6th April 1851. - Was there ever any

reverberates again What might be, What ought to be

one so vulnerable as I? If I were a father how many griefs and vexations a child might cause me. As a husband, I should have a thousand ways of suffering, because my happiness demands a thousand conditions. I have a heart too easily reached, a too restless imagination; despair is easy to me, and every sensation and again within me. spoils for me what is. consumes me with sadness. So that reality, the present, the irreparable, the necessary, repel and even terrify me. I have too much imagination, conscience, and penetration, and not enough character. The life of thought alone seems to me to have enough elasticity and immensity, to be free enough from the irreparable; 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 almost 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 am distrustful of myself and of happiness because I know myself. The ideal poisons for me all imperfect possession. Everything which compromises the future or destroys my inner liberty, which enslaves me to things or obliges me to be other than I could and ought to be, all which injures my idea of the perfect man, hurts me mortally, degrades and wounds me in mind, even beforehand. I abhor useless regrets and repentances. The fatality of the consequences which follow upon every human act, - the leading idea of dramatic art and the most tragic element of life, arrests me more certainly than the arm of the Commandeur. I only act with regret, and almost by force.

To be dependent is to me terrible; but to depend upon what is irreparable, arbitrary, and unforeseen, and above all to be so de

own error

pendent by my own fault and through my to give up liberty and hope, to slay sleep and happiness-this would be hell!

All that is necessary, providential - in short, unimputable — I could bear, I think, with some strength of mind. But responsibility mortally envenoms grief; and as an act is essentially voluntary, therefore I act as little as possible.

Last outbreak of a rebellious and deceitful self-will, craving for repose, for satisfaction, for independence! - is there not some relic of selfishness in such a disinterestedness, such a fear, such idle susceptibility?

I wish to fulfil my duty-but where is it, what is it? Here inclination comes in again and interprets the oracle. And the ultimate question is this: Does duty consist in obeying one's nature, even the best and most spiritual? or in conquering it?

Life, is it essentially the education of the mind and intelligence, or that of the will? And does will show itself in strength or in resignation? If the aim of life is to teach us renunciation, then welcome sickness, hinarances, sufferings of every kind! But if its aim is to produce the perfect man, then

one must watch over one's integrity of mind and body. To court trial is to tempt God. At bottom, the God of justice veils from me the God of love. I tremble instead of trusting.

Whenever conscience speaks with a divided, uncertain, and disputed voice, it is not yet the voice of God. Descend still deeper into yourself, until you hear nothing but a clear and undivided voice, a voice which does away with doubt and brings with it persuasion, light, and serenity. Happy, says the Apostle, are they who are at peace with themselves, and whose heart condemneth them not in the part they take. This inner identity, this unity of conviction, is all the more difficult the more the mind analyses, discriminates, and foresees. It is difficult, indeed, for liberty to return to the frank unity of instinct.

we

Alas! we must then re-climb a thousand times the peaks already scaled, and recon quer the points of view already won, must fight the fight! The human heart, like kings, signs mere truces under a pretence of perpetual peace. The eternal life is eternally to be re-won. Alas, yes! peace itself is a struggle, or rather it is struggle and activity which are the law. We only

find rest in effort, as the flame only finds existence in combustion. O Heraclitus! the symbol of happiness is after all the same as that of grief; anxiety and hope, hell and heaven, are equally restless. The altar of Vesta and the sacrifice of Beelzebub burn with the same fire. Ah, yes, there you have life life double-faced and doubleedged. The fire which enlightens is also the fire which consumes; the element of the gods may become that of the accursed.

7th April 1851. - Read a part of Ruge's1 volume Die Academic (1848) where the humanism of the Neo-Hegelians in politics, religion, and literature is represented by correspondence or articles (Kuno Fischer, Kollach, etc.). They recall the philosophist party of the last century, able to dissolve anything by reason and reasoning, but unable to construct anything; for construction rests upon feeling, instinct, and will. One finds them mistaking philosophic consciousness for realising power, the redemption of the intelligence for the redemption of the heart that is to say, the part for the whole. These papers make me understand the radical difference between morals and intellectualism.

The writers of them