March 31, 1873. (4 P. M.)--

“En quel songe

Se plonge

Mon coeur, et que veut-il?”

For an hour past I have been the prey of a vague anxiety; I recognize

my old enemy.... It is a sense of void and anguish; a sense of something

lacking: what? Love, peace--God perhaps. The feeling is one of pure

want unmixed with hope, and there is anguish in it because I can clearly

distinguish neither the evil nor its remedy.

“O printemps sans pitié, dans l’âme endolorie,

Avec tes chants d’oiseaux, tes brises, ton azur,

Tu creuses sourdement, conspirateur obscur,

Le gouffre des langueurs et de la rêverie.”

Of all the hours of the day, in fine weather, the afternoon, about 3

o’clock, is the time which to me is most difficult to bear. I never

feel more strongly than I do then, “_le vide effrayant de la vie_,”

the stress of mental anxiety, or the painful thirst for happiness. This

torture born of the sunlight is a strange phenomenon. Is it that the

sun, just as it brings out the stain upon a garment, the wrinkles in

a face, or the discoloration of the hair, so also it illumines with

inexorable distinctness the scars and rents of the heart? Does it rouse

in us a sort of shame of existence? In any case the bright hours of the

day are capable of flooding the whole soul with melancholy, of kindling

in us the passion for death, or suicide, or annihilation, or of driving

us to that which is next akin to death, the deadening of the senses

by the pursuit of pleasure. They rouse in the lonely man a horror of

himself; they make him long to escape from his own misery and solitude--

“Le coeur trempé sept fois dans le néant divin.”

People talk of the temptations to crime connected with darkness, but

the dumb sense of desolation which is often the product of the most

brilliant moment of daylight must not be forgotten either. From the one,

as from the other, God is absent; but in the first case a man follows

his senses and the cry of his passion; in the second, he feels himself

lost and bewildered, a creature forsaken by all the world.

“En nous sont deux instincts qui bravent la raison,

C’est l’effroi du bonheur et la soif du poison.

Coeur solitaire, à toi prends garde!”

April 3, 1873.--I have been to see my friends ----. Their niece has just

arrived with two of her children, and the conversation turned on Father

Hyacinthe’s lecture.

Women of an enthusiastic temperament have a curious way of speaking of

extempore preachers and orators. They imagine that inspiration radiates

from a crowd as such, and that inspiration is all that is wanted. Could

there be a more _naïf_ and childish explanation of what is really a

lecture in which nothing has been left to accident, neither the

plan, nor the metaphors, nor even the length of the whole, and where

everything has been prepared with the greatest care! But women, in their

love of what is marvelous and miraculous, prefer to ignore all this. The

meditation, the labor, the calculation of effects, the art, in a word,

which have gone to the making of it, diminishes for them the value of

the thing, and they prefer to believe it fallen from heaven, or sent

down from on high. They ask for bread, but cannot bear the idea of a

baker. The sex is superstitious, and hates to understand what it wishes

to admire. It would vex it to be forced to give the smaller share to

feeling, and the larger share to thought. It wishes to believe that

imagination can do the work of reason, and feeling the work of science,

and it never asks itself how it is that women, so rich in heart and

imagination, have never distinguished themselves as orators--that is to

say, have never known how to combine a multitude of facts, ideas, and

impulses, into one complex unity. Enthusiastic women never even suspect

the difference that there is between the excitement of a popular

harangue, which is nothing but a mere passionate outburst, and the

unfolding of a didactic process, the aim of which is to prove something

and to convince its hearers. Therefore, for them, study, reflection,

technique, count as nothing; the improvisatore mounts upon the tripod,

Pallas all armed issues from his lips, and conquers the applause of the

dazzled assembly.

Evidently women divide orators into two groups; the artisans of speech,

who manufacture their laborious discourses by the aid of the midnight

lamp, and the inspired souls, who simply give themselves the trouble

to be born. They will never understand the saying of Quintilian, “_Fit

orator, nascitur poeta._”

The enthusiasm which acts is perhaps an enlightening force, but the

enthusiasm which accepts is very like blindness. For this latter

enthusiasm confuses the value of things, ignores their shades of

difference, and is an obstacle to all sensible criticism and all

calm judgment. The “Ewig-Weibliche” favors exaggeration, mysticism,

sentimentalism--all that excites and startles. It is the enemy of

clearness, of a calm and rational view of things, the antipodes of

criticism and of science. I have had only too much sympathy and weakness

for the feminine nature. The very excess of my former indulgence toward

it makes me now more conscious of its infirmity. Justice and science,

law and reason, are virile things, and they come before imagination,

feeling, reverie, and fancy. When one reflects that Catholic

superstition is maintained by women, one feels how needful it is not to

hand over the reins to the “Eternal Womanly.”

May 23, 1873.--The fundamental error of France lies in her psychology.

France has always believed that to say a thing is the same as to do

it, as though speech were action, as though rhetoric were capable of

modifying the tendencies, habits, and character of real beings, and as

though verbiage were an efficient substitute for will, conscience, and

education.

France proceeds by bursts of eloquence, of cannonading, or of

law-making; she thinks that so she can change the nature of things; and

she produces only phrases and ruins. She has never understood the first

line of Montesquieu: “Laws are necessary relations, derived from the

nature of things.” She will not see that her incapacity to organize

liberty comes from her own nature; from the notions which she has of the

individual, of society, of religion, of law, of duty--from the manner

in which she brings up children. Her way is to plant trees downward,

and then she is astonished at the result! Universal suffrage, with a bad

religion and a bad popular education, means perpetual wavering between

anarchy and dictatorship, between the red and the black, between Danton

and Loyola.

How many scapegoats will Prance sacrifice before it occurs to her to

beat her own breast in penitence?

August 18, 1873. (_Scheveningen_).--Yesterday, Sunday, the landscape was

clear and distinct, the air bracing, the sea bright and gleaming, and

of an ashy-blue color. There were beautiful effects of beach, sea, and

distance; and dazzling tracks of gold upon the waves, after the sun had

sunk below the bands of vapor drawn across the middle sky, and before

it had disappeared in the mists of the sea horizon. The place was very

full. All Scheveningen and the Hague, the village and the capital,

had streamed out on to the terrace, amusing themselves at innumerable

tables, and swamping the strangers and the bathers. The orchestra played

some Wagner, some Auber, and some waltzes. What was all the world doing?

Simply enjoying life.

A thousand thoughts wandered through my brain. I thought how much

history it had taken to make what I saw possible; Judaea, Egypt, Greece,

Germany, Gaul; all the centuries from Moses to Napoleon, and all the

zones from Batavia to Guiana, had united in the formation of this

gathering. The industry, the science, the art, the geography, the

commerce, the religion of the whole human race, are repeated in every

human combination; and what we see before our own eyes at any given

moment is inexplicable without reference to all that has ever been. This

interlacing of the ten thousand threads which necessity weaves into the

production of one single phenomenon is a stupefying thought. One feels

one’s self in the presence of law itself--allowed a glimpse of the

mysterious workshop of nature. The ephemeral perceives the eternal.

What matters the brevity of the individual span, seeing that the

generations, the centuries, and the worlds themselves are but occupied

forever with the ceaseless reproduction of the hymn of life, in all

the hundred thousand modes and variations which make up the universal

symphony? The motive is always the same; the monad has but one law:

all truths are but the variation of one single truth. The universe

represents the infinite wealth of the Spirit seeking in vain to exhaust

all possibilities, and the goodness of the Creator, who would fain share

with the created all that sleeps within the limbo of Omnipotence.

To contemplate and adore, to receive and give back, to have uttered

one’s note and moved one’s grain of sand, is all which is expected from

such insects as we are; it is enough to give motive and meaning to our

fugitive apparition in existence....

After the concert was over the paved esplanade behind the hotels and the

two roads leading to the Hague were alive with people. One might have

fancied one’s self upon one of the great Parisian boulevards just when

the theaters are emptying themselves--there were so many carriages,

omnibuses, and cabs. Then, when the human tumult had disappeared, the

peace of the starry heaven shone out resplendent, and the dreamy glimmer

of the Milky Way was only answered by the distant murmur of the ocean.

_Later_.--What is it which has always come between real life and me?

What glass screen has, as it were, interposed itself between me and the

enjoyment, the possession, the contact of things, leaving me only the

role of the looker-on?

