Sin is, then, in our very marrow. It circulates in us like the blood in

our veins, it is mingled with all our substance, [Footnote: This is

one of the passages which rouses M. Renan’s wonder: “Voila la grande

difference,” he writes, “entre l’éducation catholique et l’éducation

protestante. Ceux qui comme moi ont reçu une éducation catholique en ont

gardé de profonds vestiges. Mais ces vestiges ne sont pas des dogmes, ce

sont des rêves. Une fois ce grand rideau de drap d’or, bariolé de soie,

d’indienne et de calicot, par lequel le catholicisme nous masque la vue

du monde, une fois, dis-je ce rideau déchiré, on voit l’univers en

sa splendeur infinie, la nature en sa haute et pleine majesté. Le

protestant le plus libre garde souvent quelque chose de triste, un fond

d’austérité intellectuelle analogue au pessimisme slave.”--(_Journal des

Débats_, September 30, 1884).

One is reminded of Mr. Morley’s criticism of Emerson. Emerson, he points

out, has almost nothing to say of death, and “little to say of that

horrid burden and impediment on the soul which the churches call sin,

and which, by whatever name we call it, is a very real catastrophe

in the moral nature of man--the courses of nature, and the prodigious

injustices of mail in society affect him with neither horror nor awe. He

will see no monster if he can help it.”

Here, then, we have the eternal difference between the two orders of

temperament--the men whose overflowing energy forbids them to

realize the ever-recurring defeat of the human spirit at the hands of

circumstance, like Renan and Emerson, and the men for whom “horror and

awe” are interwoven with experience, like Amiel.] Or rather I am wrong:

temptation is our natural state, but sin is not necessary. Sin consists

in the voluntary confusion of the independence which is good with the

independence which is bad; it is caused by the half-indulgence granted

to a first sophism. We shut our eyes to the beginnings of evil because

they are small, and in this weakness is contained the germ of our

defeat. _Principiis obsta_--this maxim dutifully followed would preserve

us from almost all our catastrophes.

We will have no other master but our caprice--that is to say, our evil

self will have no God, and the foundation of our nature is seditious,

impious, insolent, refractory, opposed to, and contemptuous of all that

tries to rule it, and therefore contrary to order, ungovernable and

negative. It is this foundation which Christianity calls the natural

man. But the savage which is within us, and constitutes the primitive

stuff of us, must be disciplined and civilized in order to produce a

man. And the man must be patiently cultivated to produce a wise man, and

the wise man must be tested and tried if he is to become righteous.

And the righteous man must have substituted the will of God for his

individual will, if he is to become a saint. And this new man, this

regenerate being, is the spiritual man, the heavenly man, of which

the Vedas speak as well as the gospel, and the Magi as well as the

Neo-Platonists.

March 17, 1870.--This morning the music of a brass band which had

stopped under my windows moved me almost to tears. It exercised an

indefinable, nostalgic power over me; it set me dreaming of another

world, of infinite passion and supreme happiness. Such impressions are

the echoes of paradise in the soul; memories of ideal spheres, whose

sad sweetness ravishes and intoxicates the heart. O Plato! O Pythagoras!

ages ago you heard these harmonies--surprised these moments of inward

ecstacy--knew these divine transports! If music thus carries us

to heaven, it is because music is harmony, harmony is perfection,

perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven. This world of quarrels

and bitterness, of selfishness, ugliness, and misery, makes us long

involuntarily for the eternal peace, for the adoration which has no

limits, and the love which has no end. It is not so much the infinite

as the beautiful that we yearn for. It is not being, or the limits of

being, which weigh upon us; it is evil, in us and without us. It is not

all necessary to be great, so long as we are in harmony with the order

of the universe. Moral ambition has no pride; it only desires to fill

its place, and make its note duly heard in the universal concert of the

God of love.

March 30, 1870.--Certainly, nature is unjust and shameless, without

probity, and without faith. Her only alternatives are gratuitous favor

or mad aversion, and her only way of redressing an injustice is to

commit another. The happiness of the few is expiated by the misery of

the greater number. It is useless to accuse a blind force.

The human conscience, however, revolts against this law of nature, and

to satisfy its own instinct of justice it has imagined two hypotheses,

out of which it has made for itself a religion--the idea of an

individual providence, and the hypothesis of another life.

In these we have a protest against nature, which is thus declared

immoral and scandalous to the moral sense. Man believes in good, and

that he may ground himself on justice he maintains that the injustice

all around him is but an appearance, a mystery, a cheat, and that

justice _will_ be done. _Fiat justitia, pereal mundus!_

It is a great act of faith. And since humanity has not made itself,

this protest has some chance of expressing a truth. If there is conflict

between the natural world and the moral world, between reality and

conscience, conscience must be right.

It is by no means necessary that the universe should exist, but it is

necessary that justice should be done, and atheism is bound to explain

the fixed obstinacy of conscience on this point. Nature is not just; we

are the products of nature: why are we always claiming and prophesying

justice? why does the effect rise up against its cause? It is a singular

phenomenon. Does the protest come from any puerile blindness of human

vanity? No, it is the deepest cry of our being, and it is for the honor

of God that the cry is uttered. Heaven and earth may pass away, but good

_ought_ to be, and injustice ought _not_ to be. Such is the creed of the

human race. Nature will be conquered by spirit; the eternal will triumph

over time.

April 1, 1870.--I am inclined to believe that for a woman love is the

supreme authority--that which judges the rest and decides what is good

or evil. For a man, love is subordinate to right. It is a great passion,

but it is not the source of order, the synonym of reason, the criterion

of excellence. It would seem, then, that a woman places her ideal in the

perfection of love, and a man in the perfection of justice. It was in

this sense that St. Paul was able to say, “The woman is the glory of

the man, and the man is the glory of God.” Thus the woman who absorbs

herself in the object of her love is, so to speak, in the line of

nature; she is truly woman, she realizes her fundamental type. On the

contrary, the man who should make life consist in conjugal adoration,

and who should imagine that he has lived sufficiently when he has made

himself the priest of a beloved woman, such a one is but half a man;

he is despised by the world, and perhaps secretly disdained by

women themselves. The woman who loves truly seeks to merge her own

individuality in that of the man she loves. She desires that her love

should make him greater, stronger, more masculine, and more active. Thus

each sex plays its appointed part: the woman is first destined for man,

and man is destined for society. Woman owes herself to one, man owes

himself to all; and each obtains peace and happiness only when he or she

has recognized this law and accepted this balance of things. The same

thing may be a good in the woman and an evil in the man, may be strength

in her, weakness in him.

There is then a feminine and a masculine morality--preparatory chapters,

as it were, to a general human morality. Below the virtue which is

evangelical and sexless, there is a virtue of sex. And this virtue of

sex is the occasion of mutual teaching, for each of the two incarnations

of virtue makes it its business to convert the other, the first

preaching love in the ears of justice, the second justice in the ears

of love. And so there is produced an oscillation and an average which

represent a social state, an epoch, sometimes a whole civilization.

Such at least is our European idea of the harmony of the sexes in a

graduated order of functions. America is on the road to revolutionize

this ideal by the introduction of the democratic principle of the

equality of individuals in a general equality of functions. Only, when

there is nothing left but a multitude of equal individualities,

neither young nor old, neither men nor women, neither benefited nor

benefactors--all social difference will turn upon money. The whole

hierarchy will rest upon the dollar, and the most brutal, the most

hideous, the most inhuman of inequalities will be the fruit of the

passion for equality. What a result! Plutolatry--the worship of wealth,

the madness of gold--to it will be confided the task of chastising a

false principle and its followers. And plutocracy will be in its turn

executed by equality. It would be a strange end for it, if Anglo-Saxon

individualism were ultimately swallowed up in Latin socialism.

It is my prayer that the discovery of an equilibrium between the two

principles may be made in time, before the social war, with all its

terror and ruin, overtakes us. But it is scarcely likely. The masses

are always ignorant and limited, and only advance by a succession of

contrary errors. They reach good only by the exhaustion of evil. They

discover the way out, only after having run their heads against all

other possible issues.

April 15, 1870.--_Crucifixion!_ That is the word we have to meditate

to-day. Is it not Good Friday?

To curse grief is easier than to bless it, but to do so is to fall back

into the point of view of the earthly, the carnal, the natural man.

By what has Christianity subdued the world if not by the apotheosis of

grief, by its marvelous transmutation of suffering into triumph, of the

crown of thorns into the crown of glory, and of a gibbet into a symbol

of salvation? What does the apotheosis of the Cross mean, if not the

death of death, the defeat of sin, the beatification of martyrdom, the

raising to the skies of voluntary sacrifice, the defiance of pain?

“O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory?” By long

brooding over this theme--the agony of the just, peace in the midst

of agony, and the heavenly beauty of such peace--humanity came to

understand that a new religion was born--a new mode, that is to say, of

explaining life and of understanding suffering.

Suffering was a curse from which man fled; now it becomes a purification

of the soul, a sacred trial sent by eternal love, a divine dispensation

meant to sanctify and ennoble us, an acceptable aid to faith, a strange

initiation into happiness. O power of belief! All remains the same, and

yet all is changed. A new certitude arises to deny the apparent and

the tangible; it pierces through the mystery of things, it places an

invisible Father behind visible nature, it shows us joy shining through

tears, and makes of pain the beginning of joy.

And so, for those who have believed, the tomb becomes heaven, and on

the funeral pyre of life they sing the hosanna of immortality; a sacred

madness has renewed the face of the world for them, and when they wish

to explain what they feel, their ecstasy makes them incomprehensible;

they speak with tongues. A wild intoxication of self-sacrifice, contempt

for death, the thirst for eternity, the delirium of love--these are

what the unalterable gentleness of the Crucified has had power to bring

forth. By his pardon of his executioners, and by that unconquerable

sense in him of an indissoluble union with God, Jesus, on his cross,

kindled an inextinguishable fire and revolutionized the world. He

proclaimed and realized salvation by faith in the infinite mercy, and in

the pardon granted to simple repentance. By his saying, “There is more

joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine

just persons who need no repentance,” he made humility the gate of

entrance into paradise.

