The

nated by a furtive ray of sunshine. picture has a ghostly suddenness and brilliancy; it pierces the mists which close upon it, like the slide of a magic lantern. What a pity I must leave this place now that everything is so bright!

The calm sea says more to the thoughtful soul than the same sea in storm and tumult. But we need the understanding of eternal things and the sentiment of the infinite to be able to feel this. The divine state par excellence is that of silence and repose, because all speech and all action are in themselves limited and fugitive. Napoleon with his arms crossed over his breast is more expressive than the furious Hercules beating the air with his athlete's fists. People of passionate temperament never understand this. They are only sensitive to the energy of succession; they know nothing of the energy of condensation. They can only be impressed by acts and effects, by noise and effort. They have no instinct of contemplation, no sense of the pure cause, the fixed source of all movement, the principle of all effects, the centre of all light, which does not need to spend itself in order to be sure of its own wealth, nor

to throw itself into violent motion to be certain of its own power. The art of passion is sure to please, but it is not the highest art; it is true, indeed, that under the rule of democracy, the serener and calmer forms of art become more and more difficult; the turbulent herd no longer knows the gods.

Minds accustomed to analysis never allow objections more than a half-value, because they appreciate the variable and relative elements which enter in.

A well-governed mind learns in time to find pleasure in nothing but the true and the just.

10th January 1868 (Eleven P.M.) — We have had a philosophical meeting at the house of Edouard Claparède. 19 The question on the order of the day was the nature of sensation. Claparède pronounced for the absolute subjectivity of all experience in other words, for pure idealism - which is amusing from a naturalist. According to him the ego alone exists, and the universe is but a projection of the ego, a phantasmagoria which we ourselves create

without suspecting it, believing all the time that we are lookers-on. It is our noümenon which objectifies itself as phenomenon. The ego, according to him, is a radiating force which, modified without knowing what it is that modifies it, imagines it, by virtue of the principle of causality — that is to say, produces the great illusion of the objective world in order so to explain itself. Our waking life, therefore, is but a more connected dream. The self is an unknown. which gives birth to an infinite number of unknowns, by a fatality of its nature. Science is summed up in the consciousness that nothing exists but consciousness. other words, the intelligent issues from the unintelligible in order to return to it, or rather the ego explains itself by the hypothesis of the non-ego, while in reality it is but a dream, dreaming itself. We might say with Scarron ·

'Et je vis l'ombre d'un esprit

Qui traçait l'ombre d'un système
Avec l'ombre de l'ombre même.'

In

This abolition of nature by natural science is logical, and it was, in fact, Schelling's starting-point. From the standpoint of physiology, nature is but a necessary illu

sion, a constitutional hallucination. We only escape from this bewitchment by the moral activity of the ego, which feels itself a cause and a free cause, and which by its responsibility breaks the spell and issues from the enchanted circle of Maia.

Maia! Is she indeed the true goddess? Hindoo wisdom long ago regarded the world as the dream of Brahma. Must we hold with Fichte that it is the individual dream of each individual ego? Every fool would then be a cosmogonic poet producing the firework of the universe under the dome of the infinite. But why then give ourselves such gratuitous trouble to learn? In our dreams, at least, nightmare excepted, we endow ourselves with complete ubiquity, liberty, and omniscience. Are we then less ingenious and inventive awake than asleep?

25th January 1868. It is when the outer man begins to decay that it becomes vitally important to us to believe in immortality, and to feel with the Apostle that the inner man is renewed from day to day.But for those who doubt it and have no hope of it? For them the remainder of life can only be the compulsory dismemberment of their small empire, the gradual

dismantling of their being by inexorable destiny. How hard it is to bear this long-drawn death, of which the stages are melancholy and the end inevitable! It is easy to see why it was that Stoicism maintained the right of suicide. What is my

real faith?

Has the universal, or at any

rate the very general and common doubt of science, invaded me in my turn? I have defended the cause of the immortality of the soul against those who questioned it, and yet when I have reduced them to silence, I have scarcely known whether at bottom I was not after all on their side. I try to do without hope; but it is possible that I have no longer the strength for it, and that, like other men, I must be sustained and consoled by a belief, by the belief in pardon and immortality that is to say, by religious belief of the Christian type. Reason and thought grow tired, like muscles and nerves. They must have their sleep, and this sleep is the relapse into the tradition of childhood, into the common hope. It takes so much effort to maintain oneself in an exceptional point of view, that one falls back into prejudice by pure exhaustion, just as the man who stands indefinitely always ends by sinking to the ground and reassuming the horizontal position.