V 
 
 GIFT
 
 AMiEL's JOURNAL 
 
 THE JOURNAL INTIME OF 
 HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL 
 
 TRANSLATED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 
 
 Mrs. HUMPHREY WARD 
 
 A. L. BURT COMPANY, PUBLISHERS,
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CAL1FOIH-TA 
 SANTA BARBARA COLLEGE LiBRAKY 
 
 7-5? 
 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 IN" THIS second edition of the English translation of 
 Amiel's " Journal Intime," I have inserted a good many new 
 passages, taken from the last French edition ( Cinquieme 
 edition, revue et augmentee.) But I have not translated 
 all the fresh material to be found in that edition nor have 
 I omitted certain sections of the Journal which in these two 
 recent volumes have been omitted by their French editors. 
 It would be of no interest to give my reasons for these 
 variations at length. They depend upon certain differences 
 between the English and the French public, which are 
 more readily felt than explained. Some of the passages 
 which I have left untranslated seemed to me to overweight 
 the introspective side of the Journal, already so full to 
 overweight it, at any rate, for English readers. Others 
 which I have retained, though they often relate to local 
 names and books, more or less unfamiliar to the general 
 public, yet seemed to me valuable as supplying some of 
 that surrounding detail, that setting, which helps one to- 
 understand a life. Besides, we English are in many ways 
 more akin to Protestant and Puritan Geneva than the 
 French readers to whom the original Journal primarily 
 addresses itself, and some of the entries I have kept have 
 probably, by the nature of things, more savor for us than. 
 for them. 
 
 M. A. W.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THIS translation of Amiel's "Journal Intime" is pri- 
 marily addressed to those whose knowledge of French, 
 while it may be sufficient to carry them with more or less 
 complete understanding through a novel or a newspaper, 
 is yet not enough to allow them to understand and appre- 
 ciate a book containing subtle and complicated forms of 
 expression. I believe there are many such to be found 
 among the reading public, and among those who would 
 naturally take a strong interest in such a life and mind as 
 Amiel's, were it not for the barrier of language. It is, at 
 any rate, in the hope that a certain number of additional 
 readers may be thereby attracted to the " Journal Intime " 
 that this translation of it has been undertaken. 
 
 The difficulties of the translation have been sometimes 
 considerable, owing, first of all, to those elliptical modes 
 of speech which a man naturally employs when he is 
 writing for himself and not for the public, but which a 
 translator at all events is bound in some degree to expand. 
 Every here and there Amiel expresses himself in a kind 
 of shorthand, perfectly intelligible to a Frenchman, but for 
 which an English equivalent, at once terse and clear, is 
 hard to find. Another difficulty has been his constant use 
 of a technical philosophical language, which, according to 
 his French critics, is not French even philosophical 
 French but German. Very often it has been impossible 
 to give any other than a literal rendering of such passages, 
 if the thought of the original was to be preserved; but in 
 those cases where a choice was open to me, I have pre- 
 ferred the more literary to the more technical expression; 
 and I have been encouraged to do so by the fact that Amiel, 
 when he came to prepare for publication a certain number 
 of "Pensees," extracted frorp the Journal, and printed at
 
 Vi PREFACE. 
 
 the end of a volume of poems published in 1853, frequently 
 softened his phrases, so that sentences which survive in the 
 Journal in a more technical form are to be found in a more 
 literary form in the "Grains de Mil." 
 
 In two or three cases not more, I think I have allowed 
 myself to transpose a sentence bodily, and in a few instances 
 I have added some explanatory words to the text, which 
 wherever the addition was of any importance, are indicated 
 by square brackets. 
 
 My warmest thanks are due to my friend and critic, M. 
 Edmond Scherer, from whose valuable and interesting 
 study, prefixed to the French Journal, as well as from cer- 
 tain materials in his possession which he has very kindly 
 allowed me to make use of, I have drawn by far the greater 
 part of the biographical material embodied in the Introduc- 
 tion. M. Scherer has also given me help and advice 
 through the whole process of translation advice which his 
 scholarly knowledge of English has made especially wortli 
 having. 
 
 In the translation of the more technical philosophical 
 passages I have been greatly helped by another friend, Mr. 
 Bernard Bosanquet, Fellow of University College, Oxford, 
 the translator of Lotze, of whose care and pains in the mat- 
 ter I cherish a grateful remembrance. 
 
 But with all the help that has been so freely given me, 
 not only by these friends but by others, I confide the little 
 book to the public with many a misgiving! May it at 
 least win a few more friends and readers here and there 
 for one who lived alone, and died sadly persuaded that his 
 life had been a barren mistake; whereas, all the while 
 such is the irony of things he had been in .reality working 
 out the mission assigned him in the spiritual economy, 
 and faithfully obeying the secret mandate which had im- 
 pressed itself upon his youthful consciousness : " Let the 
 living live; and you, gather together your thoughts, leave 
 behind you a legacy of feeling and ideas; you will be most 
 useful so." 
 
 MARY A. WARD.
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 IT WAS in the last days of December, 1882, that the first 
 volume of Henri Frederic Amiel's " Journal Intime " was 
 published at Geneva. The book, of which the general 
 literary world knew nothing prior to its appearance, con- 
 tained a long and remarkable Introduction from the pen of 
 M. Bdmond Scherer, the well-known French critic, who 
 had been for many years one of Amiel's most valued 
 friends, and it was prefaced also by a little Avertissement, 
 in which the " Editors " that is to say, the Genevese 
 friends to whom the care and publication of the Journal 
 had been in the first instance entrusted described in a 
 few reserved and sober words the genesis and objects of the 
 publication. Some thousands of sheets of Journal, cover- 
 ing a period of more than thirty years, had come into the 
 hands of Amiel's literary heirs. "They were written," 
 said the Avertissement, "with several ends in view- 
 Amiel recorded in them his various occupations, and the 
 incidents of each day. He preserved in them his psycholog- 
 ical observations, and the impressions produced on him by 
 books. But his Journal was, above all, the confidant of 
 his most private and intimate thoughts; a means whereby 
 the thinker became conscious of his own inner life ; a safe 
 shelter wherein his questionings of fate and the future, the 
 voice of grief, of self-examination and confession, the soul's 
 cry for inward peace, might make themselves freely heard. 
 . In the directions concerning his papers which 
 he left behind him, Amiel expressed the wish that his 
 literary executors should publish those parts of the 
 Journal which might seem to them to possess either inter- 
 est as thought or value as experience. The publication 
 of this volume is the fulfillment of this desire. The
 
 vii i INTROD DCT10N. 
 
 reader wiil find in it, not a volume of Memoirs, but the 
 confidences of a solitary thinker, the meditations of a phi- 
 losopher for whom the things of the soul were the sovereign 
 realities of existence." 
 
 Thus modestly announced, the little volume made its 
 quiet debut. It contained nothing, or almost nothing, 
 of ordinary biographical material. M. Scherer's Intro- 
 duction supplied such facts as were absolutely necessary 
 to the understanding of Amiel's intellectual history, but 
 nothing more. Everything of a local or private character 
 that could be excluded was excluded. The object of the 
 editors in their choice of passages for publication was 
 declared to be simply " the reproduction of the moral and 
 intellectual physiognomy of their friend," while M. Scherer 
 expressly disclaimed any biographical intentions, and 
 limited his Introduction as far as possible to "a study of 
 the character and thought of Amiel." The contents of 
 the volume, then, were purely literary and philosophical; 
 its prevailing tone was a tone of introspection, and the 
 public which can admit the claims and overlook the inher- 
 ent defects of introspective literature has always been a 
 small one. The writer of the Journal had been during 
 his lifetime wholly unknown to the general European 
 public. In Geneva itself he had been commonly regarded 
 as a man who had signally disappointed the hopes and ex- 
 pectations of his friends, whose reserve and indecision of 
 character had in many respects spoiled his life, and alienated 
 the society around him; while his professional lectures 
 were generally pronounced dry and unattractive, and the 
 few volumes of poems which represented almost his only 
 contributions to literature had nowhere met with any real 
 cordiality of reception. Those concerned, therefore, in the 
 publication of the first volume of the Journal can hardly 
 have had much expectation of a wide success. Geneva is 
 not a favorable starting-point for a French book, and it 
 may well have seemed that not even the support of M. 
 Schecer's name would be likely to carry the volume beyond 
 a small local circle.
 
 INTRODUCTION. ix 
 
 But " wisdom is justified of her children ! " It is now 
 nearly three years since the first volume of the " Journal 
 Intime " appeared ; the impression made by it was deepened 
 and extended by the publication of the second volume in 
 1884 ; and it is now not too much to say that this remark- 
 able record of a life has made its way to what promises to 
 be a permanent place in literature. Among those who 
 think and read it is beginning to be generally recognized 
 that another book has been added to the books which live 
 not to those, perhaps, which live in the public view, much 
 discussed, much praised, the objects of feeling and of 
 struggle, but to those in which a germ of permanent life 
 has been deposited silently, almost secretly, which compel 
 no homage and excite no rivalry, and which owe the place 
 that the world half-unconsciously yields to them to nothing 
 but that indestructible sympathy of man with man, that 
 eternal answering of feeling to feeling, which is one of the 
 great principles, perhaps the greatest principle, at the 
 root of literature. M. Scherer naturally was the first 
 among the recognized guides of opinion to attempt the 
 placing of his friend's Journal. "The man who, during 
 his lifetime, was incapable of giving us any deliberate or 
 conscious work worthy of his powers, has now left us, after 
 his death, a book which will not die. For the secret of 
 Amiel's malady is sublime, and the expression of it won- 
 derful." So ran one of the last paragraphs of the Intro- 
 duction, and one may see in the sentences another instance 
 of that courage, that reasoned rashness, which distin- 
 guishes the good from the mediocre critic. For it is as 
 true now as it was in the daye when La Bruyere rated the 
 critics of his time for their incapacity to praise, and praise 
 at once, that "the surest test of a man's critical power is 
 his judgment of contemporaries." M. Eenan, I think, 
 with that exquisite literary sense of his, was the next 
 among the authorities to mention Amiel's name with the 
 emphasis it deserved. He quoted a passage from the 
 Journal in his Preface to the "Souvenirs d'Enfance et de 
 Jeunesse," describing it as the saying "(Pun penseur
 
 X INTRODUCTION. 
 
 distingue, M. Amiel de Geneve" Since then M. Renan 
 has devoted two curious articles to the completed Journal 
 in the Journal des Desbats. The first object of these 
 reviews, no doubt, was not so much the critical apprecia- 
 tion of Amiel as the development of certain paradoxes 
 which have been haunting various corners of M. Kenan's 
 mind for several years past, and to which it is to be hoped 
 he has now given expression with sufficient emphasis and 
 brnsquerie to satisfy even his passion for intellectual ad- 
 venture. Still, the rank of the book was fully recognized, 
 and tlie first article especially contained some remarkable 
 criticisms, to which we shall find occasion to recur. " In 
 these two volumes otpensees," said M. Eenan, " without any 
 sacrifice of truth to artistic effect, we have both the perfect 
 mirror of a modern mind of the best type, matured by the 
 best modern culture, and also a striking picture of the 
 sufferings which beset the sterility of genius. These two 
 volumes may certainly be reckoned among the most inter- 
 esting philosophical writings which have appeared of late 
 years." 
 
 M. Caro's article on the first volume of the Journal, in 
 the Revue des Deux Mondes for February, 1883, may 
 perhaps count as the first introduction of the book to the 
 general cultivated public. He gave a careful analysis of 
 the first half of the Journal resumed eighteen months 
 later in the same periodical on the appearance of the 
 second volume and, while protesting against what he con- 
 ceived to be the general tendency and effect of Amiel's 
 mental story, he showed himself fully conscious of the rare 
 and delicate qualities of the new writer. " La reverie a 
 reussi a notre auteur" he says, a little reluctantly for M. 
 Caro has his doubts as to the legitimacy of reverie; " il en 
 aufait une ceuvure qui restera." The same final judgment, 
 accompanied by a very different series of comments, was 
 pronounced on the Journal a year later by M.Paul Bourget, 
 a young and rising writer, whose article is perhaps chiefly 
 interesting as showing the kind of effect produced by 
 Amiel's thought on minds of a type essentially alien from
 
 INTRODUCTION. xi 
 
 his owu. There is a leaven of something positive and aus- 
 tere, of something which, for want of a better name, one 
 calls Puritanism, in Amiel, which escapes the author of 
 "Une Cruelle Enigme." But whether he has understood 
 Amiel or no, M. Bourget is fully alive to the mark which 
 the Journal is likely to make among modern records of 
 mental history. He, too, insists that the book is already 
 famous and will remain so; in the first place, because of 
 its inexorable realism and sincerity; in the second, because 
 it is the most perfect example available of a certain variety 
 of the modern mind. 
 
 Among ourselves, although the Journal has attracted 
 the attention of all who keep a vigilant eye on the progress 
 of foreign literature, and although one or two appreciative 
 articles have appeared on it in the magazines, the book has 
 still to become generally known. One remarkable English 
 testimony to it, however, must be quoted. Six months after 
 the publication of the first volume, the late Mark Pattison, 
 who since then has himself bequeathed to literature a strange 
 and memorable fragment of autobiography, addressed a letter 
 to M. Scherer as the editor of the "Journal Intime," which 
 M. Scherer has since published, nearly a year after the 
 death of the writer. The words have a strong and melan- 
 choly interest for all who knew Mark Pattison; and they 
 certainly deserve a place in any attempt to estimate the 
 impression already made on contemporary thought by the 
 "Journal Intime." 
 
 "I wish to convey to you, sir," writes the rector of 
 Lincoln, "the thanks of one at least of the public for 
 giving the light to this precious record of a unique experi- 
 ence. I say unique, but I can vouch that there is in exist- 
 ence at least one other soul which has lived through the same 
 struggles, mental and moral, as Amiel. In your pathetic 
 description of the volonte qui voudrait vouloir, tnais impuis- 
 sante a se fournir a elle-meme des motifs of the repug- 
 nance for all action the soul petrified by the sentiment of 
 the infinite, in all this I recognize myself. Celui qui a 
 dechiffre le secret de la vie finie, qui en a lu le mot, est
 
 xii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 sorli du monde des vivants, il est mort de fait. I can feel 
 foicibly the truth of this, as it applies to myself! 
 
 "It is not, however, with the view of thrusting my 
 egotism upon you that I have ventured upon addressing 
 you. As I cannot suppose that so peculiar a psychological 
 revelation will enjoy a wide popularity, I think it a duty 
 to the editor to assure him that there are persons in the 
 world whose souls respond, in the depths of their inmost 
 nature, to the cry of anguish which makes itself heard in 
 the pages of these remarkable confessions." 
 
 So much for the place which the Journal the fruit of so 
 many years of painful thought and disappointed effort ; seems 
 to be at last securing for its author among those contempor- 
 aries who in his lifetime knew nothing of him. It is a nat- 
 ural consequence of the success of the book that the more 
 it penetrates, the greater desire there is to know something 
 more than its original editors and M. Scherer have yet 
 told us about the personal history of the man who wrote it 
 about his education, his habits, and his friends. Perhaps 
 some day this wish may find its satisfaction. It is an inno- 
 cent one, and the public may even be said to have a kind 
 of right to know as much as can be told it of the person- 
 alities which move and stir it. At present the biographical 
 material available is extremely scanty, and if it were not 
 for the kindness of M. Scherer, who has allowed the pres- 
 ent writer access to certain manuscript material in his 
 possession, even the sketch which follows, vague and imper- 
 fect as it necessarily is, would have been impossible.* 
 
 Henri Frederic Amiel was born at Geneva in September, 
 1821. He belonged to one of the emigrant families, of 
 which a more or less steady supply had enriched the little 
 republic during the three centuries following the Reforma- 
 tion. Amiel's ancestors, like those of Sismondi, left 
 
 * Four or five articles on the subject of Amiel's life have been con- 
 tributed to the Revue Internationale by Mdlle. Berthe Vadier during 
 the passage of the present book through the press. My knowledge 
 of them, however, came too late to enable me to make use of them 
 fnr the Durnoses of the present introduction
 
 INTRODUCTION'. xiii 
 
 Languedoc for Geneva after the revocation of the Edict of 
 Nantes. His father must have been a youth at the time 
 when Geneva passed into the power of the French repub- 
 lic, and would seem to have married and settled in the 
 halcyon days following the restoration of Genevese inde- 
 pendence in 1814. Amiel was born when the prosperity of 
 Geneva was at its height, when the little state was admin- 
 istered by men of European reputation, and Genevese 
 society had power to attract distinguished visitors and ad- 
 mirers from all parts. The veteran Bonstetten, who had 
 been the friend of Gray and the associate of Voltaire, was 
 still talking and enjoying life in his appartement over- 
 looking the woods of La Batie. Kossi and Sismondi were 
 busy lecturing to the Genevese youth, or taking part in 
 Genevese legislation ; an active scientific group, headed by 
 the Pictets, De la Eive, and the botanist Auguste-Pyrame 
 de Candolle, kept the country abreast of European thought 
 and speculation, while the mixed nationality of the place 
 the blending in it of French keenness with Protestant 
 enthusiasms and Protestant solidity was beginning to find 
 inimitable and characteristic expression in the stories of 
 Topffer. The country was governed by an aristocracy, 
 which was not so much an aristocracy of birth as one of 
 merit and intellect, and the moderate constitutional ideas, 
 which represented the Liberalism of the post- Waterloo 
 period were nowhere more warmly embraced or more intelli- 
 gently carried out than in Geneva. 
 
 During the years, however, which immediately followed 
 Amiel's birth, some signs of decadence began to be visible 
 in this brilliant Genevese society. The generation which 
 had waited for, prepared, and controlled, the Eestoration 
 of 1814, was falling into the background, and the younger 
 generation, with all its respectability, wanted energy, 
 above all, wanted leaders. The revolutionary forces in the 
 state, which had made themselves violently felt during the 
 civil turmoils of the period preceding the assembly of the 
 French States General, and had afterward produced the 
 miniature Terror which forced Sismondi into exile, had
 
 x i v INT ROD UCTION. 
 
 been for awhile laid to sleep by the events of 1814. But 
 the slumber was a short one at Geneva as elsewhere, and 
 when Kossi quitted the republic for France in 1833, he did 
 so with a mind full of misgivings as to the political future 
 of the little state which had given him an exile and a 
 Catholic so generous a welcome in 1819. The ideas of 
 1830 were shaking the fabric and disturbing the equili- 
 brium of the Swiss Confederation as a whole, and of many 
 of the cantons composing it. Geneva was still apparently 
 tranquil while her neighbors were disturbed, but no one 
 looking back on the history of the republic, and able to 
 measure the strength of the Eadical force in Europe after 
 the fall of Charles X., could have felt much doubt but that 
 a few more years would bring Geneva also into the whirl- 
 pool of political change. 
 
 In the same year 1833 that M. Rossi had left Geneva, 
 Henri Frederic Amiel, at twelve years old, was left 
 orphaned of both his parents. They had died comparatively 
 young his mother was only just over thirty, and his 
 father cannot have been much older. On the death of the 
 mother the little family was broken up, the boy passing 
 into the care of one relative, his two sisters into that of 
 another. Certain notes in M. Scherer's possession throw 
 a little light here and there upon a childhood and youth 
 which must necessarily have been a little bare and forlorn. 
 They show us a sensitive, impressionable boy, of health 
 rather delicate than robust, already disposed to a more or 
 less melancholy and dreamy view of life, and showing a 
 deep interest in those religious problems and ideas in 
 which the air of Geneva has been steeped since the days of 
 Calvin. The religious teaching which a Genevese lad 
 undergoes prior to his admission to full church member- 
 ship, made a deep impression on him, and certain mystical 
 elements of character, which remained strong in him to 
 the end, showed themselves very early. At the college 
 or public school of Geneva, and at the academic, he would 
 seem to have done only moderately as far as prizes and 
 honors were concerned. We are told, however, that he
 
 INTRODUCTION. XV 
 
 read enormously, and that he was, generally speaking, 
 inclined rather to make friends with men older than him- 
 self than with his contemporaries. He fell specially under 
 the influence of Adolphe Pictet, a brilliant philologist 
 and man of letters belonging to a well-known Generese 
 family, and in later life he was able, while reviewing one 
 of M. Pictet's books, to give grateful expression to his 
 sense of obligation. 
 
 Writing in 1856 he describes the effect produced in Geneva 
 by M. Pictet's Lectures on Esthetics in 1840 the first ever 
 delivered in a town in which the Beautiful had been for 
 centuries regarded as the rival and enemy of the True. 
 "He who is now writing," says Amiel, "was then among 
 M. Pictet's youngest hearers. Since then twenty experi- 
 ences of the same kind have followed each other in his 
 intellectual experience, yet none has effaced the deep im- 
 pression made upon him by these lectures. Coming as they 
 did at a favorable moment, and answering many a positive 
 question and many a vague aspiration of youth, they exer- 
 cised a decisive influence over his thought; they were to 
 him an important step in that continuous initiation which 
 we call life, they filled him with fresh intuitions, they 
 brought near to him the horizons of his dreams. And, as 
 always happens with a first-rate man, what struck him 
 even more than the teaching was the teacher. So that this 
 memory of 1840 is still dear and precious to him, and for 
 this double service, which is not of the kind one forgets, 
 the student of those days delights in expressing to the pro- 
 fessor of 1840 his sincere and filial gratitude." 
 
 Amiel's first literary production, or practically his first, 
 seems to have been the result partly of these lectures, and 
 partly of a visit to Italy which began in November, 1841. 
 In 1842, a year which was spent entirely in Italy and 
 Sicily, he contributed three articles on M. Kio's book, 
 "L'Art Chretien," to the Bibliotheque Universelle de 
 Geneve. We see in them the young student conscien- 
 tiously writing his first review writing it at inordinate 
 length, as young reviewers are apt to do, and treating the
 
 xvi INTRODUCTION. 
 
 subject ab ovo in a grave, pontifical way, which is a little 
 naive and inexperienced indeed, but still promising, as all 
 seriousness of work and purpose is promising. All that is 
 individual in it is first of all the strong Christian feeling 
 which much of it shows, and secondly, the tone of melan- 
 choly which already makes itself felt here and there, 
 especially in one rather remarkable passage. As to the 
 Christian feeling, we find M. Rio described as belonging 
 to "that noble school of men who are striving to rekindle 
 the dead beliefs of France, to rescue Frenchmen from the 
 camp of materialistic or pantheistic ideas, and rally them 
 round that Christian banner which is the banner of true 
 progress and true civilization." The Renaissance is treated 
 as a disastrous but inevitable crisis, in which the idealism 
 of the Middle Ages was dethroned by the naturalism of 
 modern times "The Renaissance perhaps robbed us of 
 more than it gave us" and so on. The tone of criticism 
 is instructive enough to the student of Amiel's mind, but 
 the product itself has no particular savor of its own. The 
 occasional note of depression and discouragement, how- 
 ever, is a different thing; here, for those who know the 
 "Journal Intime," there is already something characteristic, 
 something which foretells the future. For instance, after 
 dwelling with evident zest on the nature of the metaphys- 
 ical problems lying at the root of art in general, and 
 Christian art in particular, the writer goes on to set the 
 difficulty of M. Rio's task against its attractiveness, to 
 insist on the intricacy of the investigations involved, and 
 on the impossibility of making the two instruments on 
 which their success depends the imaginative and the 
 analytical faculty work harmoniously and effectively 
 together. And supposing the goal achieved, supposing a 
 man by insight and patience has succeeded in forcing his 
 way farther than any previous explorer into the recesses of 
 the Beautiful or the True, there still remains the enormous, 
 the insuperable difficulty of expression, of fit and adequate 
 communication from mind to mind ; there still remains the 
 question whether, after all, "he who discovers a new world
 
 INTRODUCTION, xvii 
 
 in the depths of the invisible would not do wisely to plant 
 on it a flag known to himself alone, and, like Achilles, 
 'devour his heart in secret;' whether the greatest problems 
 which have ever been guessed on earth had not better have 
 remained buried in the brain which had found the key to 
 them, and whether the deepest thinkers those whose 
 hand has been boldest in drawing aside the veil, and their 
 eye keenest in fathoming the mysteries beyond it had not 
 better, like the prophetess of Dion, have kept for heaven, 
 and heaven only, secrets and mysteries which human 
 tongue cannot truly express, nor human intelligence 
 conceive." 
 
 Curious words for a beginner of twenty-one! There is a 
 touch, no doubt, of youth and fatuity in the passage; one 
 feels how much the vague sonorous phrases have pleased 
 the writer's immature literary sense; but there is some- 
 thing else too there is a breath of that same speculative 
 passion which burns in the Journal, and one hears, as it 
 were, the first accents of a melancholy, the first expression 
 of a mood of mind, which became in after years the fixed 
 characteristic of the writer. " At twenty he was already 
 proud, timid, and melancholy," writes an old friend; and 
 a little farther on, " Discouragement took possession of him 
 very early. " 
 
 However, in spite of this inbred tendency, which was 
 probably hereditary and inevitable, the years which followed 
 these articles, from 1842 to Christmas, 1848, were years of 
 happiness and steady intellectual expansion. They were 
 AmiePs Wanderjahre, spent in a free, wandering student 
 life, which left deep marks on his intellectual development. 
 During four years, from 1844 to 1848, his headquarters 
 were at Berlin; but every vacation saw him exploring 
 some new country or fresh intellectual center Scandinavia 
 in 1845, Holland in 1846, Vienna, Munich, and Tubingen 
 in 1848, while Paris had already attracted him in 1841, and 
 he was to make acquaintance with London ten years later, 
 in 1851. No circumstances could have been more favor- 
 able, one would have thought, to the development of such
 
 xviii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 a nature. With his extraordinary power of " throwing him- 
 self into the object " of effacing himself and his own per- 
 sonality in the presence of the thing to be undertsood and 
 absorbed he must have passed these years of travel and 
 acquisition in a state of continuous intellectual energy and 
 excitement. It is in no spirit of conceit that he says in 
 1857, comparing himself with Maine de Biran, "This 
 nature is, as it were, only one of the men which exist in 
 me. My horizon is vaster; I have seen much more of 
 men, things, countries, peoples, books; I have a greater 
 mass of experiences." This fact, indeed, of a wide and 
 varied personal experience, must never be forgotten iit any 
 critical estimate of Amiel as a man or writer. We may 
 so easily conceive him as a sedentary professor, with the 
 ordinary professorial knowledge, or rather ignorance, of 
 men and the world, falling into introspection under the 
 pressure of circumstance, and for want, as it were, of some- 
 thing else to think about. Not at all. The man who has 
 left us these microscopic analyses of his own moods and 
 feelings, had penetrated more or less into the social and 
 intellectual life of half a dozen European countries, and 
 was familiar not only with the books, but, to a large extent 
 also, with the men of his generation. The meditative and 
 introspective gift was in him, not the product, but the 
 mistress of circumstance. It took from the outer world 
 what that world had to give, and then made the stuff so 
 gained subservient to its own ends. 
 
 Of these years of travel, however, the four years spent at 
 Berlin were by far the most important. " It was at Heidel- 
 berg and Berlin," says M. Scherer, "that the world of 
 science and speculation first opened on the dazzled eyes of 
 the young man. He was accustomed to speak of his four 
 years at Berlin as 'his intellectual phase,' and one felt that 
 he inclined to regard them as the happiest period of his 
 life. The spell which Berlin laid upon him lasted long. " 
 Probably his happiness in Germany was partly owing to a 
 sense of reaction against Geneva. There are signs that he 
 had felt himself somewhat isolated at school and college,
 
 INTROD UCTION. xi x 
 
 and that in the German world his special individuality, 
 with its dreaminess and its melancholy, found congenial 
 surroundings far more readily than had been the case in 
 the drier and harsher atmosphere of the Protestant Kome. 
 However this may be, it is certain that German thought 
 took possession of him, that he became steeped not only in 
 German methods of speculation, but in German modes of 
 expression, in German forms of sentiment, which clung to 
 him through life, and vitally affected both his opinions 
 and his style. M.Kenan and M.Bourget shake their heads 
 over the Germanisms, which, according to the latter, give a 
 certain " barbarous " air to many passages of the Journal. 
 But both admit that Amiel's individuality owes a great 
 part of its penetrating force to that intermingling of Ger- 
 man with French elements, of which there are such abun- 
 dant traces in the "Journal Intime." Amiel, in fact, is 
 one more typical product of a movement which is certainly 
 of enormous importance in the history of modern thought, 
 even though we may not be prepared to assent to all 
 the sweeping terms in which a writer like M. Taine 
 describes it. "From 1780 to 1830," says M. Taine, 
 "Germany produced all the ideas of our historical 
 age, and during another half -century, perhaps another 
 century, notre gr ancle affaire sera de les repenser." He is 
 inclined to compare the influence of German ideas on the 
 modern world to the ferment of the Renaissance. No 
 spiritual force " more original, more universal, more fruit- 
 ful in consequences of every sort and bearing, more capable 
 of transforming and remaking everything presented to it, 
 has arisen during the last three hundred years. Like the 
 spirit of the Renaissance and of the classical age, it attracts 
 into its orbit all the great works of contemporary intelli- 
 gence." Quinet, pursuing a somewhat different line of 
 thought, regards the worship of German ideas inaugurated 
 in France by Madame de Stae'l as the natural result of 
 reaction from the eighteenth century and all its ways. 
 " German systems, German hypotheses, beliefs, and poetry, 
 all were eagerly welcomed as a cure for hearts crushed by
 
 xx INTRODUCTION. 
 
 the mockery of Candide and the materialism of the Revo- 
 lution. . . . Under the Restoration France continued 
 to study German philosophy and poetry with profound 
 veneration and submission. We imitated, translated, com- 
 piled, and then again we compiled, translated, imitated." 
 The importance of the part played by German influence in 
 French Romanticism has indeed been much disputed, but 
 the debt of French metaphysics, French philology, and 
 French historical study, to German methods and German re- 
 search during the last half-century is beyond dispute. And 
 the movement to-day is as strong as ever. A modern critic 
 like M. Darmstetter regards it as a misfortune that the 
 artificial stimulus given by the war to the study of German 
 has, to some extent, checked the study of English in 
 France. He thinks that the French have more to gain 
 from our literature taking literature in its general and 
 popular sense than from German literature. But he 
 raises no question as to the inevitable subjection of the 
 French to the German mind in matters of exact thought 
 and knowledge. " To study philology, mythology, history, 
 without reading German," he is as ready to confess as any 
 one else, "is to condemn one's self to remain in every 
 department twenty years behind the progress of science." 
 Of this great movement, already so productive, Amiel is 
 then a fresh and remarkable instance. Having caught 
 from the Germans not only their love of exact knowledge 
 but also their love of vast horizons, their insatiable curiosity 
 as to the whence and whither of all things, their sense of mys- 
 tery and immensity in the universe, he then brings those 
 elements in him which belong to his French inheritance 
 and something individual besides, which is not French but 
 Genevese to bear on his new acquisitions, and the result 
 is of the highest literary interest and value. Not that he 
 succeeds altogether in the task of fusion. For one who 
 was to write and think in French, he was perhaps too long 
 in Germany; he had drunk too deeply of German thought; 
 he had been too much dazzled by the spectacle of Berlin 
 and its imposing intellectual activities. " As to his literary
 
 INTRODUCTION. xtf 
 
 talent," says M. Scherer, after dwelling on the rapid 
 growth of his intellectual powers under German influence, 
 " the profit which Amiel derived from his stay at Berlin is 
 more doubtful. Too long contact with the German mind 
 had led to the development in him of certain strangenesses 
 of style which he had afterward to get rid of, and even 
 perhaps of some habits of thought which he afterward felt 
 the need of checking and correcting." This is very true. 
 Amiel is no doubt often guilty, as M. Caro puts it, of 
 attempts "to write German in French," and there are in 
 his thought itself veins of mysticism, elements of Schwdr- 
 merei, here. and there, of which a good deal must be laid 
 to the account of his German training. 
 
 M. Renan regrets that after Geneva and after Berlin he 
 never came to Paris. Paris, he thinks, would have coun- 
 teracted the Hegelian influences brought to bear upon him 
 at Berlin,* would have taught him cheerfulness, and 
 taught him also the art of writing, not beautiful fragments, 
 but a book. Possibly but how much we should have 
 lost! Instead of the Amiel we know, we should have had 
 one accomplished French critic the more. Instead of the 
 spiritual drama of the "Journal In time," some further 
 additions to French belles lettres; instead of something to 
 love, something to admire! No, there is no wishing the 
 German element in Amiel away. Its invading, troubling 
 effect upon his thought and temperament goes far to ex- 
 plain the interest and suggestiveness of his mental history. 
 The language he speaks is the language of that French 
 criticism which we have Sainte-Beuve's authority for it 
 is best described by the motto of Montaigne, " Un pen 
 de chaque chose et rien de V ensemble, a la franfaise," and 
 the thought he tries to express in it is thought torn and 
 strained by the constant effort to reach the All, the totality 
 of things: "What I desire is the sum of all desires, and 
 what I seek to know is the sum of all different kinds of 
 knowledge. Always the complete, the absolute, the feres 
 
 * See a note, however, on the subject of Amiel's philosophic* I r- 
 lationships, printed as an Appendix to the present volume.
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 atque rotundum. " And it was this antagonism, or rathei 
 this fusion of traditions in him, which went far to make 
 him original, which opened to him, that is to say, so many 
 new lights on old paths, and stirred in him such capacities 
 of fresh and individual expression. 
 
 We have been carried forward, however, a little too far 
 by this general discussion of Amiel's debts to Germany. 
 Let us take up the biographical thread again. In 1848 
 his Berlin apprenticeship came to an end, and he returned 
 to Geneva. "How many places, how many impressions, 
 observations, thoughts how many forms of men and 
 things have passed before me and in me since April, 
 1843," he writes in the Journal, two or three months after 
 his return. " The last seven years have been the most im- 
 portant of my life; they have been the novitiate of my 
 intelligence, the initiation of my being into being." The 
 first literary evidence of his matured powers is to be found 
 in two extremely interesting papers on Berlin, which he 
 contributed to the BiUiotheque Universelle in 1848, 
 apparently just before he left Germany. Here for the 
 first time we have the Amiel of the "Journal Intime." 
 The young man who five years before had written his pains- 
 taking review of M. Rio is now in his turn a master. He 
 speaks with dignity and authority, he has a graphic, vigor- 
 ous prose at command, the form of expression is condensed 
 and epigrammatic, and there is a mixture of enthusiasm 
 and criticism in his description of the powerful intellectual 
 machine then working in the Prussian capital which repre- 
 sents a permanent note of character, a lasting attitude of 
 mind. A great deal, of course, in the two papers is tech- 
 nical and statistic, but what there is of general comment 
 and criticism is so good that one is tempted to make some 
 melancholy comparisons between them and another article 
 in the Bibliotheque, that on Adolphe Pictet, written in 
 1856, and from which we have already quoted. In 1848 
 Amiel was for awhile master of his powers and his knowl- 
 edge; no fatal divorce had yet taken place in him between 
 the accumulating and producing faculties; he writes readily
 
 INTRODUCTION. xxiii 
 
 ven for the public, without labor, without affectations. 
 Eight years later the reflective faculty has outgrown his 
 control; composition, which represents the practical side 
 of the intellectual life, has become difficult and painful 
 to him, and he has developed what he himself calls "a 
 wavering manner, born of doubt and scruple." 
 
