Nothing can lessen the dignity and value of humanity

Was einmal war, in allem Glanz und Schein,

Es regt sich dort; denn es will ewig sein.

Und ihr vertheilt es, allgewaltige Mächte,

Zum Zelt des Tages, zum Gewölb’ der Nächte.

so long as the religion of love, of unselfishness and devotion endures;

and none can destroy the altars of this faith for us so long as we feel

ourselves still capable of love.

April 15,1867--(_Seven_ A. M.).--Rain storms in the night--the weather

is showing its April caprice. From the window one sees a gray and

melancholy sky, and roofs glistering with rain. The spring is at its

work. Yes, and the implacable flight of time is driving us toward the

grave. Well--each has his turn!

“Allez, allez, ô jeunes filles,

Cueillir des bleuets dans les blés!”

I am overpowered with melancholy, languor, lassitude. A longing for the

last great sleep has taken possession of me, combated, however, by a

thirst for sacrifice--sacrifice heroic and long-sustained. Are not both

simply ways of escape from one’s self? “Sleep, or self-surrender, that I

may die to self!”--such is the cry of the heart. Poor heart!

April 17, 1867.--Awake, thou that sleepest, and rise from the dead.

What needs perpetually refreshing and renewing in me is my store of

courage. By nature I am so easily disgusted with life, I fall a prey so

readily to despair and pessimism.

“The happy man, as this century is able to produce him,” according to

Madame ----, is a _Weltmüde_, one who keeps a brave face before the

world, and distracts himself as best he can from dwelling upon the

thought which is hidden at his heart--a thought which has in it the

sadness of death--the thought of the irreparable. The outward peace of

such a man is but despair well masked; his gayety is the carelessness of

a heart which has lost all its illusions, and has learned to acquiesce

in an indefinite putting off of happiness. His wisdom is really

acclimatization to sacrifice, his gentleness should be taken to mean

privation patiently borne rather than resignation. In a word, he submits

to an existence in which he feels no joy, and he cannot hide from

himself that all the alleviations with which it is strewn cannot satisfy

the soul. The thirst for the infinite is never appeased. God is wanting.

To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed, pardoned, and

sustained by a supreme power, to feel himself in the right road, at the

point where God would have him be--in order with God and the universe.

This faith gives strength and calm. I have not got it. All that is,

seems to me arbitrary and fortuitous. It may as well not be, as be.

Nothing in my own circumstances seems to me providential. All appears to

me left to my own responsibility, and it is this thought which disgusts

me with the government of my own life. I longed to give myself up wholly

to some great love, some noble end; I would willingly have lived and

died for the ideal--that is to say, for a holy cause. But once the

impossibility of this made clear to me, I have never since taken a

serious interest in anything, and have, as it were, but amused myself

with a destiny of which I was no longer the dupe.

Sybarite and dreamer, will you go on like this to the end--forever

tossed backward and forward between duty and happiness, incapable of

choice, of action? Is not life the test of our moral force, and all

these inward waverings, are they not temptations of the soul?

September 6, 1867, _Weissenstein_. [Footnote: Weissenstein is a high

point in the Jura, above Soleure.] (_Ten o’clock in the morning_).--A

marvelous view of blinding and bewildering beauty. Above a milky sea

of cloud, flooded with morning light, the rolling waves of which are

beating up against the base of the wooded steeps of the Weissenstein,

the vast circle of the Alps soars to a sublime height. The eastern side

of the horizon is drowned in the splendors of the rising mists; but from

the Tödi westward, the whole chain floats pure and clear between the

milky plain and the pale blue sky. The giant assembly is sitting in

council above the valleys and the lakes still submerged in vapor. The

Clariden, the Spannörter, the Titlis, then the Bernese _colossi_ from

the Wetterhorn to the Diablerets, then the peaks of Vaud, Valais, and

Fribourg, and beyond these high chains the two kings of the Alps, Mont

Blanc, of a pale pink, and the bluish point of Monte Rosa, peering out

through a cleft in the Doldenhorn--such is the composition of the great

snowy amphitheatre. The outline of the horizon takes all possible forms:

needles, ridges, battlements, pyramids, obelisks, teeth, fangs, pincers,

horns, cupolas; the mountain profile sinks, rises again, twists and

sharpens itself in a thousand ways, but always so as to maintain an

angular and serrated line. Only the inferior and secondary groups of

mountains show any large curves or sweeping undulations of form. The

Alps are more than an upheaval; they are a tearing and gashing of

the earth’s surface. Their granite peaks bite into the sky instead

of caressing it. The Jura, on the contrary, spreads its broad back

complacently under the blue dome of air.

_Eleven o’clock_.--The sea of vapor has risen and attacked the

mountains, which for a long time overlooked it like so many huge reefs.

For awhile it surged in vain over the lower slopes of the Alps. Then

rolling back upon itself, it made a more successful onslaught upon the

Jura, and now we are enveloped in its moving waves. The milky sea

has become one vast cloud, which has swallowed up the plain and the

mountains, observatory and observer. Within this cloud one may hear the

sheep-bells ringing, and see the sunlight darting hither and thither.

Strange and fanciful sight!

The Hanoverian pianist has gone; the family from Colmar has gone; a

young girl and her brother have arrived. The girl is very pretty, and

particularly dainty and elegant in all her ways; she seems to touch

things only with the tips of her fingers; one compares her to an ermine,

a gazelle. But at the same time she has no interests, does not know

how to admire, and thinks of herself more than of anything else. This

perhaps is a drawback inseparable from a beauty and a figure which

attract all eyes. She is, besides, a townswoman to the core, and feels

herself out of place in this great nature, which probably seems to her

barbarous and ill-bred. At any rate she does not let it interfere with

her in any way, and parades herself on the mountains with her little

bonnet and her scarcely perceptible sunshade, as though she were on the

boulevard. She belongs to that class of tourists so amusingly drawn by

Töpffer. Character: _naïve_ conceit. Country: France. Standard of life:

fashion. Some cleverness but no sense of reality, no understanding of

nature, no consciousness of the manifold diversities of the world and

of the right of life to be what it is, and to follow its own way and not

ours.

This ridiculous element in her is connected with the same national

prejudice which holds France to be the center point of the world, and

leads Frenchmen to neglect geography and languages. The ordinary French

townsman is really deliciously stupid in spite of all his natural

cleverness, for he understands nothing but himself. His pole, his axis,

his center, his all is Paris--or even less--Parisian manners, the

taste of the day, fashion. Thanks to this organized fetishism, we have

millions of copies of one single original pattern; a whole people moving

together like bobbins in the same machine, or the legs of a single

_corps d’armée_. The result is wonderful but wearisome; wonderful

in point of material strength, wearisome psychologically. A hundred

thousand sheep are not more instructive than one sheep, but they furnish

a hundred thousand times more wool, meat, and manure. This is all, you

may say, that the shepherd--that is, the master--requires. Very

well, but one can only maintain breeding-farms or monarchies on these

principles. For a republic you must have men: it cannot get on without

individualities.

_Noon_.--An exquisite effect. A great herd of cattle are running across

the meadows under my window, which is just illuminated by a furtive ray

of sunshine. The picture has a ghostly suddenness and brilliancy;

it pierces the mists which close upon it, like the slide of a magic

lantern.

What a pity I must leave this place now that everything is so bright!

* * * * *

The calm sea says more to the thoughtful soul than the same sea in storm

and tumult. But we need the understanding of eternal things and the

sentiment of the infinite to be able to feel this. The divine state _par

excellence_ is that of silence and repose, because all speech and all

action are in themselves limited and fugitive. Napoleon with his arms

crossed over his breast is more expressive than the furious Hercules

beating the air with his athlete’s fists. People of passionate

temperament never understand this. They are only sensitive to the energy

of succession; they know nothing of the energy of condensation. They can

only be impressed by acts and effects, by noise and effort. They have no

instinct of contemplation, no sense of the pure cause, the fixed source

of all movement, the principle of all effects, the center of all light,

which does not need to spend itself in order to be sure of its own

wealth, nor to throw itself into violent motion to be certain of its own

power. The art of passion is sure to please, but it is not the highest

art; it is true, indeed, that under the rule of democracy, the serener

and calmer forms of art become more and more difficult; the turbulent

herd no longer knows the gods.

* * * * *

Minds accustomed to analysis never allow objections more than a

half-value, because they appreciate the variable and relative elements

which enter in.

* * * * *

A well-governed mind learns in time to find pleasure in nothing but the

true and the just.

January 10, 1868. (_Eleven_ P. M.).--We have had a philosophical meeting

at the house of Edouard Claparède. [Footnote: Edouard Claparède, a

Genevese naturalist, born 1832, died 1871.] The question on the order

of the day was the nature of sensation. Claparède pronounced for the

absolute subjectivity of all experience--in other words, for pure

idealism--which is amusing, from a naturalist. According to him the

_ego_ alone exists, and the universe is but a projection of the _ego_,

a phantasmagoria which we ourselves create without suspecting it,

believing all the time that we are lookers-on. It is our noümenon which

objectifies itself as phenomenon. The _ego_, according to him, is a

radiating force which, modified without knowing what it is that modifies

it, imagines it, by virtue of the principle of causality--that is to

say, produces the great illusion of the objective world in order so

to explain itself. Our waking life, therefore, is but a more connected

dream. The self is an unknown which gives birth to an infinite number

of unknowns, by a fatality of its nature. Science is summed up in the

consciousness that nothing exists but consciousness. In other words, the

intelligent issues from the unintelligible in order to return to it, or

rather the ego explains itself by the hypothesis of the _non-ego_,

while in reality it is but a dream, dreaming itself. We might say with

Scarron:

“Et je vis l’ombre d’un esprit

Qui traçait l’ombre d’um système

Avec l’ombre de l’ombre même.”

This abolition of nature by natural science is logical, and it was, in

fact, Schelling’s starting-point. From the standpoint of physiology,

nature is but a necessary illusion, a constitutional hallucination. We

only escape from this bewitchment by the moral activity of the

_ego_, which feels itself a cause and a free cause, and which by its

responsibility breaks the spell and issues from the enchanted circle of

Maïa.