False shame, no doubt. I have been ashamed to desire. Fatal result

of timidity, aggravated by intellectual delusion! This renunciation

beforehand of all natural ambitions, this systematic putting aside of

all longings and all desires, has perhaps been false in idea; it has

been too like a foolish, self-inflicted mutilation. Fear, too, has had a

large share in it--

“La peur de ce que j’aime est ma fatalité.”

I very soon discovered that it was simpler for me to give up a wish than

to satisfy it. Not being able to obtain all that my nature longed for,

I renounced the whole _en bloc_, without even taking the trouble to

determine in detail what might have attracted me; for what was the good

of stirring up trouble in one’s self and evoking images of inaccessible

treasure?

Thus I anticipated in spirit all possible disillusions, in the true

stoical fashion. Only, with singular lack of logic, I have sometimes

allowed regret to overtake me, and I have looked at conduct founded upon

exceptional principles with the eyes of the ordinary man. I should have

been ascetic to the end; contemplation ought to have been enough for me,

especially now, when the hair begins to whiten. But, after all, I am

a man, and not a theorem. A system cannot suffer, but I suffer. Logic

makes only one demand--that of consequence; but life makes a thousand;

the body wants health, the imagination cries out for beauty, and the

heart for love; pride asks for consideration, the soul yearns for peace,

the conscience for holiness; our whole being is athirst for happiness

and for perfection; and we, tottering, mutilated, and incomplete, cannot

always feign philosophic insensibility; we stretch out our arms toward

life, and we say to it under our breath, “Why--why--hast thou deceived

me?”

August 19,1873. (_Scheveningen_).--I have had a morning walk. It has

been raining in the night. There are large clouds all round; the sea,

veined with green and drab, has put on the serious air of labor. She

is about her business, in no threatening but at the same time in no

lingering mood. She is making her clouds, heaping up her sands, visiting

her shores and bathing them with foam, gathering up her floods for

the tide, carrying the ships to their destinations, and feeding the

universal life. I found in a hidden nook a sheet of fine sand which the

water had furrowed and folded like the pink palate of a kitten’s mouth,

or like a dappled sky. Everything repeats itself by analogy, and each

little fraction of the earth reproduces in a smaller and individual

form all the phenomena of the planet. Farther on I came across a bank of

crumbling shells, and it was borne in upon me that the sea-sand itself

might well be only the detritus of the organic life of preceding eras,

a vast monument or pyramid of immemorial age, built up by countless

generations of molluscs who have labored at the architecture of the

shores like good workmen of God. If the dunes and the mountains are the

dust of living creatures who have preceded us, how can we doubt but that

our death will be as serviceable as our life, and that nothing which has

been lent is lost? Mutual borrowing and temporary service seem to be the

law of existence. Only, the strong prey upon and devour the weak,

and the concrete inequality of lots within the abstract equality of

destinies wounds and disquiets the sense of justice.

_Same day_.--A new spirit governs and inspires the generation which will

succeed me. It is a singular sensation to feel the grass growing under

one’s feet, to see one’s self intellectually uprooted. One must address

one’s contemporaries. Younger men will not listen to you. Thought, like

love, will not tolerate a gray hair. Knowledge herself loves the young,

as Fortune used to do in olden days. Contemporary civilization does

not know what to do with old age; in proportion as it defies physical

experiment, it despises moral experience. One sees therein the triumph

of Darwinism; it is a state of war, and war must have young soldiers; it

can only put up with age in its leaders when they have the strength and

the mettle of veterans.

In point of fact, one must either be strong or disappear, either

constantly rejuvenate one’s self or perish. It is as though the humanity

of our day had, like the migratory birds, an immense voyage to make

across space; she can no longer support the weak or help on the

laggards. The great assault upon the future makes her hard and pitiless

to all who fall by the way. Her motto is, “The devil take the hindmost.”

The worship of strength has never lacked altars, but it looks as though

the more we talk of justice and humanity, the more that other god sees

his kingdom widen.

August 20, 1873. (_Scheveningen_).--I have now watched the sea which

beats upon this shore under many different aspects. On the whole, I

should class it with the Baltic. As far as color, effect, and landscape

go, it is widely different from the Breton or Basque ocean, and, above

all, from the Mediterranean. It never attains to the blue-green of the

Atlantic, nor the indigo of the Ionian Sea. Its scale of color runs from

flint to emerald, and when it turns to blue, the blue is a turquoise

shade splashed with gray. The sea here is not amusing itself; it has a

busy and serious air, like an Englishman or a Dutchman. Neither polyps

nor jelly-fish, neither sea-weed nor crabs enliven the sands at low

water; the sea life is poor and meagre. What is wonderful is the

struggle of man against a miserly and formidable power. Nature has done

little for him, but she allows herself to be managed. Stepmother though

she be, she is accommodating, subject to the occasional destruction of a

hundred thousand lives in a single inundation.

The air inside the dune is altogether different from that outside it.

The air of the sea is life-giving, bracing, oxydized; the air inland

is soft, relaxing, and warm. In the same way there are two Hollands

in every Dutchman: there is the man of the _polder_, heavy, pale,

phlegmatic, slow, patient himself, and trying to the patience of others,

and there is the man of the _dune_, of the harbor, the shore, the sea,

who is tenacious, seasoned, persevering, sunburned, daring. Where the

two agree is in calculating prudence, and in methodical persistency of

effort.

August 22, 1873. (_Scheveningen_).--The weather is rainy, the whole

atmosphere gray; it is a time favorable to thought and meditation. I

have a liking for such days as these; they revive one’s converse with

one’s self and make it possible to live the inner life; they are quiet

and peaceful, like a song in a minor key. We are nothing but thought,

but we feel our life to its very center. Our very sensations turn to

reverie. It is a strange state of mind; it is like those silences

in worship which are not the empty moments of devotion, but the full

moments, and which are so because at such times the soul, instead

of being polarized, dispersed, localized, in a single impression or

thought, feels her own totality and is conscious of herself. She tastes

her own substance. She is no longer played upon, colored, set in motion,

affected, from without; she is in equilibrium and at rest. Openness and

self-surrender become possible to her; she contemplates and she adores.

She sees the changeless and the eternal enwrapping all the phenomena of

time. She is in the religious state, in harmony with the general order,

or at least in intellectual harmony. For _holiness_, indeed, more is

wanted--a harmony of will, a perfect self-devotion, death to self and

absolute submission.

Psychological peace--that harmony which is perfect but virtual--is but

the zero, the potentiality of all numbers; it is not that moral peace

which is victorious over all ills, which is real, positive, tried by

experience, and able to face whatever fresh storms may assail it.

The peace of fact is not the peace of principle. There are indeed two

happinesses, that of nature and that of conquest--two equilibria, that

of Greece and that of Nazareth--two kingdoms, that of the natural man

and that of the regenerate man.

_Later_. (_Scheveningen_).--Why do doctors so often make mistakes?

Because they are not sufficiently individual in their diagnoses or their

treatment. They class a sick man under some given department of their

nosology, whereas every invalid is really a special case, a unique

example. How is it possible that so coarse a method of sifting should

produce judicious therapeutics? Every illness is a factor simple or

complex, which is multiplied by a second factor, invariably complex--the

individual, that is to say, who is suffering from it, so that the result

is a special problem, demanding a special solution, the more so the

greater the remoteness of the patient from childhood or from country

life.

The principal grievance which I have against the doctors is that they

neglect the real problem, which is to seize the unity of the individual

who claims their care. Their methods of investigation are far too

elementary; a doctor who does not read you to the bottom is ignorant of

essentials. To me the ideal doctor would be a man endowed with profound

knowledge of life and of the soul, intuitively divining any suffering

or disorder of whatever kind, and restoring peace by his mere presence.

Such a doctor is possible, but the greater number of them lack

the higher and inner life, they know nothing of the transcendent

laboratories of nature; they seem to me superficial, profane, strangers

to divine things, destitute of intuition and sympathy. The model doctor

should be at once a genius, a saint, a man of God.

September 11, 1873. (_Amsterdam_).--The doctor has just gone. He says

I have fever about me, and does not think that I can start for another

three days without imprudence. I dare not write to my Genevese friends

and tell them that I am coming back from the sea in a radically worse

state of strength and throat than when I went there, and that I have

only wasted my time, my trouble, my money, and my hopes....

This contradictory double fact--on the one side an eager hopefulness

springing up afresh after all disappointments, and on the other an

experience almost invariably unfavorable--can be explained like all

illusions by the whim of nature, which either wills us to be deceived or

wills us to act as if we were so.