 How few could have foreseen the failure in public and 
 practical life which lay before him at the moment of his 
 reappearance at Geneva in 1848 ! " My first meeting with 
 him in 1849 is still vividly present to me," says M. Scherer. 
 "He was twenty-eight, and he had just come from Ger- 
 many laden with science, but he wore his knowledge lightly, 
 his looks were attractive, his conversation animated, and 
 no affectation spoiled the favorable impression he made on 
 the bystander the whole effect, indeed, was of something 
 brilliant and striking. In his young alertness Amiel seemed 
 to be entering upon life as a conqueror; one would have 
 said the future was all his own." 
 
 His return, moreover, was marked by a success which 
 seemed to secure him at once an important position in 
 his native town. After a public competition he was 
 appointed, in 1849, professor of aesthetics and French 
 literature at the Academy of Geneva, a post which he held 
 for four years, exchanging it for the professorship of 
 moral philosophy in 1854. Thus at twenty-eight, without 
 any struggle to succeed, he had gained, it would have 
 seemed, that safe foothold in life which should be all the 
 philosopher or the critic wants to secure the full and fruit- 
 ful development of his gifts. Unfortunately the appoint- 
 ment, instead of the foundation and support, was to be the 
 stumbling block of his career. Geneva at the time was in 
 a state of social and political ferment. After a long 
 struggle, beginning with the revolutionary outbreak of 
 November, 1841, the Radical party, led by James Fazy, 
 had succeeded in ousting the Conservatives that is to say, 
 the governing class, which had ruled the republic since 
 the Restoration from power. And with the advent of 
 the democratic constitution of 1846, and the exclusion of
 
 xxiv INTRODUCTION. 
 
 the old Genevese families from the administration they 
 had so long monopolized, a number of subsidiary changes 
 were effected, not less important to the ultimate success 
 of Radicalism than the change in political machinery intro- 
 duced by the new constitution. Among them was the 
 disappearance of almost the whole existing staff of the 
 academy, then and now the center of Genevese education, 
 and up to 1847 the stronghold of the moderate ideas of 
 1814, followed by the appointment of new men less likely 
 to hamper the Radical order of things. 
 
 Of these new men Amiel was one. He had been absent 
 from Geneva during the years of conflict which had pre- 
 ceded Fazy's triumph; he seems to have had no family or 
 party connections with the leaders of the defeated side, and 
 as M. Scherer points out, he could accept a non-political 
 post at the hands of the new government, two years after 
 the violent measures which had marked its accession, 
 without breaking any pledges or sacrificing any convictions. 
 But none the less the step was a fatal one. M. Renan is 
 so far in the right. If any timely friend had at that 
 moment succeeded in tempting Amiel to Paris, as Guizot 
 tempted Rossi in 1833, there can be little question that the 
 young professor's after life would have been happier and 
 saner. As it was, Amiel threw himself into the competi- 
 tion for the chair, was appointed professor, and then found 
 himself in a hopelessly false position, placed on the 
 threshold of life, in relations and surroundings for which he 
 was radically unfitted, and cut off by no fault of his own 
 from the milieu to which he rightly belonged, and in 
 which his sensitive individuality might have expanded nor- 
 mally and freely. For the defeated upper class very 
 naturally shut their doors on the nominees of the new 
 regime, and as this class represented at that moment 
 almost everything that was intellectually distinguished in 
 Geneva, as it was the guardian, broadly speaking, of the 
 scientific and literary traditions of the little state, we 
 can easily imagine how galling such a social ostracism must: 
 have been to the young professor, accustomed toth stirnu-
 
 INTRODUCTION. XX v 
 
 lating atmosphere, the common intellectual interests of 
 Berlin, and tormented with perhaps more than the ordi- 
 nary craving of youth for sympathy and for affection. In a 
 great city, containing within it a number of different 
 circles of life, Amiel would easily have found his own 
 circle, nor could political discords have affected his social 
 comfort to anything like the same extent. But in a town 
 not much larger than Oxford, and in which the cultured 
 class had hitherto formed a more or less homogeneous and 
 united whole, it was almost impossible for Amiel to escape 
 from his grievance and establish a sufficient barrier of 
 friendly interests between himself and the society which 
 ignored him. There can be no doubt that he suffered, 
 both in mind and character, from the struggle the position 
 involved. He had no natural sympathy with radicalism. 
 Lis taste, which was extremely fastidious, his judgment, 
 his passionate respect for truth, were all offended by the 
 noise, the narrowness, the dogmatism of the triumphant 
 democracy. So that there was no making up on the one 
 side for what he had lost on the other, and he proudly 
 resigned himself to an isolation and a reserve which, 
 reinforcing, as they did, certain native weaknesses of char- 
 acter, had the most unfortunate effect upon his life. 
 
 In a passage of the Journal written nearly thirty years 
 after his election he allows himself a few pathetic words, 
 half of accusation, half of self-reproach, which make us 
 realize how deeply this untowardness of social circumstance 
 had affected him. He is discussing one of Madame de 
 Stael's favorite words, the word consideration. " What is 
 consideration?" he asks. "How does a man obtain it? 
 how does it differ from fame, esteem, admiration?" And 
 then he turns upon himself. "It is curious, but the 
 idea of consideration has been to me so little of a motivt 
 that I have not even been conscious of such an idea. But 
 ought I not to have been conscious of it? " he asks himself 
 anxiously " ought I not to have been more careful to win 
 the good opinion of others, more determined to conquer 
 their hostility or indifference? It would have been a joy
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 to me to be smiled upon, loved, encouraged, welcomed, 
 and to obtain what I was so ready to give, kindness and 
 goodwill. But to hunt down consideration and reputation 
 to force the esteem of others seemed to me an effort 
 unworthy of myself, almost a degradation. A struggle 
 with unfavorable opinion has seemed to me beneath me, 
 for all the while my heart has been full of sadness and 
 disappointment, and I have known and felt that I have 
 been systematically and deliberately isolated. Untimely 
 despair and the deepest discouragement have been my 
 constant portion. Incapable of taking any interest in my 
 talents for their own sake, I let everything slip as soon as 
 the hope of being loved for them and by them had forsaken 
 me. A hermit against my will, I have not even found 
 peace in solitude, because my inmost conscience has not 
 been any better satisfied than my heart." 
 
 Still one may no doubt easily exaggerate this loneliness 
 of Amiel's. His social difficulties represent rather a dull 
 discomfort in his life, which in course of time, and in 
 combination with a good many other causes, produced 
 certain unfavorable results on his temperament and on his 
 public career, than anything very tragic and acute. They 
 were real, and he, being what he was, was specially unfitted 
 to cope with and conquer them. But he had his friends, 
 his pleasures, and even to some extent his successes, like 
 other men. "He had an elasticity of mind," says M. 
 Scherer, speaking of him as he knew him in youth, " which 
 reacted against vexations from without, and his cheerful- 
 ness was readily restored by conversation and the society 
 of a few kindred spirits. We were accustomed, two or 
 three friends and I, to walk every Thursday to the Saleve, 
 Lamartine's Saleve aux ftancs azures; we dined there, and 
 did not return till nightfall." They were days devoted to 
 debauches platoniciennes, to " the free exchange of ideas, 
 the free play of fancy and of gayety. Amiel was not one 
 of the original members of these Thursday parties; but 
 whenever he joined us we regarded it as a fete-day. In 
 serious discussion he was a master of the unexpected, and
 
 INTRO D UCTION. xx v ii 
 
 his energy, his entrain, affected us all. If his grammatical 
 questions, his discussions of rhymes and synonyms, aston- 
 ished us at times, how often, on the other hand, did he not 
 give us cause to admire the variety of his knowledge, the 
 precision of his ideas, the charm of his quick intelligence ! 
 We found him always, besides, kindly and amiable, a nature 
 one might trust and lean upon with perfect security. He 
 awakened in us but one regret; we could not understand 
 how it was a man so richly gifted produced nothing, or 
 only trivialities." 
 
 In these last words of M. Scherer's we have come across 
 the determining fact of Amiel's life in its relation to the 
 outer world that "sterility of genius," of which he was 
 the victim. For social ostracism and political anxiety 
 would have mattered to him comparatively little if he could 
 but have lost himself in the fruitful activities of thought, 
 in the struggles and the victories of composition and crea- 
 tion. A German professor of Amiel's knowledge would 
 have wanted nothing beyond his Fach, and nine men out 
 of ten in his circumstances would have made themselves 
 the slave of a magnum opus, and forgotten the vexations 
 of everyday life in the il douces joies de la science." But 
 there were certain characteristics in Amiel which made it 
 impossible which neutralized his powers, his knowledge, 
 his intelligence, and condemned him, so far as his public 
 performance was concerned, to barrenness and failure. 
 What were these characteristics, this element of unsound- 
 ness and disease, which M. Caro calls "la maladie de 
 V ideal? " 
 
 Before we can answer the question we must go back a 
 little and try to realize the intellectual and moral equip- 
 ment of the young man of twenty-eight, who seemed to M. 
 Scherer to have the world at his feet. What were the 
 chief qualities of mind and heart which Amiel brought 
 back with him from Berlin? In the first place, an 
 omnivorous desire to know: "Amiel," says M. Scherer, 
 "read everything." In the second, an extraordinary power 
 of sustained and concentrated thought, and a passionate,
 
 xxviii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 almost a religious, delight in the exercise of his power. 
 Knowledge, science, stirred in him no mere sense of 
 curiosity or cold critical instinct " he came to his desk as 
 to an altar." "A friend who knew him well," says M. 
 Scherer, " remembers having heard him speak with deep 
 emotion of that lofty serenity of mood which he had ex- 
 perienced during his years in Germany whenever, in the 
 early morning before dawn, with his reading-lamp beside 
 him, he had found himself penetrating once more into the 
 region of pure thought, 'conversing with ideas, enjoying 
 the inmost life of things.'' "Thought," he says some- 
 where in the Journal, " is like opium. It can intoxicate us 
 and yet leave us broad awake." To this intoxication of 
 thought he seems to have been always specially liable, and 
 his German experience unbalanced, as such an experience 
 generally is with a young man, by family life, or by any 
 healthy commonplace interests and pleasures developed 
 the intellectual passion in him to an abnormal degree. 
 For four years he had devoted himself to the alternate ex- 
 citement and satisfaction of this passion. He had read 
 enormously, thought enormously, and in the absence of 
 any imperative claim on the practical side of him, the 
 accumulative, reflective faculties had grown out of all pro- 
 portion to the rest of the personality. Nor had any special 
 subject the power to fix him. Had he been in France, 
 what Sainte-Beuve calls the French "imagination de 
 detail " would probably have attracted his pliant, respon- 
 sive nature, and he would have found happy occupation in 
 some one of the innumerable departments of research on 
 which the French have been patiently spending their 
 analytical gift since that general widening of horizons 
 which accompanied and gave value to the Romantic move- 
 ment. But instead he was at Berlin, in the center of that 
 speculative ferment which followed the death of Hegel and 
 the break-up of the Hegelian idea into a number of differ- 
 ent and conflicting sections of philosophical opinion. He 
 was under the spell of German synthesis, of that tradi- 
 tional, involuntary effort which the German mind makes,
 
 INTRODUCTION. xxix 
 
 generation after generation, to find the unity of experience, 
 to range its accumulations from life and thought under a 
 more and more perfect, a more and more exhaustive, 
 formula. Not this study or that study, not this detail or 
 that, but the whole of things, the sum of Knowledge, the 
 Infinite, the Absolute, alone had value or reality. In his 
 own words : " There is no repose for the mind except in the 
 absolute; for feeling except in the infinite; for the soul 
 except in the divine. Nothing finite is true, is interesting, 
 is worthy to fix my attention. All that is particular is ex- 
 clusive, and all that is exclusive repels me. There is 
 nothing non-exclusive but the All; my end is communion 
 with Being through the whole of Being." 
 
 It was not, indeed, that he neglected the study of detail; 
 he had a strong natural aptitude for it, and his knowledge 
 was wide and real ; but detail was ultimately valuable to 
 him, not in itself, but as food for a speculative hunger, for 
 which, after all, there is no real satisfaction. All the 
 pleasant paths which traverse the kingdom of Knowledge, 
 in which so many of us find shelter and life-long means of 
 happiness, led Amiel straight into the wilderness of ab- 
 stract speculation. And the longer he lingered in the 
 wilderness, unchecked by any sense of intellectual respon- 
 sibility, and far from the sounds of human life, the 
 stranger and the weirder grew the hallucinations of 
 thought. The Journal gives marvelous expression to 
 them: "I can find no words for what I feel. My con- 
 sciousness is withdrawn into itself; I hear my heart beat- 
 ing, and my life passing. It seems to me that I have be- 
 come a statue on the banks of the river of time, that I am 
 the spectator of some mystery, and shall issue from it old, 
 or no longer capable of age." Or again: "lam a spec- 
 tator, so to speak, of the molecular whirlwind which men 
 call individual life; lam conscious of an incessant meta- 
 morphosis, an irresistible movement of existence, which is 
 going on within me and this phenomenology of myself 
 serves as a window opened upon the mystery of the world. 
 I am, or rather my sensible consciousness is, concentrated
 
 xxx INTRODUCTION. 
 
 upon this ideal standing-point, this invisible threshold, 
 as it were, whence one hears the impetuous passage of 
 time, rushing and foaming as it flows out into the change- 
 less ocean of eternity. After all the bewildering distrac- 
 tions of life after having drowned myself in a multiplicity 
 of trifles and in the caprices of this fugitive existence, yet 
 without ever attaining to self-intoxication or self-delusion 
 I come again upon the fathomless abyss, the silent 
 and melancholy cavern, where dwell ' Die Mutter S where 
 sleeps that which neither lives nor dies, which has neither 
 movement nor change, nor extension, nor form, and which 
 lasts when all else passes away." 
 
 Wonderful sentences! " Prodiges de la pensee specula- 
 tive, deer its dansune langue non moins prodigieuse," as 
 M. Scherer says of the innumerable passages which describe 
 either this intoxication of the infinite, or the various 
 forms and consequences of that deadening of personality 
 which the abstract processes of thought tend to produce. 
 But it is easy to understand that a man in whom experi- 
 ences of this kind become habitual is likely to lose his hold 
 upon the normal interests of life. What are politics or 
 literature to such a mind but fragments without real im- 
 portance dwarfed reflections of ideal truths for which 
 neither language nor institutions provide any adequate ex- 
 pression ! How is it possible to take seriously what is so 
 manifestly relative and temporary as the various existing 
 forms of human activity? Above all, how is it possible to 
 take one's self seriously, to spend one's thought on the 
 petty interests of a petty individuality, when the beatific 
 vision of universal knowledge, of absolute being, has once 
 dawned on the dazzled beholder? The charm and the 
 savor of everything relative and phenomenal is gone. A 
 man may go on talking, teaching, writing but the spring 
 of personal action is broken; his actions are like the 
 actions of a somnambulist. 
 
 No doubt to some extent this mood is familiar to all 
 minds endowed with the true speculative genius. The 
 philosopher has always tended to become unfit for practical
 
 INTRODUCTION. xxxi 
 
 life; his unfitness, indeed, is one of the comic motives, so 
 to speak, of literature. But a mood which, in the great 
 majority of thinkers, is intermittent, and is easily kept 
 within bounds by the practical needs, the mere physical 
 instincts of life, was in Amiel almost constant, and the 
 natural impulse of the human animal toward healthy move- 
 ment and a normal play of function, never very strong in 
 him, was gradually weakened and destroyed by an 
 untoward combination of circumstances. The low health 
 from which he suffered more or less from his boyhood, and 
 then the depressing influences of the social difficulties we 
 have described, made it more and more difficult for the 
 rest of the organism to react against the tyranny of the 
 brain. And as the normal human motives lost their force, 
 what he calls " the Buddhist tendency in me " gathered 
 strength year by year, until, like some strange misgrowth, 
 it had absorbed the whole energies and drained the inner- 
 most life-blood of the personality which had developed it. 
 And the result is another soul's tragedy, another story of 
 conflict and failure, which throws fresh light on the mys- 
 terious capacities of human nature, and warns us, as the 
 letters of Obermann in their day warned the generation of 
 George Sand, that with the rise of new intellectual percep- 
 tions new spiritual dangers come into being, and that 
 across the path of continuous evolution which the modern 
 mind is traversing there lies many a selva oscura, many a 
 lonely and desolate tract, in which loss and pain await it. 
 The story of the " Journal Intime " is a story to make us 
 think, to make us anxious; but at the same time, in the 
 case of a nature like Amiel's, there is so much high poetry 
 thrown off from the long process of conflict, the power of 
 vision and of reproduction which the intellect gains at the 
 expense of the rest of the personality is in many respects 
 so real and so splendid, and produces results so stirring 
 often to the heart and imagination of the listener, that in 
 the end we put down the record not so much with a throb 
 of pity as with an impulse of gratitude. The individual 
 error and suffering is almost forgotten; all that we can
 
 xxxii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 realize is the enrichment of human feeling, the quickened 
 sense of spiritual reality bequeathed to us by the baffled 
 and solitary thinker whose via dolorosa is before us. 
 
 The manner in which this intellectual idiosyncrasy we 
 have been describing gradually affected Amiel's life supplies 
 abundant proof of its actuality and sincerity. It is a 
 pitiful story. Amiel might have been saved from despair 
 by love and marriage, by paternity, by strenuous and suc- 
 cessful literary production; and this mental habit of his 
 this tyranny of ideal conceptions, helped by the natural 
 accompaniment of such a tyranny, a critical sense of 
 abnormal acuteness stood between him and everything 
 healing and restoring. "I am afraid of an imperfect, a 
 faulty synthesis, and I linger in the provisional, from 
 timidity and from loyalty." "As soon as a thing attracts 
 me I turn away from it; or rather, I cannot either be con- 
 tent with the second-best, or discover anything which satis- 
 fies my aspiration. The real disgusts me, and I cannot 
 find the ideal." And so one thing after another is put 
 away. Family life attracted him perpetually. "I cannot 
 escape," he writes, "from the ideal of it. A companion 
 of my life, of my work, of my thoughts, of my hopes; 
 within a common worship toward the world outside kind- 
 ness and beneficence; education to undertake; the thous- 
 and and one moral relations which develop round the first 
 all these ideas intoxicate me sometimes." But in vain. 
 "Keality, 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 elas- 
 ticity and immensity, to be free enough from the irrepar- 
 able; practical life makes me afraid. I am distrustful of 
 myself and of happiness because I know myself. The 
 ideal poisons for me all imperfect possession. And I 
 abhor useless regrets and repentance. " 
 
 It is the same, at bottom, with his professional work. 
 He protects the intellectual freedom, as it were, of his 
 students with the same jealousy as he protects his own.
 
 1NTROD UCTION. xxxiil 
 
 There shall be no oratorical device, no persuading, no 
 cajoling of the mind this way or that. "A professor is the 
 priest of his subject, and should do the honors of it gravely 
 and with dignity." And so the man who in his private 
 Journal is master of an eloquence and a poetry, capable of 
 illuminating the most difficult and abstract of subjects, 
 becomes in the lecture-room a dry compendium of universal 
 knowledge. "Led by his passion for the wuole," says M. 
 Scherer, " Amiel offered his hearers, not so much a series 
 of positive teachings, as an index of subjects, a framework 
 what the Germans call a Schemed ismus. The skeleton 
 was admirably put together, and excellent of its kind, and 
 lent itself admirably to a certain kind of analysis and 
 demonstration; but it was a skeleton flesh, body, and 
 life were wanting." 
 
 So that as a professor he made no mark. He was con- 
 scientiousness itself in whatever he conceived to be his 
 duty. But with all the critical and philosophical power 
 which, as we know from the Journal, he might have 
 lavished on,,his teaching, had the conditions been other 
 than they, [W.qr.e,, th^ study of literature, and the study of 
 philosophy,; as, suchj r ,owe hjmjio.thing. But for the Journal 
 hJs.^flar^Qf v tramingj^nd; : his,years of, Reaching would have 
 loft equally little, .rQord\ behind,, f thjtfl. ^.'^i^.pupil^.a.t 
 Gfenev.a," wr^tej^pne wh,o..was ? ,,h,imself ,among,tlie number,* 
 ;< never learned $o. appreciatp bjm :i a;t hJ^.^r.u&^yoijth., We 
 did justice ,uo_doubt to, a k^p^ledge, as.varie^asj^t w,as 
 wide, to his. vast stores o| rea$i#g, (( to 
 
 we,,,like,d hjm 
 w 
 
 v, u'i:>rlii; inn. mutt 1 , 'u mn( m):..?:in! 
 
 qf teaching, effectively, \yhat,hft knp-w$, aud.lias yet .redeemed 
 all other incapacities in/th.e ffeUl of literary produptipn. .And 
 
 ' 'at the 
 University of Brussels. ,ir f; v / ;ij. (;.
 
 x x xi v INT ROD UCTION. 
 
 here indeed we come to the strangest feature in Amiel's 
 career his literary sterility. That he possessed literary 
 power of the highest order is abundantly proved by the 
 "Journal Intime." Knowledge, insight, eloquence, critical 
 power all were his. And the impulse to produce, which 
 is the natural, though by no means the invariable, accom- 
 paniment of the literary gift, must have been fairly strong 
 in him also. For the "Journal Intime" runs to 17,000 
 folio pages of MS., and his half dozen volumes of poems, 
 though the actual quantity is not large, represent an 
 amount of labor which would have more than carried him 
 through some serious piece of critical or philosophical 
 work, and so enabled him to content the just expectations 
 of his world. He began to write early, as is proved by the 
 fact that at twenty he was a contributor to the best literary 
 periodical which Geneva possessed. He was a charming 
 correspondent, and in spite of his passion for abstract 
 thought, his intellectual interest, at any rate, in all the 
 activities of the day politics, religious organizations, liter- 
 ature, art was of the keenest kind. And yet at the time 
 of his death all that this fine critic and profound thinker 
 had given to the world, after a life entirely spent in the 
 pursuit of letters, was, in the first place, a few volumes of 
 poems which had had no effect except on a small number 
 of sympathetic friends; a few pages of pensees intermin- 
 gled with the poems, and, as we now know, extracted from 
 the Journal; and four or five scattered essays, the length 
 of magazine articles, on Mme. de Stael, Rousseau, the 
 history of the Academy of Geneva, the literature of 
 French-speaking Switzerland, and so on! And more 
 than this, the production, such as it was, had been a pro- 
 duction born of effort and difficulty; and the labor squan- 
 dered on poetical forms, on metrical experiments and intri- 
 cate problems of translation, as well as the occasional affec- 
 tations of the prose style, might well have convinced the 
 critical bystander that the mind of which these things were 
 the offspring could have no real importance, no profitable 
 message, for the world.
 
 INTRODUCTION. xxxv 
 
 The whole "Journal Intime " is in some sense Amiel's 
 explanation of these facts. In it he has made full and 
 bitter confession of his weakness, his failure; he has 
 endeavored, with an acuteness of analysis no other hand 
 can rival, to make the reasons of his failure and isolation 
 clear both to himself and others. " To love, to dream, to 
 feel, to learn, to understand all these are possible to me if 
 only I may be dispensed from willing I have a sort of 
 primitive horror of ambition, of struggle, of hatred, of all 
 which dissipates the soul and makes it dependent on ex- 
 ternal things and aims. The joy of becoming once more 
 conscious of myself, of listening to the passage of time 
 and the flow of the universal life, is sometimes enough to 
 make me forget every desire and to quench in me both the 
 wish to produce and the power to execute." It is the 
 result of what he himself calls " V eblouissement de Vinfini" 
 He no sooner makes a step toward production, toward 
 action and the realization of himself, than a vague sense of 
 peril overtakes him. The inner life, with its boundless 
 horizons and its indescribable exaltations, seems endan- 
 gered. Is he not about to place between himself and the 
 forms of speculative truth some barrier of sense and matter 
 to give up the real for the apparent, the substance for 
 the shadow? One is reminded of dough's cry under a 
 somewhat similar experience: 
 
 " If this pure solace should desert my mind, 
 What were all else ? I dare not risk the loss. 
 To the old paths, my soul ! " 
 
 And in close combination with the speculative sense, 
 with the tendency which carries a man toward the content 
 plative study of life and nature as a whole, is the critical 
 sense the tendency which, in the realm of action and con- 
 crete performance, carries him, as A.niiel expresses it, 
 "droit au defant," and makes him conscious at once of 
 the weak point, the germ of failure in a project or an 
 action. It is another aspect of the same idiosyncrasy. " The 
 point I have reached seems to be explained by a too rest-
 
 xxxvi INTRODUCTION. 
 
 less search for perfection, by the abuse of the critical 
 faculty, and by an unreasonable distrust of first impulses, 
 first thoughts, first words. Confidence and spontaneity 
 of life are drifting out of my reach, and this is why I can 
 no longer act." For abuse of the critical faculty brings 
 with it its natural consequences timidity of soul, paralysis 
 of the will, complete self-distrust. " To know is enough 
 for me; expression seems to me often a profanity. What 
 I lack is character, will, individuality." "By what mys- 
 tery," he writes to M. Soberer, " do others expect much 
 from me? whereas I feel myself to be incapable of any- 
 thing serious or important." Defiance and impuissance are 
 the words constantly on his lips. " My friends see what I 
 might have been; I see what I am." 
 
 And yet the literary instinct remains, and must in some 
 way be satisfied. And so he takes refuge in what he him- 
 self calls scales, exercises, tours de force in verse-transla- 
 tion of the most laborious and difficult kind, in ingenious 
 vers cVoccasion, in metrical experiments and other literary 
 trifling, as his friends think it. of the same sort. " I am 
 afraid of greatness. I am not afraid of ingenuity ; all my 
 published literary essays are little else than studies, games, 
 exercises, for the purpose of testing myself. I play scales, 
 as it were ; I run up and down my instrument. I train my 
 hand and make sure of its capacity and skill. But the 
 work itself remains unachieved. I am always preparing 
 and never accomplishing, and my energy is swallowed up 
 in a kind of barren curiosity." 
 
 Not that he surrenders himself to the nature which is 
 stronger than he all at once. His sense of duty rebels, his 
 conscience suffers, and he makes resolution after resolution 
 to shake himself free from the mental tradition which had 
 taken such hold upon him to write, to produce, to satisfy 
 his friends. In 1861, a year after M. Scherer had left 
 Geneva, Amiel wrote to him, describing his difficulties and 
 his discouragements, and asking, as one may ask an old 
 friend of one's youth, for help and counsel. M. Scherer, 
 much touched by the appeal, answered it plainly and
 
 INTRODUCTION. xxx vii 
 
 frankly described the feeling of those who knew him as 
 they watched his life slipping away unmarked by any of 
 the achievements of which his youth had given promise, 
 and pointed out various literary openings in which, if he 
 were to put out his powers, he could not but succeed. To 
 begin with, he urged him to join the Revue Germanique, 
 then being started by Charles Dollfus, Kenan, Littre, and 
 others. Amiel left the letter for three months unanswered 
 and then wrote a reply which M. Scberer probably received 
 with a sigh of impatience. For, rightly interpreted, it 
 meant that old habits were too strong, and that the mo- 
 mentary impulse had died away. When, a little later, 
 "Les Etrangeres," a collection of verse-translations, came 
 out, it was dedicated to M. Scherer, who did not, however, 
 pretend to give it any very cordial reception. Amiel took 
 his friend's coolness in very good part, calling him his 
 "dear Rhadamanthus." "How little I knew!" cries M. 
 Scherer. " What I regret is to have discovered too late by 
 means of the Journal, the key to a problem which seemed 
 to me hardly serious, and which I now feel to have been 
 tragic. A kind of remorse seizes me that I was not able 
 to understand my friend better, and to soothe his suffering 
 by a sympathy which would have been a mixture of pity 
 and admiration." 
 
 Was it that all the while Amiel felt himself sure of his 
 revanche that he knew the value of all those sheets of 
 Journal which were slowly accumulating under his hand? 
 Did he say to himself sometimes: "My friends are wrong; 
 my gifts and my knowledge are not lost; I have given ex- 
 pression to them in the only way possible to me, and when 
 I die it will be found that I too, like other men, have per- 
 formed the task appointed me, and contributed my quota 
 to the human store? " It is clear that very early he began 
 to regard it as possible that portions of the Journal should 
 be published after his death, and, as we have seen, he left 
 certain "literary instructions," dated seven years before his 
 last illness, in which his executors were directed to publish 
 euch parts of it as might seem to them to possess any gen-
 
 ixxviii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 eral interest. But it is clear also that the Journal was not, 
 in any sense, written for publication. "These pages," say 
 the Geneva editors, "written au courant de la plume 
 sometimes in the morning, but more often at the end of 
 the day, without any idea of composition or publicity are 
 marked by the repetition, the lacunce, the carelessness, inher- 
 ent in this kind of monologue. The thoughts and senti- 
 ments expressed have no other aim than sincerity of ren- 
 dering." 
 
 And his estimate of the value of the record thus pro- 
 duced was, in general, a low one, especially during the 
 depression and discouragement of his later years. "This 
 Journal of mine," he writes in 1876, "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 practice it." And again: "Is everything 
 I have produced, taken together my correspondence, 
 these thousands of Journal pages, my lectures, my articles, 
 my poems, my notes of different kinds anything better 
 than withered leaves? To whom and to what have I been 
 useful? Will my name survive me a single day, and will 
 it ever mean anything to anybody? A life of no account! 
 When all is added up nothing!" In passages like these 
 there is no anticipation of any posthumous triumph over 
 the disapproval of his friends and the criticism of his fel- 
 low-citizens. The Journal was a relief, the means of satis- 
 fying a need of expression which otherwise could find no 
 outlet; "a grief-cheating device," but nothing more. It 
 did not still the sense of remorse for wasted gifts and 
 opportunities which followed poor Amiel through the 
 painful months of his last illness. Like Keats, he passed 
 away, feeling that all was over, and the great game of life 
 lost forever. 
 
 It still remains for us to gather up a few facts and im- 
 pressions of a different kind from those which we have 
 been dwelling on, which may serve to complete and correct 
 the picture we have so far drawn of the author of the
 
 INTRODUCTION. xxxix 
 
 Journal. For Amiel is full of contradictions and surprises, 
 which are indeed one great source of his attractiveness. 
 Had he only been the thinker, the critic, the idealist we 
 have been describing, he would never have touched our 
 feeling as he now does; what makes him so interesting is 
 that there was in him a, fond of heredity, a temperament 
 and disposition, which were perpetually reacting against 
 the oppression of the intellect and its accumulations. In 
 his hours of intellectual concentration he freed himself 
 from all trammels of country or society, or even, as he 
 insists, from all sense of personality. But at other times 
 he was the dutiful son of a country which he loved, taking 
 a warm interest in everything Genevese, especially in 
 everything that represented the older life of the town. 
 When it was a question of separating the Genevese state 
 from the church, which had been the center of the national 
 life during three centuries of honorable history, Amiel the 
 philosopher, the cosmopolitan, threw himself ardently on 
 to the side of the opponents- of separation, and rejoiced in 
 their victory. A large proportion of his poems deal with 
 national subjects. He was one of the first members of 
 "L'Institut Genevois," founded in 1853, and he took a 
 warm interest in the movement started by M. Eugene 
 Kambert toward 1870, for the improvement of secondary 
 education throughout French-speaking Switzerland. One 
 of his friends dwells with emphasis on his " sens profond 
 des nationalites, des langues, des villes" on his love for 
 local characteristics, for everything deep-rooted in the 
 past, and helping to sustain the present. He is convinced 
 that no state can live and thrive without a certain number 
 of national prejudices, without a priori beliefs and tradi- 
 tions. It pleases him to see that there is a force in the 
 Genevese nationality which resists the leveling influences 
 of a crude radicalism ; it rejoices him that Geneva " has 
 not yet become a mere copy of anything, and that she is 
 still capable of deciding for herself. Those who say to 
 her, 'Do as they do at New York, at Paris, at Komy, at 
 Berlin,' are still in the minority. The doctrinaires who
 
 xl INTRODUCTION. 
 
 would split her up and destroy her unity waste their breatri 
 upon her. She divines the snare laid for her, and turns 
 away. I like this proof of vitality." 
 
 His love of traveling never left him. Paris attracted 
 him, as it attracts all who cling to letters, and he gained 
 at one time or another a certain amount of acquaintance 
 with French literary men. In 1852 we find him for a 
 time brought into contact with Thierry, Lamennais, 
 Beranger, Mignet, etc., as well as with Komantice like 
 Alfred de Vignyand TheophileGautier. There are poems 
 addressed to De Vigny and Gautier in his first published 
 volume of 1854. He revisited Italy and his old haunts 
 and friends in Germany more than once, and in general 
 kept the current of Lis life fresh and vigorous by his open- 
 ness to impressions and additions from without. 
 
