Between us and things how many screens there are! Mood, health, the tissues of the eye, the window-panes of our cell, mist, smoke, rain, dust, and light itself—and all infinitely variable ! Heraclitus said: No

man bathes twice in the same river. I feel inclined to say: No one sees the same landscape twice over, for a window is one kaleidoscope, and the spectator another.

What is madness? Illusion, raised to the second power. A sound mind establishes regular relations, a modus vivendi, between things, men, and itself, and it is under the delusion that it has got hold of stable truth and eternal fact. Madness does not even see what sanity sees, deceiving itself all the while by the belief that it sees better than sanity. The sane mind or common sense confounds the fact of experience with necessary fact, and assumes in good faith that what is, is the measure of what may be; while madness cannot perceive any difference between what is and what it imagines it confounds its dreams with reality.

Wisdom consists in rising superior both to madness and to common sense, and in lending oneself to the universal illusion without becoming its dupe. It is best, on

the whole, for a man of taste who knows how to be gay with the gay, and serious with the serious, to enter into the game of Maïa, and to play his part with a good grace in the fantastic tragi-comedy which is called the Universe. It seems to me that here intellectualism reaches its limit.13 The mind, in its intellectual capacity, arrives at the intuition that all reality is but the dream of a dream. What delivers us from the palace of dreams is pain, personal pain; it is also the sense of obligation, or that which combines the two, the pain of sin; and again it is love; in short, the moral order. What saves us from the sorceries of Maïa is conscience; conscience dissipates the narcotic vapours, the opiumlike hallucinations, the placid stupor of contemplative indifference. It drives us

into contact with the terrible wheels within wheels of human suffering and human responsibility; it is the bugle-call, the cockcrow, which puts the phantoms to flight; it is the armed archangel who chases man from an artificial paradise. Intellectualism may be described as an intoxication conscious of itself; the moral energy which replaces it, on the other hand, represents a state of fast, a famine and a sleepless thirst. Alas! Alas!

Those who have the most frivolous idea of sin are just those who suppose that there is a fixed gulf between good people and others.

The ideal which the wife and mother makes for herself, the manner in which she understands duty and life, contain the fate of the community. Her faith becomes the star of the conjugal ship, and her love the animating principle that fashions the future of all belonging to her. Woman is the salvation or destruction of the family. She carries its destinies in the folds of her mantle.

Perhaps it is not desirable that a woman should be free in mind; she would immediately abuse her freedom. She cannot become philosophical without losing her special gift, which is the worship of all that is individual, the defence of usage, manners, beliefs, traditions. Her rôle is to slacken the combustion of thought. It is analogous to that of azote in vital air.

In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past a pious guardian of some affection, of which the object has disappeared.

6th January 1873.—I have been reading the seven tragedies of Eschylus, in the translation of Leconte de Lisle. The Prometheus and the Eumenides are greatest where all is great; they have the sublimity of the old prophets. Both depict a religious revolution a profound crisis in the life of humanity. In Prometheus it is civilisation wrenched from the jealous hands of the gods; in the Eumenides it is the transformation of the idea of justice, and the substitution of atonement and pardon for the law of implacable revenge. Prometheus shows us the martyrdom which waits for all the saviours of men; the Eumenides is the glorification of Athens and the Areopagus-that is to say, of a truly human civilisation. How magnificent it is as poetry, and how small the adventures of individual passion seem beside this colossal type of tragedy, of which the theme is the destinies of nations!

31st March 1873 (4 P.M.) —

'En quel songe

Se plonge

Mon cœur, et que veut-il ? '

For an hour past I have been the prey of a vague anxiety; I recognise my old enemy.

It is a sense of void and anguish ; a sense of something lacking: what? Love, peace God perhaps. The feeling is one of pure want unmixed with hope, and there is anguish in it because I can clearly distinguish neither the evil nor its remedy.

'O printemps sans pitié, dans l'âme endolorie, Avec tes chants d'oiseaux, tes brises, ton azur, Tu creuses sourdement, conspirateur obscur, Le gouffre des languers et de la réverie.'

Of all the hours of the day, in fine weather, the afternoon, about three o'clock, is the time which to me is most difficult to bear. I never feel more strongly than I do then, 'le vide effrayant de la vie,' the stress of mental anxiety, or the painful thirst for happiness. This torture born of the sunlight is a strange phenomenon. Is it that the sun, just as it brings out the stain upon a garment, the wrinkles in a face, or the discoloration of the hair, so also it illumines with inexorable distinctness the scars and rents of the heart? Does it rouse in us a sort of shame of existence? In any case the bright hours of the day are capable of flooding the whole soul with melancholy, of kindling in us the passion for death, or suicide, or annihilation, or of driving us to