Skepticism is the wiser course, but in delivering us from error it

tends to paralyze life. Maturity of mind consists in taking part in the

prescribed game as seriously as though one believed in it. Good-humored

compliance, tempered by a smile, is, on the whole, the best line to

take; one lends one’s self to an optical illusion, and the voluntary

concession has an air of liberty. Once imprisoned in existence, we must

submit to its laws with a good grace; to rebel against it only ends

in impotent rage, when once we have denied ourselves the solution of

suicide.

Humility and submission, or the religious point of view; clear-eyed

indulgence with a touch of irony, or the point of view of worldly

wisdom--these two attitudes are possible. The second is sufficient for

the minor ills of life, the other is perhaps necessary in the greater

ones. The pessimism of Schopenhauer supposes at least health and

intellect as means of enduring the rest of life. But optimism either of

the stoical or the Christian sort is needed to make it possible for

us to bear the worst sufferings of flesh, heart and soul. If we are to

escape the grip of despair, we must believe either that the whole of

things at least is good, or that grief is a fatherly grace, a purifying

trial.

There can be no doubt that the idea of a happy immortality, serving as

a harbor of refuge from the tempests of this mortal existence, and

rewarding the fidelity, the patience, the submission, and the courage of

the travelers on life’s sea--there can be no doubt that this idea, the

strength of so many generations, and the faith of the church, carries

with it inexpressible consolation to those who are wearied, burdened,

and tormented by pain and suffering. To feel one’s self individually

cared for and protected by God gives a special dignity and beauty to

life. Monotheism lightens the struggle for existence. But does the study

of nature allow of the maintenance of those local revelations which are

called Mosaism, Christianity, Islamism? These religions founded upon an

infantine cosmogony, and upon a chimerical history of humanity, can they

bear confronting with modern astronomy and geology? The present mode of

escape, which consists in trying to satisfy the claims of both science

and faith--of the science which contradicts all the ancient beliefs,

and the faith which, in the case of things that are beyond nature

and incapable of verification, affirms them on her own responsibility

only--this mode of escape cannot last forever. Every fresh cosmical

conception demands a religion which corresponds to it. Our age of

transition stands bewildered between the two incompatible methods,

the scientific method and the religious method, and between the two

certitudes, which contradict each other.

Surely the reconciliation of the two must be sought for in the moral

law, which is also a fact, and every step of which requires for its

explanation another cosmos than the cosmos of necessity. Who knows if

necessity is not a particular case of liberty, and its condition? Who

knows if nature is not a laboratory for the fabrication of thinking

beings who are ultimately to become free creatures? Biology protests,

and indeed the supposed existence of souls, independently of time,

space, and matter, is a fiction of faith, less logical than the Platonic

dogma. But the question remains open. We may eliminate the idea of

purpose from nature, yet, as the guiding conception of the highest being

of our planet, it is a fact, and a fact which postulates a meaning in

the history of the universe.

My thought is straying in vague paths: why? because I have no creed.

All my studies end in notes of interrogation, and that I may not draw

premature or arbitrary conclusions I draw none.

_Later on_.--My creed has melted away, but I believe in good, in the

moral order, and in salvation; religion for me is to live and die in

God, in complete abandonment to the holy will which is at the root of

nature and destiny. I believe even in the gospel, the good news--that

is to say, in the reconciliation of the sinner with God, by faith in the

love of a pardoning Father.

October 4, 1873. (_Geneva_).--I have been dreaming a long while in the

moonlight, which floods my room with a radiance, full of vague mystery.

The state of mind induced in us by this fantastic light is itself so dim

and ghost-like that analysis loses its way in it, and arrives at nothing

articulate. It is something indefinite and intangible, like the noise of

waves which is made up of a thousand fused and mingled sounds. It is

the reverberation of all the unsatisfied desires of the soul, of all the

stifled sorrows of the heart, mingling in a vague sonorous whole, and

dying away in cloudy murmurs. All those imperceptible regrets, which

never individually reach the consciousness, accumulate at last into a

definite result; they become the voice of a feeling of emptiness and

aspiration; their tone is melancholy itself. In youth the tone of

these Aeolian vibrations of the heart is all hope--a proof that these

thousands of indistinguishable accents make up indeed the fundamental

note of our being, and reveal the tone of our whole situation. Tell me

what you feel in your solitary room when the full moon is shining in

upon you and your lamp is dying out, and I will tell you how old you

are, and I shall know if you are happy.

* * * * *

The best path through life is the high road, which initiates us at

the right moment into all experience. Exceptional itineraries are

suspicious, and matter for anxiety. What is normal is at once most

convenient, most honest, and most wholesome. Cross roads may tempt us

for one reason or another, but it is very seldom that we do not come to

regret having taken them.

* * * * *

Each man begins the world afresh, and not one fault of the first man has

been avoided by his remotest descendant. The collective experience

of the race accumulates, but individual experience dies with the

individual, and the result is that institutions become wiser and

knowledge as such increases; but the young man, although more

cultivated, is just as presumptuous, and not less fallible to-day than

he ever was. So that absolutely there is progress, and relatively there

is none. Circumstances improve, but merit remains the same. The whole is

better, perhaps, but man is not positively better--he is only different.

His defects and his virtues change their form, but the total balance

does not show him to be the richer. A thousand things advance, nine

hundred and ninety-eight fall back, this is progress. There is nothing

in it to be proud of, but something, after all, to console one.

February 4, 1874.--I am still reading the “Origines du Christianisme” by

Ernest Havet. [Footnote: Ernest Havet, born 1813, a distinguished French

scholar and professor. He became professor of Latin oratory at the

Collège de France in 1855, and a member of the Institute in January,

1880. His admirable edition of the “Pensées de Pascal” is well-known.

“Le Christianisme et ses Origines,” an important book, in four volumes,

was developed from a series of articles in the _Revue des deux Mondes_,

and the _Revue Contemporaine_.] I like the book and I dislike it. I like

it for its independence and courage; I dislike it for the insufficiency

of its fundamental ideas, and the imperfection of its categories.

The author, for instance, has no clear idea of religion; and his

philosophy of history is superficial. He is a Jacobin. “The Republic and

Free Thought”--he cannot get beyond that. This curt and narrow school

of opinion is the refuge of men of independent mind, who have been

scandalized by the colossal fraud of ultramontanism; but it leads rather

to cursing history than to understanding it. It is the criticism of the

eighteenth century, of which the general result is purely negative.

But Voltairianism is only the half of the philosophic mind. Hegel frees

thought in a very different way.

Havet, too, makes another mistake. He regards Christianity as synonymous

with Roman Catholicism and with the church. I know very well that the

Roman Church does the same, and that with her the assimilation is a

matter of sound tactics; but scientifically it is inexact. We ought

not even to identify Christianity with the gospel, nor the gospel with

religion in general. It is the business of critical precision to

clear away these perpetual confusions in which Christian practice and

Christian preaching abound. To disentangle ideas, to distinguish and

limit them, to fit them into their true place and order, is the first

duty of science whenever it lays hands upon such chaotic and complex

things as manners, idioms, or beliefs. Entanglement is the condition

of life; order and clearness are the signs of serious and successful

thought.

Formerly it was the ideas of nature which were a tissue of errors and

incoherent fancies; now it is the turn of moral and psychological ideas.

The best issue from the present Babel would be the formation or the

sketching out of a truly scientific science of man.

February 16, 1874.--The multitude, who already possess force, and even,

according to the Republican view, right, have always been persuaded by

the Cleons of the day that enlightenment, wisdom, thought, and reason,

are also theirs. The game of these conjurors and quacks of universal

suffrage has always been to flatter the crowd in order to make an

instrument of it. They pretend to adore the puppet of which they pull

the threads.

The theory of radicalism is a piece of juggling, for it supposes

premises of which it knows the falsity; it manufactures the oracle

whose revelations it pretends to adore; it proclaims that the multitude

creates a brain for itself, while all the time it is the clever man who

is the brain of the multitude, and suggests to it what it is supposed

to invent. To reign by flattery has been the common practice of the

courtiers of all despotisms, the favorites of all tyrants; it is an old

and trite method, but none the less odious for that.

The honest politician should worship nothing but reason and justice, and

it is his business to preach them to the masses, who represent, on

an average, the age of childhood and not that of maturity. We corrupt

childhood if we tell it that it cannot be mistaken, and that it knows

more than its elders. We corrupt the masses when we tell them that they

are wise and far-seeing and possess the gift of infallibility.

