It is clear that the western nations in general, and especially the

Americans, know very little of this state of feeling. For them life is

devouring and incessant activity. They are eager for gold, for power,

for dominion; their aim is to crush men and to enslave nature. They show

an obstinate interest in means, and have not a thought for the end. They

confound being with individual being, and the expansion of the self with

happiness--that is to say, they do not live by the soul; they ignore the

unchangeable and the eternal; they live at the periphery of their being,

because they are unable to penetrate to its axis. They are excited,

ardent, positive, because they are superficial. Why so much effort,

noise, struggle, and greed?--it is all a mere stunning and deafening of

the self. When death comes they recognize that it is so--why not then

admit it sooner? Activity is only beautiful when it is holy--that is to

say, when it is spent in the service of that which passeth not away.

February 6, 1880.--A feeling article by Edmond Scherer on the death of

Bersot, the director of the “Ecole Normale,” a philosopher who bore

like a stoic a terrible disease, and who labored to the last without

a complaint.... I have just read the four orations delivered over his

grave. They have brought the tears to my eyes. In the last days of this

brave man everything was manly, noble, moral, and spiritual. Each of the

speakers paid homage to the character, the devotion, the constancy, and

the intellectual elevation of the dead. “Let us learn from him how to

live and how to die.” The whole funeral ceremony had an antique dignity.

February 7, 1880.--Hoar-frost and fog, but the general aspect is bright

and fairylike, and has nothing in common with the gloom in Paris and

London, of which the newspapers tell us.

This silvery landscape has a dreamy grace, a fanciful charm, which are

unknown both to the countries of the sun and to those of coal-smoke. The

trees seem to belong to another creation, in which white has taken the

place of green. As one gazes at these alleys, these clumps, these groves

and arcades, these lace-like garlands and festoons, one feels no wish

for anything else; their beauty is original and self-sufficing, all the

more because the ground powdered with snow, the sky dimmed with mist,

and the smooth soft distances, combine to form a general scale of color,

and a harmonious whole, which charms the eye. No harshness anywhere--all

is velvet. My enchantment beguiled me out both before and after dinner.

The impression is that of a _fête_, and the subdued tints are, or seem

to be, a mere coquetry of winter which has set itself to paint something

without sunshine, and yet to charm the spectator.

February 9, 1880,--Life rushes on--so much the worse for the weak and

the stragglers. As soon as a man’s _tendo Achillis_ gives way he finds

himself trampled under foot by the young, the eager, the voracious.

“_Vae victis, vae debilibus!_” yells the crowd, which in its turn is

storming the goods of this world. Every man is always in some other

man’s way, since, however small he may make himself, he still occupies

some space, and however little he may envy or possess, he is still

sure to be envied and his goods coveted by some one else. Mean

world!--peopled by a mean race! To console ourselves we must think of

the exceptions--of the noble and generous souls. There are such. What

do the rest matter! The traveler crossing the desert feels himself

surrounded by creatures thirsting for his blood; by day vultures fly

about his head; by night scorpions creep into his tent, jackals prowl

around his camp-fire, mosquitoes prick and torture him with their greedy

sting; everywhere menace, enmity, ferocity. But far beyond the horizon,

and the barren sands peopled by these hostile hordes, the wayfarer

pictures to himself a few loved faces and kind looks, a few true hearts

which follow him in their dreams--and smiles. When all is said, indeed,

we defend ourselves a greater or lesser number of years, but we are

always conquered and devoured in the end; there is no escaping the grave

and its worm. Destruction is our destiny, and oblivion our portion....

How near is the great gulf! My skiff is thin as a nutshell, or even more

fragile still. Let the leak but widen a little and all is over for the

navigator. A mere nothing separates me from idiocy, from madness,

from death. The slightest breach is enough to endanger all this frail,

ingenious edifice, which calls itself my being and my life.

Not even the dragonfly symbol is enough to express its frailty; the

soap-bubble is the best poetical translation of all this illusory

magnificence, this fugitive apparition of the tiny self, which is we,

and we it.

... A miserable night enough. Awakened three or four times by my

bronchitis. Sadness--restlessness. One of these winter nights, possibly,

suffocation will come. I realize that it would be well to keep myself

ready, to put everything in order.... To begin with, let me wipe out

all personal grievances and bitternesses; forgive all, judge no one;

in enmity and ill-will, see only misunderstanding. “As much as lieth in

you, be at peace with all men.” On the bed of death the soul should have

no eyes but for eternal things. All the littlenesses of life disappear.

The fight is over. There should be nothing left now but remembrance of

past blessings--adoration of the ways of God. Our natural instinct

leads us back to Christian humility and pity. “Father, forgive us our

trespasses, as we forgive them who trespass against us.”

Prepare thyself as though the coming Easter were thy last, for thy days

henceforward shall be few and evil.

February 11, 1880.--Victor de Laprade [Footnote: Victor de Laprade, born

1812, first a disciple and imitator of Edgar Quinet, then the friend of

Lamartine, Lamennais, George Sand, Victor Hugo; admitted to the

Academy in 1857 in succession to Alfred de Musset. He wrote “Parfums de

Madeleine,” 1839; “Odes et Poèmes,” 1843; “Poèmes Evangéliques,” 1852;

“Idylles Héroiques,” 1858, etc. etc.] has elevation, grandeur, nobility,

and harmony. What is it, then, that he lacks? Ease, and perhaps

humor. Hence the monotonous solemnity, the excess of emphasis, the

over-intensity, the inspired air, the statue-like gait, which annoy

one in him. His is a muse which never lays aside the _cothurnus_, and a

royalty which never puts off its crown, even in sleep. The total absence

in him of playfulness, simplicity, familiarity, is a great defect.

De Laprade is to the ancients as the French tragedy is to that of

Euripides, or as the wig of Louis XIV. to the locks of Apollo. His

majestic airs are wearisome and factitious. If there is not exactly

affectation in them, there is at least a kind of theatrical and

sacerdotal posing, a sort of professional attitudinizing. Truth is not

as fine as this, but it is more living, more pathetic, more varied.

Marble images are cold. Was it not Musset who said, “If De Laprade is a

poet, then I am not one?”

February 27, 1880.--I have finished translating twelve or fourteen

little poems by Petöfi. They have a strange kind of savor. There is

something of the Steppe, of the East, of Mazeppa, of madness, in these

songs, which seem to go to the beat of a riding-whip. What force and

passion, what savage brilliancy, what wild and grandiose images, there

are in them! One feels that the Magyar is a kind of Centaur, and that he

is only Christian and European by accident. The Hun in him tends toward

the Arab.

March 20, 1880.--I have been reading “La Bannière Bleue”--a history of

the world at the time of Genghis Khan, under the form of memoirs. It is

a Turk, Ouïgour, who tells the story. He shows us civilization from

the wrong side, or the other side, and the Asiatic nomads appear as the

scavengers of its corruptions.

Genghis proclaimed himself the scourge of God, and he did in fact

realize the vastest empire known to history, stretching from the Blue

Sea to the Baltic, and from the vast plains of Siberia to the banks

of the sacred Ganges. The most solid empires of the ancient world were

overthrown by the tramp of his horsemen and the shafts of his archers.

From the tumult into which he threw the western continent there issued

certain vast results: the fall of the Byzantine empire, involving the

Renaissance, the voyages of discovery in Asia, undertaken from both

sides of the globe--that is to say, Gama and Columbus; the formation

of the Turkish empire; and the preparation of the Russian empire. This

tremendous hurricane, starting from the high Asiatic tablelands, felled

the decaying oaks and worm-eaten buildings of the whole ancient

world. The descent of the yellow, flat-nosed Mongols upon Europe is a

historical cyclone which devastated and purified our thirteenth century,

and broke, at the two ends of the known world, through two great Chinese

walls--that which protected the ancient empire of the Center, and that

which made a barrier of ignorance and superstition round the little

world of Christendom. Attila, Genghis, Tamerlane, ought to range in the

memory of men with Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon. They roused

whole peoples into action, and stirred the depths of human life, they

powerfully affected ethnography, they let loose rivers of blood, and

renewed the face of things. The Quakers will not see that there is a law

of tempests in history as in nature. The revilers of war are like the

revilers of thunder, storms, and volcanoes; they know not what they do.

Civilization tends to corrupt men, as large towns tend to vitiate the

air.

“Nos patimur longae pacis mala.”

Catastrophes bring about a violent restoration of equilibrium; they put

the world brutally to rights. Evil chastises itself, and the tendency to

ruin in human things supplies the place of the regulator who has not yet

been discovered. No civilization can bear more than a certain proportion

of abuses, injustice, corruption, shame, and crime. When this proportion

has been reached, the boiler bursts, the palace falls, the scaffolding

breaks down; institutions, cities, states, empires, sink into ruin. The

evil contained in an organism is a virus which preys upon it, and if

it is not eliminated ends by destroying it. And as nothing is perfect,

nothing can escape death.

