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 _flâneurs_ 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 _Mon oncle_. [Footnote:

The allusions in this passage are to Töpffer’s best known books--“La

Presbytère” and “La Bibliothèque de mon Oncle,” 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’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.

_Reverie is the Sunday of thought_; 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 _flânerie_ 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.

May 2, 1852. (Sunday) Lancy.--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’s “L’Allemagne.”]

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.

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.

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: “It were better for a man not to have been born than to

offend one of these little ones.”

May 6, 1852.--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.

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 _rôle_ in the one sense or

the other. At bottom, woman’s mission is essentially conservative,

but she is a conservative without discrimination. On the one side,

she maintains God’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.

May 14, 1852. (Lancy.)--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.

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 _manner_ 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 _ourselves_ 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.

* * * * *

... 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.

June 17, 1852.--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 _in itself_, 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 _versus_ 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.

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....

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.

August 12, 1852. (Lancy.)--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.

September 27, 1852. (Lancy.)--To-day I complete my thirty-first year....

The most beautiful poem there is, is life--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 _ego_ 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--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.

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. “Be of good cheer,” saith a heavenly voice, “I

have overcome the world.”

Lord, lend thy strength to those who are weak in the flesh, but willing

in the spirit!

October 31, 1852. (Lancy.)--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.

November 6, 1852.--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.

November 8, 1852.--Responsibility is my invisible nightmare. To suffer

through one’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’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--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 _rôle_, 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 _Doppelgängerei_,

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’s wings and going back again into the vulgar shell of

one’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.

How, then, is one to recover courage enough for action? By striving to

restore in one’s self something of that unconsciousness, spontaneity,

instinct, which reconciles us to earth and makes man useful and

relatively happy.

By believing more practically in the providence which pardons and allows

of reparation.

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.

By extracting a richer experience out of our losses and lessons.

November 9, 1852.--A few pages of the _Chrestomathie Française_ and

Vinet’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, _entraînement_, and therefore

popularity. The individualism which is his title to glory is also the

cause of his weakness.

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’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 _think_ most, is

still lacking in. Less _reflexivity_ 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!

November 10, 1852.--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?

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 _narthex_ 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.

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.

November 12, 1852.--St. Martin’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’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--that chaste

and vigorous world in which will plays a greater part than sensation and

thought has more power than instinct--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.

December 26, 1852. (Sunday.)--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--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.

* * * * *

An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth

which it contains.

Look twice, if what you want is a just conception; look once, if what

you want is a sense of beauty.

* * * * *

A man only understands what is akin to something already existing in

himself.

* * * * *

Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of

experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.

* * * * *

The wealth of each mind is proportioned to the number and to the

precision of its categories and its points of view.

* * * * *

To feel himself freer than his neighbor is the reward of the critic.

Modesty (_pudeur_) is always the sign and safeguard of a mystery. It is

explained by its contrary--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 _exchanged_.

To surrender what is most profound and mysterious in one’s being and

personality at any price less than that of absolute reciprocity is

profanation.

January 6, 1853.--Self-government with tenderness--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’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.

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’s will

is: master your own.

February 5, 1853 (seven o’clock in the morning).--I am always astonished

at the difference between one’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--that science

to which we give nowadays the insufficient name of physics of the globe.

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.

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.

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.

February 10, 1853.--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.

It is a striking fact, not unlike the changing of swords in “Hamlet,”

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’ 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.

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--truth; but never as to the

road, the method, and the criterion.

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. _Discrimen ingeniorum_.

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’s strength, this is what makes the

well-being of intelligence, the Olympic festival of thought. _Habere,

non haberi_. 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.

March 20, 1853.--I sat up alone; two or three times I paid a visit to

the children’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.

April 27, 1853.--This evening I read the treatise by Nicole so much

admired by Mme. de Sévigné: “_Des moyens de conserver la paix avec les

hommes._” 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.

May 11, 1853.--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.

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 _ego_ 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--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--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.

May 14, 1853.--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--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--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 “Dialogues” 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.

July 26, 1853.--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--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 _power_ 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--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.

But if that is the fact, the fact might be different. I understand

myself, but I do not approve myself.

August 1, 1853.--I have just finished Pelletan’s book, “Profession de

foi du dix-neuvième Siècle.” It is a fine book Only one thing is wanting

to it--the idea of evil. It is a kind of supplement to the theory of

Condorcet--indefinite perfectibility, man essentially good, _life_,

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.

Catholic thought cannot conceive of personality as supreme and conscious

of itself. Its boldness and its weakness come from one and the same

cause--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.

October 11, 1853.--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--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.