 He was, as we have said, a delightful correspondent, 
 "taking pains with the smallest note," and within a small 
 circle of friends much liked. His was not a nature to be 
 generally appreciated at its true value; the motives which 
 governed his life were too remote from the ordinary mo- 
 tives of human conduct, and his characteristics just those 
 which have always excited the distrust, if not the scorn, 
 of the more practical and vigorous order of minds. Prob- 
 ably, too especially in his later years there was a certain 
 amount of self -consciousness and artificiality in his attitude 
 toward the outer world, which was the result partly of the 
 social difficulties we have described, partly of his own 
 sense of difference from his surroundings, and partly again 
 of that timidity of nature, that self-distrust, which is 
 revealed to us in the Journal. So that he was by no 
 means generally popular, and the great success of the 
 Journal is still a mystery to the majority of those who 
 knew him merely as a fellow-citizen and acquaintance, 
 But his friends loved him and believed in him, and the 
 reserved student, whose manners were thought affected in 
 general society, could and did make himself delightful to 
 those who understood him, or those who looked to him for 
 affection. "According to my remembrance of him," wrte*
 
 M. Soberer, "he was bright, sociable, a charming com- 
 panion. Others who knew him better and longer than I 
 say the same. The mobility of his disposition counter- 
 acted his tendency to exaggerations of feeling. In spite of 
 his fits of melancholy, his natural turn of mind was; 
 cheerful; up to the end he was young, a child even, 
 amused by< mere nothings; and whoever had heard him 
 lavtgh-.his hearty-student's laugh would have found it diffi- 
 cult to identifyrhim with; the author/ of so many somber 
 pages. *V:;<M. \Bivier, his old pupil, -remembers him as 
 "strong. -and active, still handsome, .delightful in conversa- 
 tion, ready to amuse and be amused.." ;,: Indeed, if the 
 photographs of him are to be trusted, there must have 
 been something" specially 'at'trafetiVe' in Jn'e^eT^itiYe, ex- 
 pressiv^fape',' with /its loffcy fcrp^^ne^.^ye^^iaiid kindly 
 mouth. It is thci : face of a.poet/rather^han: of .a student,, 
 and makes one understand, certain other little pp.ints which 
 his friends i^y^sU^j.^u for Jn^tan.ge, his^.lo.ve for and 
 popularityiiWiUJa ohiLdr-ecu- ,:: m>= ut-^,i, ; oj w* u :: 
 
 In his poems;'- : 'or ;at any n rate M i -the f -earMeir -ones, this 
 ^^SiMA? ^^iffiPrFA^xp^^ififtrMprOsportipnally,, than in 
 the Journal. In tiMrfttbUBf ealted^" Gprains-dei Mil," pub- 
 lished in il^4, 'an d'ContainiugiTerseii'WTitten: between the 
 ages of eigttt'e'en ; 'toQ' thirty /"tfedfe^re ^o'eni's" addressed, 
 now to his,$i&;te.r:< n-o^rto Ql4('Crenevesi3;,fi-ie:nd6y,and now to- 
 famous memiof other countries'-whomihe^had seerivand made 
 friends with^ti*' pasSlftg; ^tvMch^fead^Me^by side with the 
 " Journal Intime;*' :>< brin^"a d^tain i!1 g'l^arri 'SMsparkle into 
 aint 'Otherwise: somber.! picture. .Amis!' L was ,( never a;maatef: of 
 ppetical .f orrft^; his,.versej compared: to'his <prose; isitamefand 
 fettered;: it never reaches tire giow-.and splendor: of. xpres- 
 sioDowhich mark : the finestipassages>ofvthe Journal. -It has 
 ability*; tiionght^t-beauty even; of :-a certain \ i kind,"bulb no 
 plastic power, nose^of :<the incommunicable magic whioh;a 
 O,eprge,i Eliot seeks for in !aki, while it comes unaeke ; d,nt 
 diecrkrwith: impeKisBstble'ioharm ' the commonplace mt#- 
 physksvand the simpler emotions of a Tennyson 'Oi>""a 
 Burns. Still .asuAnxielta. wock^ his .poetry has' an interest
 
 jlii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 for those who are interested in him. Sincerity is written 
 in every line of it. Most of the thoughts and experiences 
 with which one grows familiar in the Journal are repeated 
 in it; the same joys, the same aspirations, the same sor- 
 rows are visible throughout it, so that in reading it one is 
 more and more impressed with the force and reality of the 
 inner life which has left behind it so definite an image of 
 Uself. And every now and then the poems add a detail, 
 Ik new impression, which seems by contrast to give fresh 
 Talue to the fine-spun speculations, the lofty despairs, of 
 the Journal. Take these verses, written at twenty-one, 
 Jo his younger sister : 
 
 *' Treize ans ! et sur ton front aucun baiser de mere 
 Ne viendra, pauvre enfant, invoquer le bonheur ; 
 Treine ans ! et dans ce jour nul regard de ton pere 
 Ne fera d'allegresse epanouir ton cceur. 
 
 " Orplieline, c'est la le nom dont tu t'appelles, 
 Oiseau ne dans un nid que la foudre a brise ; 
 De la couvee, helas 1 seuls, trois petits, sans ailes 
 Furent lances au vent, loin du reste ecrase. 
 
 " Et, semes par 1'eclair sur les monts, dans les plaines, 
 Un meme toit encor n'a pu les abriter, 
 Et du foyer natal, inalgre leurs plaintes vaines 
 Dieu, peut-etre longtemps, voudra les ecarter. 
 
 ' Pourtant console-toi ! pense, dans tes alarmes, 
 Qu'un double bien te reste, espoir et souvenir; 
 Une main dans le ciel pour essuyer tes larmes ; 
 Une main ici-bas, enfant, pour te benir." 
 
 Tne last stanza is especially poor, and in none of them 
 js there much poetical promise. But the pathetic image 
 of a forlorn and orphaned childhood, " un nid que la 
 foudre a brise," which it calls up, and the tone of 
 brotherly affection, linger in one's memory. And through 
 much of the volume of 1863, in the verses to " My God- 
 son," or in the charming poem to Loulou, the little girl 
 who at five years old, daisy in hand, had SAVorn him eternal 
 friendship over Gretchen's game of " Er liebt mich liebt 
 mich nicht" one hears the same tender note.
 
 1NTROD UCT10N. xli ii 
 
 ' Merc!, prophetique fleurette, 
 Corolle a 1'oracle vai.iqueur, 
 Car voila trois ans, paquerette, 
 Que tu m'ouvris un petit cceur. 
 
 " Et depuis trois hivers, rua belle, 
 L'enfant aux grands yeux de velours 
 Maintient son petit coeur fidele, 
 Fidele comine aux premiers jours." 
 
 His last poetical volume, "Jour a Jour," published in 
 1880, is far more uniformly melancholyand didactic in tone 
 than the two earlier collections from which we have been 
 quoting. But though the dominant note is one of pain and 
 austerity, of philosophy touched with emotion, and the 
 general tone more purely introspective, there are many 
 traces in it of the younger Amiel, dear, for very ordinary 
 human reasons, to his sisters and his friends. And, in 
 general, the pathetic interest of the book for all whose 
 sympathy answers to what George Sand calls " Us tragedies 
 que la pensee aperpoit et que VcBil ne volt point," is very 
 great. Amiel published it a year before his death, and 
 the struggle with failing power which the Journal reveals 
 to us in its saddest and most intimate reality, is here ex- 
 pressed in more reserved and measured form. Faith, doubt, 
 submission, tenderness of feeling, infinite aspiration, moral 
 passion, that straining hope of something beyond, which is 
 the life of the religious soul they are all here, and the 
 Dernier Mot with which the sad little volume ends is poor 
 Amiel's epitaph on himself, his conscious farewell to that 
 more public aspect of his life in which he had suffered 
 much and achieved comparatively so little. 
 
 " Nous avons a plaisir complique le bonheur, 
 Et par un ideal frivole et suborneur 
 
 Attache nos cosurs a la terre ; 
 Dupes des faux deliors tenus pour I'lmportant, 
 Mille choses pour nous ont du prix . . . et pourtant. 
 
 Une seule etait necessaire. 
 
 : * Sans fin nous prodiguons calculs, efforts, travaux ; 
 Cependant, au milieu des succes, des bravos 
 En nous quelque chose souoire ;
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Multiphant nos pas et nos soins de fourmis, 
 Nous voudrions nous faire une foule d'amis . . 
 Pourtant un seul pouvait sufflre. 
 
 " Victime des desirs, esclave des regrets, 
 L'homme s'agite, et s'use, et vieillit sans progres 
 
 Sur sa toile de Penelope ; 
 
 Comtne un sage mourant, puissions-nous dire en paix 
 
 " J'ai trop longtemps erre, cherche ; je me trompais ; 
 
 Tout est bien, mon Dieu m'enveloppe." 
 
 Upon the small remains of AmiePs prose outside the 
 Journal there is no occasion to dwell. The two essays on 
 Madame de Stael and Eousseau contain much fine critical 
 remark, and might find a place perhaps as an appendix to 
 some future edition of the Journal; and some of the 
 "Pensees," published in the latter half of the volume con- 
 taining the "Grains de Mils," are worthy of preservation. 
 But in general, whatever he himself published was inferior 
 fo what might justly have been expected of him, and no 
 one was more conscious of the fact than himself. 
 
 The story of his fatal illness, of the weary struggle for 
 health which filled the last seven years of his life, is abun- 
 dantly told in the Journal we must not repeat it here. 
 He had neper been a strong man, and at fifty-three he 
 received, at his doctor's hands, his arret de mort. We are 
 told that what killed him was "heart disease, complicated 
 by disease of the larynx," and that he suffered "much 
 and long." He was buried in the cemetery of Clarens, not 
 far from his great contemporary Alexander Viiiet; and 
 the affection of a sculptor friend provided the monument 
 which now marks his resting-place. 
 
 We have thus exhausted all the biographical material 
 which is at present available for the description of AmiePs 
 life and relations toward the outside world. It is to be 
 hoped that the friends to whom the charge of his memory 
 has been specially committed may see their way in the 
 future, if not to a formal biography, which is very likely 
 better left unattempted, at least to a volume of Letters, 
 which would complete the "Journal Intiine," as Joubert's
 
 INTRODUCTION. xlv 
 
 "Correspondence" completes the "Pensees." There must 
 be ample material for it; and Amiel's letters would prob- 
 ably supply us with more of that literary and critical reflec- 
 tion which his mind produced so freely and so well, as long 
 as there was no question of publication, but which is at 
 present somewhat overweighted in the "Journal Intime." 
 
 But whether biography or correspondence is ever forth- 
 coming or not, the Journal remains and the Journal is 
 the important matter. We shall read the Letters if they 
 appear, as we now read the Poems, for the Journal's sake. 
 The man himself, as poet, teacher, and litterateur, pro- 
 duced no appreciable effect on his generation ; but the post- 
 humous record of his inner life has stirred the hearts of 
 readers all over Europe, and won him a niche in the 
 House of Fame. What are the reasons for this striking 
 transformation of a man's position a transformation 
 which, as M. Scherer says, will rank among the curiosities 
 of literary history? In other words, what has given the 
 "Journal Intime" its sudden and unexpected success? 
 
 In the first place, no doubt, its poetical quality, its 
 beauty of manner that fine literary expression in which 
 Amiel has been able to clothe the subtler processes of 
 thought, no less than the secrets of religious feeling, or 
 the aspects of natural scenery. Style is what gives value 
 and currency to thought, and Amiel, in spite of all his 
 Germanisms, has style of the best kind. He possesses in 
 prose that indispensable magic which he lacks in poetry. 
 
 His style, indeed, is by no means always in harmony 
 with the central French tradition. Probably a French- 
 man will be inclined to apply Sainte-Beuve's remarks on 
 Amiel's elder countryman, Kodolphe Tdpffer, to Amiel 
 himself: " C'est ainsi qiCon ecrit dans les litteratures qui 
 n'ont point de capitale, de quartier general dassigue, ou 
 d' Academic; tfest ainsi qu'un Allemand, qu^un Ameri- 
 cain, ou meme un Anglais, use a son gre de sa langue. En 
 France au contraire, ou il y a une Academie Francaise 
 
 . . . on doit trouver qu'un tel style est une tres- 
 grande nouveaute et le succes qu^ilaoltenu un evenement: il
 
 xl vi INTROD UCTION: 
 
 a fallu lien des cir con stances pour y pr Sparer." No 
 doubt the preparatory circumstance in AmiePs case has 
 been just that Germanization of the French mind on which 
 M. Taine and M. Bourget dwell with so much emphasis. 
 But, be this as it may, there is no mistaking the enthu- 
 siasm with which some of the best living writers of French 
 have hailed these pages instinct, as one declares, " with a 
 strange and marvelous poetry;" full of phrases "tfune 
 intense suggestion de beaute; " according to another. Not 
 that the whole of the Journal flows with the same ease, the 
 same felicity. There are a certain number of passages 
 where Amiel ceases to be the writer, and becomes the 
 technical philosopher ; there are others, though not many, 
 into which a certain German heaviness and diffuseness has 
 crept, dulling the edge of the sentences, and retarding 
 the development of the thought. When all deductions 
 have been made, however, Amiel's claim is still first and 
 foremost, the claim of the poet and the artist; of the man 
 whose thought uses at will the harmonies and resources of 
 speech, and who has attained, in words of his own, "to 
 the full and masterly expression of himself." 
 
 Then to the poetical beauty of manner which first 
 helped the book to penetrate, faire sa trouee^ as the French 
 say, we must add its extraordinary psychological interest. 
 Both as poet and as psychologist, Amiel makes another 
 link in a special tradition ; he adds another name to the 
 list of those who have won a hearing from their fellows as 
 interpreters of the inner life, as the revealers of man to 
 himself. He is the successor of St. Augustine and Dante; 
 he is the brother of Obermann and Maurice de Guerin. 
 What others have done for the spiritual life of other gener- 
 ations he has done for the spiritual life of this, and the 
 wealth of poetical, scientific, and psychological faculty 
 whioh he has brought to the analysis of human feeling and 
 human perceptions places him so far as the present cen- 
 tury is concerned at the head of the small and delicately- 
 gifted class to which he belongs. For beside his spiritual 
 experience Obermann's is superficial, and Maurice de
 
 INT ROD UCTION. x ] vii 
 
 Guerin's a passing trouble, a mere quick outburst of 
 passionate feeling. Amiel indeed has neither the con- 
 tinuous romantic beauty nor the rich descriptive wealth of 
 Senancour. The Dent du Midi, with its untrodden soli- 
 tude, its primeval silences and its hovering eagles, the 
 Swiss landscape described in the " Fragment on the Ranz 
 des Vaches," the summer moonlight on the Lake of 
 Neufchdtel these various pictures are the work of one of 
 the most finished artists in words that literature has pro- 
 duced. But how true George Sand's criticism is! "Chez 
 Obermann la sensiMlite est active, V intelligence est paresseuse 
 ou insuffisante. " He has a certain antique power of mak- 
 ing the truisms of life splendid and impressive. No one 
 can write more poetical exercises than he on the old text 
 of pulvis et umbra sumus, but beyond this his philoso- 
 phical power fails him. As soon as he leaves the region 
 of romantic description how wearisome the pages are apt 
 to grow! Instead of a poet, "un ergoteur Voltairien;" 
 instead of the explorer of fresh secrets of the heart, a 
 Parisian talking a cheap cynicism! Intellectually, the 
 ground gives way; there is no solidity of knowledge, no 
 range of thought. Above all, the scientific idea in our 
 sense is almost absent; so that while Amiel represents the 
 modern mind at its keenest and best, dealing at will with 
 the vast additions to knowledge which the last fifty years 
 have brought forth, Senancour is still in the eighteenth- 
 century stage, talking like Rousseau of a return to primi- 
 tive manners, and discussing Christianity in the tone of 
 the "Encyclopedic." 
 
 Maurice de Guerin, again, is the inventor of new terms 
 in the language of feeling, a poet as Amiel and Senancour 
 are. His love of nature, the earth-passion which breathes 
 in his letters and journal, has a strange savor, a force 
 and flame which is all his own. Beside his actual sense of 
 community with the visible world, Amiel's love of land- 
 scape has a tame, didactic air. The Swiss thinker is too 
 ready to make nature a mere vehicle of moral or philo- 
 sophical thought; Maurice de Guerin loves her for herself
 
 slviii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 alone, and has found words to describe her influence over 
 him of extraordinary individuality and power. But for 
 the rest the story of his inner life has but small value in 
 the history of thought. His difficulties do not go deep 
 enough ; his struggle is intellectually not serious enough 
 we see in it only a common incident of modern experi- 
 ence poetically told; it throws no light on the genesis and 
 progress of the great forces which are molding and reno- 
 vating the thought of the present it tells us nothing for 
 the future. 
 
 No there is much more in the "Journal Intime" 
 than the imagination or the poetical glow which Amiel 
 shares with his immediate predecessors in the art of con- 
 fession-writing. His book is representative of human ex- 
 perience in its more intimate and personal forms to aii 
 extent hardly equaled since Rousseau. For his study of 
 himself is only a means to an end. " What interests me 
 in myself," he declares, "is that I find in my own case a 
 genuine example of human nature, and therefore a speci- 
 men of general value." It is the human consciousness of 
 to-day, of the modern world, in its two-fold relation its 
 relation toward the infinite and the unknowable, and its 
 relation toward the visible universe which conditions it 
 which is the real subject of the "Journal Intime." There 
 are few elements of our present life which, in a greater or 
 less degree, are not made vocal in these pages. Amiel's 
 intellectual interest is untiring. Philosophy, science, 
 letters, art he has penetrated the spirit of them all ; there 
 is nothing, or almost nothing, within the wide range of 
 modern activities which he has not at one time or other 
 felt the attraction of, and learned in some sense to under- 
 stand. "Amiel," says M. Eenan, "has his defects, but 
 he was certainly one of the strongest speculative heads 
 who, during the period from 1845 to 1880, have reflected 
 on the nature of things." And, although a certaic fatal 
 spiritual weakness debarred him to a great extent tro' the 
 world of practical life, his sympathy with action, whether 
 it was the action of the politician or the social reformer.
 
 INTRODUCTION. xlix 
 
 or mereiy that steady half-conscious performance of its 
 daily duty which keeps humanity sweet and living, was 
 unfailing. His horizon was not bounded by his own 
 "prison-cell," or by that dream-world which he has 
 described with so much subtle beauty; rather the energies 
 which should have found their natural expression in liter- 
 ary or family life, pent up within the mind itself, excited 
 in it a perpetual eagerness for intellectual discovery, and 
 new powers of sympathy with whatever crossed its field 
 of vision. 
 
 So that the thinker, the historian, the critic, will find 
 himself at home with Amiel. The power of organizing 
 his thought, the art of writing a book, monumentum aere 
 perennius, was indeed denied him he laments it bitterly; 
 but, on the other hand, he is receptivity itself, responsive 
 to all the great forces which move the time, catching and 
 reflecting on the mobile mirror of his mind whatever winds 
 are blowing from the hills of thought. 
 
 And if the thinker is at home with him, so too are the 
 religious minds, the natures for whom God and duty are 
 the foundation of existence. Here, indeed, we come to the 
 innermost secret of Amiel's charm, the fact which prob- 
 ably goes farther than any other to explain his fascination 
 for a large and growing class of readers. For, while he 
 represents all the intellectual complexities of a time bewil- 
 dered by the range and number of its own acquisitions, the 
 religions instinct in him is as strong and tenacious as in 
 any of the representative exponents of the life of faith. 
 The intellect is clear and unwavering; but the heart clings 
 to old traditions, and steadies itself on the rock of duty. 
 His Calvinistic training lingers long in him; and what 
 detaches him from the Hegelian school, with which he has 
 much in common, is his own stronger sense of personal 
 need, his preoccupation with the idea of "sin." "He 
 speaks," says M. Renan contemptuously, "of sin, of salva- 
 tion, of redemption, and conversion, as if these things were 
 realities. He asks me 'What does M. Eenan make of sin? ' 
 ja?hbein,jecrois queje le supprime." But it is just because
 
 I INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Amiel is profoundly sensitive to the problems of evil and 
 responsibility, and M. Kenan dismisses them with this 
 half-tolerant, half-skeptical smile, that M. Kenan's 
 " Souvenirs " inform and entertain us, while the " Journal 
 Intime " makes a deep impression on that moral sense which 
 is at the root of individual and national life. 
 
 The Journal is full, indeed, of this note of personal reli- 
 gion. Religion, Amiel declares again and again, cannot 
 be replaced by philosophy. The redemption of the 
 intelligence is not the redemption of the heart. The phil- 
 osopher and critic may succeed in demonstrating that the 
 various definite forms into which the religious thought of 
 man has thrown itself throughout history are not absolute 
 truth, but only the temporary creations of a need which 
 gradually and surely outgrows them all. " The Trinity, 
 the life to come, paradise and hell, may cease to be dogmas 
 and spiritual realities, the form and the letter may vanish 
 away the question of humanity remains: What is it 
 which saves? " Amiel's answer to the question will recall 
 to a wide English circle the method and spirit of an 
 English teacher, whose dear memory lives to-day in many 
 a heart, and is guiding many an effort in the cause of good 
 the method and spirit of the late Professor Green of 
 Balliol. In many respects there was a gulf of difference 
 between the two men. The one had all the will and force 
 of personality which the other lacked. But the ultimate 
 creed of both, the way in which both interpret the facts of 
 nature and consciousness, is practically the same. In 
 Amiel's case, we have to gather it through all the varia- 
 tions and inevitable contradictions of a Journal which is the 
 reflection of a life, not the systematic expression of a series of 
 ideas, but the main results are clear enough. Man is saved 
 by love and duty, and by the hope which springs from 
 duty, or rather from the moral facts of consciousness, as a 
 flower springs from the soil. Conscience and the moral 
 progress of the race these are his points of departure. 
 Faith in the reality of the moral law is what he clings to 
 when his inherited creed has yielded to the pressure of the
 
 INTRODUCTION. }{ 
 
 intellect, and after all the storms of pessimism and necessi- 
 tarianism have passed over him. The reconciliation of the 
 two certitudes, the two methods, the scientific and the 
 religious, "is to be sought for in that moral law which is 
 also a fact, and every step of which requires for its explana- 
 tion another cosmos than the cosmos of necessity." "Na- 
 ture is the virtuality of mind, the soul the fruit of life, and 
 liberty the flower of necessity." Consciousness is the one 
 fixed point in this boundless and bottomless gulf of things, 
 and the soul's inward law, as it has been painfully elabo- 
 rated by human history, the only revelation of God. 
 
 The only but the sufficient revelation ! For this first 
 article of a reasonable creed is the key to all else the clue 
 which leads the mind safely through the labyrinth of 
 doubt into the presence of the Eternal. Without attempt- 
 ing to define the indefinable, the soul rises from the belief 
 in the reality of love and duty to the belief in "a holy will 
 at the root of nature and destiny" for " if man is capable 
 of conceiving goodness, the general principle of things, 
 which cannot be inferior to man, must be good." And 
 then the religious consciousness seizes on this intellectual 
 deduction, and clothes it in language of the heart, in the 
 tender and beautiful language of faith. " There is but one 
 thing needful to possess God. All our senses, all our 
 powers of mind and soul, are so many ways of approaching 
 the Divine, so many modes of tasting and adoring God. 
 Religion is not a method ; it is a life a higher and super- 
 natural life, mystical in its root and practical in its fruits ; 
 a communion with God, a calm and deep enthusiasm, a 
 love which radiates, a force which acts, a happiness which 
 overflows." And the faith of his youth and his maturity 
 bears the shock of suffering, and supports him through his 
 last hours. He writes a few months before the end : " The 
 animal expires; man surrenders his soul to the author of 
 the soul." . . . " We dream alone, we suffer alone, we 
 die alone, we inhabit the last resting-place alone. But 
 there is nothing to prevent us from opening our solitude to 
 God. And so what was an austere monologue becomes
 
 ]ii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 i hilogue, reluctance becomes docility, renunciation passes 
 into peace, and the sense of painful defeat is lost in the 
 sense of recovered liberty" " Tout est bien, mon Dieu 
 m'enveloppe." 
 
 Nor is this all. It is not only that Amiel's inmost 
 thought and affections are stayed on this conception of "a 
 holy will at the root of nature and destiny" in a certain 
 very real sense he is a Christian. No one is more sensitive 
 than he to the contribution which Christianity has made 
 to the religious wealth of mankind ; no one more penetrated 
 than he with the truth of its essential doctrine " death 
 unto sin and a new birth unto righteousness." " The reli- 
 gion of sin, of repentance and reconciliation," he cries, 
 " the religion of the new birth and of eternal life, is not 
 a religion to be ashamed of." The world has found in- 
 spiration and guidance for eighteen centuries in the reli- 
 gious consciousness of Jesus. "The gospel has modified 
 the world and consoled mankind," and so "we may hold 
 aloof from the churches and yet bow ourselves before 
 Jesus. We may be suspicious of the clergy and refuse to 
 have anything to do with catechisms, and yet love the 
 Holy and the Just who came to save and not to curse." 
 And in fact Amiel's whole life and thought are steeped in 
 Christianity. He is the spiritual descendant of one of the 
 intensest and most individual forms of Christian belief, and 
 traces of his religious ancestry are visible in him at every 
 step. Protestantism of the sincerer and nobler kind leaves 
 an indelible impression on the nature which has once sur- 
 rounded itself to the austere and penetrating influences 
 flowing from the religion of sin and grace; and so far as 
 feeling and temperament are concerned, Amiel retained 
 throughout his life the marks of Calvinism and Geneva. 
 
 And yet how clear the intellect remains, through all 
 the anxieties of thought, and in the face of the soul's 
 dearest memories and most passionate needs! Amiel, as 
 soon as his reasoning faculty has once reached its maturity, 
 never deceives himself as to the special claims of the reli- 
 gion which by instinct and inheritance he loves ; he makes
 
 INTRODUCTION. liii 
 
 no compromise with dogma or with miracle. Beyond the 
 religions of the present he sees always the essential religion 
 which lasts when all local forms and marvels have passed 
 away; and as years go on, with more and more clearness of 
 conviction, he learns to regard all special belief s and systems 
 as "prejudices, useful in practice, but still narrownesses of 
 the mind ; " misgrowths of thought, necessary in their time 
 and place, but still of no absolute value, and having no 
 final claim on the thought of man. 
 
 And it is just here in this mixture of the faith which 
 clings and aspires, with the intellectual pliancy which 
 allows the mind to sway freely under the pressure of life 
 and experience, and the deep respect for truth, which will 
 allow nothing to interfere between thought and its 
 appointed tasks that Amiel's special claim upon us lies. 
 It is this balance of forces in him which makes him so 
 widely representative of the modern mind of its doubts, 
 its convictions, its hopes. He speaks for the life of to-day 
 as no other single voice has yet spoken for it; in his con- 
 tradictions, his fears, his despairs, and yet in the constant 
 straining toward the unseen and the ideal which gives a 
 fundamental unity to his inner life, he is the type of a 
 generation universally touched with doubt, and yet as sen- 
 sitive to the need of faith as any that have gone before it ; 
 more widely conscious than its predecessors of the limita- 
 tions of the human mind, and of the iron pressure of man's 
 physical environment; but at the same time paradox as 
 it may seem more conscious of man's greatness, more 
 deeply thrilled by the spectacle of the nobility and beauty 
 interwoven with the universe. 
 
 And he plays this part of his so modestly, with so much 
 hesitation, so much doubt of his thought and of himself! 
 He is no preacher, like Emerson and Carlyle, with whom, 
 as poet and idealist, he has so much in common ; there is 
 little resemblance between him and the men who speak, 
 as it were, from a height to the crowd beneath, sure always 
 of themselves and what they have to say. And here again 
 he represents the present and foreshadow? the future.
 
 Hv INTRODUCTION. 
 
 For the age of the preachers is passing those who speaK 
 with authority on the riddles of life and nature as the 
 priests of this or that all-explaining dogma, are becoming 
 less important as knowledge spreads, and the complexity of 
 experience is made evident to a wider range of minds. 
 The force of things is against the certain people. Again 
 and again truth escapes from the prisons made for her by 
 mortal hands, and as humanity carries on the endless pur- 
 suit she will pay more and more respectful heed to voices 
 like this voice of the lonely Genevese thinker with its 
 pathetic alterations of hope and fear, and the moral stead- 
 fastness which is the inmost note of it to these medita* 
 tive lives, which, through all the ebb and flow of thought, 
 and in the dim ways of doubt and suffering, rich in knowl- 
 edge, and yet rich in faith, grasp in new forms, and pro- 
 claim to us in new words, 
 
 " The mighty hopes which make us into."
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 [Where no other name is mentioned, Geneva is to be understood as 
 the author's place of residence.] 
 
 BERLIN July 16. 1848. There is but one thing need- 
 ful to possess God. All our senses, all our powers of 
 mind and soul, all our external resources, are so many ways 
 of approaching the divinity, so many modes of tasting 
 and of adoring God. We must learn to detach ourselves 
 from all that is capable of being lost, to bind ourselves abso- 
 lutely only to what is absolute and eternal, and to enjoy 
 the rest as a loan, a usufruct. . . . To adore, to un- 
 derstand, to receive, to feel, to give, to act: there is my law 
 my duty, my happiness, my heaven. Let come what come 
 will even death. Only be at peace with self, live in the 
 presence of God, in communion with Him, and leave the 
 guidance of existence to those universal powers against 
 whom thou canst do nothing ! If death gives me time, so 
 much the better. If its summons is near, so much the 
 better still ; if a half -death overtake me, still so much the 
 better, for so the path of success is closed to me only that 
 I may find opening before me the path of heroism, of 
 moral greatness and resignation. Every life has its poten- 
 tiality of greatness, and as it is impossible to be outside 
 God, the best is consciously to dwell in Him. 
 
 BERLIN, July 20, 1848. It gives liberty and breadth to 
 thought, to learn to judge our own epoch from the point 
 of view of universal history, history from the point of view 
 of geological periods, geology from the point of view of 
 astronomy. When the duration of a man's life or of a 
 people's life appears to us_as microscopic as that of a fly
 
 2 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 and inversely, the life of a gnat as infinite as that of a 
 celestial body, with all its dust of nations, we feel our- 
 selves at once very small and very great, and we are able, 
 as it were, to survey from the height of the spheres our 
 own existence, and the little whirlwinds which agitate 
 our liftVEinxJpeCJ ' C \ T ^ ' T " ' r A 
 
 AlHbdCtoin there is but oWe subject oi study.: the forms 
 and metamorphoses of mind._All other subjects may be 
 reduced to that; all other studies bring us back to this 
 
 GENEVA, April'2'0; 1 'l'849.^-ii) is'<sixi years* to-day since 
 I last left Geneva. How many journeys, how many im- 
 pressions, observations, 1 thoughts, how many forms of 'men 
 and things have smce then 'passed before me'attd in me! 
 
 K?en ' 
 >erhg" 
 
 Three ''STJo'wstoi'mg -tnis" afterhodnV'-f'oor' ! blossomirrg 
 plum-trees' iaiid.'^eatch tre^s! Wfiat a dMefence" from, six 
 years "'ago, when the cherry-trees,' adorrie^i' in theirgreen 
 spring dress and ludeir with their bridal 'ftttwers; 1 smiled 
 atymy'ae^ariS!re 'Mong the" Vab dots' fields- -and the: 'lilacs 
 of 1 Burgundy^'thJ 4 ^ gi'e'ai; '"gu^ts 1 of perftime : into mx- 
 face!' '''.' V'"'. ar; - u ' v ' ;-..;.. 
 
 May 3, 1840. I have iiefef' ir felt a'ny inward assurance 
 of genius'^ or ; any presentiment of glory - or' of 'happiness. 
 1 have neve'r seiii myself 'in imagination g^eafc^or 1 'famous, 
 or even a h'usband, a father, 'an -mfluentiaJ eitizeiii '-This 
 iiuTifference to the' future, this absolute self -distrust', are, 
 no dpubt, to be "tat en'; .'as -signs. 1 Wl>at dreams I have are 
 all' vague aiid in^efinit^, I ob^Wt ^t'to ]ftei -for T'ain ! now 
 scarcely 'capable 1 df;ttving. ; Recognfife f^ur- plaice; let the 
 
 useful so. Renounce yodrself, aec6p\t the"'e'ttp ; giveii ytU', 
 with its'hdn'ey 'and its gaft,' : as it comes. !; Bring- God' d6wn 
 
 "' ';>' ... ^ '.,( I, .'.;,' ifi;^.. "_! i ' .. 'i. i"-i t i-; ,j;>"(- ., .-- 
 
 1 * AtrifeHeft Gen^Vli f6r Paris aod" Berlin in April, 1843,= the piwefjf 
 ink yea*, 184lT43ihvjp^toep,fti?enlaiik Italy ^^U^t umC
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 3 
 
 into your heart. Embalm your soul in Him now, make 
 within you a temple for the Holy Spirit, be diligent in 
 good works, make others happier and better. 
 
 Put personal ambition aAvay from you, and then you 
 will find consolation in living or in dying, whatever may 
 happen to you. 
 
 May 27j 1849. To be misunderstood even by those 
 whom one loves is the cross and bitterness of life It is the 
 secret of that sad and melancholy smile on the lips of great 
 men which so few understand ; it is the cruelest trial re- 
 served for self-devotion; it is what must have oftenest 
 wrung the heart of the Son of man; and if God could 
 suffer, it would be the wound we should be forever inflict- 
 ing upon Him. He also He above all is the great mis- 
 understood, the least comprehended. Alas! alas! never 
 to tire, never to grow cold ; to be patient, sympathetic, 
 tender ; to look for the budding flower and the opening heart ; 
 to hope always, like God; to love always this is duty. 
 
 June 3, 1849. Fresh and delicious weather. A long 
 morning walk. Surprised the hawthorn and wild rose- 
 trees in flower. From the fields vague and health-giving 
 scents. The Voirons fringed with dazzling mists, and 
 tints of exquisite softness over the Saleve. Work in the 
 fields, two delightful donkeys, one pulling greedily at a 
 hedge of barberry. Then three little children. I felt a 
 boundless desire to caress and play with them. To be able 
 to enjoy such leisure, these peaceful fields, fine weather, 
 contentment; to have my two sisters with me; to rest my 
 eyes on balmy meadows and blossoming orchards; to listen 
 to the life singing in the grass and on the trees; to be so 
 calmly happy is it not too much? is it deserved? let 
 me enjoy it without reproaching heaven for its kindness; 
 let me enjoy it with gratitude. The days of trouble come 
 soon enough and are many enough. I have no presenti- 
 ment of happiness. All the more let me profit by the 
 present. Come, kind nature, smile and enchant me! Veil 
 from me awhile my own griefs and those of others; let 
 me see only the folds of thy queenly mantle, and hide
 
 4 AMIEUS JOURNAL. 
 
 all miserable and ignoble things from me under thy boun- 
 ties and splendors ! 
 
 October 1, 1849. Yesterday, Sunday, 1 read through 
 and made extracts from the gospel of St. John. It con- 
 firmed me in my belief that about Jesus we must believe 
 no one but Himself, and that what we have to do is to dis- 
 cover the true image of the founder behind all the pris- 
 matic reactions through which it comes to us, and which 
 alter it more or less. A ray of heavenly light traversing 
 human life, the message of Christ has been broken into a 
 thousand rainbow colors and carried in a thousand direc- 
 tions. It is the historical task of Christianity to assume 
 with every succeeding age a fresh metamorphosis, and to 
 be forever spiritualizing more and more her understand- 
 ing of the Christ and of salvation. 
 
 I am astounded at the incredible amount of Judaism and 
 formalism which still exists nineteen centuries after the 
 Redeemer's proclamation, " it is the letter which killeth " 
 after his protest against a dead symbolism. The new 
 religion is so profound that it is not understood even now, 
 and would seem a blasphemy to the greater number of 
 Christians. The person of Christ is the center of it. 
 Redemption, eternal life, divinity, humanity, propitiation, 
 incarnation, judgment, Satan, heaven and hell all these 
 beliefs have been so materialized and coarsened, that with 
 a strange irony they present to us the spectacle of things 
 having a profound meaning and yet carnally interpreted. 
 Christian boldness and Christian liberty must be recon- 
 quered ; it is the church which is heretical, the church 
 whose sight is troubled and her heart timid. "Whether 
 we will or no, there is an esoteric doctrine, there is 
 a relative revelation ; each man enters into God so much 
 as God enters into him, or as Angelus,* I think, said, 
 " the eye by which I see God is the same eye by which 
 He sees me." 
 
 * Angelus Silesius, otherwise Johannes Scheffler, the German seven- 
 teenth century hymn-writer, whose tender and mystical verses have 
 been popularized in England by Miss Winkworth's translations in the 
 JLyra Germanica.
 
 A MIEDS JO URN A L. 5 
 
 Christianity, if it is to triumph over pantheism, must 
 absorb it. To our pusillanimous eyes Jesus would have 
 borne the marks of a hateful pantheism, for he confirmed 
 the Biblical phrase "ye are gods," and so would St. Paul, 
 who tells us that we are of "the race of God." Our cen- 
 tury wants a new theology that is to say, a more profound 
 explanation of the nature of Christ and of the light which 
 it flashes upon heaven and upon humanity. 
 