May 19, 1880.--_Inadaptibility_, due either to mysticism or

stiffness, delicacy or disdain, is the misfortune or at all events

the characteristic of my life. I have not been able to fit myself to

anything, to content myself with anything. I have never had the quantum

of illusion necessary for risking the irreparable. I have made use of

the ideal itself to keep me from any kind of bondage. It was thus with

marriage: only perfection would have satisfied me; and, on the

other hand, I was not worthy of perfection.... So that, finding no

satisfaction in things, I tried to extirpate desire, by which things

enslave us. Independence has been my refuge; detachment my stronghold.

I have lived the impersonal life--in the world, yet not in it, thinking

much, desiring nothing. It is a state of mind which corresponds with

what in women is called a broken heart; and it is in fact like it, since

the characteristic common to both is despair. When one knows that

one will never possess what one could have loved, and that one can be

content with nothing less, one has, so to speak, left the world, one has

cut the golden hair, parted with all that makes human life--that is to

say, illusion--the incessant effort toward an apparently attainable end.

May 31, 1880.--Let us not be over-ingenious. There is no help to be got

out of subtleties. Besides, one must live. It is best and simplest

not to quarrel with any illusion, and to accept the inevitable

good-temperedly. Plunged as we are in human existence, we must take it

as it comes, not too bitterly, nor too tragically, without horror

and without sarcasm, without misplaced petulance or a too exacting

expectation; cheerfulness, serenity, and patience, these are best--let

us aim at these. Our business is to treat life as the grandfather treats

his granddaughter, or the grandmother her grandson; to enter into the

pretenses of childhood and the fictions of youth, even when we ourselves

have long passed beyond them. It is probable that God himself looks

kindly upon the illusions of the human race, so long as they are

innocent. There is nothing evil but sin--that is, egotism and revolt.

And as for error, man changes his errors frequently, but error of some

sort is always with him. Travel as one may, one is always somewhere, and

one’s mind rests on some point of truth, as one’s feet rest upon some

point of the globe.

Society alone represents a more or less complete unity. The individual

must content himself with being a stone in the building, a wheel in the

immense machine, a word in the poem. He is a part of the family, of

the state, of humanity, of all the special fragments formed by human

interests, beliefs, aspirations, and labors. The loftiest souls are

those who are conscious of the universal symphony, and who give their

full and willing collaboration to this vast and complicated concert

which we call civilization.

In principle the mind is capable of suppressing all the limits which it

discovers in itself, limits of language, nationality, religion, race, or

epoch. But it must be admitted that the more the mind spiritualizes and

generalizes itself, the less hold it has on other minds, which no longer

understand it or know what to do with it. Influence belongs to men

of action, and for purposes of action nothing is more useful than

narrowness of thought combined with energy of will.

The forms of dreamland are gigantic, those of action are small and

dwarfed. To the minds imprisoned in things, belong success, fame,

profit; a great deal no doubt; but they know nothing of the pleasures of

liberty or the joy of penetrating the infinite. However, I do not mean

to put one class before another; for every man is happy according to

his nature. History is made by combatants and specialists; only it is

perhaps not a bad thing that in the midst of the devouring activities of

the western world, there should be a few Brahmanizing souls.

... This soliloquy means--what? That reverie turns upon itself as

dreams do; that impressions added together do not always produce a

fair judgment; that a private journal is like a good king, and permits

repetitions, outpourings, complaint.... These unseen effusions are the

conversation of thought with itself the arpeggios involuntary but not

unconscious, of that aeolian harp we bear within us. Its vibrations

compose no piece, exhaust no theme, achieve no melody, carry out no

programme, but they express the innermost life of man.

June 1, 1880.--Stendhal’s “La Chartreuse de Parme.” A remarkable book.

It is even typical, the first of a class. Stendhal opens the series of

naturalist novels, which suppress the intervention of the moral sense,

and scoff at the claim of free-will. Individuals are irresponsible; they

are governed by their passions, and the play of human passions is the

observer’s joy, the artist’s material. Stendhal is a novelist after

Taine’s heart, a faithful painter who is neither touched nor angry, and

whom everything amuses--the knave and the adventuress as well as honest

men and women, but who has neither faith, nor preference, nor ideal.

In him literature is subordinated to natural history, to science. It no

longer forms part of the humanities, it no longer gives man the honor

of a separate rank. It classes him with the ant, the beaver, and

the monkey. And this moral indifference to morality leads direct to

immorality.

The vice of the whole school is cynicism, contempt for man, whom they

degrade to the level of the brute; it is the worship of strength,

disregard of the soul, a want of generosity, of reverence, of nobility,

which shows itself in spite of all protestations to the contrary; in a

word, it is _inhumanity_. No man can be a naturalist with impunity:

he will be coarse even with the most refined culture. A free mind is

a great thing no doubt, but loftiness of heart, belief in goodness,

capacity for enthusiasm and devotion, the thirst after perfection and

holiness, are greater things still.

June 7, 1880.--I am reading Madame Necker de Saussure [Footnote:

Madame Necker de Saussure was the daughter of the famous geologist,

De Saussure; she married a nephew of Jacques Necker, and was therefore

cousin by marriage of Madame de Staël. She is often supposed to be the

original of Madame de Cerlebe in “Delphine,” and the _Notice sur

le Caractère et les Écrits de Mdme. de Staël_, prefixed to the

authoritative edition of Madame de Staël’s collected works, is by her.

Philanthropy and education were her two main interests, but she had also

a very large amount of general literary cultivation, as was proved by

her translation of Schlegel’s “Lectures on Dramatic Literature.”] again.

“L’Education progressive” is an admirable book. What moderation and

fairness of view, what reasonableness and dignity of manner! Everything

in it is of high quality--observation, thought, and style. The

reconciliation of science with the ideal, of philosophy with religion,

of psychology with morals, which the book attempts, is sound and

beneficent. It is a fine book--a classic--and Geneva may be proud of

a piece of work which shows such high cultivation and so much solid

wisdom. Here we have the true Genevese literature, the central tradition

of the country.

_Later_.--I have finished the third volume of Madame Necker. The

elevation and delicacy, the sense and seriousness, the beauty

and perfection of the whole are astonishing. A few harshnesses or

inaccuracies of language do not matter. I feel for the author a respect

mingled with emotion. How rare it is to find a book in which everything

is sincere and everything is true!

June 26, 1880.--Democracy exists; it is mere loss of time to dwell upon

its absurdities and defects. Every _régime_ has its weaknesses, and

this _régime_ is a lesser evil than others. On things its effect is

unfavorable, but on the other hand men profit by it, for it develops

the individual by obliging every one to take interest in a multitude

of questions. It makes bad work, but it produces citizens. This is

its excuse, and a more than tolerable one; in the eyes of the

philanthropist, indeed, it is a serious title to respect, for, after

all, social institutions are made for man, and not _vice versâ_.

June 27, 1880.--I paid a visit to my friends--, and we resumed the

conversation of yesterday. We talked of the ills which threaten

democracy and which are derived from the legal fiction at the root of

it. Surely the remedy consists in insisting everywhere upon the

truth which democracy systematically forgets, and which is its proper

makeweight--on the inequalities of talent, of virtue, and merit, and

on the respect due to age, to capacity, to services rendered. Juvenile

arrogance and jealous ingratitude must be resisted all the more

strenuously because social forms are in their favor; and when the

institutions of a country lay stress only on the rights of the

individual, it is the business of the citizen to lay all the more stress

on duty. There must be a constant effort to correct the prevailing

tendency of things. All this, it is true, is nothing but palliative, but

in human society one cannot hope for more.

_Later_.--Alfred de Vigny is a sympathetic writer, with a meditative

turn of thought, a strong and supple talent. He possesses elevation,

independence, seriousness, originality, boldness and grace; he has

something of everything. He paints, describes, and judges well; he

thinks, and has the courage of his opinions. His defect lies in an

excess of self-respect, in a British pride and reserve which give him a

horror of familiarity and a terror of letting himself go. This tendency

has naturally injured his popularity as a writer with a public whom he

holds at arm’s length as one might a troublesome crowd. The French race

has never cared much about the inviolability of personal conscience;

it does not like stoics shut up in their own dignity as in a tower, and

recognizing no master but God, duty or faith. Such strictness annoys and

irritates it; it is merely piqued and made impatient by anything solemn.

It repudiated Protestantism for this very reason, and in all crises

it has crushed those who have not yielded to the passionate current of

opinion.

