sophy. The amor intellectualis can never, he says, take the place of amour moral.' He uses Hegelian and Intellectualist as equivalent terms. Goethe, again, is 'Spinozist to the core,' or 'un Grec du bon temps.' Even Schleiermacher, of whose Monologues he speaks with enthusiastic admiration, hardly mentions the existence of evil.' The capital fact is not metaphysical, but moral; not even Immanence, but Sin. The neoHegelians appeal to the intelligence, not to the will, and so 'Ruge et Feuerbach ne peuvent sauver l'humanité.' Amiel had a strong sympathy with mysticism. He quotes from European mystics, and recurs frequently to Oriental ideas, especially to the notions of Nirvâna and of Mâyâ.* It was not only his profound religious instinct, and his curious psychological experiences, but also an innate distrust of apparent reality, that was active in this sympathy. Amiel was well aware of his tendency, 'Mon instinct est d'accord avec le pessimisme de Bouddha et de Schopenhauer.' His references to Mâyâ are in the tone of Schopenhauer, and though he finds the weak point in Schopenhauer's psychology, and rejects the fundamental axiom of his pessimism, yet Schopenhauer's influence can be traced in much of Amiel's meditation. Perhaps he was the more open to this influence because of a certain affinity with that French intellect which he so subtly criticises. Extremes meet in philosophy, and abstract logical antitheses are apt to favour mysticism. Sometimesfor his thought varied continually-Amiel treats the absolute as 'the zero of all determination,' and so as excluding the relative; the infinite as the unknown, or as the immensity of space or time; and the ideal as nowhere to be found in reality. In as far as these conceptions ruled his mood, Amiel's pessimistic instinct had an intellectual root. But comments of this nature, which some passages of the Diary might seem to invite, would be found nugatory when confronted with others. Among these others is a saying with which I end this note-'Le devoir a la vertu de nous faire sentir la réalité du monde positif, tout en nous en détachant.' * Cf. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Idea, Eng. Tr., vol. i. p. 9, 'The ancient wisdom of the Indian philosopher declares, "It is Mâyâ, the veil of deception, which blinds the eyes of mortals and makes them behold a world of which they cannot say either that it is or that it is not." This is, Schopenhauer continues, the world as idea subject to the principle of sufficient reason.' NOTES. [A few of the following notes are translated from the French edition of the Journal.] 1. P. 2.-Amiel left Geneva for Paris and Berlin in April 1843, the preceding year, 1841-42, having been spent in Italy and Sicily. 2. P. 6.-Angelus Silesius, otherwise Johannes Scheffler, the German seventeenth-century hymn-writer, whose tender and mystical verses have been popularised in England by Miss Winkworth's translations in the Lyra Germanica. 3. P. 11. Of these Marheineke, Neander, and Lachmann had been lecturing at Berlin during Amiel's residence there. The Danish dramatic poet Oelenschläger and the Swedish writer Tegner were among the Scandinavian men of letters with whom he made acquaintance during his tour in Sweden and Denmark in 1845. He probably came across the Swedish historian Geijer on the same occasion. Schelling and Alexander von Humboldt, mentioned a little lower down, were also still holding sway at Berlin when he was a student. There is an interesting description in one of his articles on Berlin, published in the Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève, of a University ceremonial there in or about 1847, and of the effect produced on the student's young imagination by the sight of half the leaders of European research gathered into a single room. He saw Schlosser, the veteran historian, at Heidelberg at the end of 1843. 4. P. 15.—Arnold Ruge, born in 1803, died at Brighton in 1880, principal editor of the Hallische, afterwards the Deutsche Jahrbücher (1838-43), in which Strauss, Bruno Bauer, and Louis Feuerbach wrote. He was a member of the Parliament of Frankfort. 5. P. 25.-Compare Clough's lines 'Where are the great, whom thou would'st wish to praise thee? Where are the pure, whom thou would'st choose to love thee? Where are the brave, to stand supreme above thee, Whose high commands would cheer, whose chidings raise thee? Seek, seeker, in thyself; submit to find In the stones, bread, and life in the blank mind.' 6. P. 28.-Christian Frederick Krause, died 1832, Hegel's younger contemporary, and the author of a system which he called panentheism,—Amiel alludes to it later on. 7. P. 30.-A village near Geneva. 8. P. 34. The allusions in this passage are to Töpffer's best known books, Le Presbytère and La Bibliothèque de mon Oncle, that airy chronicle of a hundred romantic or vivacious nothings which has the young student Jules for its centre. 9. P. 35.—Jacob-Élysée Cellérier, Professor of Theology at the Academy of Geneva, and son of the pastor of Satigny mentioned in Madame de Staël's L'Allemagne. 10. P. 78.-Geschichte der Poesie, by Rosenkrantz, the pupil and biographer of Hegel. 