Maïa! Is she indeed the true goddess? Hindoo wisdom long ago regarded

the world as the dream of Brahma. Must we hold with Fichte that it is

the individual dream of each individual _ego_? Every fool would then be

a cosmogonic poet producing the firework of the universe under the dome

of the infinite. But why then give ourselves such gratuitous trouble to

learn? In our dreams, at least, nightmare excepted, we endow ourselves

with complete ubiquity, liberty and omniscience. Are we then less

ingenious and inventive awake than asleep?

January 25, 1868.--It is when the outer man begins to decay that it

becomes vitally important to us to believe in immortality, and to feel

with the apostle that the inner man is renewed from day to day. But for

those who doubt it and have no hope of it? For them the remainder of

life can only be the compulsory dismemberment of their small empire, the

gradual dismantling of their being by inexorable destiny. How hard it is

to bear--this long-drawn death, of which the stages are melancholy

and the end inevitable! It is easy to see why it was that stoicism

maintained the right of suicide. What is my real faith? Has the

universal, or at any rate the very general and common doubt of science,

invaded me in my turn? I have defended the cause of the immortality of

the soul against those who questioned it, and yet when I have reduced

them to silence, I have scarcely known whether at bottom I was not after

all on their side. I try to do without hope; but it is possible that I

have no longer the strength for it, and that, like other men, I must

be sustained and consoled by a belief, by the belief in pardon and

immortality--that is to say, by religious belief of the Christian type.

Reason and thought grow tired, like muscles and nerves. They must

have their sleep, and this sleep is the relapse into the tradition of

childhood, into the common hope. It takes so much effort to maintain

one’s self in an exceptional point of view, that one falls back into

prejudice by pure exhaustion, just as the man who stands indefinitely

always ends by sinking to the ground and reassuming the horizontal

position.

What is to become of us when everything leaves us--health, joy,

affections, the freshness of sensation, memory, capacity for work--when

the sun seems to us to have lost its warmth, and life is stripped of all

its charm? What is to become of us without hope? Must we either harden

or forget? There is but one answer--keep close to duty. Never mind

the future, if only you have peace of conscience, if you feel yourself

reconciled, and in harmony with the order of things. Be what you ought

to be; the rest is God’s affair. It is for him to know what is best, to

take care of his own glory, to ensure the happiness of what depends

on him, whether by another life or by annihilation. And supposing that

there were no good and holy God, nothing but universal being, the law of

the all, an ideal without hypostasis or reality, duty would still be the

key of the enigma, the pole-star of a wandering humanity.

“Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra.”

January 26, 1868.--Blessed be childhood, which brings down something of

heaven into the midst of our rough earthliness. These eighty thousand

daily births, of which statistics tell us, represent as it were an

effusion of innocence and freshness, struggling not only against the

death of the race, but against human corruption, and the universal

gangrene of sin. All the good and wholesome feeling which is intertwined

with childhood and the cradle is one of the secrets of the providential

government of the world. Suppress this life-giving dew, and human

society would be scorched and devastated by selfish passion. Supposing

that humanity had been composed of a thousand millions of immortal

beings, whose number could neither increase nor diminish, where should

we be, and what should we be! A thousand times more learned, no

doubt, but a thousand times more evil. There would have been a vast

accumulation of science, but all the virtues engendered by suffering

and devotion--that is to say, by the family and society--would have no

existence. And for this there would be no compensation.

Blessed be childhood for the good that it does, and for the good which

it brings about carelessly and unconsciously by simply making us love

it and letting itself be loved. What little of paradise we see still

on earth is due to its presence among us. Without fatherhood, without

motherhood, I think that love itself would not be enough to prevent men

from devouring each other--men, that is to say, such as human

passions have made them. The angels have no need of birth and death as

foundations for their life, because their life is heavenly.

February 16, 1868.--I have been finishing About’s “Mainfroy (Les

Mariages de Province).” What subtlety, what cleverness, what _verve_,

what _aplomb_! About is a master of epithet, of quick, light-winged

satire. For all his cavalier freedom of manner, his work is conceived at

bottom in a spirit of the subtlest irony, and his detachment of mind is

so great that he is able to make sport of everything, to mock at others

and himself, while all the time amusing himself extremely with his own

ideas and inventions. This is indeed the characteristic mark, the common

signature, so to speak, of _esprit_ like his.

Irrepressible mischief, indefatigable elasticity, a power of luminous

mockery, delight in the perpetual discharge of innumerable arrows

from an inexhaustible quiver, the unquenchable laughter of some

little earth-born demon, perpetual gayety, and a radiant force of

epigram--there are all these in the true humorist. _Stulti sunt

innumerabiles_, said Erasmus, the patron of all these dainty

mockers. Folly, conceit, foppery, silliness, affectation, hypocrisy,

attitudinizing and pedantry of all shades, and in all forms, everything

that poses, prances, bridles, struts, bedizens, and plumes itself,

everything that takes itself seriously and tries to impose itself on

mankind--all this is the natural prey of the satirist, so many targets

ready for his arrows, so many victims offered to his attack. And we all

know how rich the world is in prey of this kind! An alderman’s feast of

folly is served up to him in perpetuity; the spectacle of society offers

him an endless _noce de Gamache_. [Footnote: _Noce de Gamache_--“repas

très somptueux.”--Littré. The allusion, of course, is to Don Quixote,

Part II. chap. xx.--“Donde se cuentan las bodas de Bamacho el rico, con

el suceso de Basilio el pobre.”] With what glee he raids through his

domains, and what signs of destruction and massacre mark the path of the

sportsman! His hand is infallible like his glance. The spirit of

sarcasm lives and thrives in the midst of universal wreck; its balls

are enchanted and itself invulnerable, and it braves retaliations

and reprisals because itself is a mere flash, a bodiless and magical

nothing.

Clever men will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness; every

authority rouses their ridicule, every superstition amuses them, every

convention moves them to contradiction. Only force finds favor in

their eyes, and they have no toleration for anything that is not purely

natural and spontaneous. And yet ten clever men are not worth one man

of talent, nor ten men of talent worth one man of genius. And in the

individual, feeling is more than cleverness, reason is worth as much as

feeling, and conscience has it over reason. If, then, the clever man is

not _mockable_, he may at least be neither loved, nor considered, nor

esteemed. He may make himself feared, it is true, and force others to

respect his independence; but this negative advantage, which is

the result of a negative superiority, brings no happiness with it.

Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing.

March 8, 1868.--Madame----kept me to have tea with three young friends

of hers--three sisters, I think. The two youngest are extremely pretty,

the dark one as pretty as the blonde. Their fresh faces, radiant with

the bloom of youth, were a perpetual delight to the eye. This electric

force of beauty has a beneficent effect upon the man of letters; it acts

as a real restorative. Sensitive, impressionable, absorbent as I am,

the neighborhood of health, of beauty, of intelligence and of goodness,

exercises a powerful influence upon my whole being; and in the same way

I am troubled and affected just as easily by the presence near me of

troubled lives or diseased souls. Madame ---- said of me that I must be

“superlatively feminine” in all my perceptions. This ready sympathy

and sensitiveness is the reason of it. If I had but desired it ever so

little, I should have had the magical clairvoyance of the somnambulist,

and could have reproduced in myself a number of strange phenomena. I

know it, but I have always been on my guard against it, whether from

indifference or from prudence. When I think of the intuitions of every

kind which have come to me since my youth, it seems to me that I have

lived a multitude of lives. Every characteristic individuality shapes

itself ideally in me, or rather molds me for the moment into its own

image; and I have only to turn my attention upon myself at such a time

to be able to understand a new mode of being, a new phase of human

nature. In this way I have been, turn by turn, mathematician, musician,

_savant_, monk, child, or mother. In these states of universal sympathy

I have even seemed to myself sometimes to enter into the condition of

the animal or the plant, and even of an individual animal, of a given

plant. This faculty of ascending and descending metamorphosis, this

power of simplifying or of adding to one’s individuality, has sometimes

astounded my friends, even the most subtle of them. It has to do

no doubt with the extreme facility which I have for impersonal and

objective thought, and this again accounts for the difficulty which I

feel in realizing my own individuality, in being simply one man having

his proper number and ticket. To withdraw within my own individual

limits has always seemed to me a strange, arbitrary, and conventional

process. I seem to myself to be a mere conjuror’s apparatus, an

instrument of vision and perception, a person without personality, a

subject without any determined individuality--an instance, to speak

technically, of pure “determinability” and “formability,” and therefore

I can only resign myself with difficulty to play the purely arbitrary

part of a private citizen, inscribed upon the roll of a particular town

or a particular country. In action I feel myself out of place; my true

_milieu_ is contemplation. Pure virtuality and perfect equilibrium--in

these I am most at home. There I feel myself free, disinterested, and

sovereign. Is it a call or a temptation?

It represents perhaps the oscillation between the two geniuses, the

Greek and the Roman, the eastern and the western, the ancient and the

Christian, or the struggle between the two ideals, that of liberty and

that of holiness. Liberty raises us to the gods; holiness prostrates us

on the ground. Action limits us; whereas in the state of contemplation

we are endlessly expansive. Will localizes us; thought universalizes us.

My soul wavers between half a dozen antagonistic general conceptions,

because it is responsive to all the great instincts of human nature, and

its aspiration is to the absolute, which is only to be reached through

a succession of contraries. It has taken me a great deal of time to

understand myself, and I frequently find myself beginning over again the

study of the oft-solved problem, so difficult is it for us to maintain

any fixed point within us. I love everything, and detest one thing

only--the hopeless imprisonment of my being within a single arbitrary

form, even were it chosen by myself. Liberty for the inner man is then

the strongest of my passions--perhaps my only passion. Is such a passion

lawful? It has been my habit to think so, but intermittently, by fits

and starts. I am not perfectly sure of it.

March 17, 1868.--Women wish to be loved without a why or a wherefore;

not because they are pretty, or good, or well bred, or graceful, or

intelligent, but because they are themselves. All analysis seems to them

to imply a loss of consideration, a subordination of their personality

to something which dominates and measures it. They will have none of

it; and their instinct is just. As soon as we can give a reason for a

feeling we are no longer under the spell of it; we appreciate, we

weigh, we are free, at least in principle. Love must always remain a

fascination, a witchery, if the empire of woman is to endure. Once

the mystery gone, the power goes with it. Love must always seem to us

indivisible, insoluble, superior to all analysis, if it is to preserve

that appearance of infinity, of something supernatural and miraculous,

which makes its chief beauty. The majority of beings despise what they

understand, and bow only before the inexplicable. The feminine triumph

_par excellence_ is to convict of obscurity that virile intelligence

which makes so much pretense to enlightenment. And when a woman inspires

love, it is then especially that she enjoys this proud triumph. I

admit that her exultation has its grounds. Still, it seems to me that

love--true and profound love--should be a source of light and calm, a

religion and a revelation, in which there is no place left for the lower

victories of vanity. Great souls care only for what is great, and to the

spirit which hovers in the sight of the Infinite, any sort of artifice

seems a disgraceful puerility.