 Heroism is the brilliant triumph of the soul over the 
 flesh that is to say, over fear: fear of poverty, of suffer- 
 ing, of calumny, of sickness, of isolation, and of death. 
 There is no serious piety without heroism. Heroism is the 
 dazzling and glorious concentration of^tourage. 
 
 Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a posi- 
 tive world while at the same time detaching us from it. 
 
 December 30,1850. The relation of thought to action 
 filled my mind on waking, and I found myself carried 
 toward a bizarre formula, which seems to have something 
 of the night still clinging about it: Action is but 
 coarsened thought; thought become concrete, obscure, and 
 unconscious. It seemed to me that our most trifling ac- 
 tions, of eating, walking, and sleeping, were the condensa- 
 tion of a multitude of truths and thoughts, and that the 
 wealth of ideas involved was in direct proportion to the 
 commonness of the action (as our dreams are the more 
 active, the deeper our sleep). We are hemmed round with 
 mystery, and the greatest mysteries are contained in what 
 we see and do every day. In all spontaneity the work of 
 creation is reproduced in analogy. When the spontaneity 
 is unconscious, you have simple action; when it is con- 
 scious, intelligent and moral action. At bottom this is 
 nothing more than the proposition of Hegel: ["What is 
 rational is real; and what is real is rational;"] but it had 
 never seemed to me more evident, more palpable. Every- 
 thing which is, is thought, but not conscious and indi-
 
 6 A MI EL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 vidual thought. The human intelligence is but the con- 
 sciousness of being. It is what I have formulated before: 
 Everything is a symbol of a symbol, and a symbol of what? 
 of mind. 
 
 . . . I have just been looking through the complete 
 works of Montesquieu, and cannot yet make plain to my- 
 self the impression left on me by this singular style, with 
 its mixture of gravity and affectation, of carelessness and 
 precision, of strength and delicacy; so full of sly intention 
 for all its coldness, expressing at once inquisitiveness and 
 indifference, abrupt, piecemeal, like notes thrown together 
 haphazard, and yet deliberate. I seem to see an intelli- 
 gence naturally grave and austere donning a dress of wit 
 for convention's sake. The author desires to entertain as 
 much as to teach, the thinker is also a bel-esprit, the juris- 
 consult has a touch of the coxcomb, and a perfumed breath 
 from the temple of Venus has penetrated the tribunal of 
 Minos. Here we have austerity, as the century under- 
 stood it, in philosophy or religion. In Montesquieu, the 
 art, if there is any, lies not in the words but in the matter. 
 The words run freely and lightly, but the thought is self- 
 conscious. 
 
 Each bud flowers but once and each flower has but its 
 minute of perfect beauty; so, in tbe garden of the soul 
 each feeling has, as it were, its flowering instant, its one 
 and only moment of expansive grace and radiant king- 
 ship. Each star passes but once in the night through the 
 meridian over our heads and shines there but an instant ; 
 so, in the heaven of the mind each thought touches its 
 zenith but once, and in that moment all its brilliancy and 
 all its greatness culminate. Artist, poet, or thinker, if you 
 want to fix and immortalize your ideas or your feelings, 
 seize them at this precise and fleeting moment, for it is 
 their highest point. Before it, you have but vague out- 
 lines or dim presentiments of them. After it you will have 
 only weakened reminiscence or powerless regret; that 
 moment is the moment of your ideal.
 
 A MIKL'S JO URNAL. 7 
 
 Spite is anger which is afraid to show itself, it is an im- 
 potent fury conscious of its impotence. 
 
 Nothing resembles pride so much as discouragement. 
 
 To repel one's cross is to make it heavier. 
 
 In the conduct of life, habits count for more than max- 
 ims, because habit is a living maxim, becomes flesh and 
 instinct. To reform one's maxims is nothing: it is but to 
 change the title of the book. To learn new habits is every- 
 thing, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but 
 a tissue of habits. 
 
 February 17, 1851. I have been reading, for six or 
 seven hours without stopping the Pensees of Joubert. I 
 felt at first a very strong attraction toward the book, and 
 a deep interest in it, but I have already a good deal cooled 
 down. These scattered and fragmentary thoughts, falling 
 upon one without a pause, like drops of light, tire, not my 
 head, but reasoning power. The merits of Joubert consist 
 in the grace of the style, the vivacity or finesse of the criti- 
 cisms, the charm of the metaphors; but he starts many 
 more problems than he solves, he notices and records more 
 than he explains. His philosophy is merely literary and 
 popular; his originality is only in detail and in execution. 
 Altogether, he is a writer of reflections rather than a phi- 
 losopher, a critic of remarkable gifts, endowed with ex- 
 quisite sensibility, but, as an intelligence, destitute of the 
 capacity for co-ordination. He wants concentration and 
 continuity. It is not that he has no claims to be consid- 
 ered a philosopher or an artist, but rather that he is both 
 imperfectly, for he thinks and writes marvelously, on a 
 small scale. He is an entomologist, a lapidary, a jeweler, 
 a coiner of sentences, of adages, of criticisms, of aphorisms, 
 counsels, problems; and his book, extracted from the ac- 
 cumulations of his journal during fifty years of his life, 
 is a collection of precious stones, of butterflies, coins and
 
 8 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 engraved gems. The whole, however, is more subtle than 
 strong, more poetical than profound, and leaves upon the 
 reader rather the impression of a great wealth of small 
 curiosities of value, than of a great intellectual existence 
 and a new point of view. The place of Joubert seems to 
 me then, below and very far from the philosophers and the 
 true poets, but honorable among the moralists and the 
 critics. He is one of those men who are superior to their 
 works, and who have themselves the unity which these 
 lack. This first judgment is, besides, indiscriminate and 
 severe. I shall have to modify it later. 
 
 February 20th. I have almost finished these two volumes 
 ofPtnsees and the greater part of the Correspondance. This 
 last has especially charmed me ; it is remarkable for grace, 
 delicacy, atticism, and precision. The chapters on meta- 
 physics and philosophy are the most insignificant. All 
 that has to do with large views with the whole of things,, 
 is very little at Joubert's command; he has no philosophy 
 of history, no speculative intuition. He is the thinker 
 of detail, and his proper field is psychology and matters of 
 taste. In this sphere of the subtleties and delicacies of 
 imagination and feeling, within the circle of personal affec- 
 tation and preoccupations, of social and educational inter- 
 ests, he abounds in ingenuity and sagacity, in fine criti- 
 cisms, in exquisite touches. It is like a bee going from 
 flower to flower, a teasing, plundering, wayward zephyr, 
 an vEolian harp, a ray of furtive light stealing through the 
 leaves. Taken as a whole, there is something impalpable 
 and immaterial about him, which I will not venture to call 
 effeminate, but which is scarcely manly. He wants bone 
 and body: timid, dreamy, and clairvoyant ; , he hovers 
 far above reality. He is rather a soul, a breath, than a 
 man. It is the mind of a woman in the character of a 
 child, so that we feel for him less admiration than tender- 
 ness and gratitude. 
 
 February 27, 1851. Read over the first book of Emile. 
 I was revolted, contrary to all expectation, for I opened 
 the book with a sort of hunger for style and beauty. I was
 
 AMIEUS JOURNAL. 9 
 
 conscious instead of an impression of heaviness and harsh- 
 ness, of labored, hammering emphasis, of something vio- 
 lent, passionate, and obstinate, without serenity, greatness, 
 nobility. Both the qualities and the defects of the book 
 produced in me a sense of lack of good manners, a blaze 
 of talent, but no grace, no distinction, the accent of good 
 company wanting. I understood how it is that Eousseau 
 rouses a particular kind of repugnance, the repugnance of 
 good taste, and I felt the danger to style involved in such 
 a model as well as the danger to thought arising from a 
 truth so alloyed and sophisticated. What there is of true 
 and strong in Rousseau did not escape me, and I still ad- 
 mired him, but his bad sides appeared to me with a clear- 
 ness relatively new. 
 
 (Same day.} The pensee-writeT is to the philosopher 
 what the dilettante is to the artist. He plays with 
 thought, and makes it produce a crowd of pretty things in 
 detail, but he is more anxious about truths than truth, 
 and what is essential in thought, its sequence, its unity, 
 escapes him. He handles his instrument agreeably, but he 
 does not possess it, still less does he create it. He is a gar- 
 dener and not a geologist ; he cultivates the earth only so 
 much as is necessary to make it produce for him flowers 
 and fruits ; he does not dig deep enough into it to under- 
 stand it. In a word, the pensee-writer deals with what 
 is superficial and fragmentary. He is the literary, the 
 oratorical, the talking or writing philosopher ; whereas the 
 philosopher is the scientific pensee- writer. The pensee- 
 writers serve to stimulate or to popularize the philosophers. 
 They have thus a double use, besides their charm. They 
 are the pioneers of the army of readers, the doctors of the 
 crowd, the money-changers of thought, which they con- 
 vert into current coin. The writer of pensee is a man of 
 letters, though of a serious type, and therefore he is 
 popular. The philosopher is a specialist, as far as the 
 form of his science goes, though not in substance, and 
 therefore he can never become popular. In France, for 
 one philosopher (Descartes) there have been thirty
 
 1 AMIEL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 writers of pensees\ in Germany, for ten such writers ther 
 have been twenty philosophers. 
 
 March 25, 1851. How many illustrious men whom I 
 have known have been already reaped by death, Steifens, 
 Marheineke, Neander, Mendelssohn, Thorwaldsen, Oelen- 
 schlager, Geijer, Tegner, Oersted, Stuhr, Lachmaun; and 
 with us, Sismondi, Topffer, de Candolle, savants, artists, 
 poets, musicians, historians.* The old generation is going. 
 What will the new bring us? What shall we ourselves 
 contribute? A' few great old men Schelling, Alexander 
 von Humboldt, Schlosser still link us with the glorious 
 past. Who is preparing to bear the weight of the future? 
 A shiver seizes us when the ranks grow thin around 
 us, when age is stealing upon us, when we approach the 
 zenith, and when destiny .sa^s to us: "Show what is in 
 tluv! ]S r o\v is the moment, now is the hour, else fall back 
 intJ nothingness ! It "is | thy turn i' Give the world thy 
 measure, say thy word, ; "re veal' tfty'tiullity' of thy' capacity. 
 Come forth' from" the ^Hade'j J ' ; It is no 7tfnger a' question oi 
 promising, thou mustperforhi'. t: 'Tnetifeeof appreritic'eship 
 i& over. Servant, show us what thmr hast doffe with thy 
 talent." Speak riow,' > br' : be silent forever."' 'This appeal 
 
 mont. : It cries, ; " rfe tnbtFr'e'ady $ Gfive"fcti account. 1 " GiVii 
 
 atf : a'ccotnft of^tliy' : ye$s : ,'' v tn^ leisure,"' 'tt\f slren2if;h, J "i;nir 
 
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 dti-Hig A'thi^I' 
 
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 tour of Sweden and Deft^i^j;,} 11 ,1845 f? ,. p^pro^ab^ca^ue across Um 
 Swedish liistonan Geijer on 'the same occasion. Scbellirig and' Alex- 
 aiiyeV voti : Huiiibol8t, in'eetfoiied a little lo^eV'downV'xWe rJso, stii/ 
 fcdldfal^sway'at'Befrlfia wteH lie '^'a'^ft'stud^rit" TBere l& an IMer'eW 
 ing descrJption'^oneJ'ftf lusr p ifrti<dca>nai B*rli. poblislwrl .in- tht, 
 ftijbliotfieqwsr Uwver.wttft &?, $#71406 u of ^ , ^^e^itj eeufQnon ^ fji9 
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 im^ginatio^ -^y tbe sigbt of balf^ tbe leaders of European resejirr.b 
 gatbered 1 Thto a ktngle Voorrt'.' ir He^aw '^cblosisfe^, t&i veteran bisto 
 riai, *t HWi)e^Wth#8iKf l848:-*"> a}1 -/
 
 AM1EU8 JOURNAL. U 
 
 studies, thy talent, and thy works. Now and here is the 
 hour of great hearts, the hour of heroism and of genius." 
 
 April 6, 1851. Was there ever any 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 thou- 
 sand ways of suffering because my happiness demands a 
 thousand conditions I. have a hea r t too easily reached, a 
 too restless imagination; despair is easy to me, and every 
 sensation reverberates again and again within me. What 
 might be, spoils for me what is. What ought to be con- 
 sumes me with sadness. So the 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 seemr 
 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. Some- 
 times I cannot escape from the ideal of it. A companions 
 of my life, of my work, of my thoughts, of my hopes;, 
 within, a common worship, toward 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 
 Avhence 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 ma; 
 develop. 
 
 I am distrustful of myself and of happiness because J 
 know myself. The ideal poisons for me all imperfect pos- 
 session. 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 mor- 
 tally, degrades and wounds me in mind, even before-
 
 J 2 A MIEISS JO URN A L. 
 
 hand. I abhor nseless regrets and repentances. The 
 fatality of the consequences which follow upon every hu- 
 man 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 dependent by my fault and through my own 
 error, to give up liberty and hope, to slay sleep and hap- 
 piness, this would be hell ! 
 
 All that is necessary, providential, in short, unimputable, 
 I could bear, 1 think, with some strength of mind. But 
 responsiblity 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, crav- 
 ing for repose for satisfaction, for independence! is there 
 hot some relic of selfishness in such a disinterestedness, 
 such a fear, such idle susceptibility. 
 
 I wish to fulfill my duty, but whero 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 k 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, hindrances, 
 Bufferings 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. De- 
 scend 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
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 1$ 
 
 themselves, and whose heart condemneth them not in the 
 part they take. This inner identity, this unity of convic- 
 tion, is all the more difficult the more the mind analyzes, 
 discriminates, and foresees. It is difficult, indeed, for 
 liberty to return to the frank unity of instinct. 
 
 Alas ! we must then re-climb a thousand times the peaks 
 already scaled, and reconquer the points of view already 
 won, we 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. Hera- 
 clitus ! the symbol of happiness is after all the same as 
 that of grief; anxiety and hope, hell and heaven, are 
 equally re&tless. The altar of Vesta and the sacrifice of 
 Beelzebub burn with the same fire. Ah, yes, there you 
 have life life double-faced and double-edged. The fire 
 which enlightens is also the fire which consumes; the 
 element of the gods may become that of the accursed. 
 
 April 7, 1851. Read a part of Euge's* volume "Die 
 Academie" (1848) where the humanism of the neo-Hegel- 
 ians in politics, religion, and literature is represented by 
 correspondents 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 realizing 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 wish to supplant religion by philos- 
 ophy. Man is the principle of their religion, and intellect 
 
 * Arnold Ruge, born in 1803, died at Brighton in 1880, principal 
 editor of the Hcdlische, afterward the Deutsche Jahrbucher (1838 43), 
 in which Strauss, Bruno Bauer, and Louis Feuerbach wrote. H 
 was a member of the parliament of Frankfort.
 
 14 AMIKL'8 JOURNAL. 
 
 is the climax of man. Their religion, then, is the religion 
 of intellect. There you have the two worlds: Christianity 
 brings and preaches salvation by the conversion of the will, 
 humanism by the emancipation of the mind. One attacks 
 the heart, the other the brain. Both wish to enable man 
 to reach his ideal. But the ideal differs, if not by its con- 
 tent, at least by the disposition of its content, by the pre- 
 dominance and sovereignity given to this for that inner 
 power. For one, the mind is the organ of the soul; for 
 the other, the soul is an inferior state of the mind; the 
 one wishes to enlighten by making better, the other to 
 make better by enlightening. It is the difference between 
 Socrates and Jesus. 
 
 The cardinal question is that of sin. The question of 
 immanence or of dualism is secondary. The trinity, the 
 life to come, paradise and hell, may cease to be dogmas, and 
 spiritual realities, the form and the letter may vanish away, 
 the question of humanity remains: What is it which saves? 
 How can man be led to be truly man? Is the ultimate 
 root of his being responsibility, yes or no? And is doing 
 or knowing the right, acting or thinking, his ultimate end? 
 If science does not produce love it is insufficient. Now all 
 that science gives is the amor intellectualis of Spinoza, light 
 without warmth, a resignation which is contemplative and 
 grandiose, but inhuman, because it is scarcely transmissi- 
 ble and remains a privilege, one of the rarest of all. Moral 
 love places the center of the individual in the center of 
 being. It has at least salvation in principle, the germ of 
 eternal life. To love is virtually to know; to know is not 
 virtually to love; there you have the relation of these two 
 modes of man. The redemption wrought by science or 
 by intellectual love is then inferior to the redemption 
 wrought by will or by moral love. The first may free a 
 man from himself, it may enfranchise him from egotism. 
 The second drives the ego out of itself, makes it active and 
 fruitful. The one is critical, purifying, negative; the 
 other is vivifying, fertilizing, positive. Science, however 
 spiritual and substantial it may be in itself, is still formal
 
 AMIEUS JOURNAL. 15 
 
 relatively to love. Moral force is then the vital point. 
 And this force is only produced by moral force. Like 
 alone acts upon like. Therefore do not amend by reason- 
 ing, but by example; approach feeling by feeling; do not 
 hope to excite love except by love. Be what you wish 
 others to become. Let yourself and not your words 
 preach for you. 
 
 Philosophy, then, to return to the subject, can never 
 replace religion ; revolutionaries are not apostles, although 
 the apostles may have been revolutionaries. To save 
 from the outside to the inside and by the outside I un- 
 derstand also the intelligence relatively to the will is an 
 error and danger. The negative part of the humanist's 
 work is good; it will strip Christianity of an outer shell, 
 which has become superfluous; but Euge andFeuerbach 
 cannot save humanity. She must have her saints and 
 her heroes to complete the work of her philosophers. 
 Science is the power of man, and love his strength; man 
 becomes man only by the intelligence, but he is man only 
 by the heart. Knowledge, love, power there is the com- 
 plete life. 
 
 June 16, 1851. This evening I walked up and down 
 on the Pont des Bergues, under a clear, moonless heaven 
 delighting in the freshness of the water, streaked with 
 light from the two quays, and glimmering under the 
 twinkling stars. Meeting all these different groups of young 
 people, families, couples and children, who were returning to 
 their homes, to their garrets or their drawing-rooms, singing 
 or talking as they went, I felt a movement of sympathy for all 
 these passers-by; my eyes and ears became those of a poet or 
 a painter; while even one's mere kindly curiosity seems to 
 bring with it a joy in living and in seeing others live. 
 
 August 15, 1851. To know how to be ready, a great, 
 thing, a precious gift, and one that implies calculation, 
 grasp and decision. To be always ready a man must be> 
 able to cut" a knot, for everything cannot be untied; he 
 must know how to disengage what is essential from the 
 detail in which it is enwrapped, for everything cannot be
 
 16 AMIEUS JOURNAL. 
 
 equally considered; in a word, he mnst be able to simplify 
 his duties, his business, and his life. To know how to 
 be ready, is to know how to start. 
 
 It is astonishing how all of us are generally cumbered up 
 with the thousand and one hindrances and duties which 
 are not such, but which nevertheless wind us about with 
 their spider threads and fetter the movement of our wings. 
 It is the lack of order which makes us slaves; the confu- 
 sion of to-day discounts the freedom of to-morrow. 
 
 Confusion is the enemy of all comfort, and confusion is 
 born of procrastination. To know how to be ready we 
 must be able to finish. Nothing is done but what is fin- 
 ished. The things which we leave dragging behind us 
 will start up again later on before us and harass our path. 
 Let each day take thought for what concerns it, liquidate 
 its own affairs and respect the day which is to follow, and 
 then we shall be always ready. To know how to be ready 
 is at bottom to know how to die. 
 
 September 2, 1851. Read the work of Tocqueville ("De 
 la Democrats en Amerique.") My impression is as yet a 
 mixed one. A fine book, but I feel in it a little too much 
 imitation of Montesquieu. This abstract, piquant, sen- 
 tentious style, too, is a little dry, over-refined and mo- 
 notonous. It has too much cleverness and not enough 
 imagination. It makes one think, more than it charms, 
 and though really serious, it seems flippant. His method 
 of splitting up a thought, of illuminating a subject by suc- 
 cessive facets, has serious inconveniences. We see the 
 details too clearly, to the detriment of the whole. A mul- 
 titude of sparks gives but a poor light. Nevertheless, the 
 author is evidently a ripe and penetrating intelligence, who 
 takes a comprehensive view of his subject, while at the 
 same time possessing a power of acute and exhaustive 
 analysis. 
 
 September 6th. Tocqueville's book has on the whole a 
 calming effect upon the mind, but it leaves a certain sense 
 of disgust behind. It makes one realize the necessity of 
 what is happening around us and the inevitableness of tb/ v
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 1? 
 
 goal prepared for us; but it also makes it plain that the era 
 of mediocrity in everything is beginning, and mediocrity 
 freezes all desire. Equality engenders uniformity, and it 
 is by sacrificing what is excellent, remarkable, and extra- 
 ordinary that we get rid of what is bad. The whole be- 
 comes less barbarous, and at the same time more vulgar. 
 
 The age of great men is going; the epoch of the ant-hill, 
 of life in multiplicity, is beginning. The century of indi- 
 vidualism, if abstract equality triumphs, runs a great risk 
 of seeing no more true individuals. By continual leveling 
 and division of labor, society will become everything and 
 man nothing. 
 
 As the floor of valleys is raised by the denudation and 
 washing down of the mountains, what is average will rise 
 at the expense of what is great. The exceptional will 
 disappear. A plateau with fewer and fewer undulations, 
 without contrasts and without oppositions, such will be 
 the aspect of human society. The statistician will register 
 a growing progress, and the moralist a gradual decline: on 
 the one hand, a progress of things ; on the other, a de- 
 cline of souls. The useful will take the place of the beau- 
 tiful, industry of art, political economy of religion, and 
 arithmetic of poetry. The spleen will become the malady 
 of a leveling age. 
 
 Is this indeed the fate reserved for the democratic era? 
 May not the general well-being be purchased too dearly at 
 such a price? The creative force which in the beginning 
 we see forever tending to produce and multiply differences, 
 will it afterward retrace its steps and obliterate them one 
 by one? And equality, which in the dawn of existence is 
 mere inertia, torpor, and death, is it to become at last the 
 natural form of life? Or rather, above the economic and 
 political equality to which the socialist and non-socialist 
 democracy aspires, taking it too often for the term of its 
 efforts, will there not arise a new kingdom of mind, a 
 church of refuge, a republic of souls, in which, far beyond 
 the region of mere right and sordid utility, beauty, devo- 
 tion, holiness, heroism, enthusiasm, the extraordinary, the
 
 18 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 infinite, shall have a worship and an abiding city? Utili 
 tarian materialism, barren well-being, the idolatry of the 
 flesh and of the "I," of the temporal and of mammon, 
 are they to be the goal if our efforts, the final recompense 
 promised to the labors of our race? I do not believe it. 
 The ideal of humanity is something different and higher. 
 
 But the animal in us must be satisfied first, and we must 
 first banish from among us all suffering which is superfluous 
 and has its origin in social arrangements, before we can 
 return to spiritual goods. 
 
 September 7, 1851. (Aix). It is ten o'clock at night. 
 A strange and mystic moonlight, with a fresh breeze and 
 a sky crossed by a few wandering clouds, makes our 
 terrace delightful. These pale and gentle rays shed from 
 the zenith a subdued and penetrating peace; it is like the 
 calm joy or the pensive smile of experience, combined with 
 a certain stoic strength. The stars shine, the leaves trem- 
 ble in the silver light. Not a sound in all the landscape; 
 great gulfs of shadow under the green alleys and at the 
 corners of the steps. Everything is secret, solemn, mys- 
 terious. 
 
 night hours, hours of silence and solitude ! with you 
 are grace and melancholy ; you sadden and you console. 
 You speak to us of all that has passed away, and of all that 
 must still die, but you say to us, "courage !" and you 
 promise us rest. 
 
 November 9, 1851. (Sunday). At the church of St. 
 Gervais, a second sermon from Adolphe Monod, less gran- 
 diose perhaps but almost more original, and to me more 
 edifying than that of last Sunday. The subject was St. 
 Paul or the active life, his former one having been St. 
 John or the inner life, of the Christian. I felt the golden 
 spell of eloquence: I found myself hanging on the lips of 
 the orator, fascinated by his boldness, his grace, his energy, 
 and his art, his sincerity, and his talent; and it was borne 
 in upon me that for some men difficulties are a source of 
 inspiration, so that what would make others stumble is 
 for them the occasion of their highest tviumphs, He made
 
 AMIEVS JOURNAL. 19 
 
 St. Paul cry during an hour and a half; he made an old 
 nurse of him, he hunted up his old cloak, his prescriptions 
 of water and wine to Timothy, the canvas that he mended, 
 his friend Tychicus, in short, all that could raise a smile; 
 and from it he drew the most unfailing pathos, the most 
 austere and penetrating lessons. He made the whole St. 
 Paul, martyr, apostle and man, his grief, his charities, 
 his tenderness, live again before us, and this with a gran- 
 deur, an unction, a warmth of reality, such as I had never 
 seen equaled. 
 
 How stirring is such an apotheosis of pain in our century 
 of comfort, when shepherds and sheep alike sink benumbed 
 in Capuan languors, such an apotheosis of ardent charity in 
 a time of coldness and indifference toward souls, such an 
 apotheosis of a human, natural, inbred Christianity, in an 
 age, when some put it, so to speak, above man, and others 
 below man ! Finally, as a peroration, he dwelt upon the 
 necessity for a new people, for a stronger generation, if the 
 world is to be saved from the tempests which threaten it. 
 " People of God, awake ! Sow in tears, that ye may reap in 
 triumph!" What a study is such a sermon! I felt all the 
 extraordinary literary skill of it, while my eyes were still 
 dim with tears. Diction, composition, similes, all is in- 
 structive and precious to remember. I was astonished, 
 shaken, taken hold of. 
 
 November 18, 1851. The energetic subjectivity, which 
 has faith in itself, which does not fear to be something 
 particular and definite without any consciousness or shame 
 of its subjective illusion, is unknown to me. I am, so far 
 as the intellectual order is concerned, essentially objective, 
 and my distinctive speciality, is to be able to place myself 
 in all points of view, to see through all eyes, to emancipate 
 myself, that is to say, from the individual prison. Hence 
 aptitude for theory and irresolution in practice; hence 
 critical talent and difficulty in spontaneous production. 
 Hence, also, a continuous uncertainty of conviction and 
 opinion, so long as my aptitude remained mere instinct; 
 but now that it is conscious and possesses itself, it is able
 
 20 A MIEL'S JO URNAL. 
 
 to conclude and affirm in its turn, so that, after having 
 brought disquiet, it now brings peace. It says: " There ia 
 no repose for the mind except in the absolute; for feeling, 
 except in the infinite; for the soul, except in the divine." 
 Nothing finite is true, is interesting, or worthy to fix my 
 attention. All that is particular is exclusive, and all that 
 is exclusive, repels me. There is nothing non-exclusive 
 but the All ; my end is communion with Being through 
 the whole of Being. Then, in the light of the absolute, 
 every idea becomes worth studying; in that of the infinite, 
 every existence worth respecting; in that of the divine, 
 every creature worth loving. 
 
 December 2, 1851. Let mystery have its place in you; 
 do not be always turning up your whole soil with the 
 plowshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow 
 corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may 
 bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird ; 
 keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an 
 altar for the unknown God. Then if a bird sing among 
 your branches, do not be too eager to tame it. If you are 
 conscious of something new thought or feeling, wakening 
 in the depths of your being do not be in a hurry to let 
 in light upon it, to look at it; let the springing germ have 
 the protection of being forgotten, hedge it round with 
 quiet, and do not break in upon its darkness; let it take 
 shape and grow, and not a word of your happiness to 
 any one ! Sacred work of nature as it is, all conception 
 should be enwrapped by the triple veil of modesty, silence 
 and night. 
 
 Kindness is the principle of tact, and respect for others 
 the first condition of savoir-vivre. 
 
 He who is silent is forgotten; he who abstains is taken 
 at his word ; he who does not advance, falls back ; he who 
 stops is overwhelmed, distanced, crushed; he who ceasea 
 to grow greater becomes smaller; he who leaves off, giveb 
 up ;' the stationary condition is the beginning of the end- --
 
 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 21 
 
 it is the terrible symptom which precedes death. To live, 
 is to achieve a perpetual triumph; it is to assert one's self 
 against destruction, against sickness, against the annulling 
 and dispersion of one's physical tjnd moral being. It is to 
 will without ceasing, or rather to refresh one's will day by 
 day. 
 
 It is not history which teaches conscience to be honest; 
 it is the conscience which educates history. Fact is cor- 
 rupting, it is we who correct it by the persistence of our 
 ideal. The soul moralizes the past in order not to be de- 
 moralized by it. Like the alchemists of the middle ages, she 
 finds in the crucible of experience only the gold that she 
 herself has poured into it. 
 
 February 1, 1852. (Sunday). Passed the afternoon in 
 reading the Monologues of Schleiermacher. This little 
 book made an impression on me almost as deep as it did 
 twelve years ago, when I read it for the first time. It 
 replunged me into the inner world, to which I return 
 with joy whenever I may have forsaken it. I was able 
 besides, to measure my progress since then by the trans- 
 parency of all the thoughts to me, and by the freedom with 
 which I entered into and judged the point of view. 
 
 It is great, powerful, profound, but there is still pride in 
 it, and even selfishness. For the center of the universe is 
 still the self, the great Ich of Fichte. The tameless lib- 
 erty, the divine dignity of the individual spirit, expanding 
 till it admits neither any limit nor anything foreign to 
 itself, and conscious of a strength instinct with creative 
 force, such is the point of view of the Monologues. 
 
 The inner life in its enfranchisement from time, in its 
 double end, the realization of the species and of the indi- 
 viduality, in its proud dominion over all hostile circum- 
 stances, in its prophetic certainty of the future, in its 
 immortal youth, such is their theme. Through them we 
 are enabled to enter into a life of monumental interest, 
 wholly original and beyond the influence of anything ex-
 
 22 AMIKL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 terior, an astonishing example of the autonomy of the ego^ 
 an imposing type of character, Zeno and Fichte in one. 
 But still the motive power of this life is not religious; it is 
 rather moral and philosophic. I see in it not so much a 
 magnificent model to imitate as a precious subject of study. 
 This ideal of a liberty, absolute, indefeasible, inviolably 
 respecting itself above all, disdaining the visible an^ 
 the universe, and developing itself after its own laws alone, 
 is also the ideal of Emerson, the stoic of a young America. 
 According to it, man finds his joy in himself, and, safe in 
 the inaccessible sanctuary, of his personal consciousness, 
 becomes almost a god.* He is himself principle, motive, 
 and end of his own destiny; he is himself, and that is 
 enough for him. This superb triumph of life is not far 
 from being a sort of impiety, or at least a displacement of 
 adoration. By the mere fact that it does away with hu- 
 mility, such a superhuman point of view becomes danger- 
 ous; it is the very temptation to which the first man 
 succumbed, that of becoming his own master by becoming 
 like unto the Elohim. Here then the heroism of the phi- 
 losopher approaches temerity, and the Monologues are there- 
 fore open to three reproaches: 
 
 Ontologically, the position of man in the spiritual uni- 
 verse is wrongly indicated; the individual soul, not being 
 unique and not springing from itself, can it be conceived 
 without God? Psychologically, the force of spontaneity in 
 the ego is allowed a dominion too exclusive of any other. 
 As a fact, it is not everything in man. Morally, evil is 
 scarcely named, and conflict, the condition of true peace, 
 is left out of count. So that the peace described in the! 
 Monologues is neither a conquest by man nor a grace from 
 heaven ; it is rather a stroke of good fortune. 
 
 * Compare dough'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 iu the blank mind."
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 23 
 
 February 2d. Still the Monologues. Critically I de- 
 feuded myself enough against them yesterday ; I may aban- 
 don myself now, without scruple and without danger, to the 
 admiration and the sympathy with which they inspire me. 
 This life so proudly independent, this sovereign concep- 
 tion of human dignity, this actual possession of the uni- 
 verse and the infinite, this perfect emancipation from all 
 which passes, this calm sense of strength and superiority, 
 this invincible energy of will, this infallible clearness of self- 
 vision, this autocracy of the consciousness which is its own 
 master, all these decisive marks of a royal personality of 
 a nature Olympian, profound, complete, harmonious, pene- 
 trate the mind with joy and heart with gratitude. What a 
 life ! what a man ! These glimpses into the inner regions 
 of a great soul do one good. Contact of this kind strength- 
 ens, restores, refreshes. Courage returns as we gaze; 
 when we see what has been, we doubt no more that it can 
 be again. At the sight of a man we too say to ourselves, 
 let us also be men. 
 
 March 3, 1852. Opinion has its value and even its 
 power: to have it against us is painful when we are among 
 friends, and harmful in the case of the outer world. We 
 should neither flatter opinion nor court it; but it is better, if 
 we can help it, not to throw it on to a false scent. The 
 first error is a meanness ; the second an imprudence. We 
 should be ashamed of the one; we may regret the other. 
 Look to yourself; you are much given to this last fault, 
 and. it has already done you great harm. Be ready to bend 
 your pride; abase yourself even so far as to show yourself 
 ready and clever like others. This world of skillful ego- 
 tisms and active ambitions, this world of men, in which 
 one must deceive by smiled, conduct, and silence as much 
 as by actual words, a world revolting to the proud and up- 
 right soul, it is our business to learn to live in it ! Suc- 
 cess is required in it: succeed. Only force is recognized 
 there: be strong. Opinion seeks to impose her law upon 
 all, instead of setting her at defiance, it would be better to 
 struggle with her and conquer. ... I understand the
 
 24 A MI EL'S JO URNAL. 
 
 indignation of contempt, and the wish to crush, ronseft 
 irresistibly by all that creeps, all that is tortuous, oblique, 
 
 ignoble But I cannot maintain such a 
 
 mood, which is a mood of vengeance, for long. This 
 world is a world of men, and these men are our brothers. 
 We must not banish from us the divine breath, we must 
 love. Evil must be conquered by good; and before all 
 things one must keep a pure conscience. Prudence may 
 be preached from this point of view too. " Be ye simple 
 as the dove and prudent as the serpent," are the words of 
 Jesus. Be careful of your reputation, not through vanity, 
 but that you may not harm your life's work, and out 
 of love for truth. There is still something of self-seeking 
 in the refined disinterestedness which will not justify itself, 
 that it may feel itself superior to opinion. It requires 
 ability, to make what we seem agree with what we are, 
 and humility, to feel that we are no great things. 
 