Crucify the rebellious self, mortify yourself wholly, give up all to

God, and the peace which is not of this world will descend upon you.

For eighteen centuries no grander word has been spoken; and although

humanity is forever seeking after a more exact and complete application

of justice, yet her secret faith is not in justice but in pardon, for

pardon alone conciliates the spotless purity of perfection with the

infinite pity due to weakness--that is to say, it alone preserves and

defends the Idea of holiness, while it allows full scope to that of

love. The gospel proclaims the ineffable consolation, the good

news, which disarms all earthly griefs, and robs even death of its

terrors--the news of irrevocable pardon, that is to say, of eternal

life. The Cross is the guarantee of the gospel.

Therefore it has been its standard.

May 7, 1870.--The faith which clings to its idols and resists all

innovation is a retarding and conservative force; but it is the property

of all religion to serve as a curb to our lawless passion for freedom,

and to steady and quiet our restlessness of temper. Curiosity is the

expansive force, which, if it were allowed an unchecked action upon

us, would disperse and volatilize us; belief represents the force of

gravitation and cohesion which makes separate bodies and individuals of

us. Society lives by faith, develops by science. Its basis then is the

mysterious, the unknown, the intangible--religion--while the fermenting

principle in it is the desire of knowledge. Its permanent substance is

the uncomprehended or the divine; its changing form is the result of its

intellectual labor. The unconscious adhesions, the confused intuitions,

the obscure presentiments, which decide the first faith of a people, are

then of capital importance in its history. All history moves between the

religion which is the genial instinctive and fundamental philosophy of

a race, and the philosophy which is the ultimate religion--the clear

perception, that is to say, of those principles which have engendered

the whole spiritual development of humanity.

It is always the same thing which is, which was, and which will be; but

this thing--the absolute--betrays with more or less transparency and

profundity the law of its life and of its metamorphoses. In its fixed

aspect it is called God; in its mobile aspect the world or nature. God

is present in nature, but nature is not God; there is a nature in

God, but it is not God himself. I am neither for immanence nor for

transcendence taken alone.

May 9, 1870.--Disraeli, in his new novel, “Lothair,” shows that the two

great forces of the present are Revolution and Catholicism, and that

the free nations are lost if either of these two forces triumphs. It is

exactly my own idea. Only, while in France, in Belgium, in Italy, and

in all Catholic societies, it is only by checking one of these forces

by the other that the state and civilization can be maintained, the

Protestant countries are better off; in them there is a third force,

a middle faith between the two other idolatries, which enables them to

regard liberty not as a neutralization of two contraries, but as a moral

reality, self-subsistent, and possessing its own center of gravity and

motive force. In the Catholic world religion and liberty exclude each

other. In the Protestant world they accept each other, so that in the

second case there is a smaller waste of force.

Liberty is the lay, the philosophical principle. It expresses the

juridical and social aspiration of the race. But as there is no society

possible without regulation, without control, without limitations on

individual liberty, above all without moral limitations, the

peoples which are legally the freest do well to take their religious

consciousness for check and ballast. In mixed states, Catholic or

free-thinking, the limit of action, being a merely penal one, invites

incessant contravention.

The puerility of the freethinkers consists in believing that a free

society can maintain itself and keep itself together without a common

faith, without a religious prejudice of some kind. Where lies the will

of God? Is it the common reason which expresses it, or rather, are a

clergy or a church the depositories of it? So long as the response

is ambiguous and equivocal in the eyes of half or the majority of

consciences--and this is the case in all Catholic states--public peace

is impossible, and public law is insecure. If there is a God, we must

have him on our side, and if there is not a God, it would be necessary

first of all to convert everybody to the same idea of the lawful and the

useful, to reconstitute, that is to say, a lay religion, before anything

politically solid could be built.

Liberalism is merely feeding upon abstractions, when it persuades itself

that liberty is possible without free individuals, and when it will not

recognize that liberty in the individual is the fruit of a foregoing

education, a moral education, which presupposes a liberating religion.

To preach liberalism to a population jesuitized by education, is to

press the pleasures of dancing upon a man who has lost a leg. How is

it possible for a child who has never been out of swaddling clothes

to walk? How can the abdication of individual conscience lead to the

government of individual conscience? To be free, is to guide one’s self,

to have attained one’s majority, to be emancipated, master of one’s

actions, and judge of good and evil; but ultramontane Catholicism never

emancipates its disciples, who are bound to admit, to believe, and to

obey, as they are told, because they are minors in perpetuity, and the

clergy alone possess the law of right, the secret of justice, and the

measure of truth. This is what men are landed in by the idea of an

exterior revelation, cleverly made use of by a patient priesthood.

But what astonishes me is the short-sight of the statesmen of the south,

who do not see that the question of questions is the religious

question, and even now do not recognize that a liberal state is

wholly incompatible with an anti-liberal religion, and almost equally

incompatible with the absence of religion. They confound accidental

conquests and precarious progress with lasting results.

There is some probability that all this noise which is made nowadays

about liberty may end in the suppression of liberty; it is plain that

the internationals, the irreconcilables, and the ultramontanes, are, all

three of them, aiming at absolutism, at dictatorial omnipotence. Happily

they are not one but many, and it will not be difficult to turn them

against each other.

If liberty is to be saved, it will not be by the doubters, the men of

science, or the materialists; it will be by religious conviction, by the

faith of individuals who believe that God wills man to be free but also

pure; it will be by the seekers after holiness, by those old-fashioned

pious persons who speak of immortality and eternal life, and prefer the

soul to the whole world; it will be by the enfranchised children of the

ancient faith of the human race.

June 5, 1870.--The efficacy of religion lies precisely in that which

is not rational, philosophic, nor external; its efficacy lies in the

unforeseen, the miraculous, the extraordinary. Thus religion attracts

more devotion in proportion as it demands more faith--that is to say, as

it becomes more incredible to the profane mind. The philosopher aspires

to explain away all mysteries, to dissolve them into light. It is

mystery, on the other hand, which the religious instinct demands and

pursues; it is mystery which constitutes the essence of worship, the

power of proselytism. When the cross became the “foolishness” of the

cross, it took possession of the masses. And in our own day, those who

wish to get rid of the supernatural, to enlighten religion, to economize

faith, find themselves deserted, like poets who should declaim against

poetry, or women who should decry love. Faith consists in the acceptance

of the incomprehensible, and even in the pursuit of the impossible,

and is self-intoxicated with its own sacrifices, its own repeated

extravagances.

It is the forgetfulness of this psychological law which stultifies

the so-called liberal Christianity. It is the realization of it which

constitutes the strength of Catholicism.

Apparently no positive religion can survive the supernatural element

which is the reason for its existence. Natural religion seems to be the

tomb of all historic cults. All concrete religions die eventually in the

pure air of philosophy. So long then as the life of nations is in need

of religion as a motive and sanction of morality, as food for faith,

hope, and charity, so long will the masses turn away from pure reason

and naked truth, so long will they adore mystery, so long--and rightly

so--will they rest in faith, the only region where the ideal presents

itself to them in an attractive form.

June 9, 1870.--At bottom, everything depends upon the presence or

absence of one single element in the soul--hope. All the activity of

man, all his efforts and all his enterprises, presuppose a hope in

him of attaining an end. Once kill this hope and his movements become

senseless, spasmodic, and convulsive, like those of some one falling

from a height. To struggle with the inevitable has something childish

in it. To implore the law of gravitation to suspend its action would no

doubt be a grotesque prayer. Very well! but when a man loses faith in

the efficacy of his efforts, when he says to himself, “You are incapable

of realizing your ideal; happiness is a chimera, progress is an

illusion, the passion for perfection is a snare; and supposing all your

ambitions were gratified, everything would still be vanity,” then he

comes to see that a little blindness is necessary if life is to be

carried on, and that illusion is the universal spring of movement.

Complete disillusion would mean absolute immobility. He who has

deciphered the secret and read the riddle of finite life escapes from

the great wheel of existence; he has left the world of the living--he

is already dead. Is this the meaning of the old belief that to raise the

veil of Isis or to behold God face to face brought destruction upon the

rash mortal who attempted it? Egypt and Judea had recorded the fact,

Buddha gave the key to it; the individual life is a nothing ignorant

of itself, and as soon as this nothing knows itself, individual life

is abolished in principle. For as soon as the illusion vanishes,

Nothingness resumes its eternal sway, the suffering of life is over,

error has disappeared, time and form have ceased to be for this

enfranchised individuality; the colored air-bubble has burst in the

infinite space, and the misery of thought has sunk to rest in the

changeless repose of all-embracing Nothing. The absolute, if it were

spirit, would still be activity, and it is activity, the daughter of

desire, which is incompatible with the absolute. The absolute, then,

must be the zero of all determination, and the only manner of being

suited to it is Non-being.

July 2, 1870.--One of the vices of France is the frivolity which

substitutes public conventions for truth, and absolutely ignores

personal dignity and the majesty of conscience. The French are ignorant

of the A B C of individual liberty, and still show an essentially

catholic intolerance toward the ideas which have not attained

universality or the adhesion of the majority. The nation is an army

which can bring to bear mass, number, and force, but not an assembly of

free men in which each individual depends for his value on himself.

The eminent Frenchman depends upon others for his value; if he

possess stripe, cross, scarf, sword, or robe--in a word, function

and decoration--then he is held to be something, and he feels himself

somebody. It is the symbol which establishes his merit, it is the public

which raises him from nothing, as the sultan creates his viziers.

These highly-trained and social races have an antipathy for individual

independence; everything with them must be founded upon authority

military, civil, or religious, and God himself is non-existent until he

has been established by decree. Their fundamental dogma is that social

omnipotence which treats the pretension of truth to be true without any

official stamp, as a mere usurpation and sacrilege, and scouts the claim

of the individual to possess either a separate conviction or a personal

value.

July 20, 1870 (_Bellalpe_).--A marvelous day. The panorama before me

is of a grandiose splendor; it is a symphony of mountains, a cantata of

sunny Alps.