March 19, 1868.--What we call little things are merely the causes of

great things; they are the beginning, the embryo, and it is the point

of departure which, generally speaking, decides the whole future of an

existence. One single black speck may be the beginning of a gangrene, of

a storm, of a revolution. From one insignificant misunderstanding hatred

and separation may finally issue. An enormous avalanche begins by the

displacement of one atom, and the conflagration of a town by the fall of

a match. Almost everything comes from almost nothing, one might think.

It is only the first crystallization which is the affair of mind; the

ultimate aggregation is the affair of mass, of attraction, of acquired

momentum, of mechanical acceleration. History, like nature, illustrates

for us the application of the law of inertia and agglomeration which is

put lightly in the proverb, “Nothing succeeds like success.” Find the

right point at starting; strike straight, begin well; everything depends

on it. Or more simply still, provide yourself with good luck--for

accident plays a vast part in human affairs. Those who have succeeded

most in this world (Napoleon or Bismarck) confess it; calculation is not

without its uses, but chance makes mock of calculation, and the result

of a planned combination is in no wise proportional to its merit. From

the supernatural point of view people say: “This chance, as you call

it, is, in reality, the action of providence. Man may give himself what

trouble he will--God leads him all the same.” Only, unfortunately,

this supposed intervention as often as not ends in the defeat of

zeal, virtue, and devotion, and the success of crime, stupidity, and

selfishness. Poor, sorely-tried Faith! She has but one way out of the

difficulty--the word Mystery! It is in the origins of things that the

great secret of destiny lies hidden, although the breathless sequence of

after events has often many surprises for us too. So that at first sight

history seems to us accident and confusion; looked at for the second

time, it seems to us logical and necessary; looked at for the third

time, it appears to us a mixture of necessity and liberty; on the fourth

examination we scarcely know what to think of it, for if force is the

source of right, and chance the origin of force, we come back to our

first explanation, only with a heavier heart than when we began.

Is Democritus right after all? Is chance the foundation of everything,

all laws being but the imaginations of our reason, which, itself born

of accident, has a certain power of self-deception and of inventing laws

which it believes to be real and objective, just as a man who dreams

of a meal thinks that he is eating, while in reality there is neither

table, nor food, nor guest nor nourishment? Everything goes on as if

there were order and reason and logic in the world, while in reality

everything is fortuitous, accidental, and apparent. The universe is but

the kaleidoscope which turns within the mind of the so-called thinking

being, who is himself a curiosity without a cause, an accident conscious

of the great accident around him, and who amuses himself with it so

long as the phenomenon of his vision lasts. Science is a lucid madness

occupied in tabulating its own necessary hallucinations. The philosopher

laughs, for he alone escapes being duped, while he sees other men the

victims of persistent illusion. He is like some mischievous spectator of

a ball who has cleverly taken all the strings from the violins, and yet

sees musicians and dancers moving and pirouetting before him as though

the music were still going on. Such an experience would delight him

as proving that the universal St. Vitus’ dance is also nothing but an

aberration of the inner consciousness, and that the philosopher is in

the right of it as against the general credulity. Is it not even enough

simply to shut one’s ears in a ballroom, to believe one’s self in a

madhouse?

The multitude of religions on the earth must have very much the same

effect upon the man who has killed the religious idea in himself. But

it is a dangerous attempt, this repudiation of the common law of the

race--this claim to be in the right, as against all the world.

It is not often that the philosophic scoffers forget themselves

for others. Why should they? Self-devotion is a serious thing, and

seriousness would be inconsistent with their rôle of mockery. To be

unselfish we must love; to love we must believe in the reality of what

we love; we must know how to suffer, how to forget ourselves, how to

yield ourselves up--in a word, how to be serious. A spirit of incessant

mockery means absolute isolation; it is the sign of a thoroughgoing

egotism. If we wish to do good to men we must pity and not despise them.

We must learn to say of them, not “What fools!” but “What unfortunates!”

The pessimist or the nihilist seems to me less cold and icy than the

mocking atheist. He reminds me of the somber words of “Ahasvérus:”

“Vous qui manquez de charité,

Tremblez à mon supplice étrange:

Ce n’est point sa divinité,

C’est l’humanité que Dieu venge!”

[Footnote: The quotation is from Quinet’s “Ahasvérus” (first published

1833), that strange _Welt-gedicht_, which the author himself described

as “l’histoire du monde, de Dieu dans le monde, et enfin du doute dans

le monde,” and which, with Faust, probably suggested the unfinished

but in many ways brilliant performance of the young Spaniard,

Espronceda--_El Diablo Mundo_.]

It is better to be lost than to be saved all alone; and it is a wrong to

one’s kind to wish to be wise without making others share our wisdom. It

is, besides, an illusion to suppose that such a privilege is possible,

when everything proves the solidarity of individuals, and when no

one can think at all except by means of the general store of thought,

accumulated and refined by centuries of cultivation and experience.

Absolute individualism is an absurdity. A man may be isolated in his

own particular and temporary _milieu_, but every one of our thoughts or

feelings finds, has found, and will find, its echo in humanity. Such an

echo is immense and far-resounding in the case of those representative

men who have been adopted by great fractions of humanity as guides,

revealers, and reformers; but it exists for everybody. Every sincere

utterance of the soul, every testimony faithfully borne to a personal

conviction, is of use to some one and some thing, even when you know it

not, and when your mouth is stopped by violence, or the noose tightens

round your neck. A word spoken to some one preserves an indestructible

influence, just as any movement whatever may be metamorphosed, but not

undone. Here, then, is a reason for not mocking, for not being silent,

for affirming, for acting. We must have faith in truth; we must seek the

true and spread it abroad; we must love men and serve them.

April 9, 1868.--I have been spending three hours over Lotze’s big volume

(“Geschichte der Aesthetikin Deutschland”). It begins attractively,

but the attraction wanes, and by the end I was very tired of it. Why?

Because the noise of a mill-wheel sends one to sleep, and these pages

without paragraphs, these interminable chapters, and this incessant,

dialectical clatter, affect me as though I were listening to a

word-mill. I end by yawning like any simple non-philosophical mortal

in the face of all this heaviness and pedantry. Erudition, and even

thought, are not everything. An occasional touch of esprit, a little

sharpness of phrase, a little vivacity, imagination, and grace, would

spoil neither. Do these pedantic books leave a single image or formula,

a single new or striking fact behind them in the memory, when one puts

them down? No; nothing but confusion and fatigue. Oh for clearness,

terseness, brevity! Diderot, Voltaire, and even Galiani!

A short article by Sainte-Beuve, Scherer, Renan, Victor Cherbuliez,

gives one more pleasure, and makes one think and reflect more, than a

thousand of these heavy German pages, stuffed to the brim, and showing

rather the work itself than its results. The Germans gather fuel for the

pile: it is the French who kindle it. For heaven’s sake, spare me your

lucubrations; give me facts or ideas. Keep your vats, your must, your

dregs, in the background. What I ask is wine--wine which will sparkle in

the glass, and stimulate intelligence instead of weighing it down.

April 11, 1868. (_Mornex sur Salève_).--I left town in a great storm of

wind, which was raising clouds of dust along the suburban roads, and two

hours later I found myself safely installed among the mountains, just

like last year. I think of staying a week here.... The sounds of the

village are wafted to my open window, barkings of distant dogs, voices

of women at the fountain, the songs of birds in the lower orchards. The

green carpet of the plain is dappled by passing shadows thrown upon it

by the clouds; the landscape has the charm of delicate tint and a sort

of languid grace. Already I am full of a sense of well-being, I am

tasting the joys of that contemplative state in which the soul, issuing

from itself, becomes as it were the soul of a country or a landscape,

and feels living within it a multitude of lives. Here is no more

resistance, negation, blame; everything is affirmative; I feel myself in

harmony with nature and with surroundings, of which I seem to myself the

expression. The heart opens to the immensity of things. This is what

I love! _Nam mihires, non me rebus submittere conor_. April 12, 1868.

(_Easter Day_), _Mornex Eight_ A. M.--The day has opened solemnly and

religiously. There is a tinkling of bells from the valley: even the

fields seem to be breathing forth a canticle of praise. Humanity must

have a worship, and, all things considered, is not the Christian worship

the best among those which have existed on a large scale? The religion

of sin, of repentance, and reconciliation--the religion of the new birth

and of eternal life--is not a religion to be ashamed of. In spite of all

the aberrations of fanaticism, all the superstitions of formalism, all

the ugly superstructures of hypocrisy, all the fantastic puerilities

of theology, the gospel has modified the world and consoled mankind.

Christian humanity is not much better than pagan humanity, but it would

be much worse without a religion, and without this religion. Every

religion proposes an ideal and a model; the Christian ideal is sublime,

and its model of a divine beauty. We may hold aloof from the churches,

and yet bow ourselves before Jesus. We may be suspicious of the clergy,

and refuse to have anything to do with catechisms, and yet love the

Holy and the Just, who came to save and not to curse. Jesus will always

supply us with the best criticism of Christianity, and when Christianity

has passed away the religion of Jesus will in all probability survive.

After Jesus as God we shall come back to faith in the God of Jesus.

_Five o’clock_ P. M.--I have been for a long walk through Cézargues,

Eseri, and the Yves woods, returning by the Pont du Loup. The weather

was cold and gray. A great popular merrymaking of some sort, with

its multitude of blouses, and its drums and fifes, has been going on

riotously for an hour under my window. The crowd has sung a number of

songs, drinking songs, ballads, romances, but all more or less heavy and

ugly. The muse has never touched our country people, and the Swiss race

is not graceful even in its gayety. A bear in high spirits--this is what

one thinks of. The poetry it produces, too, is desperately vulgar and

commonplace. Why? In the first place, because, in spite of the pretenses

of our democratic philosophies, the classes whose backs are bent with

manual labor are aesthetically inferior to the others. In the next

place, because our old rustic peasant poetry is dead, and the peasant,

when he tries to share the music or the poetry of the cultivated

classes, only succeeds in caricaturing it, and not in copying it.