11. P. 87.—Also a village in the neighbourhood of Geneva. 12. P. 106. The well-known Genevese preacher and writer, Ernest Naville, the son of a Genevese pastor, was born in 1816, became Professor at the Academy of Geneva in 1844, lost his post after the Revolution of 1846, and, except for a short interval in 1860, has since then held no official position. His courses of theological lectures, delivered at intervals from 1859 onwards, were an extraordinary success. They were at first confined to men only, and an audience of 2000 persons sometimes assembled to hear them. To literature he is mainly known as the editor of Maine de Biran's Journal. 13. P. 113.-Joseph Goerres, a German mystic and disciple of Schelling. He published, among other works, Mythengeschichte der Asiatischen Welt, and Christliche Mystik. 14. P. 125.-The following passage from Sainte-Beuve may be taken as a kind of answer by anticipation to this accusa tion, which Amiel brings more than once in the course of the Journal: : Toute nation livrée à elle-même et à son propre génie se fait une critique littéraire qui y est conforme. La France en son beau temps a eu la sienne, qui ne ressemble ni à celle de l'Allemagne ni à celle de ses autres voisins;-un peu plus superficielle, dira-t-on ;-je ne le crois pas mais plus vive, moins chargée d'erudition, moins théorique et systématique, plus confiante au sentiment immédiat du goût. Un peu de chaque chose et rien de l'ensemble, à la Française: telle était la devise de Montaigne et telle est aussi la devise de la critique française. Nous ne sommes pas synthétiques, comme diraient les Allemands; le mot même n'est pas français. L'imagination de détail nous suffit. Montaigne, La Fontaine, Madame de Sévigné, sont volontiers nos livres de chevet.' The French critic then goes on to give a rapid sketch of the authors and the books, 'qui ont peu a peu formé comme notre rhétorique.' French criticism of the old characteristic kind rests ultimately upon the minute and delicate knowledge of a few Greek and Latin classics. Arnauld, Boileau, Fénélon, Rollin, Racine fils, Voltaire, La Harpe, Marmontel, Delille, Fontanes, and Chateaubriand in one aspect, are the typical names of this tradition, the creators and maintainers of this common literary fonds, this sorte de circulation courante à l'usage des gens instruits. J'avoue ma faiblesse: nous sommes devenus bien plus forts dans la dissertation érudite, mais j'aurais un éternel regret pour cette moyenne et plus libre habitude littéraire qui laissait à l'imagination tout son espace et à l'esprit tout son jeu; qui formait une atmosphère saine et facile où le talent respirait et se mouvait à son gré cette atmosphère-là, je ne la trouve plus, et je la regrette.'-(Chateau-briand et son Groupe Littéraire, vol. i. p. 311.) The following pensée of La Bruyère applies to the second half of Amiel's criticism of the French mind: 'If you wish to travel in the Inferno or the Paradiso you must take other guides,' etc. 'Un homme né Chrétien et François se trouve contraint dans la satyre; les grands sujets lui sont défendus, il les entame quelquefois, et se détourne ensuite sur de petites choses qu'il relève par la beauté de son génie et de son style.'-(Les Caractères, etc., 'Des Ouvrages de l'Esprit.') 15. P. 148.-The Vouache is the hill which bounds the horizon of Geneva to the south-west. 16. P. 150. The saying of Pascal's alluded to is in the Pensées, Art. xi. No. 10: A mesure qu'on a plus d'esprit on trouve qu'il y a plus d'hommes originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de différence entre les hommes.' 17. P. 192.-'Die Mütter'—an allusion to a strange and enigmatical, but very effective, conception in Faust (Part II. Act. I. Scene v.) Die Mütter are the prototypes, the abstract forms, the generative ideas, of things. Sie sehn dich nicht, denn Schemen sehn sie nur.' Goethe borrowed the term from a passage of Plutarch's, but he has made the idea half Platonic, half legendary. Amiel, however, seems rather to have in his mind Faust's speech in Scene vii. than the speech of Mephistopheles in Scene v. 'In eurem Namen, Mütter, die ihr thront Zum Zelt des Tages, zum Gewölb' der Nächte.' 18. P. 196.-Weissenstein is a high point in the Jura, above Soleure. 19. P. 200.-Edouard Claparède, a Genevese naturalist, born 1832, died 1871. 20. P. 205.-Noce de Gamache='repas très somptueux.'Littré. The allusion, of course, is to Don Quixote, Part II. cap. xx.-Donde se cuentan las bodas de Camacho el rico, con el suceso de Basilio el pobre.' 21. P. 213.—The quotation is from Quinet's Ahasvérus (first published 1833), that strange Welt-gedicht, which the author himself described as 'l'histoire du monde, de Dieu dans le monde, et enfin du doute dans le monde,' and which, with Faust, probably suggested the unfinished but in many ways brilliant performance of the young Spaniard, Espronceda,-El Diablo Mundo. 22. P. 222.—I Penseroso, poésies-maximes par H. F. Amiel : Genève, 1858. This little book, which contains 133 maxims, several of which are quoted in the Journal Intime, is prefaced by |