 There, thanks to this journal, my excitement has passed 
 away. I have just read the last book of it through again, 
 and the morning has passed by. On the way I have been 
 conscious of a certain amount of monotony. It does not 
 signify ! These pages ure not written to be read ; they are 
 written for my own consolation and warning. They are 
 landmarks in my past; and some of the landmarks are 
 funeral crosses, stone pyramids, withered stalks grown 
 green again, white pebbles, coins all of them helpful 
 toward finding one's way again through the Elysian fields 
 of the soul. The pilgrim has marked his stages in it; he 
 is able to trace by it his thoughts, his tears, his joys. This 
 is my traveling diary: if some passages from it may be 
 useful to others, and if sometimes even I have communi- 
 cated such passages to the public, these thousand pages as 
 a whole are only of value to me and to those who, after 
 me, may take some interest in the itinerary of an obscurely 
 conditioned soul, far from the world's noise and fame. 
 These sheets will be monotonous when my life is so; they 
 will repeat themselves when feelings repeat themselves; 
 truth at any rate will be always there, and truth is their 
 only muse, their only pretext, their only duty.
 
 AM1EVS JOURNAL. 25 
 
 April 2, 1852. What a lovely walk! Sky clear, sun 
 rising, all the tints bright, all the outlines sharp, save for 
 the soft and misty infinite of the lake. A pinch of white 
 frost, powdered the fields, lending a metallic relief to the 
 hedges of green box, and to the whole landscape, still 
 without leaves, an air of health and vigor, of youth and 
 freshness. "Bathe, disciple, thy thirsty soul in the 
 dew of the dawn ! " says Faust, to us, and he is right. The 
 morning air breathes a new and laughing energy into veins 
 and marrow. If every day is a repetition of life, every 
 dawn gives signs as it were a new contract with- existence. 
 At dawn everything is fresh, light, simple, as it is for chil- 
 dren. At dawn spiritual truth, like the atmosphere, is 
 more transparent, and our organs, like the young leaves, 
 drink in the light more eagerly, breathe in more ether, and 
 less of things earthly. If night and the starry sky speak 
 to the meditative soul of God, of eternity and the infinite, 
 the dawn is the time for projects, for resolutions, for the 
 birth of action. While the silence and the " sad serenity 
 of the azure vault," incline the soul to self-recollection, 
 the vigor and gayety of nature spread into the heart and 
 make it eager for life and living. Spring is upon us. 
 Primroses and violets have already hailed her coming. 
 Eash blooms are showing on the peach trees; the swollen 
 buds of the pear trees and the lilacs point to the blossoming 
 that is to be; the honeysuckles are already green. 
 
 April 26, 1852. This evening a feeling of emptiness 
 took possession of me; and the solemn ideas of duty, the 
 future, solitude, pressed themselves upon me. I gave 
 myself to meditation, a very necessary defense against the 
 dispersion and distraction brought about by the day's work 
 and its detail. Kead a part of Krause's book " UrMld 
 derMenschheit,"* which answered marvelously to my 
 thought and my need. This philosopher has always a 
 beneficent effect upon me; his sweet religious serenity 
 
 * Christian Frederick Krause, died 1832, Hegel's younger contem- 
 porary, and the author of a system which he called panentheism 
 Amiel alludes to it later on.
 
 26 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 gains upon me and invades me. He inspires me with a 
 sense of peace and infinity. 
 
 Still I miss something, common worship, a positive re 
 ligion, shared with other people. Ah! when will the 
 church to which I belong in heart rise into being? I 
 cannot like Scherer, content myself with being in the right 
 all alone. I must have a less solitary Christianity. My 
 religious needs are not satisfied any more than my social 
 needs, or my needs of affection. Generally I am able to 
 forget them and lull them to sleep. But at times they 
 wake up with a sort of painful bitterness ... I waver 
 between languor and ennui, between frittering myself away 
 on the infinitely little, and longing after what is unknown 
 and distant. It is like the situation which French novel- 
 ists are so fond of, the story of a vie de province; only the 
 province is all that is not the country of the soul, every 
 place where the heart feels itself strange, dissatisfied, rest- 
 less and thirsty. Alas! well understood, this place is the 
 earth, this country of one's dreams is heaven, and this 
 suffering is the eternal homesickness, the thirst for hap- 
 piness. . 
 
 "In der Beschrankung zeigt sich erst der Meister," says 
 Goethe. Male resignation, this also is the motto of those 
 who are masters of the art of life; "manly," that is to sa} r , 
 courageous, active, resolute, persevering, "resignation," 
 that is to say, self-sacrifice, renunciation, limitation. 
 Energy in resignation, there lies the wisdom of the sons of 
 
 th, the only serenity possible in this life of struggle 
 . t nd of combat. In it is the peace of martyrdom, in it 
 too the promise of triumph. 
 
 April 28, 1852. (Lancy.)* Once more I feel the spring 
 languor creeping over me, the spring air about me. This 
 morning the poetry of the scene, the song of the birds, he 
 tranquil sunlight, the breeze blowing over the fresh green 
 fields, all rose into and filled my heart. Now all is silent. 
 silence, thou art terrible! terrible as that calm of the 
 
 * A village near Geneva.
 
 AMIEISS JOURNAL. 27 
 
 ocean which lets the eye penetrate the fathomless abysses 
 below. Thou showest us iu ourselves depths which make 
 us giddy, inextinguishable needs, treasures of suffering. 
 Welcome tempests ! at least they blur and trouble the sur- 
 face of these waters with their terrible secrets. Welcome 
 the passion blasts which stir the waves of the soul, and so 
 veil from us its bottomless gulfs ! In all of us, children of 
 dust, sons of time, eternity inspires an involuntary anguish, 
 and the infinite, a mysterious terror. We seem to be en- 
 tering a kingdom of the dead. Poor heart, thy craving is 
 for life, for love, for illusions ! And thou art right after all, 
 for life is sacred. 
 
 In these moments of tete-a-tete with the infinite, how 
 different life looks! How all that usually occupies and 
 excites us becomes suddenly puerile, frivolous and vain. 
 We seem to ourselves mere puppets, marionettes, strutting 
 seriously through a fantastic show, and mistaking gewgaws 
 for things of great price. At such moments, how every- 
 thing becomes transformed, 'how everything changes! 
 Berkeley and Fichte seem right, Emerson too; the world 
 is but an allegory; the idea is more real than the fact; 
 fairy tales, legends, are as true as natural history, and 
 even more true, for they are emblems of greater trans- 
 parency. The only substance properly so called is the soul. 
 What is all the rest? Mere shadow, pretext, figure, sym- 
 bol, or dream. Consciousness alone is immortal, positive, 
 perfectly real. The world is but a firework, a sublime' 
 phantasmagoria, destined to cheer and form the soul. 
 Consciousness is a universe, and its sun is love. . . . 
 
 Already I am falling back into the objective life of 
 thought. It delivers me from shall I say? no, it deprives 
 me of the intimate life of feeling. Keflection solves 
 reverie and burns her delicate wings. This is why science 
 does not make men, but merely entities and abstractions. 
 Ah, let us feel and live and beware of too much analysis! 
 Let us put spontaneity, naivete before reflection, expe- 
 rience beforestud^; let us make life itself our study. Shall 
 [ then never have the heart of a woman to rest upon? a
 
 28 A MIKL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 son in whom to live again, a little world where I may see 
 flowering and blooming all that is stifled in me? I shrink 
 and draw back, for fear of breaking my dream. I have 
 staked so much on this card that I dare not play it. Let 
 me dream again. . . . 
 
 Do no violence to yourself, respect in yourself the oscil- 
 lations of feeling. They are your life and your nature; 
 One wiser than you ordained them. Do not abandon your- 
 self altogether either to instinct or to will. Instinct is a 
 siren, will a despot. Be neither the slave of your impulses 
 and sensations of the moment, nor of an abstract and gen- 
 eral plan; be open to what life brings from within and 
 without, and welcome the unforeseen; but give to your life 
 unity, and bring the unforeseen within the lines of your 
 plan. Let what is natural in you raise itself to the level of 
 the spiritual, and let the spiritual become once more nat- 
 ural. Thus will your development be harmonious, and the 
 peace of heaven will shine upon your brow; always on con- 
 dition that your peace is made, and that you have climbed 
 your Calvary. 
 
 Afternoon Shall I ever enjoy again those marvelous 
 reveries of past days, as, for instance, once, when I was 
 still quite a youth, in the early dawn, sitting among the 
 ruins of the castle of Faucigny ; another time in the moun- 
 tains above Lavey, under the midday sun, lying under a 
 J;ree and visited by three butterflies; and again another 
 night on the sandy shore of the North Sea, stretched full 
 length upon the beach, my eyes wandering over the Milky 
 Way? Will they ever return to me, those grandiose, im- 
 mortal, cosmogonic dreams, in which one seems to-carry 
 the world in one's breast, to touch the stars, to possess the 
 infinite? Divine moments, hours of ecstasy, when thought 
 flies from world to world, penetrates the great enigma, 
 breathes with a respiration large, tranquil, and profound, 
 like that of the ocean, and hovers serene and boundless 
 like the blue heaven ! Visits from the muse, Urania, who 
 traces around the foreheads of those sh% loves the phos- 
 phorescent nimbus of contemplative power, and who pours
 
 ARIEL'S JOURNAL. 29 
 
 into their hearts the tranquil intoxication, if not the au- 
 thority of genius, moments of irresistible intuition in 
 which a man feels himself great like the universe and calm 
 iike a god ! From the celestial spheres down to the shell 
 or the moss, the whole of creation is then submitted to 
 our gaze, lives in our breast, and accomplishes in us its 
 eternal work with the regularity of destiny and the passionate 
 ardor of love. What hours, what memories! The traces 
 which remain to us of them are enough to fill us with 
 respect and enthusiasm, as though they had been visits of 
 the Holy Spirit. And then, to fall back again from these 
 heights with their boundless horizons into the muddy ruts 
 of triviality ! what a fall ! Poor Moses ! Thou too sawest 
 undulating in the distance the ravishing hills of the prom- 
 ised land, and it was thy fate nevertheless to lay thy weary 
 bones in a grave dug in the desert! Which of us has not 
 his promised land, his day of ecstasy and his death in 
 exile? What a pale counterfeit is real life of the life we see 
 in glimpses, and how these flaming lightnings of our pro- 
 phetic youth make the twilight of our dull monotonous 
 manhood more dark and dreary ! 
 
 April 29 (Lancy). This morning the air was calm, 
 the sky slightly veiled. I went out into the garden to see 
 what progress the spring was making. I strolled from the 
 irises to the lilacs, round the flower-beds, and in the shrub- 
 beries. Delightful surprise ! at the corner of the walk, 
 half hidden under a thick clump of shrubs, a small leaved 
 chorchorus had flowered during the night. Gay and fresh 
 as a bunch of bridal flowers, the little shrub glittered be- 
 fore me in all the attraction of its opening beauty. What 
 springlike innocence, what soft and modest loveliness, there 
 was in these white corollas, opening gently to the sun, like 
 thoughts which smile upon us at waking, and perched 
 upon their young leaves of virginal green like bees upon 
 the wing ! Mother of marvels, mysterious and tender na- 
 ture, why do we not live more in thee? The poetical 
 tfdneurs of Topffer, his Charles and Jules, the friends and 
 passionate lovers of thy secret graces, the dazzled and rav-
 
 30 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 ished beholders of thy beauties, rose up in my memory, at 
 once a reproach and a lesson. A modest garden and a 
 country rectory, the narrow horizon of a garret, contain 
 for those who know how to look and to wait more in- 
 struction than a library, even than that of Mon oncle.* 
 Yes, we are too busy, too encumbered, too much occupied, 
 too active! We read too much! The one thing needful 
 is to throw off all one's load of cares, of preoccupations, of 
 pedantry, and to become again young, simple, child-like, 
 living happily and gratefully in the present hour. "We 
 must know how to put occupation aside, which does not 
 mean that we must be idle. In an inaction which is medi- 
 tative and attentive the wrinkles of the soul are smoothed 
 away, and the soul itself spreads, unfolds, and springs 
 afresh, and, like the trodden grass of the roadside or the 
 bruised leaf of a plant, repairs its injuries, becomes new, 
 spontaneous, true, and original. Keverie, like the rain of 
 night, restores color and force to thoughts which have been 
 blanched and wearied by the heat of the day. With gentle 
 fertilizing power it awakens within us a thousand sleeping 
 germs, and as though in play, gathers round us mate- 
 rials for the future, and images for the use of talent. 
 Reverie is the Sunday of thought; and who knows which 
 is the more important and fruitful for man, the laborious 
 tension of the week, or the life-giving repose of the 
 Sabbath ? Thefldnerie so exquisitely glorified and sung 
 by Topffer is not only delicious, but useful. It is like a 
 bath which gives vigor and suppleness to the whole being, 
 to the mind as to the body ; it is the sign and festival of 
 liberty, a joyous and wholesome banquet, the banquet of 
 the butterfly wandering from flower to flower over the 
 hills and in the fields. And remember, the soul 
 too is a butterfly. 
 
 *Tlie allusions in this passage are to Topffer's best known books 
 "La Presbytere " and "La Bibliotheque de mon Oncle," that airy chron- 
 icle of a hundred romantic or vivacious nothings which has the young 
 student Jules for its center.
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 31 
 
 May 2, 1852. (Sunday) Lancy. This morning read the 
 epistle of St. James, the exegetical volume of Cellerier* en 
 this epistle, and a great deal of Pascal, after having first 
 of all passed more than an hour in the garden with the 
 children. I made them closely examine the flowers, the 
 shrubs, the grasshoppers, the snails, in order to practice 
 them in observation, in wonder, in kindness. 
 
 How enormously important are these first conversations 
 of childhood ! I felt it this morning with a sort of relig- 
 ious terror. Innocence and childhood are sacred. The 
 sower who casts in the seed, the father or mother casting 
 in the fruitful word are accomplishing a pontifical act and 
 ought to perform it with religious awe, with prayer and 
 gravity, for they are laboring at the kingdom of God. All 
 seed-sowing is a mysterious thing, whether the seed fall 
 into the earth or into souls. Man is a husbandman; his 
 whole work rightly understood is to develop life, to sow it 
 everywhere. Such is the mission of humanity, and of this 
 divine mission the great instrument is speech. We forget 
 too often that language is both a seed-sowing and a revela- 
 tion. The influence of a word in season, is it not incalcu- 
 lable? What a mystery is speech! But we are blind to 
 it, because we are carnal and earthy. AVe see the 
 stones and the trees by the road, the furniture of our 
 houses, all that is palpaple and material. We have no eyes 
 for the invisible phalanxes of ideas which people the air 
 and hover incessantly around each one of us. 
 
 Every life is a profession of faith, and exercises an inev 
 itable and silent propaganda. As far as lies in its powei, 
 it tends to transform the universe and humanity into its 
 own image. Thus we have all a cure of souls. Every 
 man is the center of perpetual radiation like a luminous 
 body; he is, as it were, a beacon which entices a ship upon 
 the rocks if it does not guide it into port. Every man is a 
 
 * Jacob-^lysee Cellerier, professor of theology at the Academy of 
 Geneva, and son of the pastor of Satienv mentioned in Madame de 
 Steel's " L'Allemagne."
 
 32 A MIKISS JO URN A L. 
 
 priest, even involuntarily; his conduct is an unspoken 
 sermon, which is forever preaching to others; but there 
 are priests of Baal, of Moloch, and of all the false gods. 
 Such is the. high importance of example. Thence comes 
 the terrible responsibility which weighs upon us all. An 
 evil example is a spiritual poison: it is the proclamation of 
 1 a sacrilegious faith, of an impure God. Sin would be only 
 an evil for him who commits it, were it not a crime toward 
 the weak brethren, whom it corrupts. Therefore, it has 
 been said : " It were better for a man not to have been born 
 than to offend one of these little ones." 
 
 May 6, 1852. It is women who, like mountain flowers, 
 mark with most characteristic precision the gradation 
 of social zones. The hierarchy of classes is plainly visible 
 among them; it is blurred in the other sex. With 
 women this hierarchy has the average regularity of nature; 
 among men we see it broken by the incalculable varieties 
 of human freedom. The reason is that the man on the 
 whole, makes himself by his own activity, and that the 
 woman, is, on the whole, made by her situation; that 
 the one modifies and shapes circumstance by his own 
 energy, while the gentleness of the other is dominated by 
 and reflects circumstance; so that woman, so to speak, 
 inclines to be species, and man to be individual. 
 
 Thus, which is curious, women are at once the sex which 
 is most constant and most variable. Most constant from 
 the moral point of view, most variable from the social. A 
 confraternity in the first case, a hierarchy in the second. 
 All degrees of culture. and all conditions of society are 
 clearly marked in their outward appearance, their man- 
 ners and their tastes; but the inward fraternity is traceable 
 in their feelings, their instincts, and their desires. The fem- 
 inine sex represents at the same time natural and historical 
 inequality ; it maintains the unity of the species and marks off 
 the categories of society, it brings together and divides, it 
 gathers and separates, it makes castes and breaks through 
 them, according as it interprets its twofold role in the one 
 sense or the other. At bottom, woman's mission is essn
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 33 
 
 tially conservative, but she is a conservative without dis- 
 crimination. On the one side, she maintains God's work 
 in man, all that is lasting, noble, and truly human, in the 
 race, poetry, religion, virtue, tenderness. On the other, 
 she maintains the results of circumstance, all that is pass- 
 ing, local, and artificial in society; that is to say, customs, 
 absurdities, prejudices, littlenesses. She surrounds with the 
 same respectful and tenacious faith the serious and the 
 irivolous, the good and the bad. Well, what then ? 
 Isolate if you can, the fire from its smoke. It is a divine 
 law that you are are tracing, and therefore good. The 
 woman preserves ; she is tradition as the man is progress. 
 And if there is no family and no humanity without the 
 two sexes, without these two forces there is no history. 
 
 May 14, 1852. (Lancy.) Yesterday I was full of the 
 philosophy of joy, of youth, of the spring, which smiles 
 and the roses which intoxicate; I preached the doctrine of 
 strength, and I forgot that, tried and afflicted like the 
 two friends with whom I was walking, I should probably 
 have reasoned and felt as they did. 
 
 Our systems, it has been said, are the expression of our 
 character, or the theory of our situation, that is to say, we 
 like to think of what has been given as having been ac- 
 quired, we take our nature for our own work, and our lot 
 in life for our own conquest, an illusion born of vanity and 
 also of the craving for liberty. We are unwilling to be the 
 product of circumstances, or the mere expansion of an 
 inner germ. And yet we have received everything, and 
 the part which is really ours, is small indeed, for it is 
 mostly made up of negation, resistance, faults. We receive 
 everything, both life and happiness; but the manner in 
 Avhich we receive, this is what is still ours. Let us then, 
 receive trustfully without shame or anxiety. Let us hum- 
 bly accept from God even our own nature, and treat it 
 charitably, firmly, intelligently. Not that we are called 
 upon to accept the evil and the disease in us, but let us 
 accept ourselves in spite of the evil and the disease. And 
 let us never be afraid of innocnt joy; God is good, and
 
 34 A MIEL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 what He does is well done ; resign yourself to everything 
 even to happiness; ask for the spirit of sacrifice, of detach- 
 ment, of renunciation, and above all, for the spirit of joy 
 and gratitude, that genuine and religious optimism which 
 sees in God a father, and asks no pardon for His benefits. 
 We must dare to be happy, and dare to confess it, regard- 
 ing ourselves always as the depositaries, not as the authors 
 of our own joy. 
 
 . . . This evening I saw the first glow-worm of the 
 season in the turf beside the little winding road which 
 descends from Lancy toward the town. It was crawling 
 furtively under the grass, like a timid thought or a dawn- 
 ing talent. 
 
 June 17, 1852. Every despotism has a specially keen 
 and hostile instinct for whatever keeps up human dignity, 
 and independence. And it is curious to see scientific and 
 realist teaching used everywhere as a means of stifling all 
 freedom of investigation as addressed to moral questions 
 under a dead weight of facts. Materialism is the auxiliary 
 doctrine of every tyranny, whether of the one or of the 
 masses. To crush what is spiritual, moral, human so to 
 speak, in man, by specializing him ; to form mere wheels 
 of the great social machine, instead of perfect individuals; 
 to make society and not conscience the center of life, to 
 enslave the soul to things, to de-personalize man, this is 
 the dominant drift of our epoch. Everywhere you may 
 see a tendency to substitute the laws of dead matter (num- 
 ber, mass) for the laws of the moral nature (persuasion, 
 adhesion, faith) equality, the principle of mediocrity, 
 becoming a dogma; unity aimed at through uniformity; 
 numbers doing duty for argument; negative liberty, 
 which has no law in itself, and recognizes no limit ex- 
 cept in force, everywhere taking the place of positive lib- 
 erty, which means action guided by an inner law and 
 curbed by a moral authority. Socialism versus individual- 
 ism : this is how Vinet put the dilemma. I should say 
 rather that it is only the eternal antagonism between letter
 
 AMJEL'S JOURNAL. 35 
 
 and spirit, between form and matter, between the outward 
 and the inward, appearance and reality, which is always 
 present in every conception and in all ideas. 
 
 Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything; makes 
 everything vulgar and every truth false. And there is a 
 religious and political materialism which spoils all that it 
 touches, liberty, equality, individuality. So that there are 
 two ways of understanding democracy. 
 
 What is threatened to-day is moral liberty, conscience, 
 respect for the soul, the very nobility of man. To defend 
 the soul, its interests, its rights, its dignity, is the most 
 pressing duty for whoever sees the danger. What the 
 writer, the teacher, the pastor, the philosopher, has to do, 
 is to defend humanity in man. Man ! the true man, the 
 ideal man! Such should be their motto, their rallying cry. 
 War to all that debases, diminishes, hinders, and degrades 
 him; protection for all that fortifies, ennobles, and raises 
 him. The test of every religious, political, or educational 
 system, is the man which it forms. If a system injures 
 the intelligence it is bad. If it injures the character it is 
 vicious. If it injures the conscience it is criminal. 
 
 August 12, 1852. (Lancy.) Each sphere of being tends 
 toward a higher sphere, and has already revelations and 
 presentiments of it. The ideal under allj its forms is the 
 anticipation and the prophetic vision of that existence,, 
 higher than his own, toward which every being perpetually 
 aspires. And this higher and more dignified existence is 
 more inward in character, that is to say, more spiritual. 
 Just as volcanoes reveal to us the secrets of the interior of 
 the globe, so enthusiasm and ecstasy are the passing ex- 
 plosions of this inner world of the soul; and human life is 
 but the preparation and the means of approach to this 
 spiritual life. The degrees of initiation are innumerable. 
 Watch, then, disciple of life, watch and labor toward the 
 development of the angel within thee! For the divine 
 Odyssey is but a series of more and more ethereal meta r 
 morphoses, in which each form, the result of what goee< 
 before, is the condition of those which follow. The di-
 
 36 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 vine life is a series of successive deaths, in which the mind 
 throws off its imperfections and its symbols, and yields to 
 the growing attraction of the ineffable center of gravita- 
 tion, the sun of intelligence and love. Created spirits in 
 the accomplishment of their destinies tend, so to speak, to 
 form constellations and milky ways within the empyrean 
 of the divinity; in becoming gods, they surround the 
 throne of the sovereign with a sparkling court. In their 
 greatness lies their homage. The divinity with which 
 they are invested is the noblest glory of God. God is the 
 father of spirits, and the constitution of the eternal king- 
 dom rests on the vassalship of love. 
 
 September 27, 1852. (Lancy.) To-day I complete my 
 thirty-first year. . 
 
 The most beautiful poem there is, is life life which dis- 
 cerns its own story in the making, in which inspiration 
 and self-consciousness go together and help each other, life 
 which knows itself to be the world in little, a repetition in 
 miniature of the divine universal poem. Yes, be man; 
 that is to say, be nature, be spirit, be the image of God, 
 be what is greatest, most beautiful, most lofty in all 
 the spheres of being, be infinite will and idea, a reproduc- 
 tion of the great whole. And be everything while being 
 .nothing, effacing thyself, letting God enter into thee as 
 the air enters an empty space, reducing the ego to the 
 mere vessel which contains the divine essence. Be hum- 
 ble, devout, silent, that so thou mayest hear within the 
 depths of thyself the subtle and profound voice; be spirit- 
 ual and pure, that so thou mayest have communion with 
 the pure spirit. Withdraw thyself often into the sanctuary 
 of thy inmost consciousness; become once more point and 
 atom, that so thou mayest free thyself from space, time, 
 matter, temptation, dispersion, that thou mayest escape 
 thy very organs themselves and thine own life. That is 
 to say, dis often, and examine thyself in the presence of 
 tfris death, as a preparation for the last death. He who 
 can without shuddering confront blindness, deafness, 
 paralysis, disease, betrayal, poverty; he who can without
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 37 
 
 terror appear before the sovereign justice, he alone can 
 oall himself prepared for partial or total death. How 
 far am I from anything of the sort, how far is my heart 
 from any such stoicism ! But at least we can try to detach 
 ourselves from all that can be taken away from us, to 
 accept everything as a loan and a gift, arid to cling only to 
 the imperishable this at any rate we can attempt. To 
 believe in a good and fatherly God, who educates us, who 
 tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, who punishes only 
 when he must, and takes away only with regret; this 
 thought, or rather this conviction, gives courage and secu- 
 rity. Oh, what need we have of love, of tenderness, of 
 affection, of kindness, and how vulnerable we are, we the 
 sons of God, we, immortal and sovereign beings ! Strong 
 as the universe or feeble as the worm, according as we 
 represent God or only ourselves, as we lean upon infinite 
 being, or as we stand alone. 
 
 The point of view of religion, of a religion at once active 
 and moral, spiritual and profound, alone gives to life all 
 the dignity and all the energy of which it is capable. Re- 
 ligion makes invulnerable and invincible. Earth can only 
 be conquered in the name of heaven. All good things are 
 given over and above to him who desires but righteousness. 
 To be disinterested is to be strong, and the world is at the 
 feet of him whom it cannot tempt. Why? Because spirit is 
 lord of matter, and the world belongs to God. "Be of 
 good cheer," saith a heavenly voice, "I have overcome the 
 world." 
 
 Lord, lend thy strength to those who are weak in the 
 flesh, but willing in the spirit! 
 
 October 31, 1852. (Lancy.) Walked for half an hour 
 in the garden. A fine rain was falling, and the landscape 
 was that of autumn. The sky was hung with various 
 shades of gray, and mists hovered about the distant moun- 
 tains, a melancholy nature. The leaves were falling on all 
 sides like the last illusions of youth under the tears of 
 irremediable grief. A brood of chattering birds were chas- 
 ing each other through the sh^bberies. and playing games
 
 38 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 among the branches, like a knot of hiding schoolboys. 
 The ground strewn with leaves, brown, yellow, and red- 
 dish; the trees half-stripped, some more, some less, and 
 decked in ragged splendors of dark-red, scarlet, and yellow; 
 the reddening shrubs and plantations; a few flowers still 
 lingering behind, roses, nasturtiums, dahlias, shedding 
 their petals round them; the bare fields, the thinned 
 hedges; and the fir, the only green thing left, vigorous 
 and stoical, like eternal youth braving decay; all these 
 innumerable and marvelous symbols which forms colors, 
 plants, and living beings, the earth and the sky, yield at all 
 times to the eye which has learned to look for them, charmed 
 and enthralled me. I wielded a poetic wand, and had but 
 to touch a phenomenon to make it render up to me its 
 moral significance. Every landscape is, as it were, a state 
 of the soul, arid whoever penetrates into both is aston- 
 ished to find how much likeness there is in each detail. 
 True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, 
 and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences 
 is able at most to attain as a final result. The soul of 
 nature is divined by the poet; the man of science, only 
 serves to accumulate materials for its demonstration. 
 
 November 6, 1852. I am capable of all the passions, 
 for I bear them all within me. Like a tamer of wild 
 beasts, I keep them caged and lassoed, but I sometimes 
 hear them growling. I have stifled more than one nascent 
 love. Why ? Because with that prophetic certainty 
 which belongs to moral intuition, I felt it lacking in true 
 life, and less durable than myself. I choked it down ir. 
 the name of the supreme affection to come. The loves of 
 sense, of imagination, of sentiment, I have seen through- 
 and rejected them all; I sought the love which springs 
 from the central profundities of being. And I still believe 
 in it. I will have none of those passions of straw which 
 dazzle, burn up, and wither; I invoke, I await, and I hope 
 for the love which is great, pure and earnest, which lives and 
 works in all the fibres and through all the powers of the 
 soul. And even if I go lonely to the end, I would rather
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 39 
 
 my hope and my dream died with me, than that my soul 
 should content itself with any meaner union. 
 
 November 8, 1852. Responsibility is my invisible 
 nightmare. To suffer through one's own fault is a tor- 
 ment worthy of the lost, for so grief is envenomed by 
 ridicule, and the worst ridicule of all, that which springs 
 from shame of one's self. I have only force and energy 
 wherewith to meet evils coming from outside; but an irre- 
 parable evil brought about by myself, a renunciation for 
 life of my liberty, my peace of mind, the very thought of 
 it is maddeni ng I expiate my privilege indeed. My priv- 
 ilege is to be spectator of my life drama, to be fully con- 
 scious of the tragi-comedy of my own destiny, and, more 
 than that, to be in the secret of the tragi-comic itself, that 
 is to say, to be unable to take my illusions seriously, to 
 see myself, so to speak, from the theater on the stage, or 
 to be like a man looking from beyond the tomb into exist- 
 ence. I feel myself forced to feign a particular interest 
 in my individual part, while all the time I am living in the 
 confidence of the poet who is playing with all these agents 
 which seem so important, and knows all that they are ig- 
 norant of. It is a strange position, and one which be- 
 comes painful as soon as grief obliges me to betake myself 
 once more to my own little role, binding me closely to it, 
 and warning me that I am going too far in imagining my- 
 self, because of my conversations with the poet, dispensed 
 from taking up again my modest part of valet in the 
 piece. Shakespeare must have experienced this feeling 
 often, and Hamlet, I think, must express it somewhere. 
 It is a Doppelgangerei, quite German in character, and 
 which explains the disgust with reality and the repug- 
 nance to public life, so common among the thinkers 
 of Germany. There is, as it were, a degradation 
 a gnostic fall, in thus folding one's wings and 
 going back again into the vulgar shell of one's own in- 
 dividuality. Without grief, which is the string of this 
 venturesome kite, man would soar too quickly and too high, 
 and the chosen souls would be lost for the race, like bal-
 
 40 AMI EL'S JO URN A. I. 
 
 loons which, save for gravitation, would never return from 
 the empyrean. 
 
 How, then, is one to recover courage enough for action? 
 By striving to restore in one's self something of that uncon- 
 sciousness, spontaneity, instinct, which reconciles us to- 
 earth and makes man useful and relatively happy. 
 
 By believing more practically in the providence which 
 pardons and allows of reparation. 
 
 By accepting our human condition in a more simple 
 and childlike spirit, fearing trouble less, calculating less, 
 hoping more. For we decrease our responibility, if we 
 decrease our clearness of vision, and fear lessens with the 
 lessening of responsibility. 
 
 By extracting a richer experience out of our losses and 
 lessons. 
 
 November 9, 1852. A few pages of the ChrestomatJiie 
 Franpaise and Vinet's remarkable letter at the head of the 
 volume, have given me one or two delightful hours. As a 
 thinker, as a Christian, and as a man, Vinet occupies a 
 typical place. His philosophy, his theology, his aesthetics, 
 in short, his work, will be, or has been already surpassed at 
 all points. His was a great soul and a fine talent. But 
 neither were well enough served by circumstances. We 
 see in him a personality worthy of all veneration, a man of 
 singular goodness and a writer of distinction, but not quite 
 a great man, nor yet a great writer. Profundity and pur- 
 ity, these are what he posseses in a high degree, but not 
 greatness, properly speaking. For that, he is a little too 
 subtle and analytical, too ingenious and fine-spun; his 
 thought is overladen with detail, and has not enough 
 flow, eloquence, imagination, warmth, and largeness. 
 Essentially and constantly meditative, he has not strength 
 enough left to deal with what is outside him. The casu- 
 istries of conscience and of language, eternal self-suspicion, 
 and self-examination, his talent lies in these things, and is 
 limited by them. Vinet wants passion, abundance, entrai- 
 nement, and therefore popularity. The individualism 
 which is his title to glory is also the ^ause of his weakness.
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 41 
 
 We find in him always the solitary and the ascetic. His 
 thought is, as it were, perpetually at church ; it is perpet- 
 ually devising trials and penances for itself. Hence the 
 air of scruple and anxiety which characterizes it even in its 
 bolder flights. Moral energy, balanced by a disquieting 
 delicacy of fibre; a fine organization marred, so to speak, by 
 low health, such is the impression it makes upon us. Is 
 it reproach or praise to say of Vinet's mind that it seems 
 to one a force perpetually reacting upon itself? A warmer 
 and more self-forgetful manner; more muscles, as it were, 
 around the nerves, more circles of intellectual and histor- 
 ical life around the individual circle, these are what Vinet, 
 of all writers perhaps the one who makes us think most, 
 is still lacking in. Less reflexivity and more plasticity, 
 the eye more on the object, would raise the style of Vinet, 
 so rich in substance, so nervous, so full of ideas, and vari- 
 ety, into a grand style. Vinet, to sum up, is conscience 
 personified, as man and as writer. Happy the literature 
 and the society which is able to count at one time two or 
 three like him, if not equal to him ! 
 
 November 10, 1852. How much have we not to learn 
 from the Greeks, those immortal ancestors of ours! And 
 how much better they solved their problem than we have 
 solved ours. Their ideal man is not ours, but they un- 
 derstood -infinitely better than we how to reverence, cultivate 
 and ennoble the man whom they knew. In a thousand re- 
 spects we are still barbarians beside them, as Beranger 
 said to me with a sigh in 1843 : barbarians in education, in 
 eloquence, in public life, in poetry, in matters of art, etc. 
 We must have millions of men in order to produce a few 
 elect spirits: a thousand was enough in Greece. If the 
 measure of a civilization is to be the number of perfected 
 men that it produces, we are still far from this model 
 people. The slaves are no longer below us, but they are 
 among us. Barbarism is no longer at our frontiers; it 
 lives side by side with us. We carry within us much 
 greater things than they, but we ourselves are smaller. It 
 u a strange result. Objective civilization preduced great
 
 4 3 AM1BVS JO URN A L. 
 
 men while making no conscious effort toward such a result', 
 subjective civilization produces a miserable and imperfect 
 race, contrary to its mission and its earnest desire. The 
 world grows more majestic but man diminishes. Why is 
 this? 
 
 We have too much barbarian blood in our veins, and we 
 lack measure, harmony and grace. Christianity, in break- 
 ing man up into outer and inner, the world into earth and 
 heaven, hell and paradise, has decomposed the human unity, 
 in order, it is true, to reconstruct it more profoundly and 
 more truly. But Christianity has not yet digested this, 
 powerful leaven. She has not yet conquered the true hu- 
 manity; she is still living under the antimony of sin and 
 grace, of here below and there above. She has not pene- 
 trated into the whole heart of Jesus. She is still in the 
 narthex of penitence ; she is not reconciled, and even the 
 churches still wear the livery of service, and have none of 
 the joy of the daughters of God, baptized of the Holy 
 Spirit. 
 