Democracy, by laying it down that there is but one class for all men,

has in fact done a wrong to everything that is not first-rate. As we can

no longer without offense judge men according to a certain recognized

order, we can only compare them to the best that exists, and then

they naturally seem to us more mediocre, more ugly, more deformed than

before. If the passion for equality potentially raises the average, it

_really_ degrades nineteen-twentieths of individuals below their former

place. There is a progress in the domain of law and a falling back in

the domain of art. And meanwhile the artists see multiplying before them

their _bête-noire_, the _bourgeois_, the Philistine, the presumptuous

ignoramus, the quack who plays at science, and the feather-brain who

thinks himself the equal of the intelligent.

“Commonness will prevail,” as De Candolle said in speaking of

the graminaceous plants. The era of equality means the triumph of

mediocrity. It is disappointing, but inevitable; for it is one of time’s

revenges. Humanity, after having organized itself on the basis of the

dissimilarity of individuals, is now organizing itself on the basis of

their similarity, and the one exclusive principle is about as true

as the other. Art no doubt will lose, but justice will gain. Is not

universal leveling-down the law of nature, and when all has been leveled

will not all have been destroyed? So that the world is striving with all

its force for the destruction of what it has itself brought forth.

Life is the blind pursuit of its own negation; as has been said of the

wicked, nature also works for her own disappointment, she labors at what

she hates, she weaves her own shroud, and piles up the stones of her own

tomb. God may well forgive us, for “we know not what to do.”

Just as the sum of force is always identical in the material universe,

and presents a spectacle not of diminution nor of augmentation but

simply of constant metamorphosis, so it is not impossible that the sum

of good is in reality always the same, and that therefore all progress

on one side is compensated inversely on another side. If this were so we

ought never to say that period or a people is absolutely and as a whole

superior to another time or another people, but only that there is

superiority in certain points. The great difference between man and man

would, on these principles, consist in the art of transforming vitality

into spirituality, and latent power into useful energy. The same

difference would hold good between nation and nation, so that the object

of the simultaneous or successive competition of mankind in history

would be the extraction of the maximum of humanity from a given amount

of animality. Education, morals, and politics would be only variations

of the same art, the art of living--that is to say, of disengaging the

pure form and subtlest essence of our individual being.

April 26, 1868. (_Sunday, Mid-day_).--A gloomy morning. On all sides a

depressing outlook, and within, disgust with self.

_Ten_ P.M.--Visits and a walk. I have spent the evening alone. Many

things to-day have taught me lessons of wisdom. I have seen the

hawthorns covering themselves with blossom, and the whole valley

springing up afresh under the breath of the spring. I have been the

spectator of faults of conduct on the part of old men who will not grow

old, and whose heart is in rebellion against the natural law. I have

watched the working of marriage in its frivolous and commonplace forms,

and listened to trivial preaching. I have been a witness of griefs

without hope, of loneliness that claimed one’s pity. I have listened to

pleasantries on the subject of madness, and to the merry songs of the

birds. And everything has had the same message for me: “Place yourself

once more in harmony with the universal law; accept the will of God;

make a religious use of life; work while it is yet day; be at once

serious and cheerful; know how to repeat with the apostle, ‘I have

learned in whatsoever state I am therewith to be content.’”

August 26, 1868.--After all the storms of feeling within and the organic

disturbances without, which during these latter months have pinned me so

closely to my own individual existence, shall I ever be able to

reascend into the region of pure intelligence, to enter again upon the

disinterested and impersonal life, to recover my old indifference toward

subjective miseries, and regain a purely scientific and contemplative

state of mind? Shall I ever succeed in forgetting all the needs which

bind me to earth and to humanity? Shall I ever become pure spirit? Alas!

I cannot persuade myself to believe it possible for an instant. I

see infirmity and weakness close upon me, I feel I cannot do without

affection, and I know that I have no ambition, and that my faculties are

declining. I remember that I am forty-seven years old, and that all my

brood of youthful hopes has flown away. So that there is no deceiving

myself as to the fate which awaits me: increasing loneliness,

mortification of spirit, long-continued regret, melancholy neither to be

consoled nor confessed, a mournful old age, a slow decay, a death in the

desert!

Terrible dilemma! Whatever is still possible to me has lost its savor,

while all that I could still desire escapes me, and will always escape

me. Every impulse ends in weariness and disappointment. Discouragement,

depression, weakness, apathy; there is the dismal series which must be

forever begun and re-begun, while we are still rolling up the Sisyphean

rock of life. Is it not simpler and shorter to plunge head-foremost into

the gulf?

No, rebel as we may, there is but one solution--to submit to the general

order, to accept, to resign ourselves, and to do still what we can. It

is our self-will, our aspirations, our dreams, that must be sacrificed.

We must give up the hope of happiness once for all! Immolation of the

self--death to self--this is the only suicide which is either useful

or permitted. In my present mood of indifference and disinterestedness,

there is some secret ill-humor, some wounded pride, a little rancor;

there is selfishness in short, since a premature claim for rest is

implied in it. Absolute disinterestedness is only reached in that

perfect humility which tramples the self under foot for the glory of

God.

I have no more strength left, I wish for nothing; but that is not what

is wanted. I must wish what God wishes; I must pass from indifference

to sacrifice, and from sacrifice to self-devotion. The cup which I would

fain put away from me is the misery of living, the shame of existing and

suffering as a common creature who has missed his vocation; it is the

bitter and increasing humiliation of declining power, of growing old

under the weight of one’s own disapproval, and the disappointment of

one’s friends! “Wilt thou be healed?” was the text of last Sunday’s

sermon. “Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will

give you rest.” “And if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our

heart.”

August 27, 1868.--To-day I took up the “Penseroso” [Footnote: “II

Penseroso,” poésies-maximes par H. F. Amiel: Genève, 1858. This little

book, which contains one hundred and thirty-three maxims, several

of which are quoted in the _Journal Intime_, is prefaced by a motto

translated from Shelley--“Ce n’est pas la science qui nous manque, à

nous modernes; nous l’avons surabondamment.... Mais ce que nous avons

absorbé nous absorbe.... Ce qui nous manque c’est la poésie de la vie.”]

again. I have often violated its maxims and forgotten its lessons.

Still, this volume is a true son of my soul, and breathes the true

spirit of the inner life. Whenever I wish to revive my consciousness of

my own tradition, it is pleasant to me to read over this little gnomic

collection which has had such scant justice done to it, and which, were

it another’s, I should often quote. I like to feel that in it I have

attained to that relative truth which may be defined as consistency

with self, the harmony of appearance with reality, of thought with

expression--in other words, sincerity, ingenuousness, inwardness. It is

personal experience in the strictest sense of the word.

September 21, 1868. (_Villars_).--A lovely autumn effect. Everything was

veiled in gloom this morning, and a gray mist of rain floated between us

and the whole circle of mountains. Now the strip of blue sky which made

its appearance at first behind the distant peaks has grown larger, has

mounted to the zenith, and the dome of heaven, swept almost clear of

cloud, sends streaming down upon us the pale rays of a convalescent sun.

The day now promises kindly, and all is well that ends well.

Thus after a season of tears a sober and softened joy may return to us.

Say to yourself that you are entering upon the autumn of your life; that

the graces of spring and the splendors of summer are irrevocably gone,

but that autumn too has its beauties. The autumn weather is often

darkened by rain, cloud, and mist, but the air is still soft, and

the sun still delights the eyes, and touches the yellowing leaves

caressingly; it is the time for fruit, for harvest, for the vintage, the

moment for making provision for the winter. Here the herds of milch-cows

have already come down to the level of the _châlet_, and next week they

will be lower than we are. This living barometer is a warning to us that

the time has come to say farewell to the mountains. There is nothing to

gain, and everything to lose, by despising the example of nature, and

making arbitrary rules of life for one’s self. Our liberty, wisely

understood, is but a voluntary obedience to the universal laws of life.

My life has reached its month of September. May I recognize it in time,

and suit thought and action to the fact!

November 13, 1868.--I am reading part of two books by Charles Secrétan

[Footnote: Charles Secrétan, a Lausanne professor, the friend of

Vinet, born 1819. He published “Leçons sur la Philosophie de Leibnitz,”

“Philosophie de la Liberté,” “La Raison et le Christianisme,” etc.]

“Recherches sur la Méthode,” 1857; “Précis élémentaire de Philosophie,”

1868. The philosophy of Secrétan is the philosophy of Christianity,

considered as the one true religion. Subordination of nature to

intelligence, of intelligence to will, and of will to dogmatic

faith--such is its general framework. Unfortunately there are no signs

of critical, or comparative, or historical study in it, and as an

apologetic--in which satire is curiously mingled with glorification of

the religion of love--it leaves upon one an impression of _parti

pris_. A philosophy of religion, apart from the comparative science of

religions, and apart also from a disinterested and general philosophy

of history, must always be more or less arbitrary and factitious. It

is only pseudo-scientific, this reduction of human life to three

spheres--industry, law, and religion. The author seems to me to possess

a vigorous and profound mind, rather than a free mind. Not only is he

dogmatic, but he dogmatizes in favor of a given religion, to which his

whole allegiance is pledged. Besides, Christianity being an X which each

church defines in its own way, the author takes the same liberty, and

defines the X in his way; so that he is at once too free and not free

enough; too free in respect to historical Christianity, not free enough

in respect to Christianity as a particular church. He does not satisfy

the believing Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed Churchman, or Catholic;

and he does not satisfy the freethinker. This Schellingian type

of speculation, which consists in logically deducing a particular

religion--that is to say, in making philosophy the servant of Christian

theology--is a legacy from the Middle Ages.

After belief comes judgment; but a believer is not a judge. A fish lives

in the ocean, but it cannot see all around it; it cannot take a view

of the whole; therefore it cannot judge what the ocean is. In order to

understand Christianity we must put it in its historical place, in

its proper framework; we must regard it as a part of the religious

development of humanity, and so judge it, not from a Christian point of

view, but from a human point of view, _sine ira nec studio_.