It is one of Montesquieu’s subtle remarks, that the more wise men you

heap together the less wisdom you will obtain. Radicalism pretends that

the greater number of illiterate, passionate, thoughtless--above all,

young people, you heap together, the greater will be the enlightenment

resulting. The second thesis is no doubt the repartee to the first, but

the joke is a bad one. All that can be got from a crowd is instinct

or passion; the instinct may be good, but the passion may be bad, and

neither is the instinct capable of producing a clear idea, nor the

passion of leading to a just resolution.

A crowd is a material force, and the support of numbers gives a

proposition the force of law; but that wise and ripened temper of mind

which takes everything into account, and therefore tends to truth, is

never engendered by the impetuosity of the masses. The masses are the

material of democracy, but its form--that is to say, the laws which

express the general reason, justice, and utility--can only be rightly

shaped by wisdom, which is by no means a universal property. The

fundamental error of the radical theory is to confound the right to do

good with good itself, and universal suffrage with universal wisdom.

It rests upon a legal fiction, which assumes a real equality of

enlightenment and merit among those whom it declares electors. It is

quite possible, however, that these electors may not desire the public

good, and that even if they do, they may be deceived as to the manner

of realizing it. Universal suffrage is not a dogma--it is an instrument;

and according to the population in whose hands it is placed, the

instrument is serviceable or deadly to the proprietor.

February 27, 1874.--Among the peoples, in whom the social gifts are the

strongest, the individual fears ridicule above all things, and ridicule

is the certain result of originality. No one, therefore, wishes to make

a party of his own; every one wishes to be on the side of all the world.

“All the world” is the greatest of powers; it is sovereign, and calls

itself _we_. _We_ dress, _we_ dine, _we_ walk, _we_ go out, _we_ come

in, like this, and not like that. This _we_ is always right, whatever

it does. The subjects of _We_ are more prostrate than the slaves of the

East before the Padishah. The good pleasure of the sovereign decides

every appeal; his caprice is law. What _we_ does or says is called

custom, what it thinks is called opinion, what it believes to be

beautiful or good is called fashion. Among such nations as these _we_

is the brain, the conscience, the reason, the taste, and the judgment

of all. The individual finds everything decided for him without his

troubling about it. He is dispensed from the task of finding out

anything whatever. Provided that he imitates, copies, and repeats the

models furnished by _we_, he has nothing more to fear. He knows all that

he need know, and has entered into salvation.

April 29, 1874.--Strange reminiscence! At the end of the terrace of La

Treille, on the eastern side, as I looked down the slope, it seemed to

me that I saw once more in imagination a little path which existed

there when I was a child, and ran through the bushy underwood, which

was thicker then than it is now. It is at least forty years since this

impression disappeared from my mind. The revival of an image so dead and

so forgotten set me thinking. Consciousness seems to be like a book, in

which the leaves turned by life successively cover and hide each other

in spite of their semi-transparency; but although the book may be open

at the page of the present, the wind, for a few seconds, may blow back

the first pages into view.

And at death will these leaves cease to hide each other, and shall we

see all our past at once? Is death the passage from the successive to

the simultaneous--that is to say, from time to eternity? Shall we

then understand, in its unity, the poem or mysterious episode of our

existence, which till then we have spelled out phrase by phrase? And

is this the secret of that glory which so often enwraps the brow and

countenance of those who are newly dead? If so, death would be like the

arrival of a traveler at the top of a great mountain, whence he sees

spread out before him the whole configuration of the country, of which

till then he had had but passing glimpses. To be able to overlook one’s

own history, to divine its meaning in the general concert and in the

divine plan, would be the beginning of eternal felicity. Till then we

had sacrificed ourselves to the universal order, but then we should

understand and appreciate the beauty of that order. We had toiled

and labored under the conductor of the orchestra; and we should find

ourselves become surprised and delighted hearers. We had seen nothing

but our own little path in the mist; and suddenly a marvelous panorama

and boundless distances would open before our dazzled eyes. Why not?

May 31, 1874.--I have been reading the philosophical poems of Madame

Ackermann. She has rendered in fine verse that sense of desolation which

has been so often stirred in me by the philosophy of Schopenhauer, of

Hartmann, Comte, and Darwin. What tragic force and power! What thought

and passion! She has courage for everything, and attacks the most

tremendous subjects.

Science is implacable; will it suppress all religions? All those

which start from a false conception of nature, certainly. But if the

scientific conception of nature proves incapable of bringing harmony and

peace to man, what will happen? Despair is not a durable situation. We

shall have to build a moral city without God, without an immortality

of the soul, without hope. Buddhism and stoicism present themselves as

possible alternatives.

But even if we suppose that there is no finality in the cosmos, it is

certain that man has ends at which he aims, and if so the notion of

end or purpose is a real phenomenon, although a limited one. Physical

science may very well be limited by moral science, and _vice versâ_. But

if these two conceptions of the world are in opposition, which must give

way?

I still incline to believe that nature is the virtuality of mind--that

the soul is the fruit of life, and liberty the flower of necessity--that

all is bound together, and that nothing can be done without. Our modern

philosophy has returned to the point of view of the Ionians, the [Greek:

_physikoi_], or naturalist thinkers. But it will have to pass once

more through Plato and through Aristotle, through the philosophy of

“goodness” and “purpose,” through the science of mind.

July 3, 1874.--Rebellion against common sense is a piece of childishness

of which I am quite capable. But it does not last long. I am soon

brought back to the advantages and obligations of my situation; I return

to a calmer self-consciousness. It is disagreeable to me, no doubt, to

realize all that is hopelessly lost to me, all that is now and will

be forever denied to me; but I reckon up my privileges as well as my

losses--I lay stress on what I have, and not only on what I want. And

so I escape from that terrible dilemma of “all or nothing,” which for me

always ends in the adoption of the second alternative. It seems to me

at such times that a man may without shame content himself with being

_some_ thing and _some_ one--

“Ni si haut, ni si bas....”

These brusque lapses into the formless, indeterminate state, are the

price of my critical faculty. All my former habits become suddenly

fluid; it seems to me that I am beginning life over again, and that all

my acquired capital has disappeared at a stroke. I am forever new-born;

I am a mind which has never taken to itself a body, a country, an

avocation, a sex, a species. Am I even quite sure of being a man, a

European, an inhabitant of this earth? It seems to me so easy to be

something else, that to be what I am appears to me a mere piece of

arbitrary choice. I cannot possibly take an accidental structure of

which the value is purely relative, seriously. When once a man has

touched the absolute, all that might be other than what it is seems to

him indifferent. All these ants pursuing their private ends excite his

mirth. He looks down from the moon upon his hovel; he beholds the earth

from the heights of the sun; he considers his life from the point of

view of the Hindoo pondering the days of Brahma; he sees the finite from

the distance of the infinite, and thenceforward the insignificance of

all those things which men hold to be important makes effort ridiculous,

passion burlesque, and prejudice absurd.

August 7, 1874. (_Clarens_).--A day perfectly beautiful, luminous,

limpid, brilliant.

I passed the morning in the churchyard; the “Oasis” was delightful.

Innumerable sensations, sweet and serious, peaceful and solemn, passed

over me.... Around me Russians, English, Swedes, Germans, were sleeping

their last sleep under the shadow of the Cubly. The landscape was one

vast splendor; the woods were deep and mysterious, the roses full blown;

all around me were butterflies--a noise of wings--the murmur of birds.

I caught glimpses through the trees of distant mists, of soaring

mountains, of the tender blue of the lake.... A little conjunction of

things struck me. Two ladies were tending and watering a grave; two

nurses were suckling their children. This double protest against death

had something touching and poetical in it. “Sleep, you who are dead; we,

the living, are thinking of you, or at least carrying on the pilgrimage

of the race!” such seemed to me the words in my ear. It was clear to me

that the Oasis of Clarens is the spot in which I should like to rest.

Here I am surrounded with memories; here death is like a sleep--a sleep

instinct with hope.

* * * * *

Hope is not forbidden us, but peace and submission are the essentials.

September 1, 1874. (_Clarens_).--On waking it seemed to me that I was

staring into the future with wide startled eyes. Is it indeed to _me_

that these things apply. [Footnote: Amiel had just received at the

hands of his doctor the medical verdict, which was his _arrêt de mort_.]