 Then, again, there is our excessive division of labor; our 
 bad and foolish education which does not develop the 
 whole man; and the problem of poverty. We have abol- 
 ished slavery, but without having solved the question of 
 labor. In law there are no more slaves, in fact, there are 
 many. And while the majority of men are not free, the 
 free man, in the true sense of the term can neither be con- 
 ceived nor realized. Here are enough causes for our 
 inferiority. 
 
 November 12, 1852. St. Martin's summer is still linger- 
 ing, and the days all begin in mist. I ran for a quarter of 
 an hour round the garden to get some warmth and supple- 
 ness. Nothing could be lovelier than the last rosebuds, 
 or than the delicate gaufred edges of the strawberry leaves 
 embroidered with hoar-frost, while above them Arachne's 
 delicate webs hung swaying in the green branches of the 
 pines, little ball-rooms for the fairies carpeted with pow- 
 dered pearls and kept in place by a thousand dewy strands 
 hanging from above like the chains of a lamp and support-
 
 AM1EUS JOURNAL. 43 
 
 ing them from below like the anchors of a vessel. These 1 
 little airy edifices had all the fantastic lightness of the elf- 
 world and all the vaporous freshness of dawn. They re- 
 called to me the poetry of the north, wafting to me a breath 
 from Caledonia or Iceland or Sweden, Frithiof and the 1 
 Edda, Ossian and the Hebrides. All that world of cold and 
 mist, of genius and of reverie, where warmth comes not 
 from the sun but from the heart where man is more notice- 
 able than nature that chaste and vigorous world in which 
 will plays a greater part than sensation and thought has more 
 power than instinct in short the whole romantic cycle 
 of German and northern poetry, awoke little by little in 
 my memory and laid claim upon my sympathy. It is a 
 poetry of bracing quality, and acts upon one like a moral 
 tonic. Strange charm of imagination ! A twig of pine 
 wood and a few spider-webs are enough to make countries, 
 epochs, and nations live again before her. 
 
 December 26, 1852. (Sunday.) If I reject many por- 
 tions of our theology and of our church system, it is that I 
 may the better reach the Christ himself. My philosophy 
 allows me this. It does not state the dilemma as one of 
 religion or philosophy, but as one of religion accepted or 
 experienced, understood or not understood. For me phi- 
 losophy is a manner of apprehending things, a mode of 
 perception of reality. It does not create nature, man or 
 God, but it finds them and seeks to understand them. 
 Philosophy is consciousness taking account of itself with 
 all that it contains. Now consciousness may contain a 
 new life the facts of regeneration and of salvation, that is 
 to say, Christian experience. The understanding of the 
 Christian consciousness is an integral part of philosophy, 
 as the Christian consciousness is a leading form of religious 
 consciousness, and religious consciousness an essential form 
 of consciousness. 
 
 An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the 
 degree of truth which it contains.
 
 44 AMI KISS JOURNAL. 
 
 Look twice, if what you want is a just conception; look 
 once, if what you want is a sense of beauty. 
 
 A man only understands what is akin to something 
 already existing in himself. 
 
 Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is 
 composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation 
 applied to life. 
 
 The wealth of each mind is proportioned to the number 
 <md to the precision of its categories and its points of view. 
 
 To feel himself freer than his neighbor is the reward of 
 the critic. 
 
 Modesty (pudeur) is always the sign and safeguard of 
 a mystery. It is explained by its contrary profanation. 
 Shyness or modesty is, in truth, the half-conscious sense 
 of a secret of nature or of the soul too intimately individ- 
 ual to be given or surrendered. It is exchanged. To sur- 
 render what is most profound and mysterious in one's 
 "being and personality at any price less than that of abso- 
 lute reciprocity is profanation. 
 
 January 6, 1853. Self-government with tenderness 
 here you have the condition of all authority over children. 
 The child must discover in us no passion, no weakness of 
 which he can make use; he must feel himself powerless to 
 deceive or to trouble us; then he will recognize in us his 
 natural superiors, and he will attach a special value to our 
 kindness, because he will respect it. The child who can 
 rouse in us anger, or impatience, or excitement, feels him- 
 self stronger than we. and a child only respects strength. 
 The mother should consider herself as her child's sun, a 
 changeless and ever radiant world, whither the small rest- 
 less creature, quick at tears and laughter, light, fickle, pas- 
 sionate, full of storms, may come for fresh stores of light, 
 warmth, and electricity, of calm and of courage. The 
 mother represents goodness, providence, law; that is to
 
 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 45 
 
 say, the divinity, under that form of it which is accessible 
 to childhood. If she is herself passionate, she will incul- 
 cate on her child a capricious and despotic God, or even 
 several discordant gods. The religion of a child depends 
 on what its mother and its father are, and not on what 
 they say. The inner and unconscious ideal which guides 
 their life is precisely what touches the child; their words, 
 their remonstrances, their punishments, their bursts of 
 feeling even, are for him merely thunder and comedy; 
 what they worship, this it is which his instinct divines and 
 reflects. 
 
 The child sees what we are, behind what we wish to be. 
 Hence his reputation as a physiognomist. He extends his 
 power as far as he can with each of us; he is the most 
 subtle of diplomatists. Unconsciously he passes under the 
 influence of each person about him, and reflects it while 
 transforming it after his own nature. He is a magnifying 
 mirror. This is why the first principle of education is: 
 train yourself; and the first rule to follow if you wish to 
 possess yourself of a child's will is: master your own. 
 
 February 5, 1853 (seven o'clock in the morning). I am 
 always astonished at the difference between one's inward 
 mood of the evening and that of the morning. The pas- 
 sions which are dominant in the evening, in the morning 
 leave the field free for the contemplative part of the soul. 
 Our whole being, irritated and overstrung by the nervous 
 excitement of the day, arrives in the evening at the culmi- 
 nating point of its human vitality; the same being, tran- 
 quilized by the calm of sleep, is in the morning nearer 
 heaven. We should weigh a resolution in the two balances, 
 and examine an idea under the two lights, if we wish to 
 minimize the chances of error by taking the average of our 
 daily oscillations. Our inner life describes regular curves, 
 barometical curves, as it were, independent of the accidental 
 disturbances which the storms of sentiment and passion 
 may raise in us. Every soul has its climate, or rather, is a 
 climate; it has, so to speak, its own meteorology in the 
 general meteorology of the soul. Psychology, therefore,
 
 46 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 cannot be complete so long as the physiology of our planet 
 is itself incomplete that science to which we give nowa- 
 days the insufficient name of physics of the globe. 
 
 I became conscious this morning that what appears to us 
 impossible is often an impossibility altogether subjective. 
 Our mind, under the action of the passions, produces by a 
 strange mirage gigantic obstacles, mountains or abysses, 
 which stop us short. Breathe upon the passion and the 
 phantasmagoria will vanish. This power of mirage, by 
 'which we are, able to delude and fascinate ourselves, is a 
 moral phenomenon worthy of attentive study. We make 
 for ourselves, in truth, our own spiritual world monsters, 
 chimeras, angels, we make objective what ferments in us. All 
 is marvelous for the poet ; all is divine for the saint ; all is great 
 for the hero; all is wretched, miserable, ugly, and bad for the 
 base and sordid soul. The bad man creates around him a pan- 
 demonium, the artist, an Olympus, the elect soul, a para- 
 dise, which each of them sees for himself alone. We are 
 all visionaries, and what we see is our soul in things. We 
 reward ourselves and punish ourselves without knowing it, 
 so that all appears to change when we change. 
 
 The soul is essentially active, and the activity of which 
 we are conscious is but a part of our activity, and voluntary 
 activity is but a part of our conscious activity. Here we 
 have the basis of a whole psychology and system of morals. 
 Man reproducing the world, surrounding himself with a 
 nature which is the objective rendering of his spiritual na- 
 ture, rewarding and punishing himself; the universe 
 identical with the divine nature, and the nature of the 
 perfect spirit only becoming understood according to the 
 measure of our perfection; intuition the recompense of 
 inward purity; science as the result of goodness; in short, 
 a new phenomenology more complete and more moral, in 
 which the total soul of things becomes spirit. This shall per- 
 haps be my subject for my summer lectures. How much 
 is contained in it ! the whole domain of inner education, all 
 that is mysterious in our life, the relation of nature to 
 spirit, of God and all other beings to man, the repetition
 
 AMIENS JOURNAL. 4? 
 
 in miniature of the cosmogony, mythology, theology, 
 and history of the universe, the evolution of mind, in a word 
 the problem of problems into which I have often plunged 
 but from which finite things, details, minutiae, have turned 
 me back a thousand times. I return to the brink of the great 
 abyss with the clear perception that here lies the problem 
 of science, that to sound it is a duty, that God hides Him- 
 self only in light and love, that He calls upon us to become 
 spirits, to possess ourselves and to possess Him in the meas- 
 ure of our strength and that it is our incredulity, our spir- 
 itual cowardice, which is our infirmity and weakness. 
 
 Dante, gazing into the three worlds with their divers 
 heavens, saw under the form of an image what I would 
 fain seize under a purer form. But he was a poet, 
 and I shall only be a philosopher. The poet makes him- 
 self understood by human generations and by the crowd; 
 the philosopher addresses himself only to a few rare minds. 
 The day has broken. It brings with it dispersion of thought 
 in action. I feel myself de-magnetized, pure clairvoyance 
 gives place to study, and the ethereal depth of the heaven 
 of contemplation vanishes before the glitter of finite 
 things. Is it to be regretted? No. But it proves that 
 the hours most apt for philosophical thought are those 
 which precede the dawn. 
 
 February 10, 1853. This afternoon I made an excursion 
 to the Saleve with ^my particular friends, Charles Heim, 
 Edmond Scherer, Elie Lecoultre, and Ernest Naville. 
 The conversation was of the most interesting kind, and 
 prevented us from noticing the deep mud which hindered 
 our walking. It was especially Scherer, Naville, and I 
 who kept it alive. Liberty in God, the essence of Chris- 
 tianity, new publications in philosophy, these were our 
 three subjects of conversation. The principle result i'cr 
 me was an excellent exercise in dialectic and in argumenta- 
 tion with solid champions. If I learned nothing, many of 
 my ideas gained new confirmation, and I was able to pene- 
 trate more deeply into the minds of my friends. I am 
 much nearer to Scherer than to JSTaville, but from him 
 also I am in some degree anarted- .
 
 48 AMIEUS JOURNAL. 
 
 It is a striking fact, not nnlike the changing of swords 
 in "Hamlet," that the abstract minds, those which move 
 from ideas to facts, are always fighting on behalf of concrete 
 reality; while the concrete minds, which move from facts 
 to ideas, are generally the champions of abstract notions. 
 Each pretends to that over which he has least power ; each 
 aims instinctively at what he himself lacks. It is an uncon- 
 scious protest against the incompleteness of each separate 
 nature. We all tend toward that which we possess least of, 
 and our point of arrival is essentially different from our 
 point of departure. The promised land is the land where 
 one is not. The most intellectual of natures adopts an 
 ethical theory of mind ; the most moral of natures has an 
 intellectual theory of morals. This reflection was brought 
 home to me in the course of our three or four hours' dis- 
 cussion. Nothing is more hidden from us than the illusion 
 which lives with us day by day, and our greatest illusion 
 is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be. 
 
 The mathematical intelligence and the historical intelli- 
 gence (the two classes of intelligences) can never under- 
 stand each oth*j. When they succeed in doing so as to 
 words, they diifer as to the things which the words mean. 
 At the boUom of every discussion of detail between them 
 reappears the problem of the origin of ideas. If the prob- 
 lem is not present to them, there is confusion; if it is 
 present to them, there is separation. They only agree as 
 to the goal truth; but never as to the road, the method, 
 and the criterion. 
 
 Heim represented the impartiality of consciousness, 
 Naville the morality of consciousness, Lecoultre the relig- 
 ion of consciousness, Scherer the intelligence of conscious- 
 ness, and I the consciousness of consciousness. A common 
 ground, but differing individualites. Discrimen ingeniorum. 
 
 What charmed me most in this long discussion was the 
 sense of mental freedom which it awakened in me. To be 
 able to set in motion the greatest subjects of thought without 
 any sense of fatigue, to be greater than the world, to play with 
 one's strength, this is what makes the well-being of intelli-
 
 A MIEL'S JO URN A L. 4i> 
 
 gence, the Olympic festival of thought. Habere, non 
 fiaberi. There is an equal happiness in the sense of recip- 
 rocal confidence, of friendship, and esteem in the midst of 
 conflict; like athletes, we embrace each other before and 
 after the combat, and the combat is but a deploying of the 
 forces of free and equal men. 
 
 March 20, 1853. I sat up alone; two or three times I 
 paid a visit to the children's room. It seemed to me, 
 young mothers, that I understood you ! sleep is the mystery 
 of life ; there is a profound charm in this darkness broken 
 by the tranquil light of the night-lamp, and in this silence 
 measured by the rhythmic breathings of two young sleeping 
 creatures. It was brought home to me that I was looking 
 on at a marvelous operation of nature, and I watched it in 
 no profane spirit. I sat silently listening, a moved and 
 hushed spectator of this poetry of the cradle, this ancient 
 and ever new benediction of the family, this symbol of 
 creation, sleeping under the wing of God, of our conscious- 
 ness withdrawing into the shade that it may rest from the 
 burden of thought, and of the tomb, that divine bed, 
 where the soul in its turn rests from life. To sleep is to 
 strain and purify our emotions, to deposit the mud of life, 
 to calm the fever of the soul, to return into the bosom of 
 maternal nature, thence to re-issue, healed and strong. 
 Sleep is a sort of innocence and purification. Blessed be 
 He who gave it to the poor sons of men as the sure and 
 faithful companion of life, our daily healer and consoler. 
 
 April 27, 1853. This evening I read the treatise by 
 Nicole so much admired by Mme. de Sevigne: "Des 
 mot/ens de conserver la paix avec les hommes." Wisdom so 
 gentle and so insinuating, so shrewd, piercing, and yot 
 humble, which divines so well the hidden thoughts and 
 secrets of the heart, and brings them all into the sacred 
 bondage of love to God and man, how good and delightful 
 a thing it is! Everything in it is smooth, even well put 
 together, well thought out, but no display, no tinsel, 110 
 worldly ornaments of style. The moralist forgets himself 
 and in us appeals only to the conscience. He becomes a 
 confessor, a friend, a covmsftllor.
 
 gO AMTKL'8 JOURNAL. 
 
 May 11, 1853. Psychology, poetry, philosophy, history, 
 and science, I have swept rapidly to-day on the wings of 
 the invisible hippogriff through all these spheres of 
 thought. But the general impression has been one of 
 tumult and anguish, temptation and disquiet. 
 
 I love to plunge deep into the ocean of life; but it is not 
 without losing sometimes all sense of the axis and the pole, 
 without losing myself and feeling the consciousness of my 
 own nature and vocation growing faint and wavering. 
 The whirlwind of the wandering Jew carries me away, 
 tears me from my little familiar enclosure, and makes me 
 behold all the empires of men. In my voluntary abandon- 
 ment to the generality, the universal, the infinite, my parti- 
 cular ego evaporates like a drop of water in a furnace ; it 
 only condenses itself anew at the return of cold, after en- 
 thusiasm has died out and the sense of reality has returned. 
 Alternate expansion and condensation, abandonment and 
 recovery of self, the conquest of the world to be pursued 
 on the one side, the deepening of consciousness on the 
 other such is the play of the inner life, the march of the 
 microcosmic mind, the marriage of the individual soul with 
 the universal soul, the finite with the infinite, whence 
 .springs the intellectual progress of man. Other betrothals 
 unite the soul to God, the religious consciousness with the 
 divine; these belong to the history of the will. And what 
 precedes will is feeling, preceded itself by instinct. Man 
 is only what he becomes profound truth; but he becomes 
 only what he is, truth still more profound. What am I? 
 Terrible question ! Problem of predestination, of birth, of 
 liberty, there lies the abyss. And yet one must plunge 
 into it, and I have done so. The prelude of Bach I 
 heard this evening predisposed me to it; it paints the soul 
 tormented and appealing and finally seizing upon God, 
 and possessing itself of peace and the infinite with an all- 
 prevailing fervor and passion. 
 
 May 14, 1853. Third quartet concert. It was short. 
 Variations for piano and violin by Beethoven, and two 
 ^quartets, not more. The quartets were perfectly clear and
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 51 
 
 easy to understand. One was by Mozart and the other by 
 Beethoven, so that I could compare the two masters. 
 Their individuality seemed to become plain to me: Mozart 
 grace, liberty, certainty, freedom, and precision of style, 
 and exquisite and aristocratic beauty, serenity of soul, the 
 health and talent of the master, both on a level with his 
 genius; Beethoven more pathetic, more passionate, more 
 torn with feeling, more intricate, more profound, less per- 
 fect, more the slave of his genius, more carried away by his 
 fancy or his passion, more moving, and more sublime than 
 Mozart. Mozart refreshes you, like the " Dialogues"of Plato ; 
 he respects you, reveals to you your strength, gives you 
 freedom a^d balance. Beethoven seizes upon you ; he is 
 more tragic and oratorical, while Mozart is more disinter- 
 ested and poetical. Mozart is more Greek, and Beethoven 
 /TITC Christian. One is serene, the other serious. The 
 fir"t is stronger than destiny, because he takes life less pro- 
 foundly; the second is less strong, because he has dared 
 to measure himself against deeper sorrows. His talent is 
 dfi always equal to his genius, and pathos is his dominant 
 feature, as perfection is that of Mozart. In Mozart the 
 bHance of the whole is perfect, and art triumphs; in Bee- 
 fch-oven feeling governs everything and emotion troubles his 
 H/t in proportion as it deepens it. 
 
 July 26, 1853. Why do I find it easier and more satis- 
 fj^tory, as a writer of verse, to compose in the short metres 
 than in the long and serious ones? Why, in general, am I 
 better fitted for what is difficult than for what is easy? 
 Always for the same reason. I cannot bring myself to 
 nM)ve freely, to show myself without a veil, to act on my 
 o T rn account and act seriously, to believe in and assert my- 
 s*~lf, whereas a piece of badinage which diverts attention 
 f^om myself to the thing in hand, from the feeling to the^ 
 sfcill of the writer, puts me at my ease. It is timidity 
 i"hich is at the bottom of it. There is another reason, too 
 I am afraid of greatness, I am not afraid of ingenuity, 
 ^.nd distrustful as I am both of my gift and my instru- 
 ment, I like to reassure myself by an elaborate practice of :
 
 52 A MIEL'S JO URNAL. 
 
 execution. All my published literary essays, therefore, are 
 little else than studies, games, exercises for the purpose of 
 testing myself. I play scales, as it were; I run up and 
 down my instrument, I train my hand and make sure of 
 its capacity and skill. But the work itself remains una- 
 chie^ed. My effort expires, and satisfied with the power to 
 act I never arrive at the will to act. I am always prepar- 
 ing and never accomplishing, and my energy is swallowed 
 up in a kind of barren curiosity. Timidity, then, and 
 curiosity these are the two obstacles which bar against me 
 a literary career. Nor must procrastination be forgotten. 
 I am always reserving for the future what is great, serious, 
 and important, and meanwhile, I am eager to exhaust what 
 is pretty and trifling. Sure of my devotion to things that 
 are vast and profound, I am always lingering in their con- 
 traries lest I should neglect them. Serious at bottom, I 
 am frivolous in appearance. A lover of thought, I seem 
 to care above all, for expression ; I keep the substance for 
 myself, and reserve the form for others. So that the net 
 result of my timidity is that I never treat the public seri- 
 ously, and that I only show myself to it in what is amus- 
 ing, enigmatical, or capricious; the result of my curiosity 
 is that everything tempts me, the shell as well as the 
 mountain, and that I lose myself in endless research ; while 
 the habit of procrastination keeps me forever at prelimina- 
 ries and antecedents, and production itself is never even 
 begun. 
 
 But if that is the fact, the fact might be different. I 
 understand myself, but I do not approve myself. 
 
 August 1, 1853. I have just finished Pelletan's book, 
 " Profession de f oi du dix-nenvi^me Seicle. " It is a fine book 
 Only one thing is wanting to it the idea of evil. It is a 
 kind of supplement to the theory of Condorcet indefinite 
 perfectibility, man essentially good, life, which is a physi- 
 ological notion, dominating virtue, duty, and holiness, in 
 short, a non-ethical conception of history, liberty identified 
 with nature, the natural man taken for the whole man. 
 The aspirations which such a book represents are generous
 
 AMIEVS JOURNAL. 53 
 
 and poetical, but in the first place dangerous, since they 
 lead to an absolute confidence in instinct; and in the second, 
 credulous and unpractical, for they set before us a mere 
 dream man, and throw a veil over both present and past 
 reality. The book is at once the plea justificatory of prog- 
 ress, conceived as fatal and irresistible, and an enthusiastic 
 hymn to the triumph of humanity. It is earnest, but 
 morally superficial ; poetical, but fanciful and untrue. It 
 confounds the progress of the race with the progress of the 
 individual, the progress of civilization with the advance of 
 the inner life. Why? Because its criterion is quantita- 
 tive, that is to say, purely exterior (having regard to the 
 wealth of life), and not qualitative (the goodness of life). 
 Always the same tendency to take the appearance for the- 
 thing, the form for the substance, the law for the essence, 
 always the same absence of moral personality, the same- 
 obtuseness of conscience, which has never recognized 
 sin present in the will, which places evil outside of man, 
 moralizes from outside, and transforms to its own liking the 
 whole lesson of history ! What is at fault is the philo- 
 sophic superficiality of France, which she owes to her fatal 
 notion of religion, itself due to a life fashioned by Cathol- 
 icism and by absolute monarchy. 
 
 Catholic thought cannot conceive of personality as 
 supreme and conscious of itself. Its boldness and its weak- 
 ness come from one and the same cause from an absence- 
 of the sense of responsibility, from that vassal state of con- 
 science which knows only slavery or anarchy, which pro- 
 claims but does not obey the law, because the law is outside 
 it, not within it. Another illusion is that of Quinet and 
 Michelet, who imagine it possible to come out of Cathol- 
 icism without entering into any other positive form of 
 religion, and whose idea is to fight Catholicism by philos- 
 ophy, a philosophy which is, after all, Catholic at bottom, 
 since it springs from anti-Catholic reaction. The mind 
 and the conscience, which have been formed by Catholi- 
 cism, are powerless to rise to any other form of religion. 
 From Catholicism, as from Epicureanism there is no re- 
 turn.
 
 54 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 October 11, 1853. My third day at Turin, is now over 
 I have been able to penetrate farther than ever before into 
 the special genius of this town and people. I have felt it 
 live, have realized it little by little, as my intuition be- 
 came more distinct. That is what I care for most: to 
 seize the soul of things, the soul of a nation; to live the 
 objective life, the life outside self; to find my way into 
 a new moral country. I long to assume the citizenship of 
 this unknown world, to enrich myself with thu fresh form 
 of existence, to feel it from within, to link myself to it, 
 and to reproduce it sympathetically ; this is the end and the 
 rewar^ of my efforts. To-day the problem grew clear to 
 me a* I stood on the terrace of the military hospital, in 
 full view of the Alps, the weather fresh and clear in spite 
 of a stormy sky. Such an intuition after all is nothing 
 out a synthesis wrought by instinct, a synthesis to which 
 everything streets, houses, landscape, accent, dialect, 
 physiognomies, history, and habits contribute their share. 
 I might call it the ideal integration of a people or its re- 
 duction to the generating point," or an entering into its 
 consciousness. This generating point explains everything 
 else, art, religion, history, politics, manners; and without 
 it nothing can be explained. The ancients realized their 
 consciousness in the national God. Modern nationalities, 
 more complicated and less artistic, are more difficult to 
 decipher. What one seeks for in them is the dcemon, the 
 fatum, the inner genius, the mission, the primitive disposi- 
 tion, both what there is desire for and what there is power 
 for, the force in them and its limitations. 
 
 A pure and life-giving freshness of thought and of the 
 spiritual life seemed to play about me, borne on the breeze 
 descending from the Alps. I breathed an atmosphere of 
 spiritual freedom, and I nailed with emotion and rapture 
 the mountains whence was wafted to me this feeling of 
 strength and purity. A thousand sensations, thoughts, 
 and analogies crowded upon me. History, too, the history 
 of the sub- Alpine countries, from the Ligurians to Hanni- 
 bal, from Hannibal to Charlemagne , from Charlemagne to
 
 A MI BUS JO URNAL. 55 
 
 Napoleon, passed through my mind. All the possible points 
 of view, were, so to speak, piled upon each other, and one 
 caught glimpses of some eccentrically across others. I was 
 enjoying and I was learning. Sight passed into vision without 
 a trace of hallucination, and the landscape was my guide, 
 my Virgil. 
 
 All this made me very sensible of the difference between 
 me and the majority of travelers, all of whom have a 
 special object, and content themselves with one thing or 
 'with several, while I desire all or nothing, and am forever 
 straining toward the total, whether of all possible objects, 
 or of all the elements present in the reality. In other 
 words, what I desire is the sum of all desires, and what I 
 seek to know is the sum of all different kinds of knowl- 
 edge. Always the complete, the absolute; the teres atque 
 rotundum, sphericity, non-resignation. 
 
 October 27, 1853. I thank Thee, my God, for the hour 
 that I have just passed in Thy presence. Thy will wa& 
 clear to me ; I measured my faults, counted my griefs, and 
 felt Thy goodness toward me. I realized my own nothing- 
 ness, Thou gavest me Thy peace. In bitterness there is 
 sweetness; in affliction, joy; in submission, strength; 
 in the God who punishes, the God who loves. To lose 
 one's life that one may gain it, to offer it that one may 
 receive it, to possess nothing that one may conquer all, to 
 renounce self that God may give Himself to us, how im- 
 possible a problem, and how sublime a reality ! No one 
 truly knows happiness who has not suffered, and the re- 
 deemed are happier than the elect. 
 
 (Same day.) -The divine miracle par excellence consist? 
 surely in the apotheosis of grief, the transfiguration of evil 
 by good. The work of creation finds its consummation, 
 aud the eternal will of the infinite mercy finds its fulfill- 
 ment only in the restoration of the free creature to God 
 and of an evil world to goodness, through love. Every 
 soul in which conversion has taken place is a symbol of the 
 history of the world. To be happy, to possess eternal life, 
 to be in God, to be saved, all these are the same. All
 
 $Q AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 alike mean the solution of the problem, the aim of exist- 
 ence- And happiness is cumulative, as misery may be. 
 An eternal growth is an unchangeable peace, an ever pro- 
 founder depth of apprehension, a possession constantly 
 more intense and more spiritual of the joy of heaven this 
 is happiness. Happiness has no limits, because God has 
 neither bottom nor bounds, and because happiness is noth- 
 ing but the conquest of God through love. 
 
 The center of life is neither in thought nor in feeling, 
 nor in will, nor even in consciousness, so far as it thinks, 
 feels, or wishes. For moral truth may have been pene- 
 trated and possessed in all these ways, and escape us still. 
 Deeper even than consciousness there is our being itself, 
 our very substance, our nature. Only those truths 
 which have entered into this last region, which have be- 
 come ourselves, become spontaneous and involuntary, in- 
 stinctive and unconscious, are really our life that is to say 
 something more than our property. So long as we are able 
 to distinguish any space whatever between the truth and us 
 we remain outside it. The thought, the feeling, the 
 desire, the consciousness of life, are not yet quite life. 
 But peace and repose can nowhere be found except in life, 
 and in eternal life and the eternal life is the divine life, is 
 God. To become divine is then the aim of life : then only can 
 truth be said to be ours beyond the possibility of loss, because 
 it is no longer outside us, nor even in us, but we are it,and it is 
 we ; we ourselves are a truth, a will, a work of God. Liberty 
 has become nature ; the creature is one with its creator one 
 through love. It is what it ought to be; its education is 
 finished, and its final happiness begins. The sun of time 
 declines and the light of eternal blessedness arises. 
 
 Our fleshly hearts may call this mysticism. It is the 
 mysticism of Jesus: "I am one with my Father; ye shall 
 be one with me. We will be one with you." 
 
 Do not despise your situation; in it you must act, suffer, 
 and conquer. From every point on earth we are equallv 
 near to heaven and to the infinite.
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 55 
 
 There are two states or conditions of pride. The first is 
 one of self-approval, the second one of self-contempt. 
 Pride is seen probably at its purest in the last. 
 
 It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating 
 that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by show- 
 ing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping 
 that we draw water into the well. 
 
 February 1, 1854. A walk. The atmosphere incredi- 
 bly pure, a warm caressing gentleness in the sunshine joy 
 in one's whole being. Seated motionless upon a bench on 
 the Tranchees, beside the slopes clothed with moss and 
 tapestried with green, I passed some intense delicious mo- 
 ments, allowing great elastic waves of music, wafted to me 
 from a military band on the terrace of St. Antoine, to surge 
 and bound through me. Every way I was happy, as idler, 
 as painter, as poet. Forgotten impressions of childhood 
 and youth came back to me all those indescribable effects 
 wrought by color, shadow, sunlight, green hedges, and 
 songs of birds, upon the soul just opening to poetry. I be- 
 came again young, wondering, and simple, as candor and 
 ignorance are simple. I abandoned myself to life and to 
 nature, and they cradled me with an infinite gentleness. 
 To open one's heart in purity to this ever pure nature, to 
 allow this immortal life of things to penetrate into one's 
 soul, is at the same time to listen to the voice of God. 
 Sensation may be i prayer, and self-abandonment an act of 
 devotion. 
 
 February 18, 1854. Everything tends to become fixed, 
 solidified, and crystallized in this French tongue of ours, 
 which seeks form and not substance, the result and not 
 its formation, what is seen rather than what is thought, 
 the outside rather than the inside. 
 
 We like the accomplished end and not the pursuit of the 
 end, the goal and not the road, in short, ideas ready-made 
 and bread ready-baked, the reverse of Lessing's principle. 
 What we IOOK for above all are conclusions. This
 
 58 A MlttUS JO URN A L. 
 
 clearness of the "ready-made" is a superficial clearness 
 physical, outward, solar clearness, so to speak, but in the 
 absence of a sense for origin and genesis it is the clearness 
 of the incomprehensible, the clearness of opacity, the clear- 
 ness of the obscure. We are always trifling on the surface. 
 Our temper is formal that is to say, frivolous and ma- 
 ';erial, or rather artistic and not philosophical. For what 
 it seeks is the figure, the fashion and manner of things, 
 not their deepest life, their soul, their secret. 
 
 March 16, 1854. (From Veevay to Geneva.) What 
 message had this lake for me, with its sad serenity, its 
 soft and even tranquility, in which was mirrored the cold mo- 
 notonous pallor of mountains and clouds? That disen- 
 chanted disillusioned life may still be traversed by duty,lit by 
 a memory of heaven. I was visited by a clear and profound 
 intuition of the flight of things, of the fatality of all life, of 
 the melancholy which is below the surface of all exist- 
 ence, but also of that deepest nepth which subsists forever 
 beneath the fleeting wave. 
 
 December 17, 1854. When we are doing nothing in 
 particular, it is then that we are living through all our be- 
 ing; and when we cease to add to our growth it is only that 
 we may ripen and possess ourselves. W T ill is suspended, 
 but nature and time are always active and if our life is no 
 longer our work, the work goes on none the less. With 
 us, without us, or in spite of us, our existence travels 
 through its appointed phases, our invisible Psyche weaves 
 the silk of its chrysalis, our destiny fulfills itself, and all 
 the hours of life work together toward that flowering time 
 which we call death. This activity, then, is inevitable 
 and fatal; sleep and idleness do not interrupt it, but it 
 nay become free and moral, a joy instead of a terror. 
 
 Nothing is more characteristic of a man than the manner 
 in which he behaves toward fools. 
 
 It costs us a great deal of trouble not to be of the same 
 opinion as our self-love, and not to be ready to believe in 
 the good taste of those who believe in our merits.
 
 A MIKL'S JO UENAL. 59 
 
 Does not true humility consist in accepting one's infirmity 
 ;as a trial, and one's evil disposition as a cross, in sacrificing 
 all one's pretensions and ambitions, even those of con- 
 science? True humility is contentment. 
 
 A man only understands that of which he has already 
 the beginnings in himself. 
 
 Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and 
 of life, the secret of eloquence and of virtue, and of all 
 moral authority. 
 
 March 28, 1855. Not a blade of grass but has a story to 
 tell, not a heart but has its romance, not a life which does 
 :not hide a secret which is either its thorn or its spur. 
 Everywhere grief, hope, comedy, tragedy ; even under the 
 petrifaction of old age, as in the twisted forms of fossils, 
 we may discover the agitations and tortures of youth. 
 This thoaght is the magic wand of poets and of preachers: 
 it strips the scales from our fleshly eyes, and gives us a 
 'dear view into human life; it opens to the ear a world of 
 unknown melodies, and makes us understand the thousand 
 languages of nature. Thwarted love makes a man a poly- 
 glot, and grief transforms him into a diviner and a sorcerer 
 
 April 16, 1855. I realized this morning the prodigious 
 effect of climate on one's state of mind. I was Italian or 
 Spanish. In this blue and limpid air, and under this 
 southern sun, the very walls smile at you. All the chest- 
 nut trees were en fete; with their glistening buds shining 
 like little flames at the curved ends of the branches, they 
 Krere the candelabra of the spring decking the festival of 
 eternal nature. How young everything was, how kindly, ho\v 
 gracious ! the moist freshness of the grass, the transparent 
 shadows in the courtyards, the strength of the old cathedral 
 towers, the white edges of the roads. I felt myself a child ; 
 the sap of life mounted again into my veins as it does in 
 plants. How sweet a thing is a little simple enjoyment! 
 And now, a brass band which has stopped in the street
 
 60 A MIKL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 makes my heart leap as it did at eighteen. Thanks be cc 
 God; there have been so many weeks and months when I 
 thought myself an old man. Come poetry, nature, youth, 
 and love, knead my life again with your fairy hands; 
 weave round me once more your immortal spells; sing your 
 siren melodies, make me drink of the cup of immortality, 
 lead me back to the Olympus of the soul. Or rather, no 
 paganism ! God of joy and of grief, do with me what Thou 
 wilt; grief is good, and joy is good also. Thou art leading 
 me now through joy. I take it from Thy hands, and I give 
 Thee thanks for it. 
 
 April 17, 1855. The weather is still incredibly brilliant, 
 warm, and clear. The day is full of the singing of birds, 
 the night is full of stars, nature has become all kindness, 
 and it is a kindness clothed upon with splendor. 
 
 For nearly two hours have I been lost in the contem- 
 plation of this magnificent spectacle. I felt myself in the 
 temple of the infinite, in the presence of the worlds, God's 
 guest in this vast nature. The stars wandering in the pale 
 ether drew me far away from earth. What peace beyond 
 the power of words, what dews of life eternal, they shed 
 on the adoring soul ! I felt the earth floating like a boat 
 in this blue ocean. Such deep and tranquil delight nour- 
 ishes the whole man, it purifies and ennobles. I surren- 
 dered myself, I was all gratitude and docility. 
 