December 16, 1868.--I am in the most painful state of anxiety as to my

poor kind friend, Charles Heim.... Since the 30th of November I have had

no letter from the dear invalid, who then said his last farewell to

me. How long these two weeks have seemed to me--and how keenly I have

realized that strong craving which many feel for the last words, the

last looks, of those they love! Such words and looks are a kind of

testament. They have a solemn and sacred character which is not merely

an effect of our imagination. For that which is on the brink of death

already participates to some extent in eternity. A dying man seems to

speak to us from beyond the tomb; what he says has the effect upon us

of a sentence, an oracle, an injunction; we look upon him as one endowed

with second sight. Serious and solemn words come naturally to the man

who feels life escaping him, and the grave opening before him. The

depths of his nature are then revealed; the divine within him need no

longer hide itself. Oh, do not let us wait to be just or pitiful or

demonstrative toward those we love until they or we are struck down by

illness or threatened with death! Life is short and we have never too

much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark

journey with us. Oh, be swift to love, make haste to be kind!

December 26, 1868.--My dear friend died this morning at Hyères. A

beautiful soul has returned to heaven. So he has ceased to suffer! Is he

happy now?

* * * * *

If men are always more or less deceived on the subject of women, it is

because they forget that they and women do not speak altogether the same

language, and that words have not the same weight or the same meaning

for them, especially in questions of feeling. Whether from shyness or

precaution or artifice, a woman never speaks out her whole thought, and

moreover what she herself knows of it is but a part of what it really

is. Complete frankness seems to be impossible to her, and complete

self-knowledge seems to be forbidden her. If she is a sphinx to us, it

is because she is a riddle of doubtful meaning even to herself. She

has no need of perfidy, for she is mystery itself. A woman is something

fugitive, irrational, indeterminable, illogical, and contradictory.

A great deal of forbearance ought to be shown her, and a good deal

of prudence exercised with regard to her, for she may bring about

innumerable evils without knowing It. Capable of all kinds of devotion,

and of all kinds of treason, “_monstre incompréhensible_,” raised to the

second power, she is at once the delight and the terror of man.

* * * * *

The more a man loves, the more he suffers. The sum of possible grief for

each soul is in proportion to its degree of perfection.

* * * * *

He who is too much afraid of being duped has lost the power of being

magnanimous.

* * * * *

Doubt of the reality of love ends by making us doubt everything. The

final result of all deceptions and disappointments is atheism, which

may not always yield up its name and secret, but which lurks, a masked

specter, within the depths of thought, as the last supreme explainer.

“Man is what his love is,” and follows the fortunes of his love.

* * * * *

The beautiful souls of the world have an art of saintly alchemy,

by which bitterness is converted into kindness, the gall of human

experience into gentleness, ingratitude into benefits, insults into

pardon. And the transformation ought to become so easy and habitual that

the lookers-on may think it spontaneous, and nobody give us credit for

it.

January 27, 1869.--What, then, is the service rendered to the world by

Christianity? The proclamation of “good news.” And what is this “good

news?” The pardon of sin. The God of holiness loving the world and

reconciling it to himself by Jesus, in order to establish the kingdom of

God, the city of souls, the life of heaven upon earth--here you have

the whole of it; but in this is a revolution. “Love ye one another, as

I have loved you;” “Be ye one with me, as I am one with the Father:” for

this is life eternal, here is perfection, salvation, joy. Faith in the

fatherly love of God, who punishes and pardons for our good, and

who desires not the death of the sinner, but his conversion and his

life--here is the motive power of the redeemed.

What we call Christianity is a vast ocean, into which flow a number of

spiritual currents of distant and various origin; certain religions,

that is to say, of Asia and of Europe, the great ideas of Greek

wisdom, and especially those of Platonism. Neither its doctrine nor

its morality, as they have been historically developed, are new or

spontaneous. What is essential and original in it is the practical

demonstration that the human and the divine nature may co-exist, may

become fused into one sublime flame; that holiness and pity, justice

and mercy, may meet together and become one, in man and in God. What is

specific in Christianity is Jesus--the religious consciousness of Jesus.

The sacred sense of his absolute union with God through perfect love and

self-surrender, this profound, invincible, and tranquil faith of his,

has become a religion; the faith of Jesus has become the faith of

millions and millions of men. From this torch has sprung a vast

conflagration. And such has been the brilliancy and the radiance both

of revealer and revelation, that the astonished world has forgotten its

justice in its admiration, and has referred to one single benefactor the

whole of those benefits which are its heritage from the past.

The conversion of ecclesiastical and confessional Christianity into

historical Christianity is the work of biblical science. The conversion

of historical Christianity into philosophical Christianity is an attempt

which is to some extent an illusion, since faith cannot be entirely

resolved into science. The transference, however, of Christianity from

the region of history to the region of psychology is the great craving

of our time. What we are trying to arrive at is the _eternal_ gospel.

But before we can reach it, the comparative history and philosophy of

religions must assign to Christianity its true place, and must judge it.

The religion, too, which Jesus professed must be disentangled from the

religion which has taken Jesus for its object. And when at last we are

able to point out the state of consciousness which is the primitive

cell, the principle of the eternal gospel, we shall have reached our

goal, for in it is the _punctum saliens_ of pure religion.

Perhaps the extraordinary will take the place of the supernatural,

and the great geniuses of the world will come to be regarded as the

messengers of God in history, as the providential revealers through whom

the spirit of God works upon the human mass. What is perishing is

not the admirable and the adorable; it is simply the arbitrary, the

accidental, the miraculous. Just as the poor illuminations of a village

_fête_, or the tapers of a procession, are put out by the great marvel

of the sun, so the small local miracles, with their meanness and

doubtfulness, will sink into insignificance beside the law of the world

of spirits, the incomparable spectacle of human history, led by that

all-powerful Dramaturgus whom we call God. _Utinam!_

March 1, 1869.--Impartiality and objectivity are as rare as justice, of

which they are but two special forms. Self-interest is an inexhaustible

source of convenient illusions. The number of beings who wish to see

truly is extraordinarily small. What governs men is the fear of

truth, unless truth is useful to them, which is as much as to say that

self-interest is the principle of the common philosophy or that truth

is made for us but not we for truth. As this fact is humiliating, the

majority of people will neither recognize nor admit it. And thus a

prejudice of self-love protects all the prejudices of the understanding,

which are themselves the result of a stratagem of the _ego_. Humanity

has always slain or persecuted those who have disturbed this selfish

repose of hers. She only improves in spite of herself. The only progress

which she desires is an increase of enjoyments. All advances in justice,

in morality, in holiness, have been imposed upon or forced from her by

some noble violence. Sacrifice, which is the passion of great souls, has

never been the law of societies. It is too often by employing one vice

against another--for example, vanity against cupidity, greed against

idleness--that the great agitators have broken through routine. In a

word, the human world is almost entirely directed by the law of nature,

and the law of the spirit, which is the leaven of its coarse paste, has

but rarely succeeded in raising it into generous expansion.

From the point of view of the ideal, humanity is _triste_ and ugly. But

if we compare it with its probable origins, we see that the human race

has not altogether wasted its time. Hence there are three possible views

of history: the view of the pessimist, who starts from the ideal; the

view of the optimist, who compares the past with the present; and the

view of the hero-worshiper, who sees that all progress whatever has cost

oceans of blood and tears.

European hypocrisy veils its face before the voluntary suicide of those

Indian fanatics who throw themselves under the wheels of their goddess’

triumphal car. And yet these sacrifices are but the symbol of what goes

on in Europe as elsewhere, of that offering of their life which is made

by the martyrs of all great causes. We may even say that the fierce and

sanguinary goddess is humanity itself, which is only spurred to progress

by remorse, and repents only when the measure of its crimes runs over.

The fanatics who sacrifice themselves are an eternal protest against

the universal selfishness. We have only overthrown those idols which are

tangible and visible, but perpetual sacrifice still exists everywhere,

and everywhere the _élite_ of each generation suffers for the salvation

of the multitude. It is the austere, bitter, and mysterious law of

solidarity. Perdition and redemption in and through each other is the

destiny of men.

March 18, 1869 (_Thursday_).--Whenever I come back from a walk outside

the town I am disgusted and repelled by this cell of mine. Out of doors,

sunshine, birds, spring, beauty, and life; in here, ugliness, piles of

paper, melancholy, and death. And yet my walk was one of the saddest

possible. I wandered along the Rhone and the Arve, and all the memories

of the past, all the disappointments of the present and all the

anxieties of the future laid siege to my heart like a whirlwind of

phantoms. I took account of my faults, and they ranged themselves in

battle against me. The vulture of regret gnawed at my heart, and the

sense of the irreparable choked me like the iron collar of the pillory.

It seemed to me that I had failed in the task of life, and that now life

was failing me. Ah! how terrible spring is to the lonely! All the needs

which had been lulled to sleep start into life again, all the sorrows

which had disappeared are reborn, and the old man which had been gagged

and conquered rises once more and makes his groans heard. It is as

though all the old wounds opened and bewailed themselves afresh. Just

when one had ceased to think, when one had succeeded in deadening

feeling by work or by amusement, all of a sudden the heart, solitary

captive that it is, sends a cry from its prison depths, a cry which

shakes to its foundations the whole surrounding edifice.

Even supposing that one had freed one’s self from all other fatalities,

there is still one yoke left from which it is impossible to escape--that

of Time. I have succeeded in avoiding all other servitudes, but I had

reckoned without the last--the servitude of age. Age comes, and its

weight is equal to that of all other oppressions taken together. Man,

under his mortal aspect, is but a species of ephemera.

As I looked at the banks of the Rhone, which have seen the river flowing

past them some ten or twenty thousand years, or at the trees forming

the avenue of the cemetery, which, for two centuries, have been the

witnesses of so many funeral processions; as I recognized the walls,

the dykes, the paths, which saw me playing as a child, and watched other

children running over that grassy plain of Plain Palais which bore my

own childish steps--I had the sharpest sense of the emptiness of life

and the flight of things. I felt the shadow of the upas tree darkening

over me. I gazed into the great implacable abyss in which are swallowed

up all those phantoms which call themselves living beings. I saw that

the living are but apparitions hovering for a moment over the earth,

made out of the ashes of the dead, and swiftly re-absorbed by eternal

night, as the will-o’-the-wisp sinks into the marsh. The nothingness

of our joys, the emptiness of our existence, and the futility of our

ambitions, filled me with a quiet disgust. From regret to disenchantment

I floated on to Buddhism, to universal weariness. Ah, the hope of a

blessed immortality would be better worth having!

