THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DIARIST: HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
“True serenity does not consist in indifference to the phenomena
of life amongst which we live. It consists of judging in an
elevated way men and facts. True serenity does not reign
apart from life. It is in the land of the hurricane that it
is a grand virtue to know how to remain calm. Possibly he who
can accomplish this will succeed in avoiding its perils, or
surmounting its consequences. Perhaps it is better to lose
one's foothold in the waves than it is to prosper in a solitude
without echo. Only solitude that has been wrought from the
tumult is precious.”--GEORGES DUHAMEL.
No brief statement ever made applies more fittingly to Henri-Frédéric
Amiel--more widely known now, one hundred years after his birth, than
during his lifetime--than these words of one of the most promising
young men of letters of France.
Amiel says in his “Journal Intime”:
“There remains the question whether the greatest problems which
have ever been guessed on earth had not better have remained
buried in the brain which found the key to them, and whether the
deepest thinkers--those whose hand has been boldest in drawing
aside the veil, and their eye keenest in fathoming the mystery
beyond it--had not better, like the prophet of Iliom, have kept
for Heaven, and for Heaven alone, secrets and mysteries which
human language cannot truly express nor human intelligence
conceive.”
* * * * *
“To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed,
pardoned, and sustained by a supreme power, to feel himself in
the right road, at the point where God would have him be--in
order with God and the universe. This faith gives strength and
calm. I have not got it. All that is, seems to me arbitrary and
fortuitous. It may as well not be, as be. Nothing in my own
circumstances seems to me providential. All appears to me left
to my own responsibility, and it is this thought which disgusts
me with the government of my own life. I longed to give myself
up wholly to some great love, some noble end; I would willingly
have lived and died for the ideal--that is to say, for a holy
cause. But once the impossibility of this made clear to me, I
have never since taken a serious interest in anything, and have,
as it were, but amused myself with a destiny of which I was no
longer the dupe.”
* * * * *
“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 favour 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 localises us, love particularises 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.” (Written at the age
of fifty-four.)
The “Journal Intime,” upon which alone Amiel's fame rests, is studded
with such expressions, all of which go to prove that he was handicapped
with an inability to participate in life. One may call it aboulia,
or lack of will power; but it was not lack of will power. That the
intellect which could produce such work was not directed into some
practical channel during a long and healthy life naturally arouses a
question; and this question has been answered by Amiel's admirers and
his critics in various ways. The only conclusion, however, to which
an unbiassed examination of his life and of his book can lead is the
simple one that Amiel was born that way, just as some people are
born Albinos, or, to put it in other words, that he was temperamentally
unfit for practical life.
[Illustration: HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL]
Henri-Frédéric Amiel was born in Geneva September 27, 1821, and died
there March 11, 1881. His ancestors were Huguenots who sought refuge in
Switzerland after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. There is no
record that any of them achieved greatness or had greatness thrust upon
them. Very little has been written of his parents, who died when he
was twelve years old, or of his uncle and aunt, in whose house he was
brought up apart from his two sisters. All those who have written about
Amiel himself are singularly silent about his boyhood, so that we know
practically nothing of the formative years of his life save that he was
a sensitive, impressionable boy, more delicate than robust, disposed to
melancholy, and with a deep interest in religious problems. In school
and college he was studious but not brilliant; he had no interest in
games or sports and made few intimacies, and these with men older
than himself. When he was nineteen he came under the influence of a
Genevan philologist and man of letters, Adolphe Picquet, whose lectures
answered many a positive question and satisfied many a vague aspiration
of this youth already in the meshes of mysticism. They exercised a
decisive influence over his thought, filled him with fresh intuitions,
and brought near to him the horizons of his dreams.
When he was twenty he went to Italy and stayed more than a year, and
while there he wrote several articles on Christian Art, and a criticism
of a book by M. Rio. The next four years he spent in Germany, where
he studied philosophy, philology, mythology, and history. After this
he travelled about the university cities of Central Europe for two
years, principally Heidelberg, Munich, and Vienna; and in 1849, when
he was twenty-eight years old, he returned to Geneva and secured the
appointment of Professor of Moral Philosophy in the Academy there.