July 1, 1880. (_Three o’clock_).--The temperature is oppressive; I ought

to be looking over my notes, and thinking of to-morrow’s examinations.

Inward distaste--emptiness--discontent. Is it trouble of conscience, or

sorrow of heart? or the soul preying upon itself? or merely a sense of

strength decaying and time running to waste? Is sadness--or regret--or

fear--at the root of it? I do not know; but this dull sense of misery

has danger in it; it leads to rash efforts and mad decisions. Oh, for

escape from self, for something to stifle the importunate voice of want

and yearning! Discontent is the father of temptation. How can we gorge

the invisible serpent hidden at the bottom of our well--gorge it so that

it may sleep?

At the heart of all this rage and vain rebellion there lies--what?

Aspiration, yearning! We are athirst for the infinite--for love--for I

know not what. It is the instinct of happiness, which, like some

wild animal, is restless for its prey. It is God calling-God avenging

himself.

July 4, 1880. (_Sunday, half-past eight in the morning_).--The sun has

come out after heavy rain. May one take it as an omen on this solemn

day? The great voice of Clémence has just been sounding in our ears. The

bell’s deep vibrations went to my heart. For a quarter of an hour

the pathetic appeal went on--“Geneva, Geneva, remember! I am called

_Clémence_--I am the voice of church and of country. People of Geneva,

serve God and be at peace together.” [Footnote: A law to bring about

separation between Church and State, adopted by the Great Council,

was on this day submitted to the vote of the Genevese people. It was

rejected by a large majority (9,306 against 4,044).--[S.]]

_Seven o’clock in the evening_.--_Clémence_ has been ringing again,

during the last half-hour of the _scrutin_. Now that she has stopped,

the silence has a terrible seriousness, like that which weighs upon a

crowd when it is waiting for the return of the judge and the delivery of

the death sentence. The fate of the Genevese church and country is now

in the voting box.

_Eleven o’clock in the evening_.--Victory along the whole line. The

Ayes have carried little more than two-sevenths of the vote. At my

friend----‘s house I found them all full of excitement, gratitude, and

joy.

July 5, 1880.--There are some words which have still a magical virtue

with the mass of the people: those of State, Republic, Country, Nation,

Flag, and even, I think, Church. Our skeptical and mocking culture knows

nothing of the emotion, the exaltation, the delirium, which these words

awaken in simple people. The blasés of the world have no idea how the

popular mind vibrates to these appeals, by which they themselves are

untouched. It is their punishment; it is also their infirmity.

Their temper is satirical and separatist; they live in isolation and

sterility.

I feel again what I felt at the time of the Rousseau centenary; my

feeling and imagination are chilled and repelled by those Pharisaical

people who think themselves too good to associate with the crowd.

At the same time, I suffer from an inward contradiction, from a

two-fold, instinctive repugnance--an aesthetic repugnance toward

vulgarity of every kind, a moral repugnance toward barrenness and

coldness of heart.

So that personally I am only attracted by the individuals of cultivation

and eminence, while on the other hand nothing is sweeter to me than to

feel myself vibrating in sympathy with the national spirit, with the

feeling of the masses. I only care for the two extremes, and it is this

which separates me from each of them.

Our everyday life, split up as it is into clashing parties and opposed

opinions, and harassed by perpetual disorder and discussion, is painful

and almost hateful to me. A thousand things irritate and provoke me. But

perhaps it would be the same elsewhere. Very likely it is the inevitable

way of the world which displeases me--the sight of what succeeds, of

what men approve or blame, of what they excuse or accuse. I need to

admire, to feel myself in sympathy and in harmony with my neighbor, with

the march of things, and the tendencies of those around me, and almost

always I have had to give up the hope of it. I take refuge in retreat,

to avoid discord. But solitude is only a _pis-aller_.

July 6, 1880.--Magnificent weather. The college prize-day. [Footnote:

The prize-giving at the College of Geneva is made the occasion of a

national festival.] Toward evening I went with our three ladies to the

plain of Plainpalais. There was an immense crowd, and I was struck with

the bright look of the faces. The festival wound up with the traditional

fireworks, under a calm and starry sky. Here we have the republic

indeed, I thought as I came in. For a whole week this people has been

out-of-doors, camping, like the Athenians on the Agora. Since Wednesday

lectures and public meetings have followed one another without

intermission; at home there are pamphlets and the newspapers to be

read; while speech-making goes on at the clubs. On Sunday, _plebiscite_;

Monday, public procession, service at St. Pierre, speeches on the

Molard, festival for the adults. Tuesday, the college fête-day.

Wednesday, the fête-day of the primary schools.

Geneva is a caldron always at boiling-point, a furnace of which the

fires are never extinguished. Vulcan had more than one forge, and Geneva

is certainly one of those world-anvils on which the greatest number of

projects have been hammered out. When one thinks that the martyrs of all

causes have been at work here, the mystery is explained a little;

but the truest explanation is that Geneva--republican, protestant,

democratic, learned, and enterprising Geneva--has for centuries depended

on herself alone for the solution of her own difficulties. Since the

Reformation she has been always on the alert, marching with a lantern

in her left hand and a sword in her right. It pleases me to see that

she has not yet become a mere copy of anything, and that she is still

capable of deciding for herself. Those who say to her, “Do as they do at

New York, at Paris, at Rome, at Berlin,” are still in the minority. The

_doctrinaires_ who would split her up and destroy her unity waste their

breath upon her. She divines the snare laid for her and turns away.

I like this proof of vitality. Only that which is original has a

sufficient reason for existence. A country in which the word of command

comes from elsewhere is nothing more than a province. This is what our

Jacobins and our Ultramontanes never will recognize. Neither of them

understand the meaning of self-government, and neither of them have any

idea of the dignity of a historical state and an independent people.

Our small nationalities are ruined by the hollow cosmopolitan formulae

which have an equally disastrous effect upon art and letters. The modern

_isms_ are so many acids which dissolve everything living and concrete.

No one achieves a masterpiece, nor even a decent piece of work, by the

help of realism, liberalism, or romanticism. Separatism has even less

virtue than any of the other _isms_, for it is the abstraction of a

negation, the shadow of a shadow. The various _isms_ of the present are

not fruitful principles: they are hardly even explanatory formulae. They

are rather names of disease, for they express some element in excess,

some dangerous and abusive exaggeration. Examples: empiricism, idealism,

radicalism. What is best among things and most perfect among beings

slips through these categories. The man who is perfectly well is neither

sanguineous--[to use the old medical term]--nor bilious nor nervous.

A normal republic contains opposing parties and points of view, but it

contains them, as it were, in a state of chemical combination. All the

colors are contained in a ray of light, while red alone does not contain

a sixth part of the perfect ray.

July 8, 1880.--It is thirty years since I read Waagen’s book on

“Museums,” which my friend ---- is now reading. It was in 1842 that I

was wild for pictures; in 1845 that I was studying Krause’s philosophy;

in 1850 that I became professor of aesthetics. ---- may be the same

age as I am; it is none the less true that when a particular stage

has become to me a matter of history, he is just arriving at it. This

impression of distance and remoteness is a strange one. I begin to

realize that my memory is a great catacomb, and that below my actual

standing-ground there is layer after layer of historical ashes.

Is the life of mind something like that of great trees of immemorial

growth? Is the living layer of consciousness super-imposed upon hundreds

of dead layers? _Dead?_ No doubt this is too much to say, but still,

when memory is slack the past becomes almost as though it had never

been. To remember that we did know once is not a sign of possession but

a sign of loss; it is like the number of an engraving which is no longer

on its nail, the title of a volume no longer to be found on its shelf.

My mind is the empty frame of a thousand vanished images. Sharpened

by incessant training, it is all culture, but it has retained hardly

anything in its meshes. It is without matter, and is only form. It

no longer has knowledge; it has become method. It is etherealized,

algebraicized. Life has treated it as death treats other minds; it

has already prepared it for a further metamorphosis. Since the age of

sixteen onward I have been able to look at things with the eyes of a

blind man recently operated upon--that is to say, I have been able to

suppress in myself the results of the long education of sight, and to

abolish distances; and now I find myself regarding existence as though

from beyond the tomb, from another world; all is strange to me; I am, as

it were, outside my own body and individuality; I am _depersonalized_,

detached, cut adrift. Is this madness? No. Madness means the

impossibility of recovering one’s normal balance after the mind has

thus played truant among alien forms of being, and followed Dante

to invisible worlds. Madness means incapacity for self-judgment and

self-control. Whereas it seems to me that my mental transformations

are but philosophical experiences. I am tied to none. I am but making

psychological investigations. At the same time I do not hide from myself

that such experiences weaken the hold of common sense, because they act

as solvents of all personal interests and prejudices. I can only defend

myself against them by returning to the common life of men, and by

bracing and fortifying the will.