With what different eyes one looks at life at ten, at twenty, at

thirty, at sixty! Those who live alone are specially conscious of this

psychological metamorphosis. Another thing, too, astonishes them; it

is the universal conspiracy which exists for hiding the sadness of

the world, for making men forget suffering, sickness, and death, for

smothering the wails and sobs which issue from every house, for painting

and beautifying the hideous face of reality. Is it out of tenderness for

childhood and youth, or is it simply from fear, that we are thus careful

to veil the sinister truth? Or is it from a sense of equity? and does

life contain as much good as evil--perhaps more? However it may be, men

feed themselves rather upon illusion than upon truth. Each one unwinds

his own special reel of hope, and as soon as he has come to the end of

it he sits him down to die, and lets his sons and his grandsons begin

the same experience over again. We all pursue happiness, and happiness

escapes the pursuit of all.

The only _viaticum_ which can help us in the journey of life is

that furnished by a great duty and some serious affections. And even

affections die, or at least their objects are mortal; a friend, a wife,

a child, a country, a church, may precede us in the tomb; duty alone

lasts as long as we.

This maxim exorcises the spirits of revolt, of anger, discouragement,

vengeance, indignation, and ambition, which rise one after another to

tempt and trouble the heart, swelling with the sap of the spring. O all

ye saints of the East, of antiquity, of Christianity, phalanx of heroes!

Ye too drank deep of weariness and agony of soul, but ye triumphed over

both. Ye who have come forth victors from the strife, shelter us under

your palms, fortify us by your example!

April 6, 1869.--Magnificent weather. The Alps are dazzling under their

silver haze. Sensations of all kinds have been crowding upon me; the

delights of a walk under the rising sun, the charms of a wonderful view,

longing for travel, and thirst for joy, hunger for work, for emotion,

for life, dreams of happiness and of love. A passionate wish to live,

to feel, to express, stirred the depths of my heart. It was a sudden

re-awakening of youth, a flash of poetry, a renewing of the soul, a

fresh growth of the wings of desire--I was overpowered by a host of

conquering, vagabond, adventurous aspirations. I forgot my age, my

obligations, my duties, my vexations, and youth leaped within me as

though life were beginning again. It was as though something explosive

had caught fire, and one’s soul were scattered to the four winds;

in such a mood one would fain devour the whole world, experience

everything, see everything. Faust’s ambition enters into one, universal

desire--a horror of one’s own prison cell. One throws off one’s hair

shirt, and one would fain gather the whole of nature into one’s arms and

heart. O ye passions, a ray of sunshine is enough to rekindle you all!

The cold black mountain is a volcano once more, and melts its snowy

crown with one single gust of flaming breath. It is the spring which

brings about these sudden and improbable resurrections, the spring

which, sending a thrill and tumult of life through all that lives,

is the parent of impetuous desires, of overpowering inclinations, of

unforeseen and inextinguishable outbursts of passion. It breaks

through the rigid bark of the trees, and rends the mask on the face of

asceticism; it makes the monk tremble in the shadow of his convent, the

maiden behind the curtains of her room, the child sitting on his school

bench, the old man bowed under his rheumatism.

“O Hymen, Hymenae!”

April 24, 1869.--Is Nemesis indeed more real than Providence, the

jealous God more true than the good God? grief more certain than joy?

darkness more secure of victory than light? Is it pessimism or optimism

which is nearest the truth, and which--Leibnitz or Schopenhauer--has

best understood the universe? Is it the healthy man or the sick man who

sees best to the bottom of things? which is in the right?

Ah! the problem of grief and evil is and will be always the greatest

enigma of being, only second to the existence of being itself. The

common faith of humanity has assumed the victory of good over evil. But

if good consists not in the result of victory, but in victory itself,

then good implies an incessant and infinite contest, interminable

struggle, and a success forever threatened. And if this is life, is not

Buddha right in regarding life as synonymous with evil since it means

perpetual restlessness and endless war? Repose according to the Buddhist

is only to be found in annihilation. The art of self-annihilation, of

escaping the world’s vast machinery of suffering, and the misery of

renewed existence--the art of reaching Nirvâna, is to him the supreme

art, the only means of deliverance. The Christian says to God: Deliver

us from evil. The Buddhist adds: And to that end deliver us from finite

existence, give us back to nothingness! The first believes that when he

is enfranchised from the body he will enter upon eternal happiness; the

second believes that individuality is the obstacle to all repose, and he

longs for the dissolution of the soul itself. The dread of the first is

the paradise of the second.

One thing only is necessary--the committal of the soul to God. Look that

thou thyself art in order, and leave to God the task of unraveling the

skein of the world and of destiny. What do annihilation or immortality

matter? What is to be, will be. And what will be, will be for the best.

Faith in good--perhaps the individual wants nothing more for his passage

through life. Only he must have taken sides with Socrates, Plato,

Aristotle, and Zeno, against materialism, against the religion of

accident and pessimism. Perhaps also he must make up his mind

against the Buddhist nihilism, because a man’s system of conduct is

diametrically opposite according as he labors to increase his life or

to lessen it, according as he aims at cultivating his faculties or at

systematically deadening them.

To employ one’s individual efforts for the increase of good in the

world--this modest ideal is enough for us. To help forward the victory

of good has been the common aim of saints and sages. _Socii Dei sumus_

was the word of Seneca, who had it from Cleanthus.

April 30, 1869.--I have just finished Vacherot’s [Footnote: Etienne

Vacherot, a French philosophical writer, who owed his first successes in

life to the friendship of Cousin, and was later brought very much into

notice by his controversy with the Abbé Gratry, by the prosecution

brought against him in consequence of his book, “La Démocratie” (1859),

and by his rejection at the hands of the Academy of Moral and Political

Sciences in 1865, for the same kind of reasons which had brought about

the exclusion of Littré in the preceding year. In 1868, however, he

became a member of the Institute in succession to Cousin. A Liberal of

the old school, he has separated himself from the republicans since the

war, and has made himself felt as a severe critic of republican blunders

in the _Revue des deux Mondes_. _La Religion_, which discusses the

psychological origins of the religious sense, was published in 1868.]

book “La Religion,” 1869, and it has set me thinking. I have a feeling

that his notion of religion is not rigorous and exact, and that

therefore his logic is subject to correction. If religion is a

psychological stage, anterior to that of reason, it is clear that it

will disappear in man, but if, on the contrary, it is a mode of the

inner life, it may and must last, as long as the need of feeling, and

alongside the need of thinking. The question is between theism and

non-theism. If God is only the category of the ideal, religion will

vanish, of course, like the illusions of youth. But if Universal Being

can be felt and loved at the same time as conceived, the philosopher may

be a religious man just as he may be an artist, an orator, or a citizen.

He may attach himself to a worship or ritual without derogation. I

myself incline to this solution. To me religion is life before God and

in God.

And even if God were defined as the universal life, so long as this life

is positive and not negative, the soul penetrated with the sense of the

infinite is in the religious state. Religion differs from philosophy

as the simple and spontaneous self differs from the reflecting self, as

synthetic intuition differs from intellectual analysis. We are initiated

into the religious state by a sense of voluntary dependence on, and

joyful submission to the principle of order and of goodness. Religious

emotion makes man conscious of himself; he finds his own place within

the infinite unity, and it is this perception which is sacred.

But in spite of these reservations I am much impressed by the book,

which is a fine piece of work, ripe and serious in all respects.

May 13, 1869.--A break in the clouds, and through the blue interstices a

bright sun throws flickering and uncertain rays. Storms, smiles, whims,

anger, tears--it is May, and nature is in its feminine phase! She

pleases our fancy, stirs our heart, and wears out our reason by the

endless succession of her caprices and the unexpected violence of her

whims.

This recalls to me the 213th verse of the second book of the Laws of

Manou. “It is in the nature of the feminine sex to seek here below to

corrupt men, and therefore wise men never abandon themselves to the

seductions of women.” The same code, however, says: “Wherever women are

honored the gods are satisfied.” And again: “In every family where

the husband takes pleasure in his wife, and the wife in her husband,

happiness is ensured.” And again: “One mother is more venerable than a

thousand fathers.” But knowing what stormy and irrational elements there

are in this fragile and delightful creature, Manou concludes: “At no age

ought a woman to be allowed to govern herself as she pleases.”

Up to the present day, in several contemporary and neighboring codes,

a woman is a minor all her life. Why? Because of her dependence upon

nature, and of her subjection to passions which are the diminutives

of madness; in other words, because the soul of a woman has something

obscure and mysterious in it, which lends itself to all superstitions

and weakens the energies of man. To man belong law, justice, science,

and philosophy, all that is disinterested, universal, and rational.

Women, on the contrary, introduce into everything favor, exception, and

personal prejudice. As soon as a man, a people, a literature, an epoch,

become feminine in type, they sink in the scale of things. As soon as

a woman quits the state of subordination in which her merits have free

play, we see a rapid increase in her natural defects. Complete equality

with man makes her quarrelsome; a position of supremacy makes her

tyrannical. To honor her and to govern her will be for a long time yet

the best solution. When education has formed strong, noble, and serious

women in whom conscience and reason hold sway over the effervescence of

fancy and sentimentality, then we shall be able not only to honor woman,

but to make a serious end of gaining her consent and adhesion. Then she

will be truly an equal, a work-fellow, a companion. At present she is so

only in theory. The moderns are at work upon the problem, and have not

solved it yet.

June 15, 1869.--The great defect of liberal Christianity [Footnote:

At this period the controversy between the orthodox party and “Liberal

Christianity” was at its height, both in Geneva and throughout

Switzerland.] is that its conception of holiness is a frivolous one,

or, what comes to the same thing, its conception of sin is a superficial

one. The defects of the baser sort of political liberalism recur in

liberal Christianity; it is only half serious, and its theology is too

much mixed with worldliness. The sincerely pious folk look upon the

liberals as persons whose talk is rather profane, and who offend

religious feelings by making sacred subjects a theme for rhetorical

display. They shock the _convenances_ of sentiment, and affront the

delicacy of conscience by the indiscreet familiarities they take with

the great mysteries of the inner life. They seem to be mere clever

special pleaders, religious rhetoricians like the Greek sophists, rather

than guides in the narrow road which leads to salvation.