Incessant and growing humiliation, my slavery becoming heavier, my

circle of action steadily narrower!... What is hateful in my situation

is that deliverance can never be hoped for, and that one misery will

succeed another in such a way as to leave me no breathing space, not

even in the future, not even in hope. All possibilities are closed to

me, one by one. It is difficult for the natural man to escape from a

dumb rage against inevitable agony.

_Noon_.--An indifferent nature? A Satanic principle of things? A

good and just God? Three points of view. The second is improbable and

horrible. The first appeals to our stoicism. My organic combination has

never been anything but mediocre; it has lasted as long as it could.

Every man has his turn, and all must submit. To die quickly is a

privilege; I shall die by inches. Well, submit. Rebellion would be

useless and senseless. After all, I belong to the better-endowed half of

human-kind, and my lot is superior to the average.

But the third point of view alone can give joy. Only is it tenable? Is

there a particular Providence directing all the circumstances of our

life, and therefore imposing all our trials upon us for educational

ends? Is this heroic faith compatible with our actual knowledge of the

laws of nature? Scarcely; But what this faith makes objective we may

hold as subjective truth. The moral being may moralize his sufferings by

using natural facts for his own inner education. What he cannot change

he calls the will of God, and to will what God wills brings him peace.

To nature both our continued existence and our morality are equally

indifferent. But God, on the other hand, if God is, desires our

sanctification; and if suffering purifies us, then we may console

ourselves or suffering. This is what makes the great advantage of the

Christian faith; it is the triumph over pain, the victory over death.

There is but one thing necessary--death unto sin, the immolation of

our selfish will, the filial sacrifice of our desires. Evil consists

in living for _self_--that is to say, for one’s own vanity, pride,

sensuality, or even health. Righteousness consists in willingly

accepting one’s lot, in submitting to, and espousing the destiny

assigned us, in willing what God commands, in renouncing what he forbids

us, in consenting to what he takes from us or refuses us.

In my own particular case, what has been taken from me is health--that

is to say, the surest basis of all independence; but friendship and

material comfort are still left to me; I am neither called upon to bear

the slavery of poverty nor the hell of absolute isolation.

Health cut off, means marriage, travel, study, and work forbidden or

endangered. It means life reduced in attractiveness and utility by

five-sixths.

Thy will be done!

September 14, 1874. (_Charnex_).--A long walk and conversation with----.

We followed a high mountain path. Seated on the turf, and talking with

open heart, our eyes wandered over the blue immensity below us, and

the smiling outlines of the shore. All was friendly, azure-tinted,

caressing, to the sight. The soul I was reading was profound and pure.

Such an experience is like a flight into paradise. A few light clouds

climbed the broad spaces of the sky, steamers made long tracks upon the

water at our feet, white sails were dotted over the vast distance of

the lake, and sea-gulls like gigantic butterflies quivered above its

rippling surface.

September 21, 1874. (_Charnex_).--A wonderful day! Never has the lake

been bluer, or the landscape softer. It was enchanting. But tragedy is

hidden under the eclogue; the serpent crawls under the flowers. All the

future is dark. The phantoms which for three or four weeks I have been

able to keep at bay, wait for me behind the door, as the Eumenides

waited for Orestes. Hemmed in on all sides!

“On ne croit plus à son étoile,

On sent que derrière la toile

Sont le deuil, les maux et la mort.”

For a fortnight I have been happy, and now this happiness is going.

There are no more birds, but a few white or blue butterflies are still

left. Flowers are becoming rare--a few daisies in the fields, some blue

or yellow chicories and colchicums, some wild geraniums growing among

fragments of old walls, and the brown berries of the privet--this is all

we were able to find. In the fields they are digging potatoes, beating

down the nuts, and beginning the apple harvest. The leaves are thinning

and changing color; I watch them turning red on the pear-trees, gray on

the plums, yellow on the walnut-trees, and tinging the thickly-strewn

turf with shades of reddish-brown. We are nearing the end of the fine

weather; the coloring is the coloring of late autumn; there is no need

now to keep out of the sun. Everything is soberer, more measured, more

fugitive, less emphatic. Energy is gone, youth is past, prodigality

at an end, the summer over. The year is on the wane and tends toward

winter; it is once more in harmony with my own age and position, and

next Sunday it will keep my birthday. All these different consonances

form a melancholy harmony.

* * * * *

The distinguishing mark of religion is not so much liberty as obedience,

and its value is measured by the sacrifices which it can extract from

the individual.

* * * * *

A young girl’s love is a kind of piety. We must approach it with

adoration if we are not to profane it, and with poetry if we are to

understand it. If there is anything in the world which gives us a sweet,

ineffable impression, of the ideal, it is this trembling modest love. To

deceive it would be a crime. Merely to watch its unfolding life is bliss

to the beholder; he sees in it the birth of a divine marvel. When the

garland of youth fades on our brow, let us try at least to have the

virtues of maturity; may we grow better, gentler, graver, like the fruit

of the vine, while its leaf withers and falls.

* * * * *

To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the

most difficult chapters in the great art of living.

* * * * *

He who asks of life nothing but the improvement of his own nature, and

a continuous moral progress toward inward contentment and religious

submission, is less liable than any one else to miss and waste life.

January 2, 1875. (_Hyères_.)--In spite of my sleeping draught I have

had a bad night. Once it seemed as if I must choke, for I could breathe

neither way.

Could I be more fragile, more sensitive, more vulnerable! People talk to

me as if there were still a career before me, while all the time I know

that the ground is slipping from under me, and that the defense of my

health is already a hopeless task. At bottom, I am only living on out of

complaisance and without a shadow of self-delusion. I know that not

one of my desires will be realized, and for a long time I have had no

desires at all. I simply accept what comes to me as though it were a

bird perching on my window. I smile at it, but I know very well that my

visitor has wings and will not stay long. The resignation which comes

from despair has a kind of melancholy sweetness. It looks at life as

a man sees it from his death-bed, and judges it without bitterness and

without vain regrets.

I no longer hope to get well, or to be useful, or to be happy. I hope

that those who have loved me will love me to the end; I should wish to

have done them some good, and to leave them a tender memory of myself.

I wish to die without rebellion and without weakness; that is about all.

Is this relic of hope and of desire still too much? Let all be as God

will. I resign myself into his hands.

January 22, 1875. (_Hyères_).--The French mind, according to Gioberti,

apprehends only the outward form of truth, and exaggerates it by

isolating it, so that it acts as a solvent upon the realities with which

it works. It takes the shadow for the substance, the word for the thing,

appearance for reality, and abstract formula for truth. It lives in a

world of intellectual _assignats_. If you talk to a Frenchman of art, of

language, of religion, of the state, of duty, of the family, you feel in

his way of speaking that his thought remains outside the subject, that

he never penetrates into its substance, its inmost core. He is not

striving to understand it in its essence, but only to say something

plausible about it. On his lips the noblest words become thin and empty;

for example--mind, idea, religion. The French mind is superficial and

yet not comprehensive; it has an extraordinarily fine edge, and yet no

penetrating power. Its desire is to enjoy its own resources by the help

of things, but it has none of the respect, the disinterestedness, the

patience, and the self-forgetfulness, which, are indispensable if we

wish to see things as they are. Far from being the philosophic mind, it

is a mere counterfeit of it, for it does not enable a man to solve any

problem whatever, and remains incapable of understanding all that

is living, complex, and concrete. Abstraction is its original sin,

presumption its incurable defect, and plausibility its fatal limit.

The French language has no power of expressing truths of birth and

germination; it paints effects, results, the _caput mortuum_, but not

the cause, the motive power, the native force the development of any

phenomenon whatever. It is analytic and descriptive, but it explains

nothing, for it avoids all beginnings and processes of formation. With

it crystallization is not the mysterious act itself by which a substance

passes from the fluid state to the solid state. It is the product of

that act.

The thirst for truth is not a French passion. In everything appearance

is preferred to reality, the outside to the inside, the fashion to

the material, that which shines to that which profits, opinion to

conscience. That is to say, the Frenchman’s center of gravity is always

outside him--he is always thinking of others, playing to the gallery.

To him individuals are so many zeros; the unit which turns them into a

number must be added from outside; it may be royalty, the writer of the

day, the favorite newspaper, or any other temporary master of fashion.

All this is probably the result of an exaggerated sociability, which

weakens the soul’s forces of resistance, destroys its capacity for

investigation and personal conviction, and kills in it the worship of

the ideal.