I am dazzled and oppressed by it. The feeling uppermost is one of

delight in being able to admire, of joy, that is to say, in a recovered

power of contemplation which is the result of physical relief, in being

able at last to forget myself and surrender myself to things, as befits

a man in my state of health. Gratitude is mingled with enthusiasm.

I have just spent two hours of continuous delight at the foot of the

Sparrenhorn, the peak behind us. A flood of sensations overpowered me. I

could only look, feel, dream, and think.

_Later_.--Ascent of the Sparrenhorn. The peak of it is not very easy to

climb, because of the masses of loose stones and the steepness of the

path, which runs between two abysses. But how great is one’s reward!

The view embraces the whole series of the Valais Alps from the Furka to

the Combin; and even beyond the Furka one sees a few peaks of the Ticino

and the Rhaetian Alps; while if you turn you see behind you a whole

polar world of snowfields and glaciers forming the southern side of

the enormous Bernese group of the Finsteraarahorn, the Mönch, and the

Jungfrau. The near representative of the group is the Aletschhorn,

whence diverge like so many ribbons the different Aletsch glaciers which

wind about the peak from which I saw them. I could study the different

zones, one above another--fields, woods, grassy Alps, bare rock and

snow, and the principle types of mountain; the pagoda-shaped Mischabel,

with its four _arêtes_ as flying buttresses and its staff of nine

clustered peaks; the cupola of the Fletchhorn, the dome of Monte Rosa,

the pyramid of the Weisshorn, the obelisk of the Cervin.

Bound me fluttered a multitude of butterflies and brilliant green-backed

flies; but nothing grew except a few lichens. The deadness and emptiness

of the upper Aletsch glacier, like some vast white street, called up the

image of an icy Pompeii. All around boundless silence. On my way back

I noticed some effects of sunshine--the close elastic mountain grass,

starred with gentian, forget-me-not, and anemones, the mountain cattle

standing out against the sky, the rocks just piercing the soil, various

circular dips in the mountain side, stone waves petrified thousands of

thousands of years ago, the undulating ground, the tender quiet of the

evening; and I invoked the soul of the mountains and the spirit of the

heights!

July 22, 1870 (_Bellalpe_).--The sky, which was misty and overcast this

morning, has become perfectly blue again, and the giants of the Valais

are bathed in tranquil light.

Whence this solemn melancholy which oppresses and pursues me? I

have just read a series of scientific books (Bronn on the “Laws of

Palaeontology,” Karl Ritter on the “Law of Geographical Forms”). Are

they the cause of this depression? or is it the majesty of this immense

landscape, the splendor of this setting sun, which brings the tears to

my eyes?

“Créature d’un jour qui t’agites une heure,”

what weighs upon thee--I know it well--is the sense of thine utter

nothingness!... The names of great men hover before my eyes like a

secret reproach, and this grand impassive nature tells me that to-morrow

I shall have disappeared, butterfly that I am, without having lived. Or

perhaps it is the breath of eternal things which stirs in me the shudder

of Job. What is man--this weed which a sunbeam withers? What is our

life in the infinite abyss? I feel a sort of sacred terror, not only for

myself, but for my race, for all that is mortal. Like Buddha, I feel

the great wheel turning--the wheel of universal illusion--and the dumb

stupor which enwraps me is full of anguish. Isis lilts the corner of

her veil, and he who perceives the great mystery beneath is struck with

giddiness. I can scarcely breathe. It seems to me that I am hanging by a

thread above the fathomless abyss of destiny. Is this the Infinite face

to face, an intuition of the last great death?

“Créature d’un jour qui t’agites une heure,

Ton âme est immortelle et tes pleurs vont finir.”

_Finir?_ When depths of ineffable desire are opening in the heart,

as vast, as yawning as the immensity which surrounds us? Genius,

self-devotion, love--all these cravings quicken into life and torture me

at once. Like the shipwrecked sailor about to sink under the waves, I am

conscious of a mad clinging to life, and at the same time of a rush of

despair and repentance, which forces from me a cry for pardon. And then

all this hidden agony dissolves in wearied submission. “Resign yourself

to the inevitable! Shroud away out of sight the flattering delusions

of youth! Live and die in the shade! Like the insects humming in the

darkness, offer up your evening prayer. Be content to fade out of life

without a murmur whenever the Master of life shall breathe upon your

tiny flame! It is out of myriads of unknown lives that every clod of

earth is built up. The infusoria do not count until they are millions

upon millions. Accept your nothingness.” Amen!

But there is no peace except in order, in law. Am I in order? Alas, no!

My changeable and restless nature will torment me to the end. I shall

never see plainly what I ought to do. The love of the better will have

stood between me and the good. Yearning for the ideal will have lost me

reality. Vague aspiration and undefined desire will have been enough

to make my talents useless, and to neutralize my powers. Unproductive

nature that I am, tortured by the belief that production was required of

me, may not my very remorse be a mistake and a superfluity?

Scherer’s phrase comes back to me, “We must accept ourselves as we are.”

September 8, 1870 (_Zurich_).--All the exiles are returning to

Paris--Edgar Quinet, Louis Blanc, Victor Hugo. By the help of their

united experience will they succeed in maintaining the republic? It

is to be hoped so. But the past makes it lawful to doubt. While

the republic is in reality a fruit, the French look upon it as a

seed-sowing. Elsewhere such a form of government presupposes free men;

in France it is and must be an instrument of instruction and protection.

France has once more placed sovereignty in the hands of universal

suffrage, as though the multitude were already enlightened, judicious,

and reasonable, and now her task is to train and discipline the force

which, by a fiction, is master.

The ambition of France is set upon self-government, but her capacity

for it has still to be proved. For eighty years she has confounded

revolution with liberty; will she now give proof of amendment and

of wisdom? Such a change is not impossible. Let us wait for it with

sympathy, but also with caution.

September 12, 1870 (_Basle_).--The old Rhine is murmuring under my

window. The wide gray stream rolls its great waves along and breaks

against the arches of the bridge, just as it did ten years or twenty

years ago; the red cathedral shoots its arrow-like spires toward heaven;

the ivy on the terraces which fringe the left bank of the Rhine hangs

over the walls like a green mantle; the indefatigable ferry-boat goes

and comes as it did of yore; in a word, things seem to be eternal, while

man’s hair turns gray and his heart grows old. I came here first as a

student, then as a professor. Now I return to it at the downward turn of

middle age, and nothing in the landscape has changed except myself.

The melancholy of memory may be commonplace and puerile--all the same it

is true, it is inexhaustible, and the poets of all times have been open

to its attacks.

At bottom, what is individual life? A variation of an eternal theme--to

be born, to live, to feel, to hope, to love, to suffer, to weep, to

die. Some would add to these, to grow rich, to think, to conquer; but in

fact, whatever frantic efforts one may make, however one may strain and

excite one’s self, one can but cause a greater or slighter undulation

in the line of one’s destiny. Supposing a man renders the series of

fundamental phenomena a little more evident to others or a little more

distinct to himself, what does it matter? The whole is still nothing but

a fluttering of the infinitely little, the insignificant repetition of

an invariable theme. In truth, whether the individual exists or no, the

difference is so absolutely imperceptible in the whole of things that

every complaint and every desire is ridiculous. Humanity in its entirety

is but a flash in the duration of the planet, and the planet may return

to the gaseous state without the sun’s feeling it even for a second. The

individual is the infinitesimal of nothing.

What, then, is nature? Nature is Maïa--that is to say, an incessant,

fugitive, indifferent series of phenomena, the manifestation of all

possibilities, the inexhaustible play of all combinations.

And is Maïa all the while performing for the amusement of somebody,

of some spectator--Brahma? Or is Brahma working out some serious and

unselfish end? From the theistic point of view, is it the purpose of

God to make souls, to augment the sum of good and wisdom by the

multiplication of himself in free beings--facets which may flash back to

him his own holiness and beauty? This conception is far more attractive

to the heart. But is it more true? The moral consciousness affirms

it. If man is capable of conceiving goodness, the general principle of

things, which cannot be inferior to man, must be good. The philosophy

of labor, of duty, of effort, is surely superior to that of phenomena,

chance, and universal indifference. If so, the whimsical Maïa would be

subordinate to Brahma, the eternal thought, and Brahma would be in his

turn subordinate to a holy God.

October 25, 1870 (_Geneva_).--“Each function to the most worthy:” this

maxim governs all constitutions, and serves to test them. Democracy is

not forbidden to apply it, but democracy rarely does apply it, because

she holds, for example, that the most worthy man is the man who pleases

her, whereas he who pleases her is not always the most worthy, and

because she supposes that reason guides the masses, whereas in reality

they are most commonly led by passion. And in the end every falsehood

has to be expiated, for truth always takes its revenge.

Alas, whatever one may say or do, wisdom, justice, reason, and goodness

will never be anything more than special cases and the heritage of a

few elect souls. Moral and intellectual harmony, excellence in all

its forms, will always be a rarity of great price, an isolated _chef

d’oeuvre_. All that can be expected from the most perfect institutions

is that they should make it possible for individual excellence to

develop itself, not that they should produce the excellent individual.

Virtue and genius, grace and beauty, will always constitute a _noblesse_

such as no form of government can manufacture. It is of no use,

therefore, to excite one’s self for or against revolutions which have

only an importance of the second order--an importance which I do not

wish either to diminish or to ignore, but an importance which, after

all, is mostly negative. The political life is but the means of the true

life.

October 26, 1870.--Sirocco. A bluish sky. The leafy crowns of the trees

have dropped at their feet; the finger of winter has touched them. The

errand-woman has just brought me my letters. Poor little woman, what

a life! She spends her nights in going backward and forward from her

invalid husband to her sister, who is scarcely less helpless, and

her days are passed in labor. Resigned and indefatigable, she goes on

without complaining, till she drops.

