same cause which will enable them to reach their goal. The soul can only imagine the absolute because the absolute exists; our consciousness of a possible perfection is the guarantee that perfection will be realised.

Thought itself is eternal. It is the consciousness of thought which is gradually achieved through the long succession of ages, races, and humanities. Such is the

doctrine of Hegel. The history of the mind is, according to him, one of approximation to the absolute, and the absolute differs at the two ends of the story. It was at the beginning it knows itself at the end. Or rather it advances in the possession of itself with the gradual unfolding of creation. Such also was the conception of Aristotle.

If the history of the mind and of consciousness is the very marrow and essence of being, then to be driven back on psychology, even personal psychology, is to be still occupied with the main question of things, to keep to the subject, to feel oneself in the centre of the universal drama. There is comfort in the idea. Everything else may be taken away from us, but if thought remains we are still connected by a magic thread with the axis of the world. But we

may lose thought and speech. Then nothing remains but simple feeling, the sense of the presence of God and of death in God,— the last relic of the human privilege, which is to participate in the whole, to commune with the absolute.

'Ta vie est un éclair qui meurt dans son nuage,

Mais l'éclair t'a sauvé s'il t'a fait voir le ciel.'

26th July 1876. — A private journal is a friend to idleness. It frees us from the necessity of looking all round a subject, it puts up with every kind of repetition, it accompanies all the caprices and meanderings of the inner life, and proposes to itself no definite end. This journal of mine represents the material of a good many volumes: what prodigious waste of time, of thought, of strength ! It will be useful to nobody, and even for myself, it has rather helped me to shirk life than to practise it. A journal takes the place of a confidant, that is, of friend or wife; it becomes a substitute for production, a substitute for country and public. It is a grief-cheating device, a mode of escape and withdrawal; but, factotum as it is, though it takes the place of everything, properly speaking it represents nothing at all.

What is it which makes the history of a soul? It is the stratification of its different stages of progress, the story of its acquisitions and of the general course of its destiny. Before my history can teach anybody anything, or even interest myself, it must be disentangled from its materials, distilled and simplified. These thousands of pages are but the pile of leaves and bark from which the essence has still to be extracted. A whole forest of cinchonas are worth but one cask of quinine. A whole Smyrna rose-garden goes to produce one phial of perfume.

This mass of written talk, the work of twenty-nine years, may in the end be worth nothing at all; for each is only interested in his own romance, his own individual life. Even I perhaps shall never have time to read them over myself. Soso what? I shall have lived my life, and life consists in repeating the human type, and the burden of the human song, as myriads of my kindred have done, are doing, and will do, century after century. To rise to consciousness of this burden and this type is something, and we can scarcely achieve anything further. The realisation of the type is more complete, and the bur

den a more joyous one, if circumstances are kind and propitious, but whether the puppets have done this or that—

'Trois p'tits tours et puis s'en vont !'

everything falls into the same gulf at last, and comes to very much the same thing.

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To rebel against fate-to try to escape the inevitable issue is almost puerile. When the duration of a centenarian and that of an insect are quantities sensibly equivalent, and geology and astronomy enable us to regard such durations from this point of view, what is the meaning of all our tiny efforts and cries, the value of our anger, our ambition, our hope? For the dream of a dream it is absurd to raise these make-believe tempests. The forty millions of infusoria which make up a cubeinch of chalk-do they matter much to us? and do the forty millions of men who make up France matter any more to an inhabitant of the moon or Jupiter?

To be a conscious monad -a nothing which knows itself to be the microscopic phantom of the universe: this is all we can ever attain to.

12th September 1876.

What is your own

particular absurdity? Why, simply that you exhaust yourself in trying to understand wisdom without practising it, that you are always making preparations for nothing, that you live without living. Contemplation which has not the courage to be purely contemplative, renunciation which does not renounce completely, chronic contradiction

there is your case. Inconsistent scepticism, irresolution, not convinced but incorrigible, weakness which will not accept itself and cannot transform itself into strength — there is your misery. The comic side of it lies in capacity to direct others becoming incapacity to direct oneself, in the dream of the infinitely great stopped short by the infinitely little, in what seems to be the utter uselessness of talent. To arrive at immobility by excess of motion, at zero from abundance of numbers, is a strange farce, a sad comedy; the poorest gossip can laugh at its absurdity.

19th September 1876. - My reading to-day has been Doudan's Lettres et Mélanges.17 A fascinating book! Wit, grace, subtlety, imagination, thought, these letters possess them all. How much I regret that I never knew the man himself. He was a