July 14, 1880.--What is the book which, of all Genevese literature, I

would soonest have written? Perhaps that of Madame Necker de Saussure,

or Madame de Staël’s “L’Allemagne.” To a Genevese, moral philosophy

is still the most congenial and remunerative of studies. Intellectual

seriousness is what suits us least ill. History, politics, economical

science, education, practical philosophy--these are our subjects.

We have everything to lose in the attempt to make ourselves mere

Frenchified copies of the Parisians: by so doing we are merely carrying

water to the Seine. Independent criticism is perhaps easier at Geneva

than at Paris, and Geneva ought to remain faithful to her own special

line, which, as compared with that of France, is one of greater freedom

from the tyranny of taste and fashion on the one hand, and the tyranny

of ruling opinion on the other--of Catholicism or Jacobinism. Geneva

should be to _La Grande Nation_ what Diogenes was to Alexander; her role

is to represent the independent thought and the free speech which is not

dazzled by prestige, and does not blink the truth. It is true that

the rôle is an ungrateful one, that it lends itself to sarcasm and

misrepresentation--but what matter?

July 28, 1880.--This afternoon I have had a walk in the sunshine, and

have just come back rejoicing in a renewed communion with nature. The

waters of the Rhone and the Arve, the murmur of the river, the austerity

of its banks, the brilliancy of the foliage, the play of the leaves,

the splendor of the July sunlight, the rich fertility of the fields, the

lucidity of the distant mountains, the whiteness of the glaciers under

the azure serenity of the sky, the sparkle and foam of the mingling

rivers, the leafy masses of the La Bâtie woods--all and everything

delighted me. It seemed to me as though the years of strength had come

back to me. I was overwhelmed with sensations. I was surprised and

grateful. The universal life carried me on its breast; the summer’s

caress went to my heart. Once more my eyes beheld the vast horizons,

the soaring peaks, the blue lakes, the winding valleys, and all the free

outlets of old days. And yet there was no painful sense of longing. The

scene left upon me an indefinable impression, which was neither hope,

nor desire, nor regret, but rather a sense of emotion, of passionate

impulse, mingled with admiration and anxiety. I am conscious at once

of joy and of want; beyond what I possess I see the impossible and the

unattainable; I gauge my own wealth and poverty; in a word, I am and

I am not--my inner state is one of contradiction, because it is one of

transition. The ambiguity of it is characteristic of human nature, which

is ambiguous, because it is flesh becoming spirit, space changing into

thought, the Finite looking dimly out upon the Infinite, intelligence

working its way through love and pain.

Man is the _sensorium commune_ of nature, the point at which all values

are interchanged. Mind is the plastic medium, the principle, and the

result of all; at once material and laboratory, product and formula,

sensation, expression, and law; that which is, that which does, that

which knows. All is not mind, but mind is in all, and contains all.

It is the consciousness of being--that is, Being raised to the second

power. If the universe subsists, it is because the Eternal mind loves to

perceive its own content, in all its wealth and expansion--especially in

its stages of preparation. Not that God is an egotist. He allows myriads

upon myriads of suns to disport themselves in his shadow; he grants

life and consciousness to innumerable multitudes of creatures who

thus participate in being and in nature; and all these animated monads

multiply, so to speak, his divinity.

August 4, 1880.--I have read a few numbers of the _Feuille Centrale de

Zofingen_. [Footnote: The journal of a students’ society, drawn from the

different cantons of Switzerland, which meets every year in the little

town of Zofingen] It is one of those perpetual new beginnings of youth

which thinks it is producing something fresh when it is only repeating

the old.

Nature is governed by continuity--the continuity of repetition; it is

like an oft-told tale, or the recurring burden of a song. The rose-trees

are never tired of rose-bearing, the birds of nest-building, young

hearts of loving, or young voices of singing the thoughts and feelings

which have served their predecessors a hundred thousand times before.

Profound monotony in universal movement--there is the simplest formula

furnished by the spectacle of the world. All circles are alike, and

every existence tends to trace its circle.

How, then, is _fastidium_ to be avoided? By shutting our eyes to the

general uniformity, by laying stress upon the small differences which

exist, and then by learning to enjoy repetition. What to the intellect

is old and worn-out is perennially young and fresh to the heart;

curiosity is insatiable, but love is never tired. The natural

preservative against satiety, too, is work. What we do may weary others,

but the personal effort is at least useful to its author. Where every

one works, the general life is sure to possess charm and savor, even

though it repeat forever the same song, the same aspirations, the same

prejudices, and the same sighs. “To every man his turn,” is the motto

of mortal beings. If what they do is old, they themselves are new; when

they imitate, they think they are inventing. They have received, and

they transmit. _E sempre bene!_

August 24, 1880.--As years go on I love the beautiful more than the

sublime, the smooth more than the rough, the calm nobility of Plato

more than the fierce holiness of the world’s Jeremiahs. The vehement

barbarian is to me the inferior of the mild and playful Socrates. My

taste is for the well-balanced soul and the well-trained heart--for

a liberty which is not harsh and insolent, like that of the newly

enfranchised slave, but lovable. The temperament which charms me is

that in which one virtue leads naturally to another. All exclusive and

sharply-marked qualities are but so many signs of imperfection.

August 29, 1880.--To-day I am conscious of improvement. I am taking

advantage of it to go back to my neglected work and my interrupted

habits; but in a week I have grown several months older--that is easy to

see. The affection of those around me makes them pretend not to see it;

but the looking-glass tells the truth. The fact does not take away from

the pleasure of convalescence; but still one hears in it the shuttle of

destiny, and death seems to be nearing rapidly, in spite of the halts

and truces which are granted one. The most beautiful existence, it seems

to me, would be that of a river which should get through all its rapids

and waterfalls not far from its rising, and should then in its widening

course form a succession of rich valleys, and in each of them a lake

equally but diversely beautiful, to end, after the plains of age were

past, in the ocean where all that is weary and heavy-laden comes to seek

for rest. How few there are of these full, fruitful, gentle lives! What

is the use of wishing for or regretting them? It is Wiser and harder to

see in one’s own lot the best one could have had, and to say to one’s

self that after all the cleverest tailor cannot make us a coat to fit us

more closely than our skin.

“Le vrai nom du bonheur est le contentement.”

... The essential thing, for every one is to accept his destiny. Fate

has deceived you; you have sometimes grumbled at your lot; well, no more

mutual reproaches; go to sleep in peace.

August 30, 1880. (_Two o’clock_).--Rumblings of a grave and distant

thunder. The sky is gray but rainless; the sharp little cries of the

birds show agitation and fear; one might imagine it the prelude to a

symphony or a catastrophe.

“Quel éclair te traverse, ô mon coeur soucieux?”

Strange--all the business of the immediate neighborhood is going on;

there is even more movement than usual; and yet all these noises are,

as it were, held suspended in the silence--in a soft, positive silence,

which they cannot disguise--silence akin to that which, in every town,

on one day of the week, replaces the vague murmur of the laboring

hive. Such silence at such an hour is extraordinary. There is something

expectant, contemplative, almost anxious in it. Are there days on which

“the little breath” of Job produces more effect than tempest? on which a

dull rumbling on the distant horizon is enough to suspend the concert of

voices, like the roaring of a desert lion at the fall of night?

September 9, 1880.--It seems to me that with the decline of my

active force I am becoming more purely spirit; everything is growing

transparent to me. I see the types, the foundation of beings, the sense

of things.

All personal events, all particular experiences, are to me texts for

meditation, facts to be generalized into laws, realities to be reduced

to ideas. Life is only a document to be interpreted, matter to be

spiritualized. Such is the life of the thinker. Every day he strips

himself more and more of personality. If he consents to act and to feel,

it is that he may the better understand; if he wills, it is that he may

know what will is. Although it is sweet to him to be loved, and he knows

nothing else so sweet, yet there also he seems to himself to be the

occasion of the phenomenon rather than its end. He contemplates the

spectacle of love, and love for him remains a spectacle. He does not

even believe his body his own; he feels the vital whirlwind passing

through him--lent to him, as it were, for a moment, in order that he

may perceive the cosmic vibrations. He is a mere thinking subject; he

retains only the form of things; he attributes to himself the material

possession of nothing whatsoever; he asks nothing from life but wisdom.

This temper of mind makes him incomprehensible to all that loves

enjoyment, dominion, possession. He is fluid as a phantom that we see

but cannot grasp; he resembles a man, as the _manes_ of Achilles or the

shade of Creusa resembled the living. Without having died, I am a ghost.

Other men are dreams to me, and I am a dream to them.