 April 21, J 855. I have been reading a great deal : ethnog- 
 raphy, comparative anatomy, cosmical systems. I have 
 traversed the universe from the deepest depths of the 
 empyrean to the peristaltic movements of the atoms in the 
 elementary cell. I .have felt myself expanding in the in- 
 finite, and enfranchised in spirit from the bounds of time 
 and space, able to trace back the whole boundless creation 
 to a point without dimensions, and seeing the vast multi- 
 tude of suns, of milky ways, of stars, and nebulae, all exist- 
 ent in the point. 
 
 And on all sides stretched mysteries, marvels and prod- 
 igies, without limit, without number, and without end. 
 I felt the unfathomable thought of which the universe is
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 61 
 
 the symbol live and burn within me; I touched, proved, 
 tasted, embraced my nothingness and my immensity; I 
 kissed the hem of the garments of God, and gave Him 
 thanks for being Spirit and for being life. Such moments 
 are glimpses of the divine. They make one conscious of 
 one's immortality; they bring home to one that an eternity 
 is not too much for the study of the thoughts and works 
 of the eternal; they awaken in us an adoring ecstasy and 
 the ardent humility of love. 
 
 May 23, 1855. Every hurtful passion draws us to it, as 
 an abyss does, by a kind of vertigo. Feebleness of will 
 brings about weakness of head, and the abyss in spite of its 
 horror, comes to fascinate us, as though it were a place of 
 refuge. Terrible danger! For this abyss is within us; this 
 gulf, open like the vast jaws of an infernal serpent bent on 
 devouring us, is in the depth of our own being, and our 
 liberty floats over this void, which is always seeking to 
 swallow it up. Our only talisman lies in that concentra" 
 tion of moral force which we call conscience, that small 
 inextinguishable flame of which the light is duty and the 
 warmth love. This little flame should be the star of our 
 life ; it alone can guide our trembling ark across the tu- 
 mult of the great waters ; it alone can enable us to escape 
 the temptations of the sea, the storms and the monsters 
 which are the offspring of night and the deluge. Faith 
 in God, in a holy, merciful, fatherly God, is the divine ray 
 which kindles this flame. 
 
 How deeply I feel the profound and terrible poetry of 
 all these primitive terrors from which have issued the vari- 
 ous theogonies of the world, and how it all grows clear to 
 me, and becomes a symbol of the one great unchang- 
 ing thought, the thought of God about the universe' 
 How present and sensible to my inner sense is the unity oi 
 everything ! It seems to me that I am able to pierce to the 
 sublime motive which, in all the infinite spheres of exist- 
 ence, and through all the modes of space and time, every 
 created form reproduces and sings within the bond of an 
 eternal harmony. From the infernal shades I feel myself
 
 62 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 mounting toward the regions of light; my flight across 
 chaos finds its rest in paradise. Heaven, hell, the world, 
 are within ns. Man is the great abyss. 
 
 July 27, 1855. So life passes away, tossed like a 
 boat by the waves up and down, hither and thither, 
 drenched by the spray, stained by the foam, now thrown 
 upon the bank, now drawn back again according to the 
 endless caprice of the water. Such, at least, is the life of 
 the heart and the passions, the life which Spinoza and the 
 stoics reprove, and which is the exact opposite of that 
 serene and contemplative life, always equable like the star- 
 light, in which man lives at peace, and sees everything 
 under its eternal aspect; the opposite also of the life of con- 
 science, in which God alone speaks, and all self-will sur- 
 renders itself to His will made manifest. 
 
 I pass from one to another of these three existences, 
 which are equally known to me; but this very mobility 
 deprives me of the advantages of each. For my heart is 
 worn with scruples, the soul in me cannot crush the needs 
 of the heart, and the conscience is troubled and no longer 
 knows how to distinguish, in the chaos of contradictory 
 inclinations, the voice of duty or the will of God. The 
 want of simple faitl;, the indecision which springs from 
 distrust of self, tend to make all my personal life a matter 
 of doubt and uncertainty. I am afraid of the subjective 
 life, and recoil from every enterprise, demand, or promise 
 which may oblige me to realize myself; I feel a terror of 
 action, and am only at ease in the impersonal, disinter- 
 ested, and objective life of thought. The reason seems 
 to be timidity, and the timidity springs from the exces- 
 sive development of the reflective power which has almost 
 destroyed in me all spontaneity, impulse, and instinct, 
 and therefore all boldness and confidence. Whenever I 
 am forced to act, 1 see cause for error and repentance every- 
 where, everywhere hidden threats and masked vexations. 
 From a child I have been liable to the disease of irony, and 
 that it may not be altogether crushed by destiny, 
 my nature seems to have armed itself with a cautio
 
 AMIEUS JOURNAL. 63 
 
 strong enough to prevail against any of life's blandish- 
 ments. It is just this strength which is my weakness. I 
 have a horror of being duped, above all, duped by myself, 
 and I would rather cut myself off from all life's joys than 
 deceive or be deceived. Humiliation, then, is the sorrow 
 which I fear the most, and therefore it would seem as if 
 pride were the deepest rooted of my faults. 
 
 This may be logical, but it is not the truth : it seemr 
 to me that it is really distrust, incurable doubt of th. 
 future, a sense of the justice but not of the goodness of 
 God in short, unbelief, which is my misfortune and my 
 sin. Every act is a hostage delivered over to avenging 
 destiny there is the instinctive belief which chills and 
 freezes ; every act is a pledge confided to a fatherly prov- 
 idence, there is the belief which calms. 
 
 Pain seems to me a punishment and not a mercy : this is 
 why I have a secret horror of it. And as I feel myself 
 vulnerable at all points, and everywhere accessible to pain, 
 I prefer to remain motionless, like a timid child, who, left 
 alone in his father's laboratory, dares not touch any- 
 thing for fear of springs, explosions, and catastrophes, 
 which may burst from every corner at the least movement 
 of his inexperienced hand?. I have trust in God directly 
 and as revealed in nature, but I have a deep distrust of all 
 free and evil agents. I feel or foresee evil, moral and 
 physical, as the consequence of every error, fault, or sin, 
 and I am ashamed of pain. 
 
 At bottom, is it not a mere boundless self-love, the 
 purism of perfection, an incapacity to accept our human 
 condition, a tacit protest against the order of the world, 
 which lies at the root of my inertia ? It means all or noth- 
 ing, a vast ambition made inactive by disgust, a yearning 
 that cannot be uttered for the ideal, joined with an of- 
 ended dignity and a wounded pride which will have noth- 
 ing to say to what they consider beneath them. It springs 
 from the ironical temper which refuses to take either self 
 or reality seriously, because it is forever comparing both 
 with the dimly-seen infinite of its dreams. It is a state of
 
 64 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 mental reservation in which one lends one's self to circnm 
 stances for form's sake, but refuses to recognize them in 
 one's heart because one cannot see the necessity or the di- 
 vine order in them. I am disinterested because I am in 
 different; I have nothing to say against what is, and yet 
 I am never satisfied. I am too weak to conquer, and yet I 
 [will not be conquered it is the isolation of the disen- 
 chanted soul, which has put even hope away from it. 
 
 But even this is a trial laid upon one. Its providential 
 purpose is no doubt to lead one to that true renunciation of 
 which charity is the sign and symbol. It is when one 
 expects nothing more for one's self that one is able to love. 
 To do good to men because we love them, to use every 
 talent we have so as to please the Father from whom we 
 hold it for His service, there is no other way of reaching 
 and curing this deep discontent with life which hides itself 
 under an appearance of indifference. 
 
 September 4, 1855. In the government of the sonl the 
 parliamentary form succeeds the monarchical. Good 
 sense, conscience, desire, reason, the present and the past, 
 the old man and the new, prudence and generosity, take 
 up their parable in turn; the reign of argument begins; 
 chaos replaces order, and darkness light. Simple will rep- 
 resents the autocratic regime, interminable discussion the 
 deliberate regime of the soul. The one is preferable from 
 the theoretical point of view, the other from the practical. 
 Knowledge and action are their two respective advantages. 
 . ( But the best of all would be to be able to realize three 
 powers in the soul. Besides the man of counsel we want 
 the man of action and the man of judgment. In me, re- 
 flection comes to no useful end, because it is forever return- 
 ing upon itself, disputing and debating. I am wanting in 
 both the general who commands and the judge who 
 decides. 
 
 Analysis is dangerous if it overrules the synthetic fac- 
 ulty; reflection is to be feared if it destroys our power of 
 intuition, and inquiry is fatal if it supplants faith. De- 
 composition becomes deadly when it surpasses in strength
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 65 
 
 the combining and constructive energies of life, and the 
 separate action of the powers of the soul tends to mere 
 disintegration and destruction as soon as it becomes impos- 
 sible to bring them to bear as one undivided force. When 
 the sovereign abdicates anarchy begins. 
 
 It is just here that my danger lies. Unity of life, of 
 force, of action, of expression, is becoming impossible to 
 me; I am legion, division, analysis, and reflection; the 
 passion for dialectic, for fine distinctions, absorbs and 
 weakens me. The point which I have reached seems to be 
 explained by a too restless search for perfection, by the 
 abuse of the critical faculty, and by an unreasonable dis- 
 trust of first impulses, first thoughts, first words. Unity 
 and simplicity of being, confidence, and spontaneity of life, 
 are drifting out of my reach, and this is why I can no 
 longer act. 
 
 Give up, then, this trying to know all, to embrace all. 
 Learn to limit yourself, to content yourself with some 
 definite thing, and some definite work; dare to be what 
 you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you 
 are not, and to believe in your own individuality. Self- 
 distrust is destroying you ; trust, surrender, abandon your- 
 self; "believe and thou shalt be healed." Unbelief is 
 death, and depression and self -satire are alike unbelief. 
 
 From the point of view of happiness, the problem of life 
 is insoluble, for it is our highest aspirations which pre- 
 vent us from being happy. From the point of view of 
 duty, there is the same difficulty, for the fulfillment of 
 duty brings peace, not happiness. It is divine love, the 
 love of the holiest, the possession of God by faith, which 
 solves the difficulty; for if sacrifice has itself become a joy, 
 a lasting, growing and imperishable joy the soul is then 
 secure of an all-sufficient and unfailing nourishment. 
 
 January 21, 1856. Yesterday seems to me as far off as 
 though it were last year. My memory holds nothing more 
 of the past than its general plan, just as my eye perceives
 
 66 AMIEL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 nothing more in the starry heaven. It is no more possible* 
 for me to recover one of my days from the depths of mem- 
 ory than if it were a glass of water poured into a lake; it 
 is not so much a lost thing as a thing melted and fused; the 
 individual has returned into the whole. The divisions of time 
 are categories which have no power to mold my life, and 
 leave no more lasting impression than lines traced by a 
 stick in water. My life, my individuality, are fluid, there 
 is nothing for it but to resign one's self. 
 
 April 9, 1856. How true it is that our destinie& are- 
 decided by nothings and that a small imprudence helped by 
 some insignificant accident, as an acorn is fertilized by a drop 
 of rain, may raise the trees on which perhaps we and others 
 shall be crucified. What happens is quite different from 
 that we planned ; we planned a blessing and there springs 
 from it a curse. How many times the serpent of fatality,, 
 or rather the law of life, the force of things, intertwining 
 itself with some very simple facts, cannot be cut away by 
 any effort, and the logic of situations and characters leads 
 inevitably to a dreaded denouement. It is the fatal spell of 
 destiny, which obliges us to feed our grief from our own 
 hand, to prolong the existence of our vulture, to throw 
 into the furnace of our punishment and expiation, our 
 powers, our qualities, our very virtues, one by one, and so 
 forces us to recognize our nothingness, our dependence and 
 the implacable majesty of law. Faith in a providence 
 softens punishment but does not do away with it. The 
 wheels of the divine chariot crush us first of all that justice 
 may be satisfied and an example given to men, and then 
 a hand is stretched out to us to raise us up, or at least to 
 reconcile us with the love hidden under the justice. Par- 
 don cannot precede repentance and repentance only begins 
 with humility. And so long as any fault whatever appears 
 trifling to us, so long as we see, not so much the cul- 
 pability of as the excuses for imprudence or negligence, 
 so long, in short, as Job murmurs and as providence 
 is thought to be too severe, so long as there is any 
 inner protestation against fate, or doubt as to the per-
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 07 
 
 feet justice of God, there is not yet entire humility or true 
 repentance. It is when we accept the expiation that it can 
 be spared us; it is when we submit sincerely that grace can 
 be granted to us. Only when grief finds its work done can 
 God dispense us from it. Trial then only stops when it is 
 useless: that is why it scarcely ever stops. Faith in the 
 justice and love of the Father is the best and indeed the 
 only support under the sufferings of this life. The foun- 
 dation of all of our pains is unbelief; we doubt whether 
 what happens to us ought to happen to us; we think our- 
 selves wiser than providence, because to avoid fatalism wo 
 believe in accident. Liberty in submission what a problem ! 
 And yet that is what we must always come back to. 
 
 May 7, 1856. I have been reading Rosenkrantz's" His- 
 tory of Poetry"* all day: it touches upon all the great 
 names of Spain, Portugal, and France, as far as Louis XV. 
 It is a good thing to take these rapid surveys; the shift- 
 ing point of view gives a perpetual freshness to the sub- 
 ject and to the ideas presented, a literary experience 
 which is always pleasant and bracing. For one of my 
 temperament, this philosophic and morphological mode of 
 embracing and expounding literary history has a strong 
 attraction. But it is the antipodes of the French method 
 of proceeding, which takes, as it were, only the peaks of 
 the subject, links them together by theoretical figures and 
 triangulations, and then assumes these lines to rep- 
 resent the genuine face of the country. The real process 
 of formation of a general opinion, of a public taste, of an 
 established genre, cannot be laid bare by an abstract 
 method, which suppresses the period of growth 
 in favor of the final fruit, which prefers clear- 
 ness of outline to fullness of statement, and sacrifices the 
 preparation to the result, the multitude to the chosen type. 
 This French method, however, is eminently characteristic, 
 and it is linked by invisible ties to their respect for cus- 
 
 *"Gescliiclite der Poesie," by Kosenkrantz, the pupil and biographer 
 of Hegel.
 
 68 A MI KISS JO URN A L. 
 
 torn and fashion, to the Catholic and dualist instinct which 
 admits two truths, two contradictory worlds, and accepts 
 quite naturally what is magical, incomprehensible, and 
 arbitrary in God, the king, or language. It is the philoso- 
 phy of accident become habit, instinct, nature and belief, 
 it is the religion of caprice. 
 
 By one of those eternal contrasts which redress the bal- 
 ance of things, the romance peoples, who excel in the prac- 
 tical matters of life, care nothing for the philosophy of it ; 
 while the Germans, who know very little about the prac- 
 tice of life, are masters of its theory. Every living being 
 seeks instinctively to complete itself; this is the secret 
 law according to which that nation whose sense of life is 
 fullest and keenest, drifts most readily toward a mathe- 
 matical rigidity of theory. Matter and form are the eter- 
 nal oppositions, and the mathematical intellects are often 
 attracted by the facts of life, just as the sensuous minds 
 are often drawn toward the study of abstract law. Thus 
 strangely enough, what we think we are is just what we 
 are not: what we desire to be is what suits us least; our 
 theories condemn us, and our practice gives the lie to our 
 theories. And the contradiction is an advantage, for it is 
 the source of conflict, of movement, and therefore a con- 
 dition of progress. Every life is an inward struggle, every 
 struggle supposes two contrary forces; nothing real is sim- 
 ple, and whatever thinks itself simple is in reality the 
 farthest from simplicity. Therefore it would seem that 
 every state is a moment in a series; every being a com- 
 promise between contraries. In concrete dialectic we have 
 the key which opens to us the understanding of beings in 
 the series of beings, of states in the series of moments; 
 and it is in dynamics that we have the explanation of equi- 
 librium. Every situation is an equilibrium of forces; every 
 life is a struggle between opposing forces working within 
 the limits of a certain equilibrium. 
 
 These two principles have been often clear to me, but I 
 have never applied them widely or rigorously enough. 
 
 July 1, 1856. A man and still more a woman, always
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL, 6'J 
 
 betrays something of his or her nationality. The women 
 of Russia, for instance, like the lakes and rivers of their 
 native country, seem to be subject to sudden and prolonged 
 fits of torpor. In their movement, undulating and caress- 
 ing like that of water, there is always a threat of unfore- 
 seen frost. The high latitude, the difficulty of life, the 
 inflexibility of their autocratic regime, the heavy and 
 mournful sky, the inexorable climate, all these harsh fatal- 
 ities have left their mark upon the Muscovite race. A 
 certain somber obstinacy, a kind of primitive ferocity, a 
 foundation of savage harshness which, under the influence 
 of circumstances, might become implacable and pitiless; a 
 cold strength, an indomitable power of resolution which 
 would rather wreck the whole world than yield, the inde- 
 structible instinct of the barbarian tribe, perceptible in the 
 half-civilized nation, all these traits are visible to an at- 
 tentive eye, even in the harmless extravagances and caprices 
 of a young woman of this powerful race. Even in their 
 badinage they betray something of that fierce and rigid 
 nationality which burns its own towns and [as Napoleon 
 said] keeps battalions of dead soldiers on their feet. 
 
 What terrible rulers the Russians would be if ever they 
 should spread the night of their rule over the countries of 
 the south! They would bring us a polar despotism, 
 tryanny such as the world has never known, silent as dark- 
 ness, rigid as ice, insensible as bronze, decked with an 
 outer amiability and glittering with the cold brilliancy of 
 snow, a slavery without compensation or relief. Probably, 
 however, they will gradually lose both the virtues and the 
 defects of their semi-barbarism. The centuries as they 
 pass will ripen these sons of the north, and they will enter 
 into the concert of peoples in some other capacity than as 
 a menace or a dissonance. They have only to transform 
 their hardiness into strength, their cunning into grace, 
 their Muscovitism into humanity, to win love instead of 
 inspiring aversion or fear. 
 
 July 3, 1856. The German admires form, but he has 
 no genius for it. He is the opposite of the Greek ; he has
 
 70 A MIEL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 critical instinct, aspiration, and desire, but no serene com- 
 mand of beauty. The south, more artistic, more self- 
 satisfied, more capable of execution, rests idly in the sense 
 of its own power to achieve. On one side you have ideas, 
 on the other side, talent. The realm of Germany is beyond 
 the clouds; that of the southern peoples is on this earth. 
 The Germanic race thinks and feels; the southerners feel 
 and express; the Anglo-Saxons will and do. To know, to 
 feel, to act, there you have the trio of Germany, Italy, 
 Kngland. France formulates, speaks, decides, and laughs. 
 Thought, talent, will, speech; or, in other words science, 
 art, action, proselytism. So the parts of the quartet are 
 assigned. 
 
 July 21, 1856. Mit sack und pack here I am back 
 again in my town rooms. I have said good-bye to my 
 friends and my country joys, to verdure, flowers, and hap- 
 piness. Why did I leave them after all? The reason I 
 gave myself was that I was anxious about my poor uncle, 
 who is ill. But at bottom are there not other reasons ? 
 Yes, several. There is the fear of making myself a burden 
 upon the two or three families of friends who show me 
 incessant kindness, for which I can make no return. 
 There are my books, which call me back. There is the 
 wish to keep faith with myself. But all that would be 
 nothing, I think, without another instinct, the instinct of 
 the wandering Jew, which snatches from me the cup I 
 have but just raised to my lips, which forbids me any pro- 
 longed enjoyment, and cries "go forward! Let there be 
 no falling asleep, no stopping, no attaching yourself to this 
 or that ! " This restless feeling is not the need of change. 
 It is rather the fear of what I love, the mistrust of what 
 charms me, the unrest of happiness. What a bizarre ten- 
 dency, and what a strange nature ! not to be able to enjoy 
 anything simply, naively, without scruple, to feel a force 
 upon one impelling one to leave the table, for fear the meal 
 should come to an end. Contradiction and mystery! not 
 to use, for fear of abusing; to think one's self obliged to go, 
 not because one has had enough, but because one has stayed
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 71 
 
 awhile. I am indeed always the same; the being who 
 wanders when he need not, the voluntary exile, the eternal 
 traveler, the man incapable of repose, who, driven on by 
 an inward voice, builds nowhere, buys and labors nowhere, 
 but passes, looks, carnps, and goes. And is there not 
 another reason for all this restlessness, in a certain sense of 
 void? of incessant pursuit of something wanting ? of long- 
 ing for a truer peace and a more entire satisfaction ? 
 Neighbors, friends, relations, I love them all ; and so long 
 as these affections are active, they leave in me no room for 
 a sense of want. But yet they do not fill my heart; and 
 that is why they have no power to fix it. I am always 
 waiting for the woman and the work which shall be capa- 
 ble of taking entire possession of my soul, and of becoming 
 my end and aim. 
 
 " Promenant par tout sejour 
 
 Le deuil que tu celes, 
 Psyche-papillon, un jour 
 Puisses-tu trouver 1'amour 
 
 Et perdre tes ailes ! " 
 
 I have not given away my heart : hence this restlessness 
 of spirit. I will not let it be taken captive by that which 
 cannot fill and satisfy it; hence this instinct of pitiless 
 detachment from all that charms me without permanently 
 binding me; so that it seems as if my love of movement, 
 which looks so like inconstancy, was at bottom only a per- 
 petual search, a hope, a desire, and a care, the malady of 
 the ideal. 
 
 . . . Life indeed must always be a compromise be- 
 .tween common sense and the ideal, the one abating nothing 
 of its demands, the other acommodating itself to what is 
 practicable and real. But marriage by common sense! 
 arrived at by a bargain ! Can it be anything but a profana- 
 tion? On the other, hand, is that not a vicious ideal which 
 hinders life from completing itself, and destroys the 
 family in germ ? Is there not too much of pride in 
 my ideal, pride which will not accept the common des- 
 tiny ? . . .
 
 72 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 Noon. I have been dreaming my head in my hand. 
 About what? About happiness. I have as it were, been 
 asleep on the fatherly breast of God. His will be done! 
 
 August 3, 1856. A delightful Sunday afternoon at 
 Pressy. Returned late, under a great sky magnificently 
 starred, with summer lightning playing from a point be- 
 hind the Jura. Drunk with poetry, and overwhelmed by 
 sensation after sensation, I came back slowly, blessing the 
 God of life, and plunged in the joy of the infinite. One 
 thing only I lacked, a soul with whom to share it all for 
 emotion and enthusiasm overflowed like water from a full 
 cup. The Milky Way, the great black poplars, the ripple 
 of the waves, the shooting stars, distant songs, the lamp- 
 lit town, all spoke to me in the language of poetry. I felt 
 myself almost a poet. The wrinkles of science disappeared 
 under the magic breath of admiration; the old elasticity 
 of soul, trustful, free, and living was mine once more. I 
 was once more young, capable of self-abandonment and of 
 love. All my barrenness had disappeared; the heavenly 
 dew had fertilized the dead and gnarled stick; it began to 
 be green and flower again. My God, how wretched 
 should we be without beauty ! But with it, everything is 
 born afresh in us; the senses, the heart, imagination, 
 reason, will, come together like the dead bones of the 
 prophet, and become one single and self-same energy. 
 What is happiness if it is not this plentitude of existence, 
 this close union with the universal and divine life? I have 
 been happy a whole half day, and I have been brooding 
 over my joy, steeping myself in it to the very depths of 
 consciousness. 
 
 October 22, 1856. We must learn to look upon life as 
 an apprenticeship to a progressive renunciation, a perpet- 
 ual diminution in our pretensions, our hopes, our powers, 
 and our liberty. The circle grows narrower and narrower; 
 we began with being eager to learn everything, to see every- 
 thing, to tame and conquer everything, and in all direc- 
 tions we reach our limit non plus ultra. Fortune, glory, 
 love, power, health, happiness, long life, all these blessings
 
 A Ml EL'S JO URN A L. 73 
 
 which have been possessed by other men seem at first 
 promised and accessible to us, and then we have to put the 
 dream away from us, to withdraw one personal claim after 
 another to make ourselves small and humble, to submit 
 to feel ourselves limited, feeble, dependent, ignorant and 
 poor, and to throw ourselves upon God for all, recognizing 
 our own worthl essness, and that AVC have no right to any- 
 thing. It is in this nothingness that we recover something 
 of life the divine spark is there at the bottom of it. 
 Resignation comes to us, and, in believing love, we recon- 
 quer the true greatness. 
 
 October 27, 1856. In all the chief matters of life we 
 are alone, and our true history is scarcely ever deciphered 
 by others. The chief part of the drama is a monologue, 
 rather an intimate debate between God, our conscience, and 
 ourselves. Tears, griefs, depressions, disappointments, 
 irritations, good and evil thoughts, decisions, uncertainties, 
 deliberations, all these belong to our secret, and are almost 
 all incommunicable and intransmissible, even when we try to 
 speak of them, and even when we write them down. 
 What is most precious in us never shows itself, never finds 
 an issue even in the closest intimacy. Only a part of it 
 reaches our consciousness, it scarcely enters into action ex- 
 cept in prayer, and is perhaps only perceived by God, for 
 our past rapidly becomes strange to us. Our monad may 
 be influenced by other monads, but none the less does it 
 remain impenetrable to them in its essence; and we our- 
 selves, when all is said, remain outside our own mystery. 
 The center of our consciousness is unconscious, as the 
 kernel of the sun is dark. All that we are, desire, do, and 
 know, is more or less superficial, and below the rays and 
 lightnings of our periphery there remains th darkness of 
 unfathomable substance. 
 
 I was then well-advised when, in my theory of the inner 
 man, I placed. at the foundation of the self, after the seven 
 spheres which the self contains had been successively dis- 
 engaged, a lowest depth of darkness, the abyss of the un- 
 revealed, the virtual pledge of an infinite future, the
 
 74 
 
 obscure self, the pure subjectivity which is incapable o^ 
 realizing itself in hiind) conscience, or reason, in the soul, 
 the heart, the imagination, or the life of the senses, and 
 which makes for itself attributes and conditions out of all 
 these forms of its own life. 
 
 But the obscure only exists that it may cease to exist. 
 In it lies the opportunity of all victory and all progress. 
 Whether it call itself fatality, death, night, or matter, it is; 
 the pedestal of life, of light, of liberty, and the spirit. 
 For it represents resistance that is to say, the fulcrum of 
 all activity, the occasion for its development and its 
 triumph. 
 
 December 17, 1856. This evening was the second 
 quartet concert. It stirred me much more than the first; 
 the music chosen was loftier and stronger. It was the 
 quartet in D minor of Mozart, and the quartet in C 
 major of Beethoven, separated by a Spohr concerto. This, 
 last, vivid, and brilliant as a whole, has fire in the allegro,, 
 feeling in the adagio, and elegance in the finale, but it is= 
 the product of one fine gift in a mediocre personality.. 
 With the two others you are at once in contact with 
 genius; you are admitted to the secrets of two great souls.. 
 Mozart stands for inward liberty, Beethoven for fcbe power 
 of enthusiasm. The one sets us free, the other ravishes 
 us out of ourselves. I do not think I ever felt more dis- 
 tinctly than to-day, or with more intensity, the difference' 
 between these two masters. Their two personalrtres be- 
 came transparent to me, and I seemed to read them to; 
 their depths. 
 
 The work of Mozart, penetrated as it is with mmd and' 
 thought, represents a solved problem, a balance- struck be- 
 tween aspiration and executive capacity, the sovereignty 
 of a grace which is always mistress of itself, marvelous-, 
 harmony and perfect unity. His quartet describes a day 
 in one of those Attic souls who pre-figure-on- earth- the; 
 werenity of Elysium. The first scene is a pleasant conver- 
 sation, like that of Socrates on the banks- of the- JJissus; its 1 
 cnief mark is an exquisite url>s<iutv. The- second scene is-
 
 A MIKL'S JO URNAL. 7fr 
 
 deeply pathetic. A cloud has risen in the blue of this> 
 Greek heaven. A storm, such as life inevitably brings 
 with it, even in the case of great souls who love and es- 
 teem each other, has come to trouble the original harmony. 
 What is the cause of it a misunderstanding, apiece of neg- 
 lect ? Impossible to say, but it breaks out notwithstand- 
 ing. The andante is a scene of reproach and complaint,, but 
 as between "immmortals. What loftiness in complaint,, 
 what dignity, what feeling, what noble sweetness in re- 
 proach ! The voice trembles and grows graver, but remains 
 affectionate and dignified. Then, the storm has passed,, 
 the sun has come back, the explanation has taken place, 
 peace is re-established. The third scene paints the bright- 
 ness of reconciliation. Love, in its restored coafidence, 
 and as though in sly self-testing, permits itself even gentle 
 mocking and friendly badinage. And the finale fcrings us 
 back to that tempered gaiety and happy serenity, that su- 
 preme freedom, flower of the inner life, which is the 
 leading motive of the whole composition. 
 
 In Beethoven's on the other hand, a spirit of tragic- 
 irony paints for you the mad tumult of existence as it 
 dances forever above the threatening abyss of the infinite. 
 No more unity, no more satisfaction, no more serenity I W r e 
 are spectators of the eternal duel between the great forces,, 
 that of the abyss which absorbs all finite things, and that 
 of life which defends and asserts itself, expands, and en- 
 joys. The first bars break the seals and open the caverns- 
 of the great deep. The struggle begins. It is long. Life 
 is born, and disports itself gay and careless as the butterfly 
 which flutters above a precipice. Then it expands the 
 realm of its conquests, and chants its successes. It founds 
 a kingdom, it constructs a system of nature. But the ty- 
 phon rises from the yawning gulf, and the Titans beat 
 upon the gates of the new empire. A battle of giants be- 
 gins. You hear the tumultuous efforts of the powers of 
 chaos. Life triumphs at last, but the victory is not final,, 
 and through all the intoxication of it there is a certain 
 note of terror and bewilderment. The soul of Beethoven
 
 76 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 was a tormented soul. The passion and the awe of the 
 infinite seemed to toss it to and fro from heaven to hell. 
 Hence its vastness. AVhich is the greater, Mozart or Bee- 
 thoven? Idle question! The one is more perfect, the 
 other more colossal. The first gives you the peace of per- 
 fect art, beauty, at first sight. The second gives you sub- 
 limity, terror, pity, a beauty of second impression. The 
 one gives that for which the other rouses a desire. Mozart 
 has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean ; Beetho- 
 ven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of 
 air and sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on 
 the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs 
 shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be 
 they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, 
 each does us good. Our love is due to both. 
 
 To judge is to see clearly, to care for what is just and 
 therefore to be impartial, more exactly, to be disinterested, 
 more exactly still, to be impersonal. 
 
 To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of 
 talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of 
 genius. 
 
 Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires 
 but according to our powers. 
 
 If nationality is consent, the state is compulsion. 
 
 Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. 
 Humanity only begins for man with self -surrender. 
 
 The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness 
 before he decides, never decides. Accept life, and you 
 must accept regret. 
 
 Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibil- 
 ity, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before 
 it can give forth its spark.
 
 AMIKUS JOURNAL. 77 
 
 February 3, 1857. The phantasmagoria of the soul 
 cradles and soothes me as though I were an Indian 
 yoghi, and everything, even my own life, becomes to me 
 smoke, shadow, vapor, and illusion. I hold so lightly to 
 all phenomena that they end by passing over me like gleams 
 over a landscape, and are gone without leaving any im- 
 pression. Thought is a kind of opium ; it can intoxicate 
 us, while still broad awake; it can make transparent the 
 mountains and everything that exists. It is by love only 
 that one keeps hold upon reality, that one recovers one's 
 proper self, that one becomes again will, force, and indi- 
 viduality. Love could do everything with me; by myself 
 and for myself I prefer to be nothing. . . 
 
 I have the imagination of regret and not that of hope. 
 My clear-sightedness is retrospective, and the result with 
 me of disinterestedness and prudence is that I attach 
 myself to what I have no chance of obtaining. . . . 
 
 May 27, 1857. (Vandceuvres*.) We are going down 
 to Geneva to hear the " Tannhiiuser" of Kichard Wagner 
 performed at the theater by the German troup now passing 
 through. Wagner's is a powerful mind endowed with 
 strong poetical sensitiveness. His work is even more poet- 
 ical than musical. The suppression of the lyrical element, 
 and therefore of melody, is with him a systematic parti 
 pris. No more duos or trios; monologue and the aria are 
 alike done away with. There remains only declamation, 
 the recitative, and the choruses. In order to avoid the con- 
 ventional in singing, Wagner falls into another conven- 
 tion that of not singing at all. He subordinates the 
 voice to articulate speech, and for fear lest the muse should 
 take flight he clips her wings. So that his works are 
 rather symphonic dramas than operas. The voice is 
 brought down to the rank of an instrument, put on a level 
 with the violins, the hautboys, and the drums, and 
 treated instrumentally. Man is deposed from his superior 
 position, and the center of gravity of the work passes into 
 
 * Also a village in the neighborhood of Geneva.
 
 78 A MIKL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 the baton of the conductor. It is music depersonalized, 
 neo-Hegeliau music music multiple instead of in- 
 dividual. If this is so, it is indeed the music of the 
 future, the music of the socialist democracy replacing the 
 art which is aristocratic, heroic, or subjective. 
 
 The overture pleased me even less than at the first hear- 
 ing: it is like nature before man appeared. Everything 
 in it is enormous, savage, elementary, like the murmur of 
 forests and the roar of animals. It is forbidding and 
 obscure, because man, that is to say, mind, the key of the 
 enigma, personality, the spectator, is wanting to it. 
 
 The idea of the piece is grand. It is nothing less than 
 the struggle of passion and pure love, of flesh and spirit, 
 of the animal and the angel in man. The music is always 
 expressive, the choruses very beautiful, the orchestration 
 skillful, but the whole is fatiguing and excessive, too full, 
 too laborious. When all is said, it lacks gayety, ease, natural- 
 ness and vivacity it has no smile, no wings. Poetically one 
 is fascinated, but one's musical enjoyment is hesitating, 
 often doubtful, and one recalls nothing but the general 
 impression Wagner's music represents the abdication of 
 the self, and the emancipation of all the forces once under its 
 rule. It is a falling back into Spinozism the triumph 
 of fatality. This music has its root and its fulcrum in 
 two tendencies of the epoch, materialism and socialism 
 each of them ignoring the true value of the human 
 personality, and drowning it in the totality of nature or of 
 society. 
 
 June 17, 1857. (Vandceuvres). I have just followed 
 Maine de Biran from his twenty-eighth to his forty-eighth 
 year by means of his journal, and a crowd of thoughts have 
 besieged me. Let me disengage those which concern my- 
 self. In this eternal self-chronicler and observer I seem 
 to see myself reflected with all my faults, indecision, dis- 
 couragement, over-dependence on sympathy, difficulty of 
 finishing, with my habit of watching myself feel and live, 
 with my growing incapacity for practical action, with my 
 aptitude for psychological study. But I have also discov
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 79 
 
 ered some differences which cheer and console me. This 
 nature is, as it were, only one of the men which exist in 
 me. It is one of my departments. It is not the whole of 
 my territory, the whole of my inner kingdom. Intellect- 
 ually, I am more objectire and more constructive; 
 my horizon is vaster; I have seen much more of men, 
 things, countries, peoples and books ; I have a greater mass 
 of experiences in a word, I feel that I have more culture, 
 greater wealth, range, and freedom of mind, in spite of 
 my wants, my limits, and my weaknesses. Why does 
 Maine de Biran make will the whole of man? Perhaps 
 because he had too little will. A man esteems most highly 
 what he himself lacks, and exaggerates what he longs to 
 possess. Another incapable of thought, and meditation, 
 would have made self-consciousness the supreme thing. 
 Only the totality of things has an objective value. As 
 soon as one isolates a part from the whole, as soon as one 
 chooses, the choice is involuntarily and instinctively dic- 
 tated by subjective inclinations which obey one or other of 
 the two opposing laws, the attraction of similars or the 
 affinity of contraries. 
 