The appointment was made by the Democratic Party, which had just
then come into control of the Government. The Aristocratic Party,
which had had things their own way since the days following the
restoration of Geneva's independence in 1814, would have nothing to do
with intellectual upstarts, puppets of the Radical Party, so Amiel,
by nature and conviction a conservative, found himself in the right
pew, but the wrong church; and many of his friends thought that the
discouragement which was manifest in his writings and in his conduct
may, in a measure at least, have been due to the conflict between his
discomfiture and his duty.
He had few friends, but these he impressed enormously by his learning
and his knowledge. He made no particular reputation as a professor
or as a poet, and had it not been for the “Journal,” he would never
have been heard of save by his friends and pupils. It is now forty
years since the first volume of the book was published at Geneva. It
had been put together from the thousands of sheets of diary which
had come into the hands of his literary heirs. The Preface to the
volume announced that this “Journal” was made up of his psychological
observations and impressions produced on him by books. It was the
confidant of his private and intimate thoughts; a means whereby
the thinker became conscious of his own inner life; a safe shelter
wherein his questionings of fate and future, the voice of grief, of
self-examination and confession, the soul's cry for inward peace might
make themselves freely heard.
It made a great noise in the world and the reverberations of it will
not cease.
Some consider that the “Journal Intime” occupies a unique place in
literature, not because it is a diary of introspection, but because
of the tragedy which attended its production. This is the height of
absurdity. There was no tragedy about its production. Amiel lived an
unhealthy life, thwarted nature's laws, and nature exacted the penalty.
N. J. Symons, in an article in the _Queen's Quarterly_, says, “To
be gifted with the qualities of genius, yet to be condemned by some
obscure psychosis to perpetual sterility and failure; to live and
die in the despairing recognition of this fact; and finally to win
posthumous fame by the analysis and confession of one's failure is one
of the most puzzling and pathetic of life's anomalies.” It would be if
it were true. But what were the qualities of genius that Amiel had? And
how did he display the obscure psychosis? He discharged the duties of
a professor from the time he was twenty-eight until he was sixty. He
poetised pleasantly; he communed with nature and got much pleasure from
it; and he had very definite social adaptability. His general level of
behaviour was high. He was a diligent, methodical worker; he reacted
in a normal way to conventional standards; he had few personal biases
or peculiarities and none that drew particular attention to him; and
he seemed to have adjusted himself without great difficulty to the
incidences of life that he encountered.
To say that such a man was the victim of some obscure psychosis is
either to speak beyond the facts or to speak from the possession of
some knowledge that is denied one familiar with his writings and what
has been written about him.
Unique the “Journal Intime” unquestionably is, in that it is the
sincere confession of failure, both as a man and as a writer, of a
man whose intellectual qualities justified his friends in expecting
from him a large measure of success as both. Both admirers and critics
agree that Amiel's failure was his refusal or his inability to act.
This refusal to act was not the expression of some obscure psychosis,
but was entirely consistent with his philosophy of life, which was
arrived at through a logical process of thought. “Men's thoughts are
made according to their nature,” says Bacon. It is to Amiel's nature,
or temperament, or personality, that we must look for the answer to the
question: To what can his confessed failure be charged?
Any estimate of personality must weigh not only the capacity for
dealing with thoughts, but the capacity for dealing with men and with
things as well. Intellectual qualities are of value only in relation
to the dynamic quality of the mind; emotional qualities must be
measured by the reactions to the environment; and the individual, in
the last analysis, must take his standing among his fellows upon his
acts, not upon his thoughts. In a balanced personality act harmonises
with thought, is conditioned and controlled by it. Purely impulsive
action carried to the extreme means insanity, and in milder degrees
it exhibits itself in all grades and forms of what is known as lack
of self-control. Such action is too familiar to call for comment.
But there is the opposite type of individual whose impulses are not
impelling enough to lead to expression in outward form of either
thoughts or emotions. Such thoughts and emotions are turned back
upon themselves and, like a dammed-up stream, whirl endlessly around
the spring, the ego, until the individual becomes predominantly
introspective and egocentric.