_Later_--Consciousness in me takes no account of the category of time,

and therefore all the partitions which tend to make of life a palace

with a thousand rooms, do not exist in my case; I am still in the

primitive unicellular state. I possess myself only as Monad and as Ego,

and I feel my faculties themselves reabsorbed into the substance which

they have individualized. All the endowment of animality is, so to

speak, repudiated; all the produce of study and of cultivation is in the

same way annulled; the whole crystallization is redissolved into fluid;

the whole rainbow is withdrawn within the dewdrop; consequences return

to the principle, effects to the cause, the bird to the egg, the

organism to its germ.

This psychological reinvolution is an anticipation of death; it

represents the life beyond the grave, the return to school, the soul

fading into the world of ghosts, or descending into the region of _Die

Mütter_; it implies the simplification of the individual who, allowing

all the accidents of personality to evaporate, exists henceforward

only in the indivisible state, the state of point, of potentiality, of

pregnant nothingness. Is not this the true definition of mind? Is not

mind, dissociated from space and time, just this? Its development,

past or future, is contained in it just as a curve is contained in its

algebraical formula. This nothing is an all. This _punctum_ without

dimensions is a _punctum saliens_. What is the acorn but the oak which

has lost its branches, its leaves, its trunk, and its roots--that is

to say, all its apparatus, its forms, its particularities--but which is

still present in concentration, in essence, in a force which contains

the possibility of complete revival?

This impoverishment, then, is only superficially a loss, a reduction. To

be reduced to those elements in one which are eternal, is indeed to die

but not to be annihilated: it is simply to become virtual again.

October 9, 1880. (_Clarens_).--A walk. Deep feeling and admiration.

Nature was so beautiful, so caressing, so poetical, so maternal. The

sunlight, the leaves, the sky, the bells, all said to me--“Be of good

strength and courage, poor bruised one. This is nature’s kindly season;

here is forgetfulness, calm, and rest. Faults and troubles, anxieties

and regrets, cares and wrongs, are but one and the same burden. We make

no distinctions; we comfort all sorrows, we bring peace, and with us

is consolation. Salvation to the weary, salvation to the afflicted,

salvation to the sick, to sinners, to all that suffer in heart, in

conscience, and in body. We are the fountain of blessing; drink and

live! God maketh his sun to rise upon the just and upon the unjust.

There is nothing grudging in his munificence; he does not weigh his

gifts like a moneychanger, or number them like a cashier. Come--there is

enough for all!”

October 29, 1880. (_Geneva_).--The ideal which a man professes may

itself be only a matter of appearance--a device for misleading his

neighbor, or deluding himself. The individual is always ready to claim

for himself the merits of the badge under which he fights; whereas,

generally speaking, it is the contrary which happens. The nobler the

badge, the less estimable is the wearer of it. Such at least is the

presumption. It is extremely dangerous to pride one’s self on any moral

or religious specialty whatever. Tell me what you pique yourself upon,

and I will tell you what you are not.

But how are we to know what an individual is? First of all by his

acts; but by something else too--something which is only perceived by

intuition. Soul judges soul by elective affinity, reaching through and

beyond both words and silence, looks and actions.

The criterion is subjective, I allow, and liable to error; but in the

first place there is no safer one, and in the next, the accuracy of the

judgment is in proportion to the moral culture of the judge. Courage is

an authority on courage, goodness on goodness, nobleness on nobleness,

loyalty on uprightness. We only truly know what we have, or what we have

lost and regret, as, for example, childish innocence, virginal purity,

or stainless honor. The truest and best judge, then, is Infinite

Goodness, and next to it, the regenerated sinner or the saint, the man

tried by experience or the sage. Naturally, the touchstone in us becomes

finer and truer the better we are.

November 3, 1880.--What impression has the story I have just read

made upon me? A mixed one. The imagination gets no pleasure out of it,

although the intellect is amused. Why? Because the author’s mood is one

of incessant irony and _persiflage_. The Voltairean tradition has been

his guide--a great deal of wit and satire, very little feeling, no

simplicity. It is a combination of qualities which serves eminently

well for satire, for journalism, and for paper warfare of all kinds, but

which is much less suitable to the novel or short story, for cleverness

is not poetry, and the novel is still within the domain of poetry,

although on the frontier. The vague discomfort aroused in one by these

epigrammatic productions is due probably to a confusion of kinds.

Ambiguity of style keeps one in a perpetual state of tension and

self-defense; we ought not to be left in doubt whether the speaker is

jesting or serious, mocking or tender. Moreover, banter is not humor,

and never will be. I think, indeed, that the professional wit finds a

difficulty in being genuinely comic, for want of depth and disinterested

feeling. To laugh at things and people is not really a joy; it is at

best but a cold pleasure. Buffoonery is wholesomer, because it is a

little more kindly. The reason why continuous sarcasm repels us is that

it lacks two things--humanity and seriousness. Sarcasm implies pride,

since it means putting one’s self above others--and levity, because

conscience is allowed no voice in controlling it. In short, we read

satirical books, but we only love and cling to the books in which there

is _heart_.

November 22, 1880.--How is ill-nature to be met and overcome? First, by

humility: when a man knows his own weaknesses, why should he be angry

with others for pointing them out? No doubt it is not very amiable

of them to do so, but still, truth is on their side. Secondly, by

reflection: after all we are what we are, and if we have been thinking

too much of ourselves, it is only an opinion to be modified; the

incivility of our neighbor leaves us what we were before. Above all, by

pardon: there is only one way of not hating those who do us wrong, and

that is by doing them good; anger is best conquered by kindness. Such

a victory over feeling may not indeed affect those who have wronged us,

but it is a valuable piece of self-discipline. It is vulgar to be

angry on one’s own account; we ought only to be angry for great causes.

Besides, the poisoned dart can only be extracted from the wound by the

balm of a silent and thoughtful charity. Why do we let human malignity

embitter us? why should ingratitude, jealousy--perfidy even--enrage

us? There is no end to recriminations, complaints, or reprisals. The

simplest plan is to blot everything out. Anger, rancor, bitterness,

trouble the soul. Every man is a dispenser of justice; but there is one

wrong that he is not bound to punish--that of which he himself is the

victim. Such a wrong is to be healed, not avenged. Fire purifies all.

“Mon âme est comme un feu qui dévore et parfume

Ce qu’on jette pour le ternir.”

December 27, 1880--In an article I have just read, Biedermann

reproaches Strauss with being too negative, and with having broken with

Christianity. The object to be pursued, according to him, should be the

freeing of religion from the mythological element, and the substitution

of another point of view for the antiquated dualism of orthodoxy--this

other point of view to be the victory over the world, produced by the

sense of divine sonship.

It is true that another question arises: has not a religion which has

separated itself from special miracle, from local interventions of the

supernatural, and from mystery, lost its savor and its efficacy? For

the sake of satisfying a thinking and instructed public, is it wise to

sacrifice the influence of religion over the multitude? Answer. A pious

fiction is still a fiction. Truth has the highest claim. It is for the

world to accommodate itself to truth, and not _vice versâ_. Copernicus

upset the astronomy of the Middle Ages--so much the worse for it! The

Eternal Gospel revolutionizes modern churches--what matter! When symbols

become transparent, they have no further binding force. We see in them

a poem, an allegory, a metaphor; but we believe in them no longer.

Yes, but still a certain esotericism is inevitable, since critical,

scientific, and philosophical culture is only attainable by a minority.

The new faith must have its symbols too. At present the effect it

produces on pious souls is a more or less profane one; it has a

disrespectful, incredulous, frivolous look, and it seems to free a man

from traditional dogma at the cost of seriousness of conscience. How are

sensitiveness of feeling, the sense of sin, the desire for pardon, the

thirst for holiness, to be preserved among us, when the errors which

have served them so long for support and food have been eliminated? Is

not illusion indispensable? is it not the divine process of education?

Perhaps the best way is to draw a deep distinction between opinion and

belief, and between belief and science. The mind which discerns these

different degrees may allow itself imagination and faith, and still

remain within the lines of progress.

December 28, 1880.--There are two modes of classing the people we know:

the first is utilitarian--it starts from ourselves, divides our friends

from our enemies, and distinguishes those who are antipathetic to us,

those who are indifferent, those who can serve or harm us; the second is

disinterested--it classes men according to their intrinsic value, their

own qualities and defects, apart from the feelings which they have for

us, or we for them.

My tendency is to the second kind of classification. I appreciate

men less by the special affection which they show to me than by their

personal excellence, and I cannot confuse gratitude with esteem. It is a

happy thing for us when the two feelings can be combined; and nothing is

more painful than to owe gratitude where yet we can feel neither respect

nor confidence.

I am not very willing to believe in the permanence of accidental states.

