My system, if I may venture to give it so fine a name, is the only attempt,
I know, ever made to reduce all knowledges into harmony. It opposes no
other system, but shows what was true in each; and how that which was true
in the particular, in each of them became error, _because_ it was only half
the truth. I have endeavoured to unite the insulated fragments of truth,
and therewith to frame a perfect mirror. I show to each system that I fully
understand and rightfully appreciate what that system means; but then I
lift up that system to a higher point of view, from which I enable it to
see its former position, where it was, indeed, but under another light and
with different relations;--so that the fragment of truth is not only
acknowledged, but explained. Thus the old astronomers discovered and
maintained much that was true; but, because they were placed on a false
ground, and looked from a wrong point of view, they never did, they never
could, discover the truth--that is, the whole truth. As soon as they left
the earth, their false centre, and took their stand in the sun, immediately
they saw the whole system in its true light, and their former station
remaining, but remaining as a part of the prospect. I wish, in short, to
connect by a moral _copula_ natural history with political history; or, in
other words, to make history scientific, and science historical--to take
from history its accidentality, and from science its fatalism.
* * * * *
I never from a boy could, under any circumstances, feel the slightest dread
of death as such. In all my illnesses I have ever had the most intense
desire to be released from this life, unchecked by any but one wish,
namely, to be able to finish my work on Philosophy. Not that I have any
author's vanity on the subject: God knows that I should be absolutely glad,
if I could hear that the thing had already been done before me.
* * * * *
Illness never in the smallest degree affects my intellectual powers. I can
_think_ with all my ordinary vigour in the midst of pain; but I am beset
with the most wretched and unmanning reluctance and shrinking from action.
I could not upon such occasions take the pen in hand to write down my
thoughts for all the wide world.
_October 26._ 1831.