January 27, 1875. (_Hyères_).--The whole atmosphere has a luminous

serenity, a limpid clearness. The islands are like swans swimming in a

golden stream. Peace, splendor, boundless space!... And I meanwhile look

quietly on while the soft hours glide away. I long to catch the wild

bird, happiness, and tame it. Above all, I long to share it with others.

These delicious mornings impress me indescribably. They intoxicate

me, they carry me away. I feel beguiled out of myself, dissolved in

sunbeams, breezes, perfumes, and sudden impulses of joy. And yet all the

time I pine for I know not what intangible Eden.

Lamartine in the “Préludes” has admirably described this oppressive

effect of happiness on fragile human nature. I suspect that the reason

for it is that the finite creature feels itself invaded by the infinite,

and the invasion produces dizziness, a kind of vertigo, a longing

to fling one’s self into the great gulf of being. To feel life too

intensely is to yearn for death; and for man, to die means to become

like unto the gods--to be initiated into the great mystery. Pathetic and

beautiful illusion.

_Ten o’clock in the evening_.--From one end to the other the day has

been perfect, and my walk this afternoon to Beau Vallon was one long

delight. It was like an expedition into Arcadia. Here was a wild and

woodland corner, which would have made a fit setting for a dance of

nymphs, and there an ilex overshadowing a rock, which reminded me of an

ode of Horace or a drawing of Tibur. I felt a kind of certainty that

the landscape had much that was Greek in it. And what made the sense of

resemblance the more striking was the sea, which one feels to be always

near, though one may not see it, and which any turn of the valley may

bring into view. We found out a little tower with an overgrown garden,

of which the owner might have been taken for a husbandman of the

Odyssey. He could scarcely speak any French, but was not without a

certain grave dignity. I translated to him the inscription on his

sun-dial, “_Hora est benefaciendi_,” which is beautiful, and pleased him

greatly. It would be an inspiring place to write a novel in. Only I do

not know whether the little den would have a decent room, and one

would certainly have to live upon eggs, milk, and figs, like Philemon.

February 15, 1875. (_Hyères_).--I have just been reading the two last

“Discours” at the French Academy, lingering over every word and weighing

every idea. This kind of writing is a sort of intellectual dainty, for

it is the art “of expressing truth with all the courtesy and finesse

possible;” the art of appearing perfectly at ease without the smallest

loss of manners; of being gracefully sincere, and of making criticism

itself a pleasure to the person criticized. Legacy as it is from

the monarchical tradition, this particular kind of eloquence is the

distinguishing mark of those men of the world who are also men of

breeding, and those men of letters who are also gentlemen. Democracy

could never have invented it, and in this delicate _genre_ of literature

France may give points to all rival peoples, for it is the fruit of that

refined and yet vigorous social sense which is produced by court and

drawing-room life, by literature and good company, by means of a mutual

education continued for centuries. This complicated product is as

original in its way as Athenian eloquence, but it is less healthy and

less durable. If ever France becomes Americanized this _genre_ at least

will perish, without hope of revival.

April 16, 1875. (_Hyères_).--I have already gone through the various

emotions of leave-taking. I have been wandering slowly through the

streets and up the castle hill, gathering a harvest of images and

recollections. Already I am full of regret that I have not made a better

study of the country, in which I have now spent four months and more. It

is like what happens when a friend dies; we accuse ourselves of having

loved him too little, or loved him ill; or it is like our own death,

when we look back upon life and feel that it has been misspent.

August 16,1875.--Life is but a daily oscillation between revolt and

submission, between the instinct of the _ego_, which is to expand,

to take delight in its own tranquil sense of inviolability, if not to

triumph in its own sovereignty, and the instinct of the soul, which is

to obey the universal order, to accept the will of God.

The cold renunciation of disillusioned reason brings no real peace.

Peace is only to be found in reconciliation with destiny, when destiny

seems, in the religious sense of the word, _good_; that is to say, when

man feels himself directly in the presence of God. Then, and then only,

does the will acquiesce. Nay more, it only completely acquiesces when it

adores. The soul only submits to the hardness of fate by virtue of

its discovery of a sublime compensation--the loving kindness of the

Almighty. That is to say, it cannot resign itself to lack or famine,

it shrinks from the void around it, and the happiness either of hope or

faith is essential to it. It may very well vary its objects, but some

object it must have. It may renounce its former idols, but it will

demand another cult. The soul hungers and thirsts after happiness, and

it is in vain that everything deserts it--it will never submit to its

abandonment.

August 28, 1875. (_Geneva_).--A word used by Sainte-Beuve à propos of

Benjamin Constant has struck me: it is the word _consideration_. To

possess or not to possess _consideration_ was to Madame de Staël a

matter of supreme importance--the loss of it an irreparable evil, the

acquirement of it a pressing necessity. What, then, is this good thing?

The esteem of the public. And how is it gained? By honorable character

and life, combined with a certain aggregate of services rendered and

of successes obtained. It is not exactly a good conscience, but it

is something like it, for it is the witness from without, if not the

witness from within. _Consideration_ is not reputation, still less

celebrity, fame, or glory; it has nothing to do with _savoir faire_, and

is not always the attendant of talent or genius. It is the reward given

to constancy in duty, to probity of conduct. It is the homage rendered

to a life held to be irreproachable. It is a little more than esteem,

and a little less than admiration. To enjoy public consideration is

at once a happiness and a power. The loss of it is a misfortune and a

source of daily suffering. Here am I, at the age of fifty-three,

without ever having given this idea the smallest place in my life. It is

curious, but the desire for consideration has been to me so little of a

motive that I have not even been conscious of such an idea at all.

The fact shows, I suppose, that for me the audience, the gallery, the

public, has never had more than a negative importance. I have neither

asked nor expected anything from it, not even justice; and to be a

dependent upon it, to solicit its suffrages and its good graces, has

always seemed to me an act of homage and flunkeyism against which my

pride has instinctively rebelled. I have never even tried to gain the

good will of a _côterìe_ or a newspaper, nor so much as the vote of

an elector. And yet it would have been a joy to me to be smiled upon,

loved, encouraged, welcomed, and to obtain what I was so ready to

give, kindness and good will. But to hunt down consideration and

reputation--to force the esteem of others--seemed to me an effort

unworthy of myself, almost a degradation. I have never even thought of

it.

Perhaps I have lost consideration by my indifference to it. Probably I

have disappointed public expectation by thus allowing an over-sensitive

and irritable consciousness to lead me into isolation and retreat. I

know that the world, which is only eager to silence you when you do

speak, is angry with your silence as soon as its own action has killed

in you the wish to speak. No doubt, to be silent with a perfectly clear

conscience a man must not hold a public office. I now indeed say to

myself that a professor is morally bound to justify his position by

publication; that students, authorities, and public are placed thereby

in a healthier relation toward him; that it is necessary for his good

repute in the world, and for the proper maintenance of his position. But

this point of view has not been a familiar one to me. I have endeavored

to give conscientious lectures, and I have discharged all the subsidiary

duties of my post to the best of my ability; but I have never been able

to bend myself to a struggle with hostile opinion, for all the while my

heart has been full of sadness and disappointment, and I have known

and felt that I have been systematically and deliberately isolated.

Premature despair and the deepest discouragement have been my constant

portion. Incapable of taking any interest in my talents for my own sake,

I let everything slip as soon as the hope of being loved for them and

by them had forsaken me. A hermit against my will, I have not even found

peace in solitude, because my inmost conscience has not been any better

satisfied than my heart.

Does not all this make up a melancholy lot, a barren failure of a life?

What use have I made of my gifts, of my special circumstances, of my

half-century of existence? What have I paid back to my country? Are all

the documents I have produced, taken together, my correspondence, these

thousands of journal pages, my lectures, my articles, my poems, my notes

of different kinds, anything better than withered leaves? To whom and to

what have I been useful? Will my name survive me a single day, and will

it ever mean anything to anybody? A life of no account! A great many

comings and goings, a great many scrawls--for nothing. When all is added

up--nothing! And worst of all, it has not been a life used up in the

service of some adored object, or sacrificed to any future hope.

Its sufferings will have been vain, its renunciations useless, its

sacrifices gratuitous, its dreariness without reward.... No, I am wrong;

it will have had its secret treasure, its sweetness, its reward. It will

have inspired a few affections of great price; it will have given joy to

a few souls; its hidden existence will have had some value. Besides,

if in itself it has been nothing, it has understood much. If it has not

been in harmony with the great order, still it has loved it. If it has

missed happiness and duty, it has at least felt its own nothingness, and

implored its pardon.