It is not to the clever folk, nor even to the scientific folk, that

the empire over souls belongs, but to those who impress us as having

conquered nature by grace, passed through the burning bush, and as

speaking, not the language of human wisdom, but that of the divine will.

In religious matters it is holiness which gives authority; it is love,

or the power of devotion and sacrifice, which goes to the heart, which

moves and persuades.

What all religious, poetical, pure, and tender souls are least able to

pardon is the diminution or degradation of their ideal. We must never

rouse an ideal against us; our business is to point men to another

ideal, purer, higher, more spiritual than the old, and so to raise

behind a lofty summit one more lofty still. In this way no one is

despoiled; we gain men’s confidence, while at the same time forcing

them to think, and enabling those minds which are already tending toward

change to perceive new objects and goals for thought. Only that which is

replaced is destroyed, and an ideal is only replaced by satisfying the

conditions of the old with some advantages over.

Let the liberal Protestants offer us a spectacle of Christian virtue of

a holier, intenser, and more intimate kind than before; let us see

it active in their persons and in their influence, and they will have

furnished the proof demanded by the Master; the tree will be judged by

its fruits.

* * * * *

June 22, 1869 (_Nine_ A. M).--Gray and lowering weather. A fly lies dead

of cold on the page of my book, in full summer! What is life? I said to

myself, as I looked at the tiny dead creature. It is a loan, as movement

is. The universal life is a sum total, of which the units are visible

here, there, and everywhere, just as an electric wheel throws off sparks

along its whole surface. Life passes through us; we do not possess it.

Hirn admits three ultimate principles: [Footnote: Gustave-Adolphe Hirn,

a French physicist, born near Colmar, 1815, became a corresponding

member of the Academy of Sciences in 1867. The book of his to which

Amiel refers is no doubt _Conséquences philosophiques at métaphysiques

de la thermodynamique, Analyse élémentaire de l’univers_ (1869).] the

atom, the force, the soul; the force which acts upon atoms, the soul

which acts upon force. Probably he distinguishes between anonymous souls

and personal souls. Then my fly would be an anonymous soul.

(_Same day_).--The national churches are all up in arms against

so-called Liberal Christianity; Basle and Zurich began the fight, and

now Geneva has entered the lists too. Gradually it is becoming plain

that historical Protestantism has no longer a _raison d’être_ between

pure liberty and pure authority. It is, in fact, a provisional stage,

founded on the worship of the Bible--that is to say, on the idea of

a written revelation, and of a book divinely inspired, and therefore

authoritative. When once this thesis has been relegated to the rank of

a fiction Protestantism crumbles away. There is nothing for it but

to retire up on natural religion, or the religion of the moral

consciousness. M.M. Réville, Conquerel, Fontanes, Buisson, [Footnote:

The name of M. Albert Réville, the French Protestant theologian, is

more or less familiar in England, especially since his delivery of the

Hibbert lectures in 1884. Athanase Coquerel, born 1820, died 1876, the

well-known champion of liberal ideas in the French Protestant Church,

was suspended from his pastoral functions by the Consistory of Paris,

on account of his review of M. Renan’s “Vie de Jésus” in 1864.

Ferdinand-Edouard Buisson, a liberal Protestant, originally a professor

at Lausanne, was raised to the important function of Director of Primary

Instruction by M. Ferry in 1879. He was denounced by Bishop Dupanloup,

in the National Assembly of 1871, as the author of certain liberal

pamphlets on the dangers connected with Scripture-teaching in schools,

and, for the time, lost his employment under the Ministry of Education.]

accept this logical outcome. They are the advance-guard of Protestantism

and the laggards of free thought.

Their mistake is not seeing that all institutions rest upon a legal

fiction, and that every living thing involves a logical absurdity. It

may be logical to demand a church based on free examination and absolute

sincerity; but to realize it is a different matter. A church lives

by what is positive, and this positive element necessarily limits

investigation. People confound the right of the individual, which is

to be free, with the duty of the institution, which is to be something.

They take the principle of science to be the same as the principle

of the church, which is a mistake. They will not see that religion is

different from philosophy, and that the one seeks union by faith, while

the other upholds the solitary independence of thought. That the bread

should be good it must have leaven; but the leaven is not the bread.

Liberty is the means whereby we arrive at an enlightened faith--granted;

but an assembly of people agreeing only upon this criterion and

this method could not possibly found a church, for they might differ

completely as to the results of the method. Suppose a newspaper the

writers of which were of all possible parties--it would no doubt be a

curiosity in journalism, but it would have no opinions, no faith, no

creed. A drawing-room filled with refined people, carrying on polite

discussion, is not a church, and a dispute, however courteous, is not

worship. It is a mere confusion of kinds.

July 13, 1869.--Lamennais, Heine--the one the victim of a mistaken

vocation, the other of a tormenting craving to astonish and mystify his

kind. The first was wanting in common sense; the second was wanting

in seriousness. The Frenchman was violent, arbitrary, domineering; the

German was a jesting Mephistopheles, with a horror of Philistinism.

The Breton was all passion and melancholy; the Hamburger all fancy and

satire. Neither developed freely nor normally. Both of them, because of

an initial mistake, threw themselves into an endless quarrel with the

world. Both were revolutionists. They were not fighting for the good

cause, for impersonal truth; both were rather the champions of their

own pride. Both suffered greatly, and died isolated, repudiated, and

reviled. Men of magnificent talents, both of them, but men of small

wisdom, who did more harm than good to themselves and to others! It is

a lamentable existence which wears itself out in maintaining a first

antagonism, or a first blunder. The greater a man’s intellectual power,

the more dangerous is it for him to make a false start and to begin life

badly.

July 20, 1869.--I have been reading over again five or six chapters,

here and there, of Renan’s “St. Paul.” Analyzed to the bottom, the

writer is a freethinker, but a free thinker whose flexible imagination

still allows him the delicate epicurism of religious emotion. In his

eyes the man who will not lend himself to these graceful fancies is

vulgar, and the man who takes them seriously is prejudiced. He is

entertained by the variations of conscience, but he is too clever to

laugh at them. The true critic neither concludes nor excludes; his

pleasure is to understand without believing, and to profit by

the results of enthusiasm, while still maintaining a free mind,

unembarrassed by illusion. Such a mode of proceeding has a look of

dishonesty; it is nothing, however, but the good-tempered irony of a

highly-cultivated mind, which will neither be ignorant of anything nor

duped by anything. It is the dilettantism of the Renaissance in its

perfection. At the same time what innumerable proofs of insight and of

exultant scientific power!

August 14, 1869.--In the name of heaven, who art thou? what wilt

thou--wavering inconstant creature? What future lies before thee? What

duty or what hope appeals to thee?

My longing, my search is for love, for peace, for something to fill my

heart; an idea to defend; a work to which I might devote the rest of my

strength; an affection which might quench this inner thirst; a cause for

which I might die with joy. But shall I ever find them? I long for

all that is impossible and inaccessible: for true religion, serious

sympathy, the ideal life; for paradise, immortality, holiness, faith,

inspiration, and I know not what besides! What I really want is to die

and to be born again, transformed myself, and in a different world.

And I can neither stifle these aspirations nor deceive myself as to the

possibility of satisfying them. I seem condemned to roll forever the

rock of Sisyphus, and to feel that slow wearing away of the mind which

befalls the man whose vocation and destiny are in perpetual conflict.

“A Christian heart and a pagan head,” like Jacobi; tenderness and

pride; width of mind and feebleness of will; the two men of St. Paul;

a seething chaos of contrasts, antinomies, and contradictions; humility

and pride; childish simplicity and boundless mistrust; analysis and

intuition; patience and irritability; kindness and dryness of heart;

carelessness and anxiety; enthusiasm and languor; indifference and

passion; altogether a being incomprehensible and intolerable to myself

and to others!

Then from a state of conflict I fall back into the fluid, vague,

indeterminate state, which feels all form to be a mere violence and

disfigurement. All ideas, principles, acquirements, and habits are

effaced in me like the ripples on a wave, like the convolutions of a

cloud. My personality has the least possible admixture of individuality.

I am to the great majority of men what the circle is to rectilinear

figures; I am everywhere at home, because I have no particular and

nominative self. Perhaps, on the whole, this defect has good in it.

Though I am less of _a_ man, I am perhaps nearer to _the_ man; perhaps

rather more _man_. There is less of the individual, but more of the

species, in me. My nature, which is absolutely unsuited for practical

life, shows great aptitude for psychological study. It prevents me from

taking sides, but it allows me to understand all sides. It is not only

indolence which prevents me from drawing conclusions; it is a sort of

a secret aversion to all _intellectual proscription_. I have a feeling

that something of everything is wanted to make a world, that all

citizens have a right in the state, and that if every opinion is equally

insignificant in itself, all opinions have some hold upon truth. To live

and let live, think and let think, are maxims which are equally dear to

me. My tendency is always to the whole, to the totality, to the general

balance of things. What is difficult to me is to exclude, to condemn,

to say no; except, indeed, in the presence of the exclusive. I am always

fighting for the absent, for the defeated cause, for that portion of

truth which seems to me neglected; my aim is to complete every thesis,

to see round every problem, to study a thing from all its possible

sides. Is this skepticism? Yes, in its result, but not in its purpose.

It is rather the sense of the absolute and the infinite reducing to

their proper value and relegating to their proper place the finite and

the relative. But here, in the same way, my ambition is greater than my

power; my philosophical perception is superior to my speculative gift.

I have not the energy of my opinions; I have far greater width than

inventiveness of thought, and, from timidity, I have allowed the

critical intelligence in me to swallow up the creative genius. Is it

indeed from timidity?

Alas! with a little more ambition, or a little more good luck, a

different man might have been made out of me, and such as my youth gave

promise of.