The generosity of a miser, the good nature of an egotist, the gentleness

of a passionate temperament, the tenderness of a barren nature, the

piety of a dull heart, the humility of an excitable self-love, interest

me as phenomena--nay, even touch me if I am the object of them, but they

inspire me with very little confidence. I foresee the end of them too

clearly. Every exception tends to disappear and to return to the rule.

All privilege is temporary, and besides, I am less flattered than

anxious when I find myself the object of a privilege.

A man’s primitive character may be covered over by alluvial deposits of

culture and acquisition--none the less is it sure to come to the surface

when years have worn away all that is accessory and adventitious. I

admit indeed the possibility of great moral crises which sometimes

revolutionize the soul, but I dare not reckon on them. It is a

possibility--not a probability. In choosing one’s friends we must

choose those whose qualities are inborn, and their virtues virtues of

temperament. To lay the foundations of friendship on borrowed or added

virtues is to build on an artificial soil; we run too many risks by it.

Exceptions are snares, and we ought above all to distrust them when they

charm our vanity. To catch and fix a fickle heart is a task which

tempts all women; and a man finds something intoxicating in the tears of

tenderness and joy which he alone has had the power to draw from a proud

woman. But attractions of this kind are deceptive. Affinity of nature

founded on worship of the same ideal, and perfect in proportion to

perfectness of soul, is the only affinity which is worth anything. True

love is that which ennobles the personality, fortifies the heart, and

sanctifies the existence. And the being we love must not be mysterious

and sphinx-like, but clear and limpid as a diamond; so that admiration

and attachment may grow with knowledge.

* * * * *

Jealousy is a terrible thing. It resembles love, only it is precisely

love’s contrary. Instead of wishing for the welfare of the object

loved, it desires the dependence of that object upon itself, and its

own triumph. Love is the forgetfulness of self; jealousy is the most

passionate form of egotism, the glorification of a despotic, exacting,

and vain _ego_, which can neither forget nor subordinate itself. The

contrast is perfect.

* * * * *

Austerity in women is sometimes the accompaniment of a rare power of

loving. And when it is so their attachment is strong as death; their

fidelity as resisting as the diamond; they are hungry for devotion

and athirst for sacrifice. Their love is a piety, their tenderness

a religion, and they triple the energy of love by giving to it the

sanctity of duty.

* * * * *

To the spectator over fifty, the world certainly presents a good deal

that is new, but a great deal more which is only the old furbished

up--mere plagiarism and modification, rather than amelioration. Almost

everything is a copy of a copy, a reflection of a reflection, and the

perfect being is as rare now as he ever was. Let us not complain of it;

it is the reason why the world lasts. Humanity improves but slowly; that

is why history goes on.

Is not progress the goad of Siva? It excites the torch to burn itself

away; it hastens the approach of death. Societies which change rapidly

only reach their final catastrophe the sooner. Children who are too

precocious never reach maturity. Progress should be the aroma of life,

not its substance.

* * * * *

Man is a passion which brings a will into play, which works an

intelligence--and thus the organs which seem to be in the service of

intelligence, are in reality only the agents of passion. For all the

commoner sorts of being, determinism is true: inward liberty exists only

as an exception and as the result of self-conquest. And even he who has

tasted liberty is only free intermittently and by moments. True

liberty, then, is not a continuous state; it is not an indefeasible

and invariable quality. We are free only so far as we are not dupes of

ourselves, our pretexts, our instincts, our temperament. We are freed by

energy and the critical spirit--that is to say, by detachment of soul,

by self-government. So that we are enslaved, but susceptible of freedom;

we are bound, but capable of shaking off our bonds. The soul is caged,

but it has power to flutter within its cage.

* * * * *

Material results are but the tardy sign of invisible activities. The

bullet has started long before the noise of the report has reached us.

The decisive events of the world take place in the intellect.

* * * * *

Sorrow is the most tremendous of all realities in the sensible world,

but the transfiguration of sorrow after the manner of Christ is a more

beautiful solution of the problem than the extirpation of sorrow, after

the method of Çakyamouni.

* * * * *

Life should be a giving birth to the soul, the development of a higher

mode of reality. The animal must be humanized; flesh must be made

spirit; physiological activity must be transmuted into intellect and

conscience, into reason, justice, and generosity, as the torch is

transmuted into life and warmth. The blind, greedy, selfish nature of

man must put on beauty and nobleness. This heavenly alchemy is what

justifies our presence on the earth: it is our mission and our glory.

* * * * *

To renounce happiness and think only of duty, to put conscience in the

place of feeling--this voluntary martyrdom has its nobility. The natural

man in us flinches, but the better self submits. To hope for justice in

the world is a sign of sickly sensibility; we must be able to do without

it. True manliness consists in such independence. Let the world think

what it will of us, it is its own affair. If it will not give us the

place which is lawfully ours until after our death, or perhaps not at

all, it is but acting within its right. It is our business to behave as

though our country were grateful, as though the world were equitable, as

though opinion were clear-sighted, as though life were just, as though

men were good.

* * * * *

Death itself may become matter of consent, and therefore a moral act.

The animal expires; man surrenders his soul to the author of the soul.

[With the year 1881, beginning with the month of January, we enter upon

the last period of Amiel’s illness. Although he continued to attend to

his professional duties, and never spoke of his forebodings, he felt

himself mortally ill, as we shall see by the following extracts from the

Journal. Amiel wrote up to the end, doing little else, however, toward

the last than record the progress of his disease, and the proofs of

interest and kindliness which he received. After weeks of suffering and

pain a state of extreme weakness gradually gained upon him. His last

lines are dated the 29th of April; it was on the 11th of May that he

succumbed, without a struggle, to the complicated disease from which he

suffered.--S.]

January 5, 1881.--I think I fear shame more than death. Tacitus said:

_Omnia serviliter pro dominatione_. My tendency is just the contrary.

Even when it is voluntary, dependence is a burden to me. I should blush

to find myself determined by interest, submitting to constraint, or

becoming the slave of any will whatever. To me vanity is slavery,

self-love degrading, and utilitarianism meanness. I detest the ambition

which makes you the liege man of something or some-one--I desire to be

simply my own master.

If I had health I should be the freest man I know. Although perhaps

a little hardness of heart would be desirable to make me still more

independent.

Let me exaggerate nothing. My liberty is only negative. Nobody has any

hold over me, but many things have become impossible to me, and if I

were so foolish as to wish for them, the limits of my liberty would soon

become apparent. Therefore I take care not to wish for them, and not to

let my thoughts dwell on them. I only desire what I am able for, and in

this way I run my head against no wall, I cease even to be conscious

of the boundaries which enclose me. I take care to wish for rather less

than is in my power, that I may not even be reminded of the obstacles in

my way. Renunciation is the safeguard of dignity. Let us strip ourselves

if we would not be stripped. He who has freely given up his life may

look death in the face: what more can it take away from him? Do away

with desire and practice charity--there you have the whole method of

Buddha, the whole secret of the great Deliverance....

It is snowing, and my chest is troublesome. So that I depend on nature

and on God. But I do not depend on human caprice; this is the point to

be insisted on. It is true that my chemist may make a blunder and poison

me, my banker may reduce me to pauperism, just as an earthquake may

destroy my house without hope of redress. Absolute independence,

therefore, is a pure chimera. But I do possess relative

independence--that of the stoic who withdraws into the fortress of his

will, and shuts the gates behind him.

“Jurons, excepté Dieu, de n’avoir point de maître.”

This oath of old Geneva remains my motto still.

January 10, 1881.--To let one’s self be troubled by the ill-will, the

ingratitude, the indifference, of others, is a weakness to which I am

very much inclined. It is painful to me to be misunderstood, ill-judged.

I am wanting in manly hardihood, and the heart in me is more vulnerable

than it ought to be. It seems to me, however, that I have grown tougher

in this respect than I used to be. The malignity of the world troubles

me less than it did. Is it the result of philosophy, or an effect of

age, or simply caused by the many proofs of respect and attachment that

I have received? These proofs were just what were wanting to inspire me

with some self-respect. Otherwise I should have so easily believed in

my own nullity and in the insignificance of all my efforts. Success is

necessary for the timid, praise is a moral stimulus, and admiration a

strengthening elixir. We think we know ourselves, but as long as we are

ignorant of our comparative value, our place in the social assessment,

we do not know ourselves well enough. If we are to act with effect, we

must count for something with our fellow-men; we must feel ourselves

possessed of some weight and credit with them, so that our effort may be

rightly proportioned to the resistance which has to be overcome. As

long as we despise opinion we are without a standard by which to measure

ourselves; we do not know our relative power. I have despised opinion

too much, while yet I have been too sensitive to injustice. These two

faults have cost me dear. I longed for kindness, sympathy, and equity,

but my pride forbade me to ask for them, or to employ any address

or calculation to obtain them.... I do not think I have been wrong

altogether, for all through I have been in harmony with my best self,

but my want of adaptability has worn me out, to no purpose. Now, indeed,

I am at peace within, but my career is over, my strength is running out,

and my life is near its end.