Lives such as hers prove something: that the true ignorance is moral

ignorance, that labor and suffering are the lot of all men, and that

classification according to a greater or less degree of folly is

inferior to that which proceeds according to a greater or less degree

of virtue. The kingdom of God belongs not to the most enlightened but to

the best; and the best man is the most unselfish man. Humble, constant,

voluntary self-sacrifice--this is what constitutes the true dignity of

man. And therefore is it written, “The last shall be first.” Society

rests upon conscience and not upon science. Civilization is first

and foremost a moral thing. Without honesty, without respect for law,

without the worship of duty, without the love of one’s neighbor--in a

word, without virtue--the whole is menaced and falls into decay, and

neither letters nor art, neither luxury nor industry, nor rhetoric,

nor the policeman, nor the custom-house officer, can maintain erect and

whole an edifice of which the foundations are unsound.

A state founded upon interest alone and cemented by fear is an

ignoble and unsafe construction. The ultimate ground upon which

every civilization rests is the average morality of the masses, and a

sufficient amount of practical righteousness. Duty is what upholds all.

So that those who humbly and unobtrusively fulfill it, and set a good

example thereby, are the salvation and the sustenance of this brilliant

world, which knows nothing about them. Ten righteous men would have

saved Sodom, but thousands and thousands of good homely folk are needed

to preserve a people from corruption and decay.

If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must

be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated

classes. The modern separation of enlightenment and virtue, of thought

and conscience, of the intellectual aristocracy from the honest and

vulgar crowd, is the greatest danger that can threaten liberty. When

any society produces an increasing number of literary exquisites, of

satirists, skeptics, and _beaux esprits_, some chemical disorganization

of fabric may be inferred. Take, for example, the century of Augustus,

and that of Louis XV. Our cynics and railers are mere egotists, who

stand aloof from the common duty, and in their indolent remoteness are

of no service to society against any ill which may attack it. Their

cultivation consists in having got rid of feeling. And thus they fall

farther and farther away from true humanity, and approach nearer to

the demoniacal nature. What was it that Mephistopheles lacked? Not

intelligence certainly, but goodness.

October 28, 1870.--It is strange to see how completely justice is

forgotten in the presence of great international struggles. Even the

great majority of the spectators are no longer capable of judging except

as their own personal tastes, dislikes, fears, desires, interests, or

passions may dictate--that is to say, their judgment is not a judgment

at all. How many people are capable of delivering a fair verdict on the

struggle now going on? Very few! This horror of equity, this antipathy

to justice, this rage against a merciful neutrality, represents a kind

of eruption of animal passion in man, a blind fierce passion, which

is absurd enough to call itself a reason, whereas it is nothing but a

force.

November 16, 1870.--We are struck by something bewildering and ineffable

when we look down into the depths of an abyss; and every soul is an

abyss, a mystery of love and piety. A sort of sacred emotion descends

upon me whenever I penetrate the recesses of this sanctuary of man, and

hear the gentle murmur of the prayers, hymns, and supplications which

rise from the hidden depths of the heart. These involuntary confidences

fill me with a tender piety and a religious awe and shyness. The whole

experience seems to me as wonderful as poetry, and divine with the

divineness of birth and dawn. Speech fails me, I bow myself and adore.

And, whenever I am able, I strive also to console and fortify.

December 6, 1870.--“Dauer im Wechsel”--“Persistence in change.” This

title of a poem by Goethe is the summing up of nature. Everything

changes, but with such unequal rapidity that one existence appears

eternal to another. A geological age, for instance, compared to the

duration of any living being, the duration of a planet compared to

a geological age, appear eternities--our life, too, compared to the

thousand impressions which pass across us in an hour. Wherever one

looks, one feels one’s self overwhelmed by the infinity of infinites.

The universe, seriously studied, rouses one’s terror. Everything seems

so relative that it is scarcely possible to distinguish whether anything

has a real value.

Where is the fixed point in this boundless and bottomless gulf? Must

it not be that which perceives the relations of things--in other words,

thought, infinite thought? The perception of ourselves within the

infinite thought, the realization of ourselves in God, self-acceptance

in him, the harmony of our will with his--in a word, religion--here

alone is firm ground. Whether this thought be free or necessary,

happiness lies in identifying one’s self with it. Both the stoic and

the Christian surrender themselves to the Being of beings, which the one

calls sovereign wisdom and the other sovereign goodness. St. John

says, “God is Light,” “God is Love.” The Brahmin says, “God is the

inexhaustible fount of poetry.” Let us say, “God is perfection.” And

man? Man, for all his inexpressible insignificance and frailty, may

still apprehend the idea of perfection, may help forward the supreme

will, and die with Hosanna on his lips!

* * * * *

All teaching depends upon a certain presentiment and preparation in the

taught; we can only teach others profitably what they already virtually

know; we can only give them what they had already. This principle of

education is also a law of history. Nations can only be developed on the

lines of their tendencies and aptitudes. Try them on any other and they

are rebellious and incapable of improvement.

* * * * *

By despising himself too much a man comes to be worthy of his own

contempt.

* * * * *

Its way of suffering is the witness which a soul bears to itself.

* * * * *

The beautiful is superior to the sublime because it lasts and does not

satiate, while the sublime is relative, temporary and violent.

* * * * *

February 4, 1871.--Perpetual effort is the characteristic of modern

morality. A painful process has taken the place of the old harmony, the

old equilibrium, the old joy and fullness of being. We are all so

many fauns, satyrs, or Silenuses, aspiring to become angels; so

many deformities laboring for our own embellishment; so many clumsy

chrysalises each working painfully toward the development of the

butterfly within him. Our ideal is no longer a serene beauty of soul;

it is the agony of Laocoon struggling with the hydra of evil. The lot

is cast irrevocably. There are no more happy whole-natured men among us,

nothing but so many candidates for heaven, galley-slaves on earth.

“Nous ramons notre vie en attendant le port.”

Molière said that reasoning banished reason. It is possible also that

the progress toward perfection we are so proud of is only a pretentious

imperfection. Duty seems now to be more negative than positive; it means

lessening evil rather than actual good; it is a generous discontent,

but not happiness; it is an incessant pursuit of an unattainable goal,

a noble madness, but not reason; it is homesickness for the

impossible--pathetic and pitiful, but still not wisdom.

The being which has attained harmony, and every being may attain it, has

found its place in the order of the universe, and represents the divine

thought at least as clearly as a flower or a solar system. Harmony seeks

nothing outside itself. It is what it ought to be; it is the expression

of right, order, law, and truth; it is greater than time, and represents

eternity.

February 6,1871.--I am reading Juste Olivier’s “Chansons du Soir” over

again, and all the melancholy of the poet seems to pass into my veins.

It is the revelation of a complete existence, and of a whole world of

melancholy reverie.

How much character there is in “Musette,” the “Chanson de l’Alouette,”

the “Chant du Retour,” and the “Gaîté,” and how much freshness in

“Lina,” and “A ma fille!” But the best pieces of all are “Au delà,”

“Homunculus,” “La Trompeuse,” and especially “Frère Jacques,” its

author’s masterpiece. To these may be added the “Marionettes” and the

national song, “Helvétie.” Serious purpose and intention disguised in

gentle gayety and childlike _badinage_, feeling hiding itself under

a smile of satire, a resigned and pensive wisdom expressing itself

in rustic round or ballad, the power of suggesting everything in a

nothing--these are the points in which the Vaudois poet triumphs. On the

reader’s side there is emotion and surprise, and on the author’s a sort

of pleasant slyness which seems to delight in playing tricks upon you,

only tricks of the most dainty and brilliant kind. Juste Olivier has the

passion we might imagine a fairy to have for delicate mystification.

He hides his gifts. He promises nothing and gives a great deal. His

generosity, which is prodigal, has a surly air; his simplicity is really

subtlety; his malice pure tenderness; and his whole talent is, as it

were, the fine flower of the Vaudois mind in its sweetest and dreamiest

form.

February 10, 1871.--My reading for this morning has been some vigorous

chapters of Taine’s “History of English Literature.” Taine is a writer

whose work always produces a disagreeable impression upon me, as though

of a creaking of pulleys and a clicking of machinery; there is a smell

of the laboratory about it. His style is the style of chemistry and

technology. The science of it is inexorable; it is dry and forcible,

penetrating and hard, strong and harsh, but altogether lacking in charm,

humanity, nobility, and grace. The disagreeable effect which it makes on

one’s taste, ear, and heart, depends probably upon two things: upon the

moral philosophy of the author and upon his literary principles. The

profound contempt for humanity which characterizes the physiological

school, and the intrusion of technology into literature inaugurated

by Balzac and Stendhal, explain the underlying aridity of which one is

sensible in these pages, and which seems to choke one like the gases

from a manufactory of mineral products. The book is instructive in

the highest degree, but instead of animating and stirring, it parches,

corrodes, and saddens its reader. It excites no feeling whatever; it is

simply a means of information. I imagine this kind of thing will be the

literature of the future--a literature _à l’Américaine_, as different as

possible from Greek art, giving us algebra instead of life, the formula

instead of the image, the exhalations of the crucible instead of the

divine madness of Apollo. Cold vision will replace the joys of thought,

and we shall see the death of poetry, flayed and dissected by science.

February 15, 1871.--Without intending it, nations educate each other,

while having apparently nothing in view but their own selfish interests.

It was France who made the Germany of the present, by attempting its

destruction during ten generations; it is Germany who will regenerate

contemporary France, by the effort to crush her. Revolutionary France

will teach equality to the Germans, who are by nature hierarchical.

Germany will teach the French that rhetoric is not science, and that

appearance is not as valuable as reality. The worship of prestige--that

is to say, of falsehood; the passion for vainglory--that is to say, for

smoke and noise; these are what must die in the interests of the world.

It is a false religion which is being destroyed. I hope sincerely that

this war will issue in a new balance of things better than any which has

gone before--a new Europe, in which the government of the individual by

himself will be the cardinal principle of society, in opposition to the

Latin principle, which regards the individual as a thing, a means to an

end, an instrument of the church or of the state.