_Later on._--There is a great affinity in me with the Hindoo

genius--that mind, vast, imaginative, loving, dreamy, and speculative,

but destitute of ambition, personality, and will. Pantheistic

disinterestedness, the effacement of the self in the great whole,

womanish gentleness, a horror of slaughter, antipathy to action--these

are all present in my nature, in the nature at least which has been

developed by years and circumstances. Still the West has also had its

part in me. What I have found difficult is to keep up a prejudice in

favor of any form, nationality, or individuality whatever. Hence my

indifference to my own person, my own usefulness, interest, or opinions

of the moment. What does it all matter? _Omnis determinatio est

negatio_. Grief localizes us, love particularizes us, but thought

delivers us from personality.... To be a man is a poor thing, to be

a man is well; to be _the_ man--man in essence and in principle--that

alone is to be desired.

Yes, but in these Brahmanic aspirations what becomes of the

subordination of the individual to duty? Pleasure may lie in ceasing to

be individual, but duty lies in performing the microscopic task allotted

to us. The problem set before us is to bring our daily task into the

temple of contemplation and ply it there, to act as in the presence of

God, to interfuse one’s little part with religion. So only can we inform

the detail of life, all that is passing, temporary, and insignificant,

with beauty and nobility. So may we dignify and consecrate the meanest

of occupations. So may we feel that we are paying our tribute to the

universal work and the eternal will. So are we reconciled with life and

delivered from the fear of death. So are we in order and at peace.

September 1, 1875.--I have been working for some hours at my article on

Mme. de Staël, but with what labor, what painful effort! When I write

for publication every word is misery, and my pen stumbles at every line,

so anxious am I to find the ideally best expression, and so great is the

number of possibilities which open before me at every step.

Composition demands a concentration, decision, and pliancy which I no

longer possess. I cannot fuse together materials and ideas. If we are

to give anything a form, we must, so to speak, be the tyrants of it.

[Footnote: Compare this paragraph from the “Pensées of a new writer,

M. Joseph Roux, a country curé, living in a remote part of the _Bas

Limousin_, whose thoughts have been edited and published this year by M.

Paul Mariéton (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre):

“Le verbe ne souffre et ne connait que la volonté qui le dompte, et

n’emporte loin sans péril que l’intelligence qui lui ménage avec empire

l’éperon et le frein.”]

We must treat our subject brutally, and not be always trembling lest we

are doing it a wrong. We must be able to transmute and absorb it into

our own substance. This sort of confident effrontery is beyond me: my

whole nature tends to that impersonality which respects and subordinates

itself to the object; it is love of truth which holds me back from

concluding and deciding. And then I am always retracing my steps:

instead of going forward I work in a circle: I am afraid of having

forgotten a point, of having exaggerated an expression, of having used

a word out of place, while all the time I ought to have been thinking

of essentials and aiming at breadth of treatment. I do not know how to

sacrifice anything, how to give up anything whatever. Hurtful timidity,

unprofitable conscientiousness, fatal slavery to detail!

In reality I have never given much thought to the art of writing, to

the best way of making an article, an essay, a book, nor have I ever

methodically undergone the writer’s apprenticeship; it would have been

useful to me, and I was always ashamed of what was useful. I have felt,

as it were, a scruple against trying to surprise the secret of the

masters of literature, against picking _chef-d’oeuvres_ to pieces. When

I think that I have always postponed the serious study of the art of

writing, from a sort of awe of it, and a secret love of its beauty, I

am furious with my own stupidity, and with my own respect. Practice and

routine would have given me that ease, lightness, and assurance, without

which the natural gift and impulse dies away. But on the contrary,

I have developed two opposed habits of mind, the habit of scientific

analysis which exhausts the material offered to it, and the habit of

immediate notation of passing impressions. The art of composition lies

between the two; you want for it both the living unity of the thing and

the sustained operation of thought.

October 25, 1875.--I have been listening to M. Taine’s first lecture

(on the “Ancien Régime”) delivered in the university hall. It was an

extremely substantial piece of work--clear, instructive, compact, and

full of matter. As a writer he shows great skill in the French method of

simplifying his subject by massing it in large striking divisions; his

great defect is a constant straining after points; his principal merit

is the sense he has of historical reality, his desire to see things

as they are. For the rest, he has extreme openness of mind, freedom of

thought, and precision of language. The hall was crowded.

October 26, 1875.--All origins are secret; the principle of every

individual or collective life is a mystery--that is to say, something

irrational, inexplicable, not to be defined. We may even go farther

and say, Every individuality is an insoluble enigma, and no beginning

explains it. In fact, all that has _become_ may be explained

retrospectively, but the beginning of anything whatever did not

_become_. It represents always the “_fiat lux_,” the initial miracle,

the act of creation; for it is the consequence of nothing else, it

simply appears among anterior things which make a _milieu_, an occasion,

a surrounding for it, but which are witnesses of its appearance without

understanding whence it comes.

Perhaps also there are no true individuals, and, if so, no beginning but

one only, the primordial impulse, the first movement. All men on this

hypothesis would be but _man_ in two sexes; man again might be reduced

to the animal, the animal to the plant, and the only individuality left

would be a living nature, reduced to a living matter, to the hylozoism

of Thales. However, even upon this hypothesis, if there were but one

absolute beginning, relative beginnings would still remain to us as

multiple symbols of the absolute. Every life, called individual for

convenience sake and by analogy, would represent in miniature the

history of the world, and would be to the eye of the philosopher a

microscopic compendium of it.

The history of the formation of ideas is what, frees the mind.

* * * * *

A philosophic truth does not become popular until some eloquent soul has

humanized it or some gifted personality has translated and embodied it.

Pure truth cannot be assimilated by the crowd; it must be communicated

by contagion.

January 30, 1876.--After dinner I went two steps off, to Marc Monnier’s,

to hear the “Luthier de Crémone,” a one-act comedy in verse, read by the

author, François Coppée.

It was a feast of fine sensations, of literary dainties. For the little

piece is a pearl. It is steeped in poetry, and every line is a fresh

pleasure to one’s taste.

This young _maestro_ is like the violin he writes about, vibrating and

passionate; he has, besides delicacy, point, grace, all that a writer

wants to make what is simple, naïve, heartfelt, and out of the beaten

track, acceptable to a cultivated society.

How to return to nature through art: there is the problem of all highly

composite literatures like our own. Rousseau himself attacked letters

with all the resources of the art of writing, and boasted the delights

of savage life with a skill and adroitness developed only by the most

advanced civilization. And it is indeed this marriage of contraries

which charms us; this spiced gentleness, this learned innocence, this

calculated simplicity, this yes and no, this foolish wisdom. It is the

supreme irony of such combinations which tickles the taste of advanced

and artificial epochs, epochs when men ask for two sensations at once,

like the contrary meanings fused by the smile of La Gioconda. And

our satisfaction, too, in work of this kind is best expressed by that

ambiguous curve of the lip which says: I feel your charm, but I am not

your dupe; I see the illusion both from within and from without; I yield

to you, but I understand you; I am complaisant, but I am proud; I am

open to sensations, yet not the slave of any; you have talent, I have

subtlety of perception; we are quits, and we understand each other.

February 1, 1876.--This evening we talked of the infinitely great and

the infinitely small. The great things of the universe are for----so

much easier to understand than the small, because all greatness is a

multiple of herself, whereas she is incapable of analyzing what requires

a different sort of measurement.

It is possible for the thinking being to place himself in all points of

view, and to teach his soul to live under the most different modes of

being. But it must be confessed that very few profit by the possibility.

Men are in general imprisoned, held in a vice by their circumstances

almost as the animals are, but they have very little suspicion of it

because they have so little faculty of self-judgment. It is only the

critic and the philosopher who can penetrate into all states of being,

and realize their life from within.

When the imagination shrinks in fear from the phantoms which it creates,

it may be excused because it is imagination. But when the intellect

allows itself to be tyrannized over or terrified by the categories to

which itself gives birth, it is in the wrong, for it is not allowed to

intellect--the critical power of man--to be the dupe of anything.

Now, in the superstition of size the mind is merely the dupe of itself,

for it creates the notion of space. The created is not more than the

creator, the son not more than the father. The point of view wants

rectifying. The mind has to free itself from space, which gives it a

false notion of itself, but it can only attain this freedom by reversing

things and by learning to see space in the mind instead of the mind in

space. How can it do this? Simply by reducing space to its virtuality.