Amiel possessed the power of clear logical thought to a high degree,
but he limited its expression largely to the introspective musings of
the diary. Aside from his daily life, which was narrow but normal and
conventional, it is to Amiel's deepest interests and admirations as
revealed by his diary that one must look for light upon his emotional
make-up. The things with which he occupied himself were extremely few:
introspective literature, philosophy and religion, and contemplation
of God and the hereafter. The diary covers the years of his life from
twenty-seven to sixty, the entire fruitful span of most men's lives.
During all of this time his interests showed little or no variation.
Nowhere throughout the record do we find any evidence of interest in
the developments which were shaping the course of the world's history.
Still less do we find any indication of a desire or a conscience
to participate in such history. Amiel evidently felt no urge to be
an actor in the drama. He was not even a critic or an interested
on-looker. Rather did he prefer to withdraw to a sheltered distance
and forget the reverberations of the struggle in contemplation of
abstractions.
He lived in an era in which the world was revolutionised. The most
deforming institution which civilisation has ever tolerated, slavery,
was razed and dismantled; yet he never said a word about it. He was
a witness of one of the greatest transformations that has ever been
wrought, the making of things by machinery rather than by hand; and he
never commented on it. His life was contemporaneous with the beginning
of discovery in science, such as the origin of species and the general
evolutionary doctrine associated with Darwin's name; and it seems only
to have excited his scorn.
“The growing triumph of Darwinism--that is to say of
materialism, or of force--threatens the conception of justice.
But justice will have its turn. The higher human law cannot be
the offspring of animality. Justice is the right to the maximum
of individual independence compatible with the same liberty
for others;--in other words, it is respect for man, for the
immature, the small, the feeble; it is the guarantee of those
human collectivities, associations, states, nationalities--those
voluntary or involuntary unions--the object of which is to
increase the sum of happiness, and to satisfy the aspiration
of the individual. That some should make use of others for
their own purposes is an injury to justice. The right of the
stronger is not a right, but a simple fact, which obtains only
so long as there is neither protest nor resistance. It is like
cold, darkness, weight, which tyrannise over man until he has
invented artificial warmth, artificial light, and machinery.
Human industry is throughout an emancipation from brute
nature, and the advances made by justice are in the same way a
series of rebuffs inflicted upon the tyranny of the stronger.
As the medical art consists in the conquest of disease, so
goodness consists in the conquest of the blind ferocities and
untamed appetites of the human animal. I see the same law
throughout:--increasing emancipation of the individual, a
continuous ascent of being towards life, happiness, justice,
and wisdom. Greed and gluttony are the starting-point,
intelligence and generosity the goal.”
Nor is there anything in the “Journal Intime” to indicate that he had
ever heard of Pasteur, or Morton, or Simpson, who laid the foundation
of a diseaseless world and a painless world. His diary is a record of
his own thoughts, to be sure, but one's thoughts are engendered, in a
measure at least, by what is going on in the world. An inhabitant of
any other world whose knowledge of this could be obtained only from
Amiel's book, would be left with an abysmal ignorance of the subject.
He would learn something of the German philosophers and of French
littérateurs and of Amiel's ideas of God and of infinity.
Schopenhauer says that
“It is not by the unification of the intellect and the will that
man attains to higher truth, but by their dissociation. When
the intellect casts off the yoke of the will it rises above the
illusion of finite life and attains a vision of transcendent
truth. When one can contemplate without will, beyond, when
he can dissolve the life instinct in pure thought, then he
possesses the field of higher truth, then he is on the avenue
that leads to Nirvana.”