In the order and harmony which would result from free adhesion and

voluntary submission to a common ideal, we should see the rise of a new

moral world. It would be an equivalent, expressed in lay terms, to the

idea of a universal priesthood. The model state ought to resemble

a great musical society in which every one submits to be organized,

subordinated, and disciplined for the sake of art, and for the sake of

producing a masterpiece. Nobody is coerced, nobody is made use of for

selfish purposes, nobody plays a hypocritical or selfish part. All bring

their talent to the common stock, and contribute knowingly and gladly

to the common wealth. Even self-love itself is obliged to help on the

general action, under pain of rebuff should it make itself apparent.

February 18, 1871.--It is in the novel that the average vulgarity of

German society, and its inferiority to the societies of France and

England, are most clearly visible. The notion of “bad taste” seems to

have no place in German aesthetics. Their elegance has no grace in it;

and they cannot understand the enormous difference there is between

distinction (what is _gentlemanly_, _ladylike_), and their stiff

_vornehmlichkeit_. Their imagination lacks style, training, education,

and knowledge of the world; it has an ill-bred air even in its

Sunday dress. The race is poetical and intelligent, but common and

ill-mannered. Pliancy and gentleness, manners, wit, vivacity, taste,

dignity, and charm, are qualities which belong to others.

Will that inner freedom of soul, that profound harmony of all the

faculties which I have so often observed among the best Germans,

ever come to the surface? Will the conquerors of to-day ever learn to

civilize and soften their forms of life? It is by their future novels

that we shall be able to judge. As soon as they are capable of the novel

of “good society” they will have excelled all rivals. Till then, finish,

polish, the maturity of social culture, are beyond them; they may have

humanity of feeling, but the delicacies, the little perfections of life,

are unknown to them. They may be honest and well-meaning, but they are

utterly without _savoir vivre_.

February 22, 1871.--_Soirée_ at the M--. About thirty people

representing our best society were there, a happy mixture of sexes and

ages. There were gray heads, young girls, bright faces--the whole framed

in some Aubusson tapestries which made a charming background, and gave a

soft air of distance to the brilliantly-dressed groups.

In society people are expected to behave as if they lived on ambrosia

and concerned themselves with nothing but the loftiest interests.

Anxiety, need, passion, have no existence. All realism is suppressed as

brutal. In a word, what we call “society” proceeds for the moment on

the flattering illusory assumption that it is moving in an ethereal

atmosphere and breathing the air of the gods. All vehemence, all natural

expression, all real suffering, all careless familiarity, or any

frank sign of passion, are startling and distasteful in this delicate

_milieu_; they at once destroy the common work, the cloud palace,

the magical architectural whole, which has been raised by the general

consent and effort. It is like the sharp cock-crow which breaks the

spell of all enchantments, and puts the fairies to flight. These select

gatherings produce, without knowing it, a sort of concert for eyes and

ears, an improvised work of art. By the instinctive collaboration

of everybody concerned, intellect and taste hold festival, and

the associations of reality are exchanged for the associations of

imagination. So understood, society is a form of poetry; the cultivated

classes deliberately recompose the idyll of the past and the buried

world of Astrea. Paradox or no, I believe that these fugitive attempts

to reconstruct a dream whose only end is beauty represent confused

reminiscences of an age of gold haunting the human heart, or rather

aspirations toward a harmony of things which every day reality denies to

us, and of which art alone gives us a glimpse.

April 28, 1871.--For a psychologist it is extremely interesting to

be readily and directly conscious of the complications of one’s own

organism and the play of its several parts. It seems to me that the

sutures of my being are becoming just loose enough to allow me at once

a clear perception of myself as a whole and a distinct sense of my own

brittleness. A feeling like this makes personal existence a perpetual

astonishment and curiosity. Instead of only seeing the world which

surrounds me, I analyze myself. Instead of being single, all of a piece,

I become legion, multitude, a whirlwind--a very cosmos. Instead of

living on the surface, I take possession of my inmost self, I apprehend

myself, if not in my cells and atoms, at least so far as my groups of

organs, almost my tissues, are concerned. In other words, the central

monad isolates itself from all the subordinate monads, that it may

consider them, and finds its harmony again in itself.

Health is the perfect balance between our organism, with all its

component parts, and the outer world; it serves us especially for

acquiring a knowledge of that world. Organic disturbance obliges us to

set up a fresh and more spiritual equilibrium, to withdraw within the

soul. Thereupon our bodily constitution itself becomes the object of

thought. It is no longer we, although it may belong to us; it is nothing

more than the vessel in which we make the passage of life, a vessel of

which we study the weak points and the structure without identifying it

with our own individuality.

Where is the ultimate residence of the self? In thought, or rather in

consciousness. But below consciousness there is its germ, the _punctum

saliens_ of spontaneity; for consciousness is not primitive, it

_becomes_. The question is, can the thinking monad return into its

envelope, that is to say, into pure spontaneity, or even into the dark

abyss of virtuality? I hope not. The kingdom passes; the king remains;

or rather is it the royalty alone which subsists--that is to say, the

idea--the personality begin in its turn merely the passing vesture

of the permanent idea? Is Leibnitz or Hegel right? Is the individual

immortal under the form of the spiritual body? Is he eternal under the

form of the individual idea? Who saw most clearly, St. Paul or Plato?

The theory of Leibnitz attracts me most because it opens to us an

infinite of duration, of multitude, and evolution. For a monad, which

is the virtual universe, a whole infinite of time is not too much to

develop the infinite within it. Only one must admit exterior actions

and influences which affect the evolution of the monad. Its independence

must be a mobile and increasing quantity between zero and the infinite,

without ever reaching either completeness or nullity, for the monad can

be neither absolutely passive nor entirely free.

June 21, 1871.--The international socialism of the _ouvriers_,

ineffectually put down in Paris, is beginning to celebrate its

approaching victory. For it there is neither country, nor memories,

nor property, nor religion. There is nothing and nobody but itself. Its

dogma is equality, its prophet is Mably, and Baboeuf is its god.

[Footnote: Mably, the Abbé Mably, 1709-85, one of the precursors of the

revolution, the professor of a cultivated and classical communism

based on a study of antiquity, which Babeuf and others like him, in

the following generation, translated into practical experiment. “Caius

Gracchus” Babeuf, born 1764, and guillotined in 1797 for a conspiracy

against the Directory, is sometimes called the first French socialist.

Perhaps socialist doctrines, properly so called, may be said to make

their first entry into the region of popular debate and practical

agitation with his “Manifeste des Égaux,” issued April 1796.]

How is the conflict to be solved, since there is no longer one single

common principle between the partisans and the enemies of the existing

form of society, between liberalism and the worship of equality? Their

respective notions of man, duty, happiness--that is to say, of life

and its end--differ radically. I suspect that the communism of the

_Internationale_ is merely the pioneer of Russian nihilism, which will

be the common grave of the old races and the servile races, the Latins

and the Slavs. If so, the salvation of humanity will depend upon

individualism of the brutal American sort. I believe that the nations

of the present are rather tempting chastisement than learning wisdom.

Wisdom, which means balance and harmony, is only met within individuals.

Democracy, which means the rule of the masses, gives preponderance to

instinct, to nature, to the passions--that is to say, to blind impulse,

to elemental gravitation, to generic fatality. Perpetual vacillation

between contraries becomes its only mode of progress, because it

represents that childish form of prejudice which falls in love

and cools, adores, and curses, with the same haste and unreason. A

succession of opposing follies gives an impression of change which the

people readily identify with improvement, as though Enceladus was more

at ease on his left side than on his right, the weight of the volcano

remaining the same. The stupidity of Demos is only equaled by its

presumption. It is like a youth with all his animal and none of his

reasoning powers developed.

Luther’s comparison of humanity to a drunken peasant, always ready to

fall from his horse on one side or the other, has always struck me as

a particularly happy one. It is not that I deny the right of the

democracy, but I have no sort of illusion as to the use it will make of

its right, so long, at any rate, as wisdom is the exception and conceit

the rule. Numbers make law, but goodness has nothing to do with figures.

Every fiction is self-expiating, and democracy rests upon this legal

fiction, that the majority has not only force but reason on its

side--that it possesses not only the right to act but the wisdom

necessary for action. The fiction is dangerous because of its flattery;

the demagogues have always flattered the private feelings of the

masses. The masses will always be below the average. Besides, the age

of majority will be lowered, the barriers of sex will be swept away, and

democracy will finally make itself absurd by handing over the decision

of all that is greatest to all that is most incapable. Such an end will

be the punishment of its abstract principle of equality, which dispenses

the ignorant man from the necessity of self-training, the foolish man

from that of self-judgment, and tells the child that there is no need

for him to become a man, and the good-for-nothing that self-improvement

is of no account. Public law, founded upon virtual equality, will

destroy itself by its consequences. It will not recognize the

inequalities of worth, of merit, and of experience; in a word, it

ignores individual labor, and it will end in the triumph of platitude

and the residuum. The _régime_ of the Parisian Commune has shown us what

kind of material comes to the top in these days of frantic vanity and

universal suspicion.

Still, humanity is tough, and survives all catastrophes. Only it makes

one impatient to see the race always taking the longest road to an end,

and exhausting all possible faults before it is able to accomplish one

definite step toward improvement. These innumerable follies, that are to

be and must be, have an irritating effect upon me. The more majestic is

the history of science, the more intolerable is the history of politics

and religion. The mode of progress in the moral world seems an abuse of

the patience of God.

Enough! There is no help in misanthropy and pessimism. If our race vexes

us, let us keep a decent silence on the matter. We are imprisoned on the

same ship, and we shall sink with it. Pay your own debt, and leave the

rest to God. Sharer, as you inevitably are, in the sufferings of your

kind, set a good example; that is all which is asked of you. Do all the

good you can, and say all the truth you know or believe; and for the

rest be patient, resigned, submissive. God does his business, do yours.

July 29, 1871.--So long as a man is capable of self-renewal he is a

living being. Goethe, Schleiermacher and Humboldt, were masters of the

art. If we are to remain among the living there must be a perpetual

revival of youth within us, brought about by inward change and by love

of the Platonic sort. The soul must be forever recreating itself, trying

all its various modes, vibrating in all its fibres, raising up new

interests for itself....