“Il n’est plus temps pour rien excepté pour mourir.”

This is why I can look at it all historically.

January 23, 1881.--A tolerable night, but this morning the cough has

been frightful. Beautiful weather, the windows ablaze with sunshine.

With my feet on the fender I have just finished the newspaper.

At this moment I feel well, and it seems strange to me that my doom

should be so near. Life has no sense of kinship with death. This is why,

no doubt, a sort of mechanical instinctive hope is forever springing up

afresh in us, troubling our reason, and casting doubt on the verdict of

science. All life is tenacious and persistent. It is like the parrot in

the fable, who, at the very moment when its neck is being wrung, still

repeats with its last breath:

“Cela, cela, ne sera rien.”

The intellect puts the matter at its worst, but the animal protests.

It will not believe in the evil till it comes. Ought one to regret it?

Probably not. It is nature’s will that life should defend itself against

death; hope is only the love of life; it is an organic impulse which

religion has taken under its protection. Who knows? God may save us,

may work a miracle. Besides, are we ever sure that there is no remedy?

Uncertainty is the refuge of hope. We reckon the doubtful among the

chances in our favor. Mortal frailty clings to every support. How be

angry with it for so doing? Even with all possible aids it hardly ever

escapes desolation and distress. The supreme solution is, and always

will be, to see in necessity the fatherly will of God, and so to submit

ourselves and bear our cross bravely, as an offering to the Arbiter

of human destiny. The soldier does not dispute the order given him: he

obeys and dies without murmuring. If he waited to understand the use of

his sacrifice, where would his submission be?

It occurred to me this morning how little we know of each other’s

physical troubles; even those nearest and dearest to us know nothing

of our conversations with the King of Terrors. There are thoughts

which brook no confidant: there are griefs which cannot be shared.

Consideration for others even bids us conceal them. We dream alone, we

suffer alone, we die alone, we inhabit the last resting-place alone. But

there is nothing to prevent us from opening our solitude to God. And

so what was an austere monologue becomes dialogue, reluctance becomes

docility, renunciation passes into peace, and the sense of painful

defeat is lost in the sense of recovered liberty.

“Vouloir ce que Dieu veut est la seule science

Qui nous met en repos.”

None of us can escape the play of contrary impulse; but as soon as

the soul has once recognized the order of things and submitted itself

thereto, then all is well.

“Comme un sage mourant puissions nous dire en paix:

J’ai trop longtemps erré, cherché; je me trompais:

Tout est bien, mon Dieu m’enveloppe.”

January 28, 1881.--A terrible night. For three or four hours I struggled

against suffocation and looked death in the face.... It is clear that

what awaits me is suffocation--asphyxia. I shall die by choking.

I should not have chosen such a death; but when there is no option, one

must simply resign one’s self, and at once.... Spinoza expired in the

presence of the doctor whom he had sent for. I must familiarize myself

with the idea of dying unexpectedly, some fine night, strangled by

laryngitis. The last sigh of a patriarch surrounded by his kneeling

family is more beautiful: my fate indeed lacks beauty, grandeur, poetry;

but stoicism consists in renunciation. _Abstine et sustine_.

I must remember besides that I have faithful friends; it is better not

to torment them. The last journey is only made more painful by scenes

and lamentations: one word is worth all others--“Thy will, not mine, be

done!” Leibnitz was accompanied to the grave by his servant only.

The loneliness of the deathbed and the tomb is not an evil. The great

mystery cannot be shared. The dialogue between the soul and the King of

Terrors needs no witnesses. It is the living who cling to the thought

of last greetings. And, after all, no one knows exactly what is reserved

for him. What will be will be. We have but to say, “Amen.”

February 4, 1881.--It is a strange sensation that of laying one’s

self down to rest with the thought that perhaps one will never see the

morrow. Yesterday I felt it strongly, and yet here I am. Humility

is made easy by the sense of excessive frailty, but it cuts away all

ambition.

“Quittez le long espoir et les vastes pensées.”

A long piece of work seems absurd--one lives but from day to day.

When a man can no longer look forward in imagination to five years,

a year, a month, of free activity--when he is reduced to counting

the hours, and to seeing in the coming night the threat of an unknown

fate--it is plain that he must give up art, science, and politics,

and that he must be content to hold converse with himself, the one

possibility which is his till the end. Inward soliloquy is the only

resource of the condemned man whose execution is delayed. He withdraws

upon the fastnesses of conscience. His spiritual force no longer

radiates outwardly; it is consumed in self-study. Action is cut

off--only contemplation remains. He still writes to those who have

claims upon him, but he bids farewell to the public, and retreats into

himself. Like the hare, he comes back to die in his form, and this form

is his consciousness, his intellect--the journal, too, which has been

the companion of his inner life. As long as he can hold a pen, as long

as he has a moment of solitude, this echo of himself still claims his

meditation, still represents to him his converse with his God.

In all this, however, there is nothing akin to self-examination: it is

not an act of contrition, or a cry for help. It is simply an Amen of

submission--“My child, give me thy heart!”

Renunciation and acquiescence are less difficult to me than to others,

for I desire nothing. I could only wish not to suffer, but Jesus on

Gethesemane allowed himself to make the same prayer; let us add to

it the words that he did: “Nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be

done,”--and wait.

... For many years past the immanent God has been more real to me than

the transcendent God, and the religion of Jacob has been more alien to

me than that of Kant, or even Spinoza. The whole Semitic dramaturgy has

come to seem to me a work of the imagination. The apostolic documents

have changed in value and meaning to my eyes. Belief and truth have

become distinct to me with a growing distinctness. Religious psychology

has become a simple phenomenon, and has lost its fixed and absolute

value. The apologetics of Pascal, of Leibnitz, of Secrétan, are to me no

more convincing than those of the Middle Ages, for they presuppose what

is really in question--a revealed doctrine, a definite and unchangeable

Christianity. It seems to me that what remains to me from all my studies

is a new phenomenology of mind, an intuition of universal metamorphosis.

All particular convictions, all definite principles, all clear-cut

formulas and fixed ideas, are but prejudices, useful in practice, but

still narrownesses of the mind. The absolute in detail is absurd and

contradictory. All political, religious, aesthetic, or literary

parties are protuberances, misgrowths of thought. Every special belief

represents a stiffening and thickening of thought; a stiffening,

however, which is necessary in its time and place. Our monad, in its

thinking capacity, overleaps the boundaries of time and space and of

its own historical surroundings; but in its individual capacity, and

for purposes of action, it adapts itself to current illusions, and

puts before itself a definite end. It is lawful to be _man_, but it

is needful also to be _a_ man, to be an individual. Our rôle is thus a

double one. Only, the philosopher is specially authorized to develop the

first rôle, which the vast majority of humankind neglects.

February 7, 1881.--Beautiful sunshine to-day. But I have scarcely spring

enough left in me to notice it. Admiration, joy, presuppose a little

relief from pain. Whereas my neck is tired with the weight of my

head, and my heart is wearied with the weight of life; this is not the

aesthetic state.

I have been thinking over different things which I might have written.

But generally speaking we let what is most original and best in us be

wasted. We reserve ourselves for a future which never comes. _Omnis

mortar_.

February 14, 1881.--Supposing that my weeks are numbered, what duties

still remain to me to fulfill, that I may leave all in order? I must

give every one his due; justice, prudence, kindness must be satisfied;

the last memories must be sweet ones. Try to forget nothing useful,

nor anybody who has a claim upon thee! February 15, 1881.--I have, very

reluctantly, given up my lecture at the university, and sent for my

doctor. On my chimney-piece are the flowers which ---- has sent me.

Letters from London, Paris, Lausanne, Neuchatel ... They seem to me like

wreaths thrown into a grave.

Mentally I say farewell to all the distant friends whom I shall never

see again.

February 18, 1881.--Misty weather. A fairly good night. Still, the

emaciation goes on. That is to say, the vulture allows me some respite,

but he still hovers over his prey. The possibility of resuming my

official work seems like a dream to me.

Although just now the sense of ghostly remoteness from life which I

so often have is absent, I feel myself a prisoner for good, a hopeless

invalid. This vague intermediate state, which is neither death nor life,

has its sweetness, because if it implies renunciation, still it allows

of thought. It is a reverie without pain, peaceful and meditative.

Surrounded with affection and with books, I float down the stream of

time, as once I glided over the Dutch canals, smoothly and noiselessly.