Higher truth is possible only through the annihilation of the will,
and if this annihilation is done after taking thought, that is after
planning to do it and determining to do it, the price that one has to
pay, or the penalty that is exacted, is an incapacity or diminished
capacity for practical life. Amiel was a real mystic, not by choice,
perhaps, but by birth. He was proud of it in his youth and early
maturity; he questioned it in his late maturity; and regretted it in
his senescence. When he was fifty years old he wrote,
“The man who gives himself to contemplation looks on at rather
than directs his life, is a spectator rather than an actor,
seeks rather to understand than to achieve. Is this mode of
existence illegitimate, immoral? Is one bound to act? Is such
detachment an idiosyncrasy to be respected or a sin to be
fought against? I have always hesitated on this point, and I
have wasted years in futile self-reproach and useless fits
of activity. My western conscience, penetrated as it is with
Christian morality, has always persecuted my Oriental quietism
and Buddhist tendencies. I have not dared to approve myself, I
have not known how to correct myself.... Having early caught
a glimpse of the absolute, I have never had the indiscreet
effrontery of individualism. What right have I to make a merit
of a defect? I have never been able to see any necessity for
imposing myself upon others, nor for succeeding. I have seen
nothing clearly except my own deficiencies and the superiority
of others.... With varied aptitudes and a fair intelligence, I
had no dominant tendency, no imperious faculty, so that while
by virtue of capacity I felt myself free, yet when free I could
not discover what was best. Equilibrium produced indecision and
indecision has rendered all my faculties barren.”
If Amiel had been a real Christian, that is, if he had taken his
orientation and orders from Christ, he would have had no doubt whether
such a mode of existence was illegitimate and immoral or not. He could
have found specific instruction telling him he was bound to act. He was
a nominal Christian, but a _de facto_ Buddhist.
Next to the output of a man's activity as shown by his work,
his selection of recreational outlets for his emotional life is
illuminating. What were Amiel's amusements? So far as the diary shows,
day dreaming, poetising, fancy, and a contemplation of nature furnished
the only outlets for his more organised emotional nature. For play in
any form he apparently felt no need.
There is a type of individual whose failure to bring his performance up
to the standard which his intelligence would seem to warrant takes the
form of inability to face concrete situations. Unable to adjust himself
to his environment when realities present difficulties that call for
solution, such an individual becomes burdened with a sense of his own
inadequacy; and from this he is inclined to seek escape in impersonal
abstractions, usually described by him as ideals. Mystic philosophy in
some form is the frequent refuge of such tender souls from their own
sense of inability to cope with life and its concrete problems.
Throughout the record divergence between ideals and acts stands out.
Idealism is everywhere pled as the basis of the hesitation to act. The
conscious and foredoomed disparity between conception and realisation
is made the excuse for the absence of effort.
“Practical life makes me afraid. And yet, at the same time, it
attracts me; I have need of it. Family life, especially, in
all its delightfulness, in all its moral depth, appeals to me
like a duty. Sometimes I cannot escape from the ideal of it. A
companion of my life, of my work, of my thoughts, of my hopes;
within, a common worship, towards the world outside, kindness
and beneficence; educations to undertake, the thousand and one
moral relations which develop round the first--all these ideas
intoxicate me sometimes. But I put them aside, because every
hope is, as it were, an egg whence a serpent may issue instead
of a dove, because every joy missed is a stab, because every
seed confided to destiny contains an ear of grief which the
future may develop.”
* * * * *
“I have never felt any inward assurance of genius, or any
presentiment of glory or happiness. I have never seen myself
in imagination great or famous, or even a husband, a father,
an influential citizen. This indifference to the future, this
absolute self-distrust, are, no doubt, to be taken as signs.
What dreams I have are vague and indefinite; I ought not to
live, for I am now scarcely capable of living.--Recognise your
place; let the living live; and you, gather together your
thoughts, leave behind you a legacy of feeling and ideas; you
will be more useful so. Renounce yourself, accept the cup given
you, with its honey and its gall, as it comes. Bring God down
into your heart. Embalm your soul in him now, make within you
a temple for the Holy Spirit; be diligent in good works, make
others happier and better. Put personal ambition away from
you, and then you will find consolation in living or in dying,
whatever may happen to you.”
Complaining of a restless feeling which was not the need for change, he
said,
“It is rather the fear of what I love, the mistrust of what
charms me, the unrest of happiness.... And is there not another
reason for all this restlessness, in a certain sense of void--of
incessant pursuit of something wanting?--of longing for a truer
peace and a more entire satisfaction? Neighbours, friends,
relations--I love them all; and so long as these affections are
active, they leave in me no room for a sense of want. But yet
they do not _fill_ my heart; and that is why they have no power
to fix it. I am always waiting for the woman and the work which
shall be capable of taking entire possession of my soul, and of
becoming my end and aim.”