The “Epistles” and the “Epigrams” of Goethe which I have been reading

to-day do not make one love him. Why? Because he has so little soul. His

way of understanding love, religion, duty, and patriotism has something

mean and repulsive in it. There is no ardor, no generosity in him. A

secret barrenness, an ill-concealed egotism, makes itself felt through

all the wealth and flexibility of his talent. It is true that the

egotism of Goethe has at least this much that is excellent in it, that

it respects the liberty of the individual, and is favorable to all

originality. But it will go out of its way to help nobody; it will give

itself no trouble for anybody; it will lighten nobody else’s burden;

in a word, it does away with charity, the great Christian virtue.

Perfection for Goethe consists in personal nobility, not in love; his

standard is aesthetic, not moral. He ignores holiness, and has never

allowed himself to reflect on the dark problem of evil. A Spinozist

to the core, he believes in individual luck, not in liberty, nor in

responsibility. He is a Greek of the great time, to whom the inward

crises of the religious consciousness are unknown. He represents, then,

a state of soul earlier than or subsequent to Christianity, what the

prudent critics of our time call the “modern spirit;” and only one

tendency of the modern spirit--the worship of nature. For Goethe stands

outside all the social and political aspirations of the generality

of mankind; he takes no more interest than Nature herself in the

disinherited, the feeble, and the oppressed....

The restlessness of our time does not exist for Goethe and his school.

It is explicable enough. The deaf have no sense of dissonance. The man

who knows nothing of the voice of conscience, the voice of regret or

remorse, cannot even guess at the troubles of those who live under two

masters and two laws, and belong to two worlds--that of nature and that

of liberty. For himself, his choice is made. But humanity cannot choose

and exclude. All needs are vocal at once in the cry of her suffering.

She hears the men of science, but she listens to those who talk to her

of religion; pleasure attracts her, but sacrifice moves her; and she

hardly knows whether she hates or whether she adores the crucifix.

_Later_.--Still re-reading the sonnets and the miscellaneous poems of

Goethe. The impression left by this part of the “Gedichte” is much more

favorable than that made upon me by the “Elegies” and the “Epigrams.”

The “Water Spirits” and “The Divine” are especially noble in feeling.

One must never be too hasty in judging these complex natures. Completely

lacking as he is in the sense of obligation and of sin, Goethe

nevertheless finds his way to seriousness through dignity. Greek

sculpture has been his school of virtue.

August 15, 1871.--Re-read, for the second time, Renan’s “Vie de Jesus,”

in the sixteenth popular edition. The most characteristic feature of

this analysis of Christianity is that sin plays no part at all in it.

Now, if anything explains the success of the gospel among men, it is

that it brought them deliverance from sin--in a word, salvation. A man,

however, is bound to explain a religion seriously, and not to shirk the

very center of his subject. This white-marble Christ is not the Christ

who inspired the martyrs and has dried so many tears. The author lacks

moral seriousness, and confounds nobility of character with holiness. He

speaks as an artist conscious of a pathetic subject, but his moral sense

is not interested in the question. It is not possible to mistake the

epicureanism of the imagination, delighting itself in an aesthetic

spectacle, for the struggles of a soul passionately in search of truth.

In Renan there are still some remains of priestly _ruse_; he strangles

with sacred cords. His tone of contemptuous indulgence toward a more or

less captious clergy might be tolerated, but he should have shown a

more respectful sincerity in dealing with the sincere and the spiritual.

Laugh at Pharisaism as you will, but speak simply and plainly to honest

folk. [Footnote: “‘Persifflez les pharisaïsmes, mais parlez droit aux

honnêtes gens’ me dit Amiel, avec une certaine aigreur. Mon Dieu, que

les honnêtes gens sont souvent exposés à être des pharisiens sans le

savoir!”--(M. Renan’s article, already quoted).]

_Later_.--To understand is to be conscious of the fundamental unity

of the thing to be explained--that is to say, to conceive it in its

entirety both of life and development, to be able to remake it by a

mental process without making a mistake, without adding or omitting

anything. It means, first, complete identification of the object,

and then the power of making it clear to others by a full and just

interpretation. To understand is more difficult than to judge, for

understanding is the transference of the mind into the conditions of

the object, whereas judgment is simply the enunciation of the individual

opinion.

August 25, 1871. (_Charnex-sur-Montreux_).--Magnificent weather. The

morning seems bathed in happy peace, and a heavenly fragrance rises from

mountain and shore; it is as though a benediction were laid upon us. No

vulgar intrusive noise disturbs the religious quiet of the scene. One

might believe one’s self in a church--a vast temple in which every being

and every natural beauty has its place. I dare not breathe for fear of

putting the dream to flight--a dream traversed by angels.

“Comme autrefois j’entends dans l’éther infini

La musique du temps et l’hosanna des mondes.”

In these heavenly moments the cry of Pauline rises to one’s lips.

[Footnote: “Polyeuete,” Act. V. Scene v.

“Mon époux en mourant m’a laissé ses lumiéres;

Son sang dont tes bourreaux viennent de me couvrir

M’a dessillé les yeux et me les vient d’ouvrir.

Je vois, je sais, je crois----“]

“I feel! I believe! I see!” All the miseries, the cares, the vexations

of life, are forgotten; the universal joy absorbs us; we enter into the

divine order, and into the blessedness of the Lord. Labor and tears,

sin, pain, and death have passed away. To exist is to bless; life

is happiness. In this sublime pause of things all dissonances have

disappeared. It is as though creation were but one vast symphony,

glorifying the God of goodness with an inexhaustible wealth of praise

and harmony. We question no longer whether it is so or not. We have

ourselves become notes in the great concert; and the soul breaks the

silence of ecstasy only to vibrate in unison with the eternal joy.

September 22, 1871. (_Charnex_).--Gray sky--a melancholy day. A friend

has left me, the sun is unkind and capricious. Everything passes away,

everything forsakes us. And in place of all we have lost, age and gray

hairs! ... After dinner I walked to Chailly between two showers. A rainy

landscape has a great charm for me; the dark tints become more velvety,

the softer tones more ethereal. The country in rain is like a face with

traces of tears upon it--less beautiful no doubt, but more expressive.

Behind the beauty which is superficial, gladsome, radiant, and palpable,

the aesthetic sense discovers another order of beauty altogether,

hidden, veiled, secret and mysterious, akin to moral beauty. This sort

of beauty only reveals itself to the initiated, and is all the more

exquisite for that. It is a little like the refined joy of sacrifice,

like the madness of faith, like the luxury of grief; it is not within

the reach of all the world. Its attraction is peculiar, and affects one

like some strange perfume, or bizarre melody. When once the taste for it

is set up the mind takes a special and keen delight in it, for one finds

in it

“Son bien premièrement, puis le dédain d’autrui,”

and it is pleasant to one’s vanity not to be of the same opinion as

the common herd. This, however, is not possible with things which are

evident, and beauty which is incontestable. Charm, perhaps, is a better

name for the esoteric and paradoxical beauty, which escapes the vulgar,

and appeals to our dreamy, meditative side. Classical beauty belongs,

so to speak, to all eyes; it has ceased to belong to itself. Esoteric

beauty is shy and retiring. It only unveils itself to unsealed eyes, and

bestows its favors only upon love.

This is why my friend ----, who places herself immediately in relation

with the souls of those she meets, does not see the ugliness of people

when once she is interested in them. She likes and dislikes, and those

she likes are beautiful, those she dislikes are ugly. There is nothing

more complicated in it than that. For her, aesthetic considerations are

lost in moral sympathy; she looks with her heart only; she passes by the

chapter of the beautiful, and goes on to the chapter of charm. I can

do the same; only it is by reflection and on second thoughts; my friend

does it involuntarily and at once; she has not the artistic fiber. The

craving for a perfect correspondence between the inside and the outside

of things--between matter and form--is not in her nature. She does not

suffer from ugliness, she scarcely perceives it. As for me, I can only

forget what shocks me, I cannot help being shocked. All corporal defects

irritate me, and the want of beauty in women, being something which

ought not to exist, shocks me like a tear, a solecism, a dissonance, a

spot of ink--in a word, like something out of order. On the other

hand, beauty restores and fortifies me like some miraculous food, like

Olympian ambrosia.

“Que le bon soit toujours camarade du beau

Dès demain je chercherai femme.

Mais comme le divorce entre eux n’est pas nouveau,

Et que peu de beaux corps, hôtes d’une belle âme,

Assemblent l’un et l’autre point----”

I will not finish, for after all one must resign one’s self, A beautiful

soul in a healthy body is already a rare and blessed thing; and if one

finds heart, common sense, intellect, and courage into the bargain,

one may well do without that ravishing dainty which we call beauty,

and almost without that delicious seasoning which we call grace. We do

without--with a sigh, as one does without a luxury. Happy we, to possess

what is necessary.

December 29, 1871.--I have been reading Bahnsen (“Critique

de l’évolutionisme de Hegel-Hartmann, au nom des principes de

Schopenhauer”). What a writer! Like a cuttle-fish in water, every

movement produces a cloud of ink which shrouds his thought in darkness.

And what a doctrine! A thoroughgoing pessimism, which regards the world

as absurd, “absolutely idiotic,” and reproaches Hartmann for having

allowed the evolution of the universe some little remains of logic,

while, on the contrary, this evolution is eminently contradictory, and

there is no reason anywhere except in the poor brain of the reasoner. Of

all possible worlds that which exists is the worst. Its only excuse is

that it tends of itself to destruction. The hope of the philosopher is

that reasonable beings will shorten their agony and hasten the return

of everything to nothing. It is the philosophy of a desperate Satanism,

which has not even the resigned perspectives of Buddhism to offer to the

disappointed and disillusioned soul. The individual can but protest and

curse. This frantic Sivaism is developed from the conception which makes

the world the product of blind will, the principle of everything.

The acrid blasphemy of the doctrine naturally leads the writer to

indulgence in epithets of bad taste which prevent our regarding his work

as the mere challenge of a paradoxical theorist. We have really to do

with a theophobist, whom faith in goodness rouses to a fury of

contempt. In order to hasten the deliverance of the world, he kills all

consolation, all hope, and all illusion in the germ, and substitutes

for the love of humanity which inspired Çakyamouni, that Mephistophelian

gall which defiles, withers, and corrodes everything it touches.