It is as though I were once more on board the _Treckschute_. Scarcely

can one hear even the soft ripple of the water furrowed by the barge,

or the hoof of the towing horse trotting along the sandy path. A journey

under these conditions has something fantastic in it. One is not

sure whether one still exists, still belongs to earth. It is like the

_manes_, the shadows, flitting through the twilight of the _inania

regna_. Existence has become fluid. From the standpoint of complete

personal renunciation I watch the passage of my impressions, my dreams,

thoughts, and memories.... It is a mood of fixed contemplation akin to

that which we attribute to the seraphim. It takes no interest in the

individual self, but only in the specimen monad, the sample of

the general history of mind. Everything is in everything, and the

consciousness examines what it has before it. Nothing is either great or

small. The mind adopts all modes, and everything is acceptable to it. In

this state its relations with the body, with the outer world, and with

other individuals, fade out of sight. _Selbst-bewusstsein_ becomes once

more impersonal _Bewusstsein_, and before personality can be reacquired,

pain, duty, and will must be brought into action.

Are these oscillations between the personal and the impersonal, between

pantheism and theism, between Spinoza and Leibnitz, to be regretted? No,

for it is the one state which makes us conscious of the other. And

as man is capable of ranging the two domains, why should he mutilate

himself?

February 22, 1881.--The march of mind finds its typical expression in

astronomy--no pause, but no hurry; orbits, cycles, energy, but at the

same time harmony; movement and yet order; everything has its own weight

and its relative weight, receives and gives forth light. Cannot this

cosmic and divine become oars? Is the war of all against all, the

preying of man upon man, a higher type of balanced action? I shrink form

believing it. Some theorists imagine that the phase of selfish brutality

is the last phase of all. They must be wrong. Justice will prevail, and

justice is not selfishness. Independence of intellect, combined with

goodness of heart, will be the agents of a result, which will be the

compromise required.

March 1, 1881.--I have just been glancing over the affairs of the world

in the newspaper. What a Babel it is! But it is very pleasant to be able

to make the tour of the planet and review the human race in an hour. It

gives one a sense of ubiquity. A newspaper in the twentieth century

will be composed of eight or ten daily bulletins--political, religious,

scientific, literary, artistic, commercial, meteorological, military,

economical, social, legal, and financial; and will be divided into two

parts only--_Urbs_ and _Orbis_. The need of totalizing, of simplifying,

will bring about the general use of such graphic methods as permit of

series and comparisons. We shall end by feeling the pulse of the race

and the globe as easily as that of a sick man, and we shall count the

palpitations of the universal life, just as we shall hear the grass

growing, or the sunspots clashing, and catch the first stirrings of

volcanic disturbances. Activity will become consciousness; the earth

will see herself. Then will be the time for her to blush for her

disorders, her hideousness, her misery, her crime and to throw herself

at last with energy and perseverance into the pursuit of justice. When

humanity has cut its wisdom-teeth, then perhaps it will have the grace

to reform itself, and the will to attempt a systematic reduction of the

share of the evil in the world. The _Weltgeist_ will pass from the state

of instinct to the moral state. War, hatred, selfishness, fraud, the

right of the stronger, will be held to be old-world barbarisms, mere

diseases of growth. The pretenses of modern civilization will be

replaced by real virtues. Men will be brothers, peoples will be friends,

races will sympathize one with another, and mankind will draw from love

a principle of emulation, of invention, and of zeal, as powerful as any

furnished by the vulgar stimulant of interest. This millennium--will it

ever be? It is at least an act of piety to believe in it.

March 14, 1881.--I have finished Mérimée’s letters to Panizzi. Mérimée

died of the disease which torments me--“_Je tousse, et j’étouffe_.”

Bronchitis and asthma, whence defective assimilation, and finally

exhaustion. He, too, tried arsenic, wintering at Cannes, compressed air.

All was useless. Suffocation and inanition carried off the author of

“Colomba.” _Hic tua res agitur_. The gray, heavy sky is of the same

color as my thoughts. And yet the irrevocable has its own sweetness and

serenity. The fluctuations of illusion, the uncertainties of desire, the

leaps and bounds of hope, give place to tranquil resignation. One feels

as though one were already beyond the grave. It is this very week,

too, I remember, that my corner of ground in the Oasis is to be bought.

Everything draws toward the end. _Festinat ad eventum_.

March 15, 1881.--The “Journal” is full of details of the horrible affair

at Petersburg. How clear it is that such catastrophes as this, in

which the innocent suffer, are the product of a long accumulation of

iniquities. Historical justice is, generally speaking, tardy--so tardy

that it becomes unjust. The Providential theory is really based on human

solidarity. Louis XVI. pays for Louis XV., Alexander II. for Nicholas.

We expiate the sins of our fathers, and our grandchildren will be

punished for ours. A double injustice! cries the individual. And he is

right if the individualist principle is true. But is it true? That is

the point. It seems as though the individual part of each man’s destiny

were but one section of that destiny. Morally we are responsible

for what we ourselves have willed, but socially, our happiness

and unhappiness depend on causes outside our will. Religion

answers--“Mystery, obscurity, submission, faith. Do your duty; leave the

rest to God.”

March 16, 1881.--A wretched night. A melancholy morning.... The two

stand-bys of the doctor, digitalis and bromide, seem to have lost their

power over me. Wearily and painfully I watch the tedious progress of

my own decay. What efforts to keep one’s self from dying! I am worn out

with the struggle.

Useless and incessant struggle is a humiliation to one’s manhood. The

lion finds the gnat the most intolerable of his foes. The natural

man feels the same. But the spiritual man must learn the lesson of

gentleness and long-suffering. The inevitable is the will of God. We

might have preferred something else, but it is our business to accept

the lot assigned us.... One thing only is necessary--

“Garde en mon coeur la foi dans ta volonté sainte,

Et de moi fais, ô Dieu, tout ce que tu voudras.”

_Later_.--One of my students has just brought me a sympathetic message

from my class. My sister sends me a pot of azaleas, rich in flowers and

buds;----sends roses and violets: every one spoils me, which proves that

I am ill.

March 19, 1881.--Distaste--discouragement. My heart is growing cold.

And yet what affectionate care, what tenderness, surrounds me!... But

without health, what can one do with all the rest? What is the good

of it all to me? What was the good of Job’s trials? They ripened his

patience; they exercised his submission.

Come, let me forget myself, let me shake off this melancholy, this

weariness. Let me think, not of all that is lost, but of all that I

might still lose. I will reckon up my privileges; I will try to be

worthy of my blessings.

March 21, 1881.--This invalid life is too Epicurean. For five or six

weeks now I have done nothing else but wait, nurse myself, and amuse

myself, and how weary one gets of it! What I want is work. It is work

which gives flavor to life. Mere existence without object and without

effort is a poor thing. Idleness leads to languor, and languor to

disgust. Besides, here is the spring again, the season of vague desires,

of dull discomforts, of dim aspirations, of sighs without a cause. We

dream wide-awake. We search darkly for we know not what; invoking the

while something which has no name, unless it be happiness or death.

March 28, 1881.--I cannot work; I find it difficult to exist. One may

be glad to let one’s friends spoil one for a few months; it is an

experience which is good for us all; but afterward? How much better to

make room for the living, the active, the productive.

“Tircis, voici le temps de prendre sa retraite.”

Is it that I care so much to go on living? I think not. It is health

that I long for--freedom from suffering.

And this desire being vain, I can find no savor in anything else.

Satiety. Lassitude. Renunciation. Abdication. “In your patience possess

ye your souls.”

April 10, 1881. (_Sunday_).--Visit to ----. She read over to me letters

of 1844 to 1845--letters of mine. So much promise to end in so meager

a result! What creatures we are! I shall end like the Rhine, lost among

the sands, and the hour is close by when my thread of water will have

disappeared.

Afterward I had a little walk in the sunset. There was an effect of

scattered rays and stormy clouds; a green haze envelops all the trees--

“Et tout renaît, et déjà l’aubépine

A vu l’abeille accourir à ses fleurs,”

--but to me it all seems strange already.

_Later_.--What dupes we are of our own desires!... Destiny has two ways

of crushing us--by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them. But he

who only wills what God wills escapes both catastrophes. “All things

work together for his good.”

April 14, 1881.--Frightful night; the fourteenth running, in which I

have been consumed by sleeplessness....

April 15, 1881.--To-morrow is Good Friday, the festival of pain. I know

what it is to spend days of anguish and nights of agony. Let me bear my

cross humbly.... I have no more future. My duty is to satisfy the claims

of the present, and to leave everything in order. Let me try to end

well, seeing that to undertake and even to continue, are closed to me.

April 19, 1881.--A terrible sense of oppression. My flesh and my heart

fail me.

“Que vivre est difficile, ô mon coeur fatigué!”