Space is dispersion; mind is concentration.

And that is why God is present everywhere, without taking up a thousand

millions of cube leagues, nor a hundred times more nor a hundred times

less.

In the state of thought the universe occupies but a single point; but in

the state of dispersion and analysis this thought requires the heaven of

heavens for its expansion.

In the same way, time and number are contained in the mind. Man, as

mind, is not their inferior, but their superior.

It is true that before he can reach this state of freedom his own body

must appear to him at will either speck or world--that is to say,

he must be independent of it. So long as the self still feels itself

spatial, dispersed, corporeal, it is but a soul, it is not a mind; it

is conscious of itself only as the animal is, the impressionable,

affectionate, active and restless animal.

The mind being the subject of phenomena cannot be itself phenomenal; the

mirror of an image, if it was an image, could not be a mirror. There can

be no echo without a noise. Consciousness means some one who experiences

something. And all the somethings together cannot take the place of the

some one. The phenomenon exists only for a point which is not itself,

and for which it is an object. The perceptible supposes the perceiver.

May 15, 1876.--This morning I corrected the proofs of the “Etrangères.”

[Footnote: _Les Etrangères: Poésies traduites de diverses littératures_,

par H. F. Amiel, 1876.] Here at least is one thing off my hands. The

piece of prose theorizing which ends the volume pleased and satisfied

me a good deal more than my new meters. The book, as a whole, may be

regarded as an attempt to solve the problem of French verse-translation

considered as a special art. It is science applied to poetry. It ought

not, I think, to do any discredit to a philosopher, for, after all, it

is nothing but applied psychology.

Do I feel any relief, any joy, pride, hope? Hardly. It seems to me that

I feel nothing at all, or at least my feeling is so vague and doubtful

that I cannot analyze it. On the whole, I am rather tempted to say to

myself, how much labor for how small a result--_Much ado about nothing!_

And yet the work in itself is good, is successful. But what does

verse-translation matter? Already my interest in it is fading; my mind

and my energies clamor for something else.

What will Edmond Scherer say to the volume?

* * * * *

To the inmost self of me this literary attempt is quite indifferent--a

Lilliputian affair. In comparing my work with other work of the same

kind, I find a sort of relative satisfaction; but I see the intrinsic

futility of it, and the insignificance of its success or failure. I do

not believe in the public; I do not believe in my own work; I have

no ambition, properly speaking, and I blow soap-bubbles for want of

something to do.

“Car le néant peut seul bien cacher l’infini.”

Self-satire, disillusion, absence of prejudice, may be freedom, but they

are not strength.

July 12, 1876.--Trouble on trouble. My cough has been worse than ever.

I cannot see that the fine weather or the holidays have made any change

for the better in my state of health. On the contrary, the process of

demolition seems more rapid. It is a painful experience, this premature

decay!... “_Après tant de malheurs, que vous reste-t-il? Moi._” This

_“moi”_ is the central consciousness, the trunk of all the branches

which have been cut away, that which bears every successive mutilation.

Soon I shall have nothing else left than bare intellect. Death reduces

us to the mathematical “point;” the destruction which precedes it forces

us back, as it were, by a series of ever-narrowing concentric circles to

this last inaccessible refuge. Already I have a foretaste of that zero

in which all forms and all modes are extinguished. I see how we return

into the night, and inversely I understand how we issue from it. Life is

but a meteor, of which the whole brief course is before me. Birth, life,

death assume a fresh meaning to us at each phase of our existence. To

see one’s self as a firework in the darkness--to become a witness of

one’s own fugitive phenomenon--this is practical psychology. I prefer

indeed the spectacle of the world, which is a vaster and more splendid

firework; but when illness narrows my horizon and makes me dwell

perforce upon my own miseries, these miseries are still capable of

supplying food for my psychological curiosity. What interests me in

myself, in spite of my repulsions is, that I find in my own case a

genuine example of human nature, and therefore a specimen of general

value. The sample enables me to understand a multitude of similar

situations, and numbers of my fellow-men.

To enter consciously into all possible modes of being would be

sufficient occupation for hundreds of centuries--at least for our finite

intelligences, which are conditioned by time. The progressive happiness

of the process, indeed may be easily poisoned and embittered by the

ambition which asks for everything at once, and clamors to reach

the absolute at a bound. But it may be answered that aspirations are

necessarily prophetic, for they could only have come into being under

the action of the same cause which will enable them to reach their goal.

The soul can only imagine the absolute because the absolute exists; our

consciousness of a possible perfection is the guarantee that perfection

will be realized.

Thought itself is eternal. It is the consciousness of thought which

is gradually achieved through the long succession of ages, races, and

humanities. Such is the doctrine of Hegel. The history of the mind is,

according to him one of approximation to the absolute, and the absolute

differs at the two ends of the story. It _was_ at the beginning; it

_knows itself_ at the end. Or rather it advances in the possession

of itself with the gradual unfolding of creation. Such also was the

conception of Aristotle.

If the history of the mind and of consciousness is the very marrow and

essence of being, then to be driven back on psychology, even personal

psychology, is to be still occupied with the main question of things, to

keep to the subject, to feel one’s self in the center of the universal

drama. There is comfort in the idea. Everything else may be taken away

from us, but if thought remains we are still connected by a magic thread

with the axis of the world. But we may lose thought and speech. Then

nothing remains but simple feeling, the sense of the presence of God

and of death in God--the last relic of the human privilege, which is to

participate in the whole, to commune with the absolute.

“Ta vie est un éclair qui meurt dans son nuage,

Mais l’éclair t’a sauvé s’il t’a fait voir le ciel.”

July 26, 1876.--A private journal is a friend to idleness. It frees us

from the necessity of looking all round a subject, it puts up with every

kind of repetition, it accompanies all the caprices and meanderings of

the inner life, and proposes to itself no definite end. This journal

of mine represents the material of a good many volumes: what prodigious

waste of time, of thought, of strength! It will be useful to nobody, and

even for myself--it has rather helped me to shirk life than to practice

it. A journal takes the place of a confidant, that is, of friend or

wife; it becomes a substitute for production, a substitute for country

and public. It is a grief-cheating device, a mode of escape and

withdrawal; but, factotum as it is, though it takes the place of

everything, properly speaking it represents nothing at all....

What is it which makes the history of a soul? It is the stratification

of its different stages of progress, the story of its acquisitions

and of the general course of its destiny. Before my history can teach

anybody anything, or even interest myself, it must be disentangled from

its materials, distilled and simplified. These thousands of pages are

but the pile of leaves and bark from which the essence has still to

be extracted. A whole forest of cinchonas are worth but one cask of

quinine. A whole Smyrna rose-garden goes to produce one vial of perfume.

This mass of written talk, the work of twenty-nine years, may in the end

be worth nothing at all; for each is only interested in his own romance,

his own individual life. Even I perhaps shall never have time to read

them over myself. So--so what? I shall have lived my life, and life

consists in repeating the human type, and the burden of the human song,

as myriads of my kindred have done, are doing, and will do, century

after century. To rise to consciousness of this burden and this type is

something, and we can scarcely achieve anything further. The realization

of the type is more complete, and the burden a more joyous one, if

circumstances are kind and propitious, but whether the puppets have done

this or that--

“Trois p’tits tours et puis s’en vont!”

everything falls into the same gulf at last, and comes to very much the

same thing.

To rebel against fate--to try to escape the inevitable issue--is almost

puerile. When the duration of a centenarian and that of an insect are

quantities sensibly equivalent--and geology and astronomy enable us to

regard such durations from this point of view--what is the meaning of

all our tiny efforts and cries, the value of our anger, our ambition,

our hope? For the dream of a dream it is absurd to raise these

make-believe tempests. The forty millions of infusoria which make up a

cube-inch of chalk--do they matter much to us? and do the forty millions

of men who make up France matter any more to an inhabitant of the moon

or Jupiter?

To be a conscious monad--a nothing which knows itself to be the

microscopic phantom of the universe: this is all we can ever attain to.

September 12, 1876.--What is your own particular absurdity? Why,

simply that you exhaust yourself in trying to understand wisdom without

practicing it, that you are always making preparations for nothing, that

you live without living. Contemplation which has not the courage to be

purely contemplative, renunciation which does not renounce completely,

chronic contradiction--there is your case. Inconsistent skepticism,

irresolution, not convinced but incorrigible, weakness which will not

accept itself and cannot transform itself into strength--there is your

misery.