Evolutionism, fatalism, pessimism, nihilism--how strange it is to see

this desolate and terrible doctrine growing and expanding at the very

moment when the German nation is celebrating its greatness and its

triumphs! The contrast is so startling that it sets one thinking.

This orgie of philosophic thought, identifying error with existence

itself, and developing the axiom of Proudhon--“Evil is God,” will bring

back the mass of mankind to the Christian theodicy, which is neither

optimist nor pessimist, but simply declares that the felicity which

Christianity calls eternal life is accessible to man.

Self-mockery, starting from a horror of stupidity and hypocrisy,

and standing in the way of all wholeness of mind and all true

seriousness--this is the goal to which intellect brings us at last,

unless conscience cries out.

The mind must have for ballast the clear conception of duty, if it is

not to fluctuate between levity and despair.

* * * * *

Before giving advice we must have secured its acceptance, or rather,

have made it desired.

* * * * *

If we begin by overrating the being we love, we shall end by treating it

with wholesale injustice.

* * * * *

It is dangerous to abandon one’s self to the luxury of grief; it

deprives one of courage, and even of the wish for recovery.

* * * * *

We learn to recognize a mere blunting of the conscience in that

incapacity for indignation which is not to be confounded with the

gentleness of charity, or the reserve of humility.

February 7, 1872.--Without faith a man can do nothing.

But faith can stifle all science.

What, then, is this Proteus, and whence?

Faith is a certitude without proofs. Being a certitude, it is an

energetic principle of action. Being without proof, it is the contrary

of science. Hence its two aspects and its two effects. Is its point of

departure intelligence? No. Thought may shake or strengthen faith; it

cannot produce it. Is its origin in the will? No; good will may favor

it, ill-will may hinder it, but no one believes by will, and faith is

not a duty. Faith is a sentiment, for it is a hope; it is an instinct,

for it precedes all outward instruction. Faith is the heritage of the

individual at birth; it is that which binds him to the whole of being.

The individual only detaches himself with difficulty from the maternal

breast; he only isolates himself by an effort from the nature around

him, from the love which enwraps him, the ideas in which he floats, the

cradle in which he lies. He is born in union with humanity, with the

world, and with God. The trace of this original union is faith. Faith is

the reminiscence of that vague Eden whence our individuality issued, but

which it inhabited in the somnambulist state anterior to the personal

life.

Our individual life consists in separating ourselves from our _milieu_;

in so reacting upon it that we apprehend it consciously, and make

ourselves spiritual personalities--that is to say, intelligent and free.

Our primitive faith is nothing more than the neutral matter which our

experience of life and things works up a fresh, and which may be so

affected by our studies of every kind as to perish completely in its

original form. We ourselves may die before we have been able to

recover the harmony of a personal faith which may satisfy our mind and

conscience as well as our hearts. But the need of faith never leaves us.

It is the postulate of a higher truth which is to bring all things into

harmony. It is the stimulus of research; it holds out to us the reward,

it points us to the goal. Such at least is the true, the excellent

faith. That which is a mere prejudice of childhood, which has never

known doubt, which ignores science, which cannot respect or understand

or tolerate different convictions--such a faith is a stupidity and a

hatred, the mother of all fanaticisms. We may then repeat of faith what

Aesop said of the tongue--

“Quid medius linguâ, linguâ quid pejus eadem?”

To draw the poison-fangs of faith in ourselves, we must subordinate it

to the love of truth. The supreme worship of the true is the only means

of purification for all religions all confessions, all sects. Faith

should only be allowed the second place, for faith has a judge--in

truth. When she exalts herself to the position of supreme judge the

world is enslaved: Christianity, from the fourth to the seventeenth

century, is the proof of it... Will the enlightened faith ever conquer

the vulgar faith? We must look forward in trust to a better future.

The difficulty, however, is this. A narrow faith has much more energy

than an enlightened faith; the world belongs to will much more than

to wisdom. It is not then certain that liberty will triumph over

fanaticism; and besides, independent thought will never have the force

of prejudice. The solution is to be found in a division of labor. After

those whose business it will have been to hold up to the world the ideal

of a pure and free faith, will come the men of violence, who will bring

the new creed within the circle of recognized interests, prejudices, and

institutions. Is not this just what happened to Christianity? After the

gentle Master, the impetuous Paul and the bitter Councils. It is true

that this is what corrupted the gospel. But still Christianity has

done more good than harm to humanity, and so the world advances, by the

successive decay of gradually improved ideals.

June 19, 1872.--The wrangle in the Paris Synod still goes on. [Footnote:

A synod of the Reformed churches of France was then occupied in

determining the constituent conditions of Protestant belief.] The

supernatural is the stone of stumbling.

It might be possible to agree on the idea of the divine; but no, that is

not the question--the chaff must be separated from the good grain.

The supernatural is miracle, and miracle is an objective phenomenon

independent of all preceding casuality. Now, miracle thus understood

cannot be proved experimentally; and besides, the subjective phenomena,

far more important than all the rest, are left out of account in the

definition. Men will not see that miracle is a perception of the soul;

a vision of the divine behind nature; a psychical crisis, analogous to

that of Aeneas on the last day of Troy, which reveals to us the heavenly

powers prompting and directing human action. For the indifferent there

are no miracles. It is only the religious souls who are capable of

recognizing the finger of God in certain given facts.

The minds which have reached the doctrine of immanence are

incomprehensible to the fanatics of transcendence. They will never

understand--these last--that the _panentheism_ of Krause is ten times

more religious than their dogmatic supernaturalism. Their passion for

the facts which are objective, isolated, and past, prevents them from

seeing the facts which are eternal and spiritual. They can only

adore what comes to them from without. As soon as their dramaturgy is

interpreted symbolically all seems to them lost. They must have their

local prodigies--their vanished unverifiable miracles, because for them

the divine is there and only there.

This faith can hardly fail to conquer among the races pledged to the

Cartesian dualism, who call the incomprehensible clear, and abhor what

is profound. Women also will always find local miracle more easy

to understand than universal miracle, and the visible objective

intervention of God more probable than his psychological and inward

action. The Latin world by its mental form is doomed to petrify its

abstractions, and to remain forever outside the inmost sanctuary of

life, that central hearth where ideas are still undivided, without shape

or determination. The Latin mind makes everything objective, because

it remains outside things, and outside itself. It is like the eye which

only perceives what is exterior to it, and which cannot see itself

except artificially, and from a distance, by means of the reflecting

surface of a mirror.

August 30, 1872.--_A priori_ speculations weary me now as much as

anybody. All the different scholasticisms make me doubtful of what they

profess to demonstrate, because, instead of examining, they affirm

from the beginning. Their object is to throw up entrenchments around

a prejudice, and not to discover the truth. They accumulate that which

darkens rather than that which enlightens. They are descended, all

of them, from the Catholic procedure, which excludes comparison,

information, and previous examination. Their object is to trick men into

assent, to furnish faith with arguments, and to suppress free inquiry.

But to persuade me, a man must have no _parti pris_, and must begin with

showing a temper of critical sincerity; he must explain to me how the

matter lies, point out to me the questions involved in it, their origin,

their difficulties, the different solutions attempted, and their

degree of probability. He must respect my reason, my conscience, and my

liberty. All scholasticism is an attempt to take by storm; the authority

pretends to explain itself, but only pretends, and its deference is

merely illusory. The dice are loaded and the premises are pre-judged.

The unknown is taken as known, and all the rest is deduced from it.

Philosophy means the complete liberty of the mind, and therefore

independence of all social, political, or religious prejudice. It is

to begin with neither Christian nor pagan, neither monarchical nor

democratic, neither socialist nor individualist; it is critical and

impartial; it loves one thing only--truth. If it disturbs the ready-made

opinions of the church or the state--of the historical medium--in which

the philosopher happens to have been born, so much the worse, but there

is no help for it.

“Est ut est aut non est,”

Philosophy means, first, doubt; and afterward the consciousness of what

knowledge means, the consciousness of uncertainty and of ignorance, the

consciousness of limit, shade, degree, possibility. The ordinary man

doubts nothing and suspects nothing. The philosopher is more cautious,

but he is thereby unfitted for action, because, although he sees the

goal less dimly than others, he sees his own weakness too clearly, and

has no illusions as to his chances of reaching it.

The philosopher is like a man fasting in the midst of universal

intoxication. He alone perceives the illusion of which all creatures are

the willing playthings; he is less duped than his neighbor by his own

nature. He judges more sanely, he sees things as they are. It is in this

that his liberty consists--in the ability to see clearly and soberly, in

the power of mental record. Philosophy has for its foundation critical

lucidity. The end and climax of it would be the intuition of the

universal law, of the first principle and the final aim of the universe.

Not to be deceived is its first desire; to understand, its second.

Emancipation from error is the condition of real knowledge. The

philosopher is a skeptic seeking a plausible hypothesis, which may

explain to him the whole of his experiences. When he imagines that he

has found such a key to life he offers it to, but does not force it on

his fellow men.

October 9, 1872.--I have been taking tea at the M’s. These English

homes are very attractive. They are the recompense and the result of a

long-lived civilization, and of an ideal untiringly pursued. What ideal?

That of a moral order, founded on respect for self and for others, and

on reverence for duty--in a word, upon personal worth and dignity. The

master shows consideration to his guests, the children are deferential

to their parents, and every one and everything has its place. They

understand both how to command and how to obey. The little world is well

governed, and seems to go of itself; duty is the _genius loci_--but

duty tinged with a reserve and self-control which is the English

characteristic. The children are the great test of this domestic system;

they are happy, smiling, trustful, and yet no trouble. One feels that

they know themselves to be loved, but that they know also that they

must obey. _Our_ children behave like masters of the house, and when

any definite order comes to limit their encroachments they see in it an

abuse of power, an arbitrary act. Why? Because it is their principle to

believe that everything turns round them. Our children may be gentle

and affectionate, but they are not grateful, and they know nothing of

self-control.