Amiel's life was a constant negation. His ideals were all concerned
with concepts of perfection, with the absolute, and being sane enough
to realise the impossibility of attaining such perfection, he refused
compromises. He would not play the game for its own sake, nor for the
fine points. If he could not win all the points--and being sane he knew
beforehand that he could not--he preferred not to play at all. But he
made a virtue of his weakness and called it idealism. Had he possessed
the courage to hitch his wagon to a star--and let the star carry him
where it would; had he heeded the warning,
“And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Is--the unlit lamp and the ungird loin”;
or gone the way of thousands of practical idealists who have made their
idealism an incentive to action and thereby left the world richer
for having passed through it, he would have needed no excuse for his
failure to attain perfection. On the contrary, he would have learned
with the sureness of a hard-learned lesson that idealism is worth our
loyalty only when it becomes an inspiration to living, and that it is
worse than futile when it serves merely as a standard for thought or an
excuse for failure.
Amiel coddled his sensibilities for fear of rebuff; he hid his
intellectuality in the diary lest he should suffer from the clear
light of publicity; he denied life out of apprehension that life might
bruise his ego. He told himself that he was protecting his idealism. In
reality he was protecting his egoism. If he had been the victim of a
psychosis he would not have recognised his limitations nor stated them
so clearly. It was sanity that enabled him to see the impossibility
of attaining the perfection of which he dreamed and wrote. It was
cowardice, not a psychosis, which made him refuse to act in the face of
this knowledge. Had he been a Roman Catholic, he might have rested upon
the conception of absolute perfection offered in the authority of the
Church and the life of the cloister. But being a Protestant, both by
inheritance and by conscience, he had to think things out for himself;
and the more he thought the wider became the breach between his
conception of perfection and his hope of realising it. He was tortured
by a conscience goading him to action and a temperament paralysing him
with the fear that the end would fall short of anticipation. He lacked
the moral courage to put his power to the test and be disappointed. He
was without the stamina of the man who fights and runs away. He was too
much of an egoist to risk a losing game, and in consequence he never
tasted the sweet flavour of work well done--even though the end was
apparent failure.
The growing sense of inadequacy between the conscience to act and
the temperament to deny action is written plainly in these random
quotations from the “Journal” during the record of many years. At
thirty he wrote,
“He who is silent is forgotten; he who abstains is taken at
his word; he who does not advance, falls back; he who stops is
overwhelmed, distanced, crushed; he who ceases to grow greater
becomes smaller; he who leaves off gives up; the stationary
condition is the beginning of the end--it is the terrible
symptom which precedes death. To live, is to achieve a perpetual
triumph; it is to assert oneself against destruction, against
sickness, against the annulling and dispersion of one's physical
and moral being. It is to will without ceasing, or rather to
refresh one's will day by day.”
Ten years later when the conflict was closing in upon him he wrote,
“In me an intellect which would fain forget itself in things, is
contradicted by a heart which yearns to live in human beings.
The uniting link of the two contradictions is the tendency
towards self-abandonment, towards ceasing to will and exist
for oneself, towards laying down one's own personality, and
losing--dissolving--oneself in love and anticipation. What I
lack above all things is character, will, individuality. But, as
always happens, the appearance is exactly the contrary of the
reality, and my outward life the reverse of my true and deepest
aspiration. I whose whole being--heart and intellect--thirsts to
absorb itself in reality, in its neighbour man, in Nature and in
God--I, whom solitude devours and destroys--I shut myself up in
solitude and seem to delight only in myself and to be sufficient
for myself.”
At forty-seven, when most men's work is at the high tide of
realisation, he said,
“I have no more strength left, I wish for nothing; but that
is not what is wanted. I must wish what God wishes; I must
pass from indifference to sacrifice, and from sacrifice to
self-devotion. The cup I would fain put away from me is the
misery of living, the shame of existing and suffering as a
common creature who has missed his vocation; it is the bitter
and increasing humiliation of declining power, of growing
old under the weight of one's own disapproval, and the
disappointment of one's friends.”
