the less wisdom you will obtain.

Radical

All

ism pretends that the greater number of illiterate, passionate, thoughtless — above all, young people, you heap together, the greater will be the enlightenment resulting. The second thesis is no doubt the repartee to the first, but the joke is a bad one. that can be got from a crowd is instinct or passion; the instinct may be good, but the passion may be bad, and neither is the instinct capable of producing a clear idea, nor the passion of leading to a just resolution.

A crowd is a material force, and the support of numbers gives a proposition the force of law; but that wise and ripened temper of mind which takes everything into account, and therefore tends to truth, is never engendered by the impetuosity of the masses. The masses are the material of democracy, but its form that is to say, the laws which express the general reason, justice, and utility can only be rightly shaped by wisdom, which is by no means a universal property. The fundamental error of the radical theory is to confound the right to do good with good itself, and universal suffrage with universal wisdom. It rests upon a legal fiction, which assumes a

real equality of enlightenment and merit among those whom it declares electors. It is quite possible, however, that these electors may not desire the public good, and that even if they do, they may be deceived as to the manner of realising it. Universal suffrage is not a dogma—it is an instrument; and according to the population in whose hands it is placed, the instrument is serviceable or deadly to the proprietor.

27th February 1874. — Among the peoples, in whom the social gifts are strongest, the individual fears ridicule above all things, and ridicule is the certain result of originality. No one, therefore, wishes to make a party of his own; every one wishes to be on the side of all the world. 'All the world' is the greatest of powers; it is sovereign, and calls itself we. We dress, we dine, we walk, we go out, we come in, like this, and not like that. This we is always right, whatever it does. The subjects of We are more prostrate than the slaves of the East before the Padishah. The good pleasure of the sovereign decides every appeal; his caprice is law. What we does or says is called custom, what it thinks is called opinion, what it believes to be beautiful or

good is called fashion. Among such nations as these we is the brain, the conscience, the reason, the taste, and the judgment of all. everything decided troubling about it.

The individual finds for him without his He is dispensed from

the task of finding out anything whatever. Provided that he imitates, copies, and repeats the models furnished by we, he has nothing more to fear. He knows all that he need know, and has entered into salvation.

29th April 1874.- Strange reminiscence ! At the end of the terrace of La Treille, on the eastern side, as I looked down the slope, it seemed to me that I saw once more in imagination a little path which existed there when I was a child, and ran through the bushy underwood, which was thicker then than it is now. It is at least forty years since this impression disappeared from my mind. The revival of an image .so dead and so forgotten set me thinking.

Con

sciousness seems to be like a book, in which the leaves turned by life successively cover and hide each other in spite of their semitransparency; but although the book may be open at the page of the present, the

wind, for a few seconds, may blow back the first pages into view.

And at death will these leaves cease to hide each other, and shall we see all our past at once? Is death the passage from

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

then understand, in its unity, the poem or mysterious episode of our existence, which till then we have spelled out phrase by phrase? And is this the secret of that glory which so often enwraps the brow and countenance of those who are newly dead? If so, death would be like the arrival of a traveller at the top of a great mountain, whence he sees spread out before him the whole configuration of the country, of which till then he had had but passing glimpses. To be able to overlook one's own history, to divine its meaning in the general concert and in the divine plan, would be the beginning of eternal felicity. Till then we had sacrificed ourselves to the universal order, but then we should understand and appreciate the beauty of that order. We had toiled and laboured under the conductor of the orchestra; and we should find ourselves become surprised and delighted hearers. We had seen nothing but our own little

ath in the mist; and suddenly a marellous panorama and boundless distances would open before our dazzled eyes. Why ot ?

31st May 1874.—I have been reading the hilosophical poems of Madame Ackermann. She has rendered in fine verse that sense of lesolation which has been so often stirred n me by the philosophy of Schopenhauer, f Hartmann, Comte, and Darwin. What ragic force and power! What thought nd passion! She has courage for everyhing, and attacks the most tremendous subjects.

Science is implacable; will it suppress all eligions? All those which start from a false conception of nature, certainly. But f the scientific conception of nature proves ncapable of bringing harmony and peace to man, what will happen? Despair is not a durable situation. We shall have to build a moral city without God, without an immortality of the soul, without hope. Buddhism and Stoicism present themselves as possible alternatives.

But even if we suppose that there is no finality in the cosmos, it is certain that man has ends at which he aims, and if so the