How do English mothers attain this result? By a rule which is

impersonal, invariable, and firm; in other words, by law, which forms

man for liberty, while arbitrary decree only leads to rebellion and

attempts at emancipation. This method has the immense advantage of

forming characters which are restive under arbitrary authority, and yet

amenable to justice, conscious of what is due to them and what they owe

to others, watchful over conscience, and practiced in self-government.

In every English child one feels something of the national motto--“God

and my right,” and in every English household one has a sense that the

home is a citadel, or better still, a ship in which every one has

his place. Naturally in such a world the value set on family life

corresponds with the cost of producing it; it is sweet to those whose

efforts maintain it.

October 14, 1872.--The man who gives himself to contemplation looks on

at, rather than directs his life, is rather a spectator than an actor,

seeks rather to understand than to achieve. Is this mode of existence

illegitimate, immoral? Is one bound to act? Is such detachment an

idiosyncrasy to be respected or a sin to be fought against? I have

always hesitated on this point, and I have wasted years in futile

self-reproach and useless fits of activity. My western conscience,

penetrated as it is with Christian morality, has always persecuted my

oriental quietism and Buddhist tendencies. I have not dared to approve

myself, I have not known how to correct myself. In this, as in all else,

I have remained divided, and perplexed, wavering between two extremes.

So equilibrium is somehow preserved, but the crystallization of action

or thought becomes impossible.

Having early a glimpse of the absolute, I have never had the indiscreet

effrontery of individualism. What right have I to make a merit of a

defect? I have never been able to see any necessity for imposing myself

upon others, nor for succeeding. I have seen nothing clearly except my

own deficiencies and the superiority of others. That is not the way to

make a career. With varied aptitudes and a fair intelligence, I had

no dominant tendency, no imperious faculty, so that while by virtue of

capacity I felt myself free, yet when free I could not discover what was

best. Equilibrium produced indecision, and indecision has rendered all

my faculties barren.

November 8, 1872. (_Friday_).--I have been turning over the “Stoics”

again. Poor Louisa Siefert! [Footnote: Louise Siefert, a modern French

poetess, died 1879. In addition to “Les Stoïques,” she published

“L’Année Républicaine,” Paris 1869, and other works.] Ah! we play the

stoic, and all the while the poisoned arrow in the side pierces and

wounds, _lethalis arundo_. What is it that, like all passionate souls,

she really craves for? Two things which are contradictory--glory

and happiness. She adores two incompatibles--the Reformation and the

Revolution, France and the contrary of France; her talent itself is a

combination of two opposing qualities, inwardness and brilliancy, noisy

display and lyrical charm. She dislocates the rhythm of her verse,

while at the same time she has a sensitive ear for rhyme. She is always

wavering between Valmore and Baudelaire, between Leconte de Lisle

and Sainte-Beuve--that is to say, her taste is a bringing together of

extremes. She herself has described it:

“Toujours extrême en mes désirs,

Jadis, enfant joyeuse et folle,

Souvent une seule parole

Bouleversait tous mes plaisirs.”

But what a fine instrument she possesses! what strength of soul! what

wealth of imagination!

December 3, 1872.--What a strange dream! I was under an illusion and yet

not under it; I was playing a comedy to myself, deceiving my imagination

without being able to deceive my consciousness. This power which dreams

have of fusing incompatibles together, of uniting what is exclusive, of

identifying yes and no, is what is most wonderful and most symbolical

in them. In a dream our individuality is not shut up within itself; it

envelops, so to speak, its surroundings; it is the landscape, and all

that it contains, ourselves included. But if our imagination is not our

own, if it is impersonal, then personality is but a special and limited

case of its general functions. _A fortiori_ it would be the same for

thought. And if so, thought might exist without possessing itself

individually, without embodying itself in an _ego_. In other words,

dreams lead us to the idea of an imagination enfranchised from the

limits of personality, and even of a thought which should be no longer

conscious. The individual who dreams is on the way to become dissolved

in the universal phantasmagoria of Maïa. Dreams are excursions into the

limbo of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison. The man

who dreams is but the _locale_ of various phenomena of which he is the

spectator in spite of himself; he is passive and impersonal; he is the

plaything of unknown vibrations and invisible sprites.

The man who should never issue from the state of dream would have never

attained humanity, properly so called, but the man who had never dreamed

would only know the mind in its completed or manufactured state, and

would not be able to understand the genesis of personality; he would

be like a crystal, incapable of guessing what crystallization means.

So that the waking life issues from the dream life, as dreams are an

emanation from the nervous life, and this again is the fine flower of

organic life. Thought is the highest point of a series of ascending

metamorphoses, which is called nature. Personality by means of thought,

recovers in inward profundity what it has lost in extension, and makes

up for the rich accumulations of receptive passivity by the enormous

privilege of that empire over self which is called liberty. Dreams, by

confusing and suppressing all limits, make us feel, indeed, the severity

of the conditions attached to the higher existence; but conscious and

voluntary thought alone brings knowledge and allows us to act--that is

to say, is alone capable of science and of perfection. Let us then take

pleasure in dreaming for reasons of psychological curiosity and mental

recreation; but let us never speak ill of thought, which is our strength

and our dignity. Let us begin as Orientals, and end as Westerns, for

these are the two halves of wisdom.

December 11, 1872.--A deep and dreamless sleep and now I wake up to the

gray, lowering, rainy sky, which has kept us company for so long. The

air is mild, the general outlook depressing. I think that it is partly

the fault of my windows, which are not very clean, and contribute by

their dimness to this gloomy aspect of the outer world. Rain and smoke

have besmeared them.

Between us and things how many screens there are! Mood, health, the

tissues of the eye, the window-panes of our cell, mist, smoke, rain,

dust, and light itself--and all infinitely variable! Heraclitus said:

“No man bathes twice in the same river.” I feel inclined to say; No one

sees the same landscape twice over, for a window is one kaleidoscope,

and the spectator another.

What is madness? Illusion, raised to the second power. A sound mind

establishes regular relations, a _modus vivendi_, between things, men,

and itself, and it is under the delusion that it has got hold of stable

truth and eternal fact. Madness does not even see what sanity sees,

deceiving itself all the while by the belief that it sees better than

sanity. The sane mind or common sense confounds the fact of experience

with necessary fact, and assumes in good faith that what is, is the

measure of what may be; while madness cannot perceive any difference

between what is and what it imagines--it confounds its dreams with

reality.

Wisdom consists in rising superior both to madness and to common sense,

and in lending one’s self to the universal illusion without becoming its

dupe. It is best, on the whole, for a man of taste who knows how to be

gay with the gay, and serious with the serious, to enter into the

game of Maïa, and to play his part with a good grace in the fantastic

tragi-comedy which is called the Universe. It seems to me that here

intellectualism reaches its limit. [Footnote: “We all believe in duty,”

says M. Renan, “and in the triumph of righteousness;” but it is possible

notwithstanding, “que tout le contraire soit vrai--et que le monde ne

soit qu’une amusante féerie dont aucun dieu ne se soucie. Il faut donc

nous arranger de maniere à ceque, dans le cas où le seconde hypothèse

serait la vraie, nous n’ayons pas été trop dupés.”

This strain of remark, which is developed at considerable length, is

meant as a criticism of Amiel’s want of sensitiveness to the irony of

things. But in reality, as the passage in the text shows, M. Renan is

only expressing a feeling with which Amiel was just as familiar as his

critic. Only he is delivered from this last doubt of all by his habitual

seriousness; by that sense of “horror and awe” which M. Renan puts away

from him. Conscience saves him “from the sorceries of Maïa.”] The mind,

in its intellectual capacity, arrives at the intuition that all reality

is but the dream of a dream. What delivers us from the palace of dreams

is pain, personal pain; it is also the sense of obligation, or that

which combines the two, the pain of sin; and again it is love; in short,

the moral order. What saves us from the sorceries of Maïa is

conscience; conscience dissipates the narcotic vapors, the opium-like

hallucinations, the placid stupor of contemplative indifference. It

drives us into contact with the terrible wheels within wheels of human

suffering and human responsibility; it is the bugle-call, the cockcrow,

which puts the phantoms to flight; it is the armed archangel who chases

man from an artificial paradise. Intellectualism may be described as an

intoxication conscious of itself; the moral energy which replaces it,

on the other hand, represents a state of fast, a famine and a sleepless

thirst. Alas! Alas!

Those who have the most frivolous idea of sin are just those who suppose

that there is a fixed gulf between good people and others.

* * * * *

The ideal which the wife and mother makes for herself, the manner in

which she understands duty and life, contain the fate of the community.

Her faith becomes the star of the conjugal ship, and her love the

animating principle that fashions the future of all belonging to her.

Woman is the salvation or destruction of the family. She carries its

destinies in the folds of her mantle.

* * * * *

Perhaps it is not desirable that a woman should be free in mind; she

would immediately abuse her freedom. She cannot become philosophical

without losing her special gift, which is the worship of all that is

individual, the defense of usage, manners, beliefs, traditions. Her

rôle is to slacken the combustion of thought. It is analogous to that of

azote in vital air.

* * * * *

In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past--a pious guardian

of some affection, of which the object has disappeared.

January 6, 1873.--I have been reading the seven tragedies of Aeschylus,

in the translation of Leconte de Lisle. The “Prometheus” and the

“Eumenides” are greatest where all is great; they have the sublimity of

the old prophets. Both depict a religious revolution--a profound crisis

in the life of humanity. In “Prometheus” it is civilization wrenched

from the jealous hands of the gods; in the “Eumenides” it is the

transformation of the idea of justice, and the substitution of atonement

and pardon for the law of implacable revenge. “Prometheus” shows us the

martyrdom which waits for all the saviors of men; the “Eumenides” is the

glorification of Athens and the Areopagus--that is to say, of a truly

human civilization. How magnificent it is as poetry, and how small

the adventures of individual passion seem beside this colossal type of

tragedy, of which the theme is the destinies of nations!