At fifty-four,
“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 ... anything
better than withered leaves?... 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.”
Psychology teaches that too much emphasis cannot be laid in education
upon the reconciliation of ideals and performance, nor too much effort
devoted to the formation of habits of facing concrete situations
squarely, reaching definite decisions, and thereby making efforts,
however ineffective and crude, to link ideals to action. It has been
proved that if natural dispositions are ignored or denied by the
repression of normal primary instincts, disassociation of personality
is likely to be the result. Amiel's ineffectiveness, his lack of
dynamic quality, while in no sense a psychosis, may be considered as
a personality defect. How far this defect may have been conditioned
by his denial of the basic springs of human action cannot be stated.
Neither can it, in any impartial estimate of his life and personality,
be ignored. Next to the instinct of self-preservation, the instinct
for the preservation of the race to which one belongs is the dominant
impulse of the individual. No system of thought, no plan of life can
ignore it and not pay the penalty. Amiel's diary is full of such
denials, and they frequently carry with them the consciousness that he
realised the death sentence to aspiration and realisation which he was
reading to himself between the lines.
Amiel was a shy, sensitive, solitary child. We know very little about
his adolescent struggles and transition to heterosexual fixation.
Indeed we do not know whether it ever came about, and that is where
the chief hiatus in our knowledge of Amiel lies. As a youth he became
intoxicated with philosophic idealism, and Hegel was for him the
fountainhead of all philosophic thought.
There is nothing in the diary to indicate that the normal love-making
of healthy youth had any part in his thoughts or his life. Later,
his sex consciousness colours the record to a great extent--indeed it
might be said to give the colour to the book--but always in the guise
of repressions, fears, hesitations, and longings for unattainable
perfection, and finally of half-hearted regrets for his own denials.
“I am capable of all the passions, for I bear them all within
me. Like a tamer of wild beasts, I keep them caged and lassoed,
but I sometimes hear them growling. I have stifled more than one
nascent love. Why? Because with that prophetic certainty which
belongs to moral intuition, I felt it lacking in true life, and
less durable than myself. I choked it down in the name of the
supreme affection to come. The loves of sense, of imagination,
of sentiment--I have seen through and rejected them all; I
sought the love which springs from the central profundities of
being. And I still believe in it. I will have none of those
passions of straw which dazzle, burn up, and wither; I invoke,
I await, and I hope for the love which is great, pure, and
earnest, which lives and works in all the fibres and through
all the powers of the soul. And even if I go lonely to the end,
I would rather my hope and my dream died with me, than that my
soul should content itself with any meaner union.”
This is the basis of monasticism in the Catholic Church, and it is, in
my judgment, the most violent offence to God that can be given. Goethe
says that he never wrote a new poem without having a new love affair.
Amiel was intrigued by Goethe secondly only to Hegel. If he had copied
Goethe more nearly in living, he might have said with him,
“Wonach soll man am Ende trachten?
Die Welt zu Kennen und nicht zu Verachten.”
There have been books made up of beautiful quotations from Amiel's
“Journal Intime,” which are supposed to help people live, to mitigate
pain, to disperse apprehension, and to assuage misery. They are not a
patch on the Bible or on the writings of Socrates.
“The oracle of today drops from his tripod on the morrow,” said John
Morley. Will this apply to Amiel? Is he a passing fashion? And why
has his popularity grown? The best answer to these questions is found
in the nature of his audience. To what kind of people does Amiel
appeal? To the contemporary purveyors of cloudy stuff; to mystics;
to the tender-minded; to those who prefer the contemplation of far
horizons to travelling the road just ahead. He does not appeal to
anyone with fighting blood, whether he be facing the conflict with the
glorious self-confidence of healthy untried youth, the magnetism of
past success, the tried measure of his own limitations and powers, the
scars of honest defeat, or the pluck of the one who fights a losing
fight with more courage and idealism than he would have mustered for a
winning one.
Amiel's tragedy was that he outraged nature's unique law and nature
exacted the penalty. If the world had a few thousand Amiels and they
got the whip hand, it might cease to exist.