August 16, 1869.--I have been thinking over Schopenhauer. It has struck

me and almost terrified me to see how well I represent Schopenhauer’s

typical man, for whom “happiness is a chimera and suffering a reality,”

for whom “the negation of will and of desire is the only road to

deliverance,” and “the individual life is a misfortune from which

impersonal contemplation is the only enfranchisement,” etc. But the

principle that life is an evil and annihilation a good lies at the root

of the system, and this axiom I have never dared to enunciate in any

general way, although I have admitted it here and there in individual

cases. What I still like in the misanthrope of Frankfort, is his

antipathy to current prejudice, to European hobbies, to western

hypocrisies, to the successes of the day. Schopenhauer is a man of

powerful mind, who has put away from him all illusions, who professes

Buddhism in the full flow of modern Germany, and absolute detachment

of mind In the very midst of the nineteenth-century orgie. His great

defects are barrenness of soul, a proud and perfect selfishness, an

adoration of genius which is combined with complete indifference to

the rest of the world, in spite of all his teaching of resignation

and sacrifice. He has no sympathy, no humanity, no love. And here I

recognize the unlikeness between us. Pure intelligence and solitary

labor might easily lead me to his point of view; but once appeal to the

heart, and I feel the contemplative attitude untenable. Pity, goodness,

charity, and devotion reclaim their rights, and insist even upon the

first place.

August 29, 1869.--Schopenhauer preaches impersonality, objectivity, pure

contemplation, the negation of will, calmness, and disinterestedness, an

aesthetic study of the world, detachment from life, the renunciation of

all desire, solitary meditation, disdain of the crowd, and indifference

to all that the vulgar covet. He approves all my defects, my

childishness, my aversion to practical life, my antipathy to the

utilitarians, my distrust of all desire. In a word, he flatters all my

instincts; he caresses and justifies them.

This pre-established harmony between the theory of Schopenhauer and my

own natural man causes me pleasure mingled with terror. I might indulge

myself in the pleasure, but that I fear to delude and stifle conscience.

Besides, I feel that goodness has no tolerance for this contemplative

indifference, and that virtue consists in self-conquest.

August 30, 1869.--Still some chapters of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer

believes in the unchangeableness of innate tendencies in the individual,

and in the invariability of the primitive disposition. He refuses to

believe in the new man, in any real progress toward perfection, or in

any positive improvement in a human being. Only the appearances are

refined; there is no change below the surface. Perhaps he confuses

temperament, character, and individuality? I incline to think that

individuality is fatal and primitive, that temperament reaches far back,

but is alternable, and that character is more recent and susceptible

of voluntary or involuntary modifications. Individuality is a matter of

psychology, temperament, a matter of sensation or aesthetics; character

alone is a matter of morals. Liberty and the use of it count for nothing

in the first two elements of our being; character is a historical fruit,

and the result of a man’s biography. For Schopenhauer, character is

identified with temperament just as will with passion. In short, he

simplifies too much, and looks at man from that more elementary point

of view which is only sufficient in the case of the animal. That

spontaneity which is vital or merely chemical he already calls will.

Analogy is not equation; a comparison is not reason; similes and

parables are not exact language. Many of Schopenhauer’s originalities

evaporate when we come to translate them into a more close and precise

terminology.

_Later_.--One has merely to turn over the “Lichtstrahlem” of Herder to

feel the difference between him and Schopenhauer. The latter is full of

marked features and of observations which stand out from the page and

leave a clear and vivid impression. Herder is much less of a writer; his

ideas are entangled in his style, and he has no brilliant condensations,

no jewels, no crystals. While he proceeds by streams and sheets of

thought which have no definite or individual outline, Schopenhauer

breaks the current of his speculation with islands, striking, original,

and picturesque, which engrave themselves in the memory. It is the same

difference as there is between Nicole and Pascal, between Bayle and

Satin-Simon.

What is the faculty which gives relief, brilliancy, and incisiveness

to thought? Imagination. Under its influence expression becomes

concentrated, colored, and strengthened, and by the power it has of

individualizing all it touches, it gives life and permanence to the

material on which it works. A writer of genius changes sand into glass

and glass into crystal, ore into iron and iron into steel; he marks

with his own stamp every idea he gets hold of. He borrows much from

the common stock, and gives back nothing; but even his robberies are

willingly reckoned to him as private property. He has, as it were,

_carte blanche_, and public opinion allows him to take what he will.

August 31, 1869.--I have finished Schopenhauer. My mind has been a

tumult of opposing systems--Stoicism, Quietism, Buddhism, Christianity.

Shall I never be at peace with myself? If impersonality is a good, why

am I not consistent in the pursuit of it? and if it is a temptation, why

return to it, after having judged and conquered it?

Is happiness anything more than a conventional fiction? The deepest

reason for my state of doubt is that the supreme end and aim of life

seems to me a mere lure and deception. The individual is an eternal

dupe, who never obtains what he seeks, and who is forever deceived by

hope. My instinct is in harmony with the pessimism of Buddha and of

Schopenhauer. It is a doubt which never leaves me even in my moments of

religious fervor. Nature is indeed for me a Maïa; and I look at her, as

it were, with the eyes of an artist. My intelligence remains skeptical.

What, then, do I believe in? I do not know. And what is it I hope for?

It would be difficult to say. Folly! I believe in goodness, and I hope

that good will prevail. Deep within this ironical and disappointed being

of mine there is a child hidden--a frank, sad, simple creature,

who believes in the ideal, in love, in holiness, and all heavenly

superstitions. A whole millennium of idylls sleeps in my heart; I am a

pseudo-skeptic, a pseudo-scoffer.

“Borné dans sa nature, infini dans ses voeux,

L’homme est un dieu tombé qui se souvient des cieux.”

October 14, 1869.--Yesterday, Wednesday, death of Sainte-Beuve. What a

loss!

October 16, 1869.--_Laboremus_ seems to have been the motto of

Sainte-Beuve, as it was that of Septimius Severus. He died in harness,

and up to the evening before his last day he still wrote, overcoming the

sufferings of the body by the energy of the mind. To-day, at this very

moment, they are laying him in the bosom of mother earth. He refused the

sacraments of the church; he never belonged to any confession; he was

one of the “great diocese”--that of the independent seekers of truth,

and he allowed himself no final moment of hypocrisy. He would have

nothing to do with any one except God only--or rather the mysterious

Isis beyond the veil. Being unmarried, he died in the arms of his

secretary. He was sixty-five years old. His power of work and of memory

was immense and intact. What is Scherer thinking about this life and

this death?

October 19, 1869.--An admirable article by Edmond Scherer on

Sainte-Beuve in the _Temps_. He makes him the prince of French critics

and the last representative of the epoch of literary taste, the future

belonging to the bookmakers and the chatterers, to mediocrity and to

violence. The article breathes a certain manly melancholy, befitting a

funeral oration over one who was a master in the things of the mind. The

fact is, that Sainte-Beuve leaves a greater void behind him than either

Béranger or Lamartine; their greatness was already distant, historical;

he was still helping us to think. The true critic acts as a fulcrum for

all the world. He represents the public judgment, that is to say the

public reason, the touchstone, the scales, the refining rod, which tests

the value of every one and the merit of every work. Infallibility of

judgment is perhaps rarer than anything else, so fine a balance of

qualities does it demand--qualities both natural and acquired, qualities

of mind and heart. What years of labor, what study and comparison, are

needed to bring the critical judgment to maturity! Like Plato’s sage,

it is only at fifty that the critic rises to the true height of his

literary priesthood, or, to put it less pompously, of his social

function. By then only can he hope for insight into all the modes of

being, and for mastery of all possible shades of appreciation. And

Sainte-Beuve joined to this infinitely refined culture a prodigious

memory, and an incredible multitude of facts and anecdotes stored up for

the service of his thought.

December 8, 1869.--Everything has chilled me this morning; the cold of

the season, the physical immobility around me, but, above all, Hartman’s

“Philosophy of the Unconscious.” This book lays down the terrible thesis

that creation is a mistake; being, such as it is, is not as good as

non-being, and death is better than life.

I felt the same mournful impression that Obermann left upon me in my

youth. The black melancholy of Buddhism encompassed and overshadowed

me. If, in fact, it is only illusion which hides from us the horror of

existence and makes life tolerable to us, then existence is a snare and

life an evil. Like the Greek Annikeris, we ought to counsel suicide, or

rather with Buddha and Schopenhauer we ought to labor for the radical

extirpation of hope and desire--the causes of life and resurrection.

_Not_ to rise again; there is the point, and there is the difficulty.

Death is simply a beginning again, whereas it is annihilation that

we have to aim at. Personal consciousness being the root of all our

troubles, we ought to avoid the temptation to it and the possibility

of it as diabolical and abominable. What blasphemy! And yet it is all

logical; it is the philosophy of happiness carried to its farthest

point. Epicurism must end in despair. The philosophy of duty is

less depressing. But salvation lies in the conciliation of duty and

happiness, in the union of the individual will with the divine will, and

in the faith that this supreme will is directed by love.

* * * * *

It is as true that real happiness is good, as that the good become

better under the purification of trial. Those who have not suffered

are still wanting in depth; but a man who has not got happiness cannot

impart it. We can only give what we have. Happiness, grief, gayety,

sadness, are by nature contagious. Bring your health and your strength

to the weak and sickly, and so you will be of use to them. Give them,

not your weakness, but your energy, so you will revive and lift them

up. Life alone can rekindle life. What others claim from us is not our

thirst and our hunger, but our bread and our gourd.

The benefactors of humanity are those who have thought great thoughts

about her; but her masters and her idols are those who have flattered

and despised her, those who have muzzled and massacred her, inflamed her

with fanaticism or used her for selfish purposes. Her benefactors are

the poets, the artists, the inventors, the apostles and all pure hearts.

Her masters are the Caesars, the Constantines, the Gregory VII.’s, the

Innocent III.’s, the Borgias, the Napoleons.

* * * * *

Every civilization is, as it were, a dream of a thousand years, in

which heaven and earth, nature and history, appear to men illumined

by fantastic light and representing a drama which is nothing but a

projection of the soul itself, influenced by some intoxication--I was

going to say hallucination--or other. Those who are widest awake still

see the real world across the dominant illusion of their race or time.

And the reason is that the deceiving light starts from our own mind: the

light is our religion. Everything changes with it. It is religion which

gives to our kaleidoscope, if not the material of the figures, at least

their color, their light and shade, and general aspect. Every religion

makes men see the world and humanity under a special light; it is a mode

of apperception, which can only be scientifically handled when we have

cast it aside, and can only be judged when we have replaced it by a

better.

* * * * *

February 23, 1870.--There is in man an instinct of revolt, an enemy of

all law, a rebel which will stoop to no yoke, not even that of reason,

duty, and wisdom. This element in us is the root of all sin--_das

radicale Böse_ of Kant. The independence which is the condition

of individuality is at the same time the eternal temptation of the

individual. That which makes us beings makes us also sinners.