 Five o'clock. The morning has passed like a dream. 
 I went on with the journal of Maine de Biran down to th 
 end of 1817. After dinner I passed my time with the birds 
 in the open air, wandering in the shady walks which 
 wind along under Pressy. The sun was brilliant and the 
 air clear. The midday orchestra of nature was at its best. 
 Against the humming background made by a thousand 
 invisible insects there rose the delicate caprices and impro- 
 visations of the nightingale singing from the ash-trees, or of 
 the hedge-sparrows and the chaffinches in their nests. The 
 hedges are hung with wild roses, the scent of the acacia 
 still perfumes the paths; the light down of the poplar 
 'seeds floated in the air like a kind of warm, fair-weathei 
 snow. I felt myself as gay as a butterfly. On coming in 
 I read the three first books of that poem " Corinne," 
 which I have not seen since I was a youth. Now as I read 
 it again, I look at it across interposing memories; the
 
 80 A Ml EL' 8 JO V RNAL. 
 
 romantic interest of it seems to me to have vanished, but 
 not the poetical, pathetic, or moral interest. 
 
 June 18th. I have just been spending three hours in 
 the orchard under the shade of the hedge, combining the 
 spectacle of a beautiful morning with reading and taking a 
 turn between each chapter. Now the sky is again covered 
 with its white veil of cloud, and I have come up with 
 Biran, whose "Pensee" I have just finished, and Corinne, 
 whom I have followed with Oswald in their excursions 
 among the monuments of the eternal city. Nothing is so 
 melancholy and wearisome as this journal of Maine de 
 Biran. This unchanging monotony of perpetual reflection 
 has an enervating and depressing effect upon one. Here, 
 then, is the life of a distinguished man seen in its most 
 intimate aspects! It is one long repetition, in which the 
 only change is an almost imperceptible displacement of 
 center in the writer's manner of viewing himself. This 
 thinker takes thirty years to move from the Epicurean 
 quietude to the quietism of Fenelon, and this only specula- 
 tively, for his practical life remains the same, and all his 
 anthropological discovery consists in returning to the 
 theory of the three lives, lower, human, and higher, which 
 is in Pascal and in Aristotle. And this is what they call a 
 philosopher in France! Beside the great philosophers, 
 how poor and narrow seems such an intellectual life! It 
 is the journey of an ant, bounded by the limits of a 
 field; of a mole, who spends his days in' the construction of 
 a mole-hill. How narrow and stifling the swallow who flies 
 across the whole Old World, and whose sphere of life em- 
 braces Africa and Europe, would find the circle with which 
 the mole and the ant are content ! This volume of Biran 
 produces in me a sort of asphyxia; as I assimilate it, it 
 seems to paralyze me; I am chained to it by some spell of 
 secret sympathy. I pity, and I am afraid of my pity, for 
 I feel how near I am to the same evils and the same 
 faults. . . . 
 
 Ernest Naville's introductory essay is full of interest, 
 written in a serious and noble style; but it is almost as sad
 
 A MIEISS JO URNAL. 81 
 
 as it is ripe and mature. What displeases me in it a little 
 is its exaggeration of the merits of Biran. For the rest, 
 the small critical impatience which the volume has stirred 
 in me will be gone by to-morrow. Maine de Biran is an 
 important link in the French literary tradition. It is from 
 him that our Swiss critics descend, Naville father and son, 
 Secretan. He is the source of our best contemporary 
 psychology, for Stapfer, Koyer-Collard, and Cousin called 
 him their master, and Ampere, his junior by nine years, 
 was his friend. 
 
 July 25, 1857. (Vandoeuvres). At ten o'clock this even- 
 ing, unrler a starlit sky, a group of rustics under the win- 
 dows of the salon employed themselves in shouting dis 
 agreeable songs. Why is it that this tuneless shrieking of 
 false notes and scoffing words delights these people? Why 
 is it that this ostentatious parade of ugliness, this jarring 
 vulgarity and grimacing is their way of finding expression 
 and expansion in the great solitary and tranquil night? 
 
 Why? Because of a sad and secret instinct. Because 
 of the need they have of realizing themselves as individuals, 
 of asserting themselves exclusively, egotistically, idola- 
 trously opposing the self in them to everything else, plac- 
 ing it in harsh contrast with the nature which enwraps us, 
 with the poetry which raises us above ourselves, with the 
 harmony which binds us to others, with the adoration 
 which carries us toward God. No, no, no ! Myself only, 
 and that is enough ! Myself by negation, by ugliness, by 
 grimace and irony ! Myself, in my caprice, in my independ- 
 ence, in my irresponsible sovereignty ; myself, set free by 
 laughter, free as the demons are, and exulting in my 
 freedom ; I, master of myself, invincible and self-sufficient, 
 living for this one time yet by and for myself ! This is 
 what seems to me at the bottom of this merry-making. 
 One hears in it an echo of Satan, the temptation to make 
 self the center of all things, to be like an Elohim, the 
 worst and last revolt of man. It means also, perhaps, 
 some rapid perception of what is absolute in personality, 
 some rough exaltation of the subject, the individual, who
 
 32 A MI EL'S JO URNAL. 
 
 thus claims, by abusing them, the rights of subjective ex- 
 istence. If so, it is the caricature of our most precious 
 privilege, the parody of our apotheosis, a vulgarizing of 
 our highest greatness. Shout away, then, drunkards! 
 Your ignoble concert, with all its repulsive vulgarity, still 
 reveals to us, without knowing it, something of the maj- 
 esty of life and the sovereign power of the soul. 
 
 September 15, 1857. I have just finished Sismondi's 
 journal and correspondence. Sismondi is essentially the 
 honest man, conscientious, upright, respectable, the friend 
 of the public good and the devoted upholder of a great 
 cause, the amelioration of the-common lot of men. Char- 
 acter and heart are the dominant elements in his individ- 
 uality, and cordiality is the salient feature of his nature. 
 Sismondi's is a most encouraging example. With average 
 faculties, very little imagination, not much taste, not 
 much talent, without subtlety of feeling, without great 
 elevation or width or profundity of mind, he yet succeeded 
 in achieving a career which was almost illustrious, and he 
 has left behind him some sixty volumes, well-known and 
 well spoken of. How was this? His love for men on the 
 one side, and his passion for work en the other, are the 
 two factors in his fame. In political economy, in literary 
 or political history, in personal action, Sismondi showed 
 <xo genius scarcely talent; but in all he did there was 
 solidity, loyalty, good sense and integrity. The poetical, 
 artistic and philosophic sense is deficient in him, but he 
 attracts and interests us by his moral sense. We see in 
 him the sincere writer, a man of excellent heart, a good 
 citizen and wvm friend, worthy and honest in the widest 
 sense of tb-s >erms, not brilliant, but inspiring trust and 
 confidence iy his character, his principles and his virtues. 
 More tha'i this, he is the best type of good Genevese lib- 
 eralism, ; ^publican but not democratic, Protestant but not 
 Calvini',, human but not socialist, progressive but without 
 any sympathy with violence. He was a conservative 
 without either egotism or hypocrisy, a patriot without 
 larrowness. In his theories he was governed by experi-
 
 AMIEUS JOURNAL. 83 
 
 ence and observation, and in his practice by general ideas. 
 A laborious philanthropist, the past and the present were 
 to him but fields of study, from which useful lessons might 
 be gleaned. Positive and reasonable in temper, his mind 
 was set upon a high average well-being for human society, 
 and his efforts were directed toward founding such i. 
 social science as might most readily promote it. 
 
 September 24, 1857. In the course of much thought 
 yesterday about " Atala" and " Rene, "Chateaubriand became 
 clear to me. I saw in him a great artist but not a great 
 man, immense talent but a still vaster pride a nature at 
 once devoured with ambition and unable to find anything 
 to love or admire in the world except itself indefatigable in 
 labor and capable of everything except of true devotion, 
 self-sacrifice and faith. Jealous of all success, he was 
 always on the opposition side, that he might be the better 
 able to disavow all services received, and to hold aloof 
 from any other glory but his own. Legitimist under the 
 empire, a parliamentarian ander the legitimist regime, 
 republican under the constitutional monarchy, defending 
 Christianity when France was philosophical, and taking a 
 distaste for religion as soon as it became once more a 
 serious power, the secret of these endless contradictions in 
 him- was simply the desire to reign alone like the sun a 
 devouring thirst for applause, an incurable and insatiable 
 vanity, which, with the true, fierce instinct of tyranny, 
 would endure no brother near the throne. A man of mag- 
 nificent imagination but of poor character, of indisputable 
 power, but cursed with a cold egotism and an incurable 
 barrenness of feeling, which made it impossible for him to 
 tolerate about him anybody but slaves or adorers. A tor- 
 ment d soul and miserable life, when all is said, under its 
 aureole of glory and its crown of laurels! 
 
 Essentially jealous and choleric, Chateaubriand from the 
 beginning was inspired by mistrust, by the passion for 
 contradicting, for crushing and conquering. This motive 
 may always be traced in him. Rousseau seems to me his 
 point of departure, the man who suggested to him by
 
 84 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 contrast and opposition all his replies and attacks. Rous- 
 seau is revolutionary: Chateaubriand therefore writes his 
 " Essay on Revolutions." Rousseau is republican and Protes- 
 tant; Chateaubriand will be royalist and Catholic. Rous- 
 seau is bourgeois; Chateaubriand will glorify nothing but 
 noble birth, honor, chivalry and deeds of arms. Rousseau 
 conquered nature for French letters, above all the nature 
 of the mountains and of the Swiss and Savoy, and lakes. 
 He pleaded for her against civilization. Chateaubriand 
 will take possession of a new and colossal nature, of the 
 ocean, of America; but he will make his savages speak the 
 language of Louis XIV., he will bow Atala before a 
 Catholic missionary, and sanctify passions born on the 
 banks of the Mississippi by the solemnities of Catholic 
 ceremonial. Rousseau was the apologist of reverie; Cha- 
 teaubriand will build the monument of it in order to break 
 it in Rene. Rousseau preaches Deism with all his elo- 
 quence in the "Vicaire Savoyard;" Chateaubriand sur- 
 rounds the Roman creed with all the garlands of his poetry in 
 the" Genie du Christianisme." Rousseau appeals to natural 
 law and pleads for the future of nations; Chateaubriand 
 will only sing the glories of the past, the ashes of history 
 and the noble ruins of empires. Always a rdle to be filled, 
 cleverness to be displayed, a parti-pris to be upheld and 
 fame to be won his theme, one of imagination, his faith 
 one to order, but sincerity, loyalty, candor, seldom or 
 never! Always a real indifference simulating a passion for 
 truth; always an imperious thirst for glory instead of 
 devotion to the good; always the ambitious artist, never 
 the citizen, the believer, the man. Chateaubriand posed 
 all his life as the wearied Colossus, smiling pitifully upon 
 a pygmy world, and contemptuously affecting to desire 
 nothing from it, though at the same time wishing it to be 
 believed that he could if he pleased possess himself of 
 everything by mere force of genius. He is the type of an 
 untoward race, and the father of a disagreeable lineage. 
 
 But to return to the two episodes. " Rene" seems to me 
 very superior to " Atala.' r Both the stories show a talent of
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 85 
 
 the first rank, but of the two the beauty of " Atala" is of 
 the more transitory kind. The attempt to render in the 
 style of Versailles the loves of a Natchez and a Seminole, 
 and to describe the manners of the adorers of the Manitous 
 in the tone of Catholic sentiment, was an attempt too 
 violent to succeed. But the work is a tour de force of 
 style, and it was only by the polished classicism of the 
 form, that the romantic matter of the sentiments and the 
 descriptions could have been imported into the colorless 
 literature of the empire. " Atala" is already old-fashioned 
 and theatrical in all the parts which are not descriptive or 
 European that is to say, throughout all the sentimental 
 savagery. 
 
 " Rene" is infinitely more durable. Its theme, which is the 
 malady of a whole generation distaste for life brought 
 about by idle reverie and the ravages of a vague and 
 unmeasured ambition is true to reality. Without know- 
 ing or wishing it, Chateaubriand has been sincere, for Ren6 
 is himself. This little sketch is in every respect a master- 
 piece. It is not, like " Atala," spoilt artistically by intentions 
 alien to the subject, by being made the means of expres- 
 sion of a particular tendency. Instead of taking a passion 
 for Kene, indeed, future generations will scorn and wonder 
 at him ; instead of a hero they will see in him a patho- 
 logical case; but the work itself, like the Sphinx, will 
 endure. A work of art will bear all kinds of interpreta- 
 tions; each in turn finds a basis in it, while the work 
 itself, because it represents an idea, and therefore partakes 
 of the richness and complexity which belong to ideas, 
 suffices for all and survives all. A portrait proves what- 
 ever one asks of it. Even in its forms of style, in the dis- 
 dainful generality of the terms in which the story is told, 
 in the terseness of the sentences, in the sequence of the 
 images and of the pictures, traced with classic purity and 
 marvelous vigor, " Rene" maintains its monumental charac- 
 ter. Carved, as it were, in material of the present cen- 
 tury, with the tools of classical art, " Rene" is the immortal 
 cameo of Chateaubriand.
 
 86 A MIEUS JO URN A L. 
 
 We are never more discontented with others than when 
 we are discontented with ourselves. The consciousness of 
 wrong-doing makes us irritable, and our heart in its 
 cunning quarrels with what is outside it, in order that it 
 may deafen the clamor within. 
 
 The faculty of intellectual metamorphosis is the first 
 and indispensable faculty of the critic; without it he is 
 not apt at understanding other minds, and ought, there- 
 tore, if he love truth, to hold his peace. The conscien- 
 tious critic must first criticise himself; what we do not 
 understand we have not the right to judge. 
 
 June 14, 1858. Sadness and anxiety seem to be increas- 
 ing upon me. Like cattle in a burning stable, I cling to 
 what consumes me, to the solitary life which does me 
 so much harm. I let myself be devoured by inward 
 suffering. . . . 
 
 Yesterday, however, I struggled against this fatal ten- 
 dency. I went out into the country, and the children's 
 caresses restored to me something of serenity and calm. 
 After we had dined out of doors all three sang some songs 
 and school hymns, which were delightful to listen to. 
 The spring fairy had been scattering flowers over the 
 fields with lavish hands; it was a little glimpse of para- 
 dise. It is true, indeed, that the serpent too was not far 
 off. Yesterday there was a robbery close by the house, 
 and death had visited another neighbor. Sin and death 
 lurk around every Eden, and sometimes within it. Hence 
 the tragic beauty, the melancholy poetry of human destiny. 1 
 Flowers, shade, a fine view, a sunset sky, joy, grace, feel- 
 ing, abundance and serenity, tenderness and song here 
 you have the element of beauty: the dangers of the present 
 and the treacheries of the future, here is the element of 
 pathos. The fashion of this world passeth away. Unless 
 #e have laid hold upon eternity, unless we take the 
 religious view of life, these bright, fleeting days can only 
 be a subject for terror. Happiness should be a prayer -
 
 A MIEL'S JO URNAL. 8? 
 
 and grief also. Faith in the moral order, in the protect- 
 ing fatherhood of God, appeared to me in all its serious 
 sweetness. 
 
 " Pense, aime, agis et souffre en Dieu 
 C'est la grande science." 
 
 July 18, 1858. To-day I have been deeply moved by 
 the nostalgia of happiness and by the appeals of memory. 
 ,My old self, the dreams which used to haunt me in Ger- 
 'many, passionate impulses, high aspirations, all revived in 
 me at once with unexpected force. The dread lest I 
 should have missed my destiny and stifled my true nature, 
 lest I should have buried myself alive, passed through me 
 like a shudder. Thirst for the unknown, passionate love 
 of life, the yearning for the blue vaults of the infinite and 
 the strange worlds of the ineffable, and that sad ecstasy 
 which the ideal wakens in its beholders all these carried 
 me away in a whirlwind of feeling that I cannot describe. 
 Was it a warning, a punishment, a temptation? Was it a 
 secret protest, or a violent act of rebellion on the part of a 
 nature which is unsatisfied? the last agony of happiness 
 and of a hope that will not die? 
 
 What raised all this storm? Nothing but a book the 
 first number of the "Revue Germanique." The articles 
 of Dollfus, Eenan, Littre, Montegut, Taillandier, by 
 recalling to me some old and favorite subjects, made me 
 forget ten wasted years, and carried me back to my univer- 
 sity life. I was tempted to throw off my Genevese garb 
 and to set off, stick in hand, for any country that might 
 offer stripped and poor, but still young, enthusiastic, and 
 alive, full of ardor and of faith. 
 
 . . . I have been dreaming alone since ten o'clock at 
 the wirdow, while the stars twinkled among the clouds, 
 and the lights of the neighbors disappeared one by one in 
 the houses round. Dreaming of what? Of the meaning 
 of this tragic comedy which we call life. Alas! alas! I 
 was as melancholy as the preacher. A hundred years 
 seemed to me a dream, life a breath, and everything a
 
 88 AMIKL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 nothing. What tortures of mind and soul, and all that 
 we may die in a few minutes! What should interest us, 
 and why? 
 
 " Le temps n'est rien pour Pfime, enfant, ta vie est pleine, 
 Et ce jour vaut cent ans, s'il te fait trouver Dieu." 
 
 To make an object for myself, to hope, to straggle, 
 seems to me more and more impossible and amazing. At 
 twenty I was the embodiment of curiosity, elasticity and 
 spiritual ubiquity; at thirty-seven I have not a will, a 
 desire, or a talent left ; the fireworks of my youth have 
 left nothing but a handful of ashes behind them. 
 
 December 13, 1858. Consider yourself a refractory 
 pupil for whom you are responsible as mentor and tutor. 
 To sanctify sinful nature, by bringing it gradually under 
 the control of the angel within us, by the help of a holy 
 God, is really the whole of Christian pedagogy and of 
 religious morals. Our work my work consists in tam- 
 ing, subduing, evangelizing and angelizing the evil self; 
 and in restoring harmony with the good self. Salvation 
 lies in abandoning the evil self in principle and in taking 
 refuge with the other, the divine self, in accepting with 
 courage and prayer the task of living with one's own demon, 
 and making it into a less and less rebellious instrument of 
 good. The Abel in us must labor for the salvation of the 
 Cain. To undertake it is to be converted, and this conver- 
 sion must be repeated day by day. Abel only redeems 
 and touches Cain by exercising him constantly in good 
 works. To do right is in one sense an act of violence; it 
 is suffering, expiation, a cross, for it means the conquest 
 and enslavement of self. In another sense it is the 
 apprenticeship to heavenly things, sweet and secret joy, 
 contentment and peace. Sanctification implies perpetual 
 martyrdom, but it is a martyrdom which glorifies. A 
 crown of thorns is the sad eternal symbol of the life of the 
 saints. The best measure of the profundity of any reli- 
 gious doctrine is given by its conception of sin and the 
 cure of sin.
 
 A Ml EL'S JO URN A L. 89 
 
 A duty is no sooner divined than from that very moment 
 it. becomes binding upon us. 
 
 Latent genius is but a presumption. Everything that 
 can be, is bound to come into being, and what never comes 
 into being is nothing. 
 
 July 14, 1859. I have just read "Faust" again. Alas, 
 every year I am fascinated afresh by this somber figure, 
 this restless life. It is the type of suffering toward which 
 I myself gravitate, and I am always finding in the poem 
 words which strike straight to my heart. Immortal, 
 malign, accursed type! Specter of my own conscience, 
 ghost of my own torment, image of the ceaseless struggle 
 of the soul which has not yet found its true aliment, 
 its peace, its faith art thou not the typical example of a 
 life which feeds upon itself, because it has not found its 
 God, and which, in its wandering flight across the worlds, 
 carries within it, like a comet, an inextinguishable flame of 
 desire, and an agony of incurable disillusion? I also am 
 reduced to nothingness, and I shiver on the brink of the 
 great empty abysses of my inner being, stifled by longing 
 for the unknown, consumed with the thirst for the infi- 
 nite, prostrate before the ineffable. I also am torn some- 
 times by this blind passion for life, these desperate 
 struggles for happiness, though more often I am a prey to 
 complete exhaustion and tactiturn despair. What is the 
 reason of it all? Doubt doubt of one's self, of thought, of 
 men, and of life doubt which enervates the will and 
 weakens all our powers, which makes us forget God and 
 neglect prayer and duty that restless and corrosive doubt 
 which makes existence impossible and meets all hope with 
 satire. 
 
 July 17, 1859. Always and everywhere salvation is tor- 
 ture, deliverance means death, and peace lies in sacrifice. 
 If we would win oiir pardon, we must kiss the fiery cruci- 
 fix. Life is a series of agonies, a Calvary, which we can 
 only climb on bruised and aching knees. We seek distrac- 
 tions; we wander away; we deafen and stupefy ourselves
 
 90 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 that we may escape the test; we turn away our eyes from 
 the via dolorosa; and yet there is no help for it we must 
 come back to it in the end. What we have to recognize is 
 tliut each of us carries within himself his own executioner 
 his demon, his hell, in his sin ; that his sin is his idol, and 
 that this idol, which seduces the desire of his heart, is his 
 curse. 
 
 Die unto sin! This great saying of Christianity xemains 
 still the highest theoretical solution of the inner life. Only 
 in it is there any peace of conscience ; and without this 
 peace there is no peace. . . . 
 
 I have, just read seven chapters of the gospel. Nothing 
 calms me so much. To do one's duty in love and obedi- 
 ence, to do what is right these are the ideas which remain 
 with one. To live in God and to do his work this is 
 religion, salvation, life eternal; this is both the effect and 
 the sign of love and of the Holy Spirit; this is the new 
 man announced by Jesus, and the new life into which we 
 enter by the second birth. To be born again is to renounce 
 the old life, sin, and the natural man, and to take to one's 
 self another principle of life. It is to exist for God with 
 another self, another will, another love. 
 
 August 9, 1859. Nature is forgetful: the world 13 
 almost more so. However little the individual may lend 
 himself to it, oblivion soon covers him like a shroud. 
 This rapid and inexorable expansion of the universal life, 
 which covers, overflows, and swallows up all individual 
 being, which effaces our existence and annuls all memory 
 of us, fills me with unbearable melancholy. To be born, 
 to struggle, to disappear there is the whole ephemeral 
 drama of human life. Except in a few hearts, and not 
 even always in one, our memory passes like a ripple on the 
 water, or a breeze in the air. If nothing in us is immortal, 
 what a small thing is life. Like a dream which trembles 
 and dies at the first glimmer of dawn, all my past, all my 
 present, dissolve in me, and fall away from my conscious- 
 ness at the moment when it returns upon itself. I feel 
 myself then stripped and empty, like a convalescent who
 
 AMIEUS JOURNAL. 91 
 
 remembers nothing. My travels, my reading, my studies, 
 my projects, my hopes, have faded from my mind. It is a 
 singular state. All my faculties drop away from me like 
 a cloak that one takes off, like the chrysalis case of a larva. 
 I feel myself returning into a more elementary form. I 
 behold my own unclothing; I forget, still more than I am 
 forgotten; I pass gently into the grave while still living, 
 and I feel, as it were, the indescribable peace of annihila- 
 tion, and the dim quiet of the Nirvana. I am conscious 
 of the river of time passing before and in me, of the impal- 
 pable shadows of life gliding past me, but nothing breaks 
 the cateleptic tranquillity which enwraps me. 
 
 I come to understand the Buddhist trance of the Soufis, 
 the kief of the Turk, the "ecstasy" of the orientals, and 
 yet I am conscious all the time that the pleasure of it is 
 deadly, that, like the use of opium or of hasheesh, it is a 
 kind of slow suicide, inferior in all respects to the joys of 
 action, to the sweetness of love, to the beauty of enthu- 
 siasm, to the sacred savor of accomplished duty. 
 
 November 28, 1859. This evening I heard the first lec- 
 ture of Ernest Naville* on "The Eternal Life." It was 
 admirably sure in touch, true, clear, and noble through- 
 out. He proved that, whether we would or no, we were 
 bound to face the question of another life. Beauty of 
 character, force of expression, depth of thought, were all 
 equally visible in this extemporized address, which was as 
 closely reasoned as a book, and can scarcely be disentangled 
 from the quotations of which it was full. The great 
 room of the Casino was full to the doors, and one saw a 
 fairly large number of white heads. 
 
 * 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 onward, were an extraordinary success. They 
 were at first confined to rnen only, and an audience of two thousand 
 persons sometimes assembled to hear them. To literature he is 
 mainly known as the editor of Maine de Biran's Journal.
 
 92 AMIEL't, JOURNAL. 
 
 December 13, 1859. Fifth lecture on " The Eternal Life" 
 ("The Proof of the Gospel by the Supernatural.") The 
 same talent and great eloquence; but the orator does not 
 understand that the supernatural must either be histori- 
 cally proved, or, supposing it cannot be proved, that it 
 must renounce all pretensions to overstep the domain of 
 faith and to encroach upon that of history and science. 
 He quotes Strauss, Kenan, Scherer, but he touches only 
 the letter of them, not the spirit. Everywhere one sees 
 the Cartesian dualism and a striking want of the genetic, 
 historical, and critical sense. The idea of a living evolu- 
 tion has not penetrated into the consciousness of the orator. 
 With every intention of dealing with things as they are, 
 he remains, in spite of himself, subjective and oratorical. 
 There is the inconvenience of handling a matter polemi- 
 cally instead of in the spirit of the student. Naville's 
 moral sense is too strong for his discernment and prevents 
 him from seeing what he does not wish to see. In his 
 metaphysic, will is placed above intelligence, and in his 
 personality the character is superior to the understanding, 
 as one might logically expect. And the consequence is, 
 that he may prop up what is tottering, but he makes no 
 conquests; he may help to preserve existing truths and 
 beliefs, but he is destitute of initiative or vivifying power. 
 He is a moralizing but not a suggestive or stimulating 
 influence. A popularizer, apologist and orator of the 
 greatest merit, he is a schoolman at bottom ; his arguments 
 are of the same type as those of the twelfth century, and 
 he defends Protestantism in the same way in which Cathol- 
 icism has been commonly defended. The best way of 
 demonstrating the insufficiency of this point of view is to 
 show by history how incompletely it has been superseded. 
 The chimera of a simple and absolute truth is wholly 
 Catholic and anti-historic. The mind of Naville is mathe- 
 matical and his objects moral. His strength lies in mathe- 
 maticizing morals. As soon as it becomes a question of 
 development, metamorphosis, organization as soon as he 
 is brought into contact with the mobile world of actual
 
 AMIKL'8 JOURNAL. 93 
 
 life, especially of the spiritual life, he has no longer any- 
 thing serviceable to say. Language is for him a system of 
 fixed signs; a man, a people, a book, are so many geomet- 
 rical figures of which we have only to discover the 
 properties. 
 
 December 15th. Naville's sixth lecture, an admirable 
 one, because it did nothing more than expound the Chris- 
 tian doctrine of eternal life. As an extempore perform- 
 ance marvelously exact, finished, clear and noble, marked 
 by a strong and disciplined eloquence. There was not a 
 single reservation to make in the name of criticism, his- 
 tory or philosophy. It was all beautiful, noble, true and 
 pure. It seems to me that Naville has improved in the 
 art of speech during these latter years. He has always had 
 a kind of dignified and didactic beauty, but he has now 
 added to it the contagious cordiality and warmth of feeling 
 which complete the orator; he moves the whole man, 
 beginning with the intellect but finishing with the heart. 
 He is now very near to the true virile eloquence, and 
 possesses one species of it indeed very nearly in perfection. 
 He has arrived at the complete command of the resources 
 of his own nature, at an adequate and masterly expression 
 of himself. Such expression is the joy and glory of the 
 oratorical artist as of every other. Naville is rapidly 
 becoming a model in the art of premeditated and self- 
 controlled eloquence. 
 
 There is another kind of eloquence that which seems 
 inspired, which finds, discovers, and illuminates by bounds 
 and flashes, which is born in the sight of the audience and 
 transports it. Such is not Naville's kind. Is it better 
 worth having? I do not know. 
 
 Every real need is stilled, and every vice is stimulated 
 by satisfaction. 
 
 Obstinacy is will asserting itself without being able to 
 justify itself. It is persistence without a plausible motive. 
 It is the tenacity of self-love substituted for the tenacity 
 of reason or conscience.
 
 94 AMIKL'8 JOURNAL. 
 
 It is not what he has, nor even what he does, which 
 directly expresses the worth of a man, but what he is. 
 
 What comfort, what strength, what economy there is in 
 order material order, intellectual order, moral order. To 
 know where one is going and what one wishes this is 
 order; to keep one's word and one's engagements again 
 order; to have everything ready under one's hand, to be 
 able to dispose of all one's forces, and to have all one'a 
 means of whatever kind under command still order; to 
 discipline one's habits, one's effort, one's wishes; to organ- 
 ize one's life, to distribute one's time, to take the measure of 
 one's duties and make one's rights respected ; to employ 
 one's capital and resources, one's talent and one's chances 
 profitably all this belongs to and is included in the word 
 order. Order means light and peace, inward liberty and 
 free command over one's self ; order is power. ^Esthetic and 
 moral beauty consist, the first in a true perception of 
 order, and the second in submission to it, and in the reali- 
 zation of it, by, in, and around one's self. Order is man's 
 greatest need and his true well-being. 
 
 April 17, I860. The cloud has lifted; I am better. I 
 have been able to take my usual walk on the Treille; all 
 the buds were opening and the young shoots were green 
 on all the branches. The rippling of clear water, the 
 merriment of birds, the young freshness of plants, and 
 the noisy play of children, produce a strange effect upon 
 an invalid. Or rather it was strange to me to be looking 
 at such things with the eyes of a sick and dying man ; it 
 was my first introduction to a new phase of experience. 
 There is a deep sadness in it. One feels one's self cut off 
 from nature outside her communion as it were. She is 
 strength and joy and eternal health. "Room for the 
 living," she cries to us; "do not come to darken my blue 
 sky with your miseries; each has his turn: begone!" But 
 to strengthen our own courage, we must say to ourselves, 
 No; it is good for the world to see suffering and weakness; 
 the sight adds zest to the joy of the happy and the care-
 
 AMIKUS JO URN A L. 95 
 
 less, and is rich in warning for all who think. Life has 
 been lent to us, and we owe it to our traveling companions 
 to let them see what use we make of it to the end. We 
 must show our brethren both how to live and how to die. 
 These first summonses of illness have besides a divine 
 value; they give us glimpses behind the scenes of life; 
 they teach us something of its awful reality and its inevi 
 table end. They teach us sympathy. They warn us to 
 redeem the time while it is yet day. They awaken in us 
 gratitude for the blessings which are still ours, and humil- 
 ity for the gifts which are in us. So that, evils though 
 they seem, they are really an appeal to us from on high, a 
 touch of God's fatherly scourge. 
 
 How frail a thing is health, and what a thin envelope 
 protects our life against being swallowed up from without, 
 or disorganized from within! A breath, and the boat 
 springs a leak or founders; a nothing, and all is endan- 
 gered ; a passing cloud, and all is darkness ! Life is indeed 
 a flower which a morning withers and the beat of a passing 
 wing breaks down; it is the widow's lamp, which the 
 slightest blast of air extinguishes. In order to realize the 
 poetry which clings to morning roses, one needs to have just 
 escaped from the claws of that vulture which we call ill- 
 ness. The foundation and the heightening of all things 
 is the graveyard. The only certainty in this world of vain 
 agitations and endless anxieties, is the certainty of death, 
 and that which is the foretaste and small change of death 
 pain. 
 
 As long as we turn our eyes away from this implacable 
 reality, the tragedy of life remains hidden from us. As 
 soon as we look at it face to face, the true proportions of 
 everything reappear, and existence becomes solemn again. 
 It is made clear to us that we have been frivolous and 
 petulant, intractable and forgetful, and that we have been 
 wrong. 
 
 We must die and give an account of our life: here in all 
 its simplicity is the teaching of sickness! "Do with all 
 diligence Avhat you have to do; reconcile yourself with the
 
 96 AM J EL' 8 JOURNAL. 
 
 law of the universe; think of your duty; prepare yourself 
 for departure:" such is the cry of conscience and of 
 reason. 
 
 May 3, 1860. Edgar Quinet has attempted everything: 
 he has aimed at nothing but the greatest things; he is 
 rich in ideas, a master of splendid imagery, serious, enthu- 
 siastic, courageous, a noble writer. How is it, then, that he 
 has not more reputation? Because he is too pure; be- 
 cause he is too uniformly ecstatic, fantastic, inspired 
 a mood which soon palls on Frenchmen. Because 
 he is too single-minded, candid, theoretical, and spec- 
 ulative, too ready to believe in the power of words 
 and of ideas, too expansive and confiding; while at the 
 same time he is lacking in the qualities which amuse 
 clever people in sarcasm, irony, cunning andfinesse. He 
 is an idealist reveling in color: a Platonist brandishing 
 the thyrsus of the Menads. At bottom his is a mind of no 
 particular country. It is in vain that he satirizes Germany 
 and abuses England; he does not make himself any more 
 of a Frenchman by doing so. It is a northern intellect 
 wedded to a southern imagination, but the marriage has 
 not been a happy one. He has the disease of chronic 
 magniloquence, of inveterate sublimity; abstractions for 
 him become personified and colossal beings, which act or 
 speak in colossal fashion; he is intoxicated with the infi- 
 nite. But one feels all the time that his creations are only 
 individual monologues; he cannot escape from the bounds 
 of a subjective lyrism. Ideas, passions, anger, hopes, 
 complaints he himself is present in them all. We never 
 have the delight of escaping from his magic circle, of 
 seeing truth as it is, of entering into relation with the 
 phenomena and the beings of whom he speaks, with the 
 reality of things. This imprisonment of the author within 
 his personality looks like conceit. But on the contrary, 
 it is because the heart is generous that the mind is egotis- 
 tical. It is because Quinet thinks himself so much of a 
 Frenchman that he is it so little. These ironical compen- 
 sations of destiny are very familiar to me : I have often
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 97 
 
 observed them. Man is nothing but contradiction : the less 
 he knows it the more dupe he is. In consequence of his 
 small capacity for seeing things as they are, Quinet has 
 neither much accuracy nor much balance of mind. He 
 recalls Victor Hugo, Avith much less artistic power but 
 more historical sense. His principal gift is a great com- 
 mand of imagery and symbolism. He seems to me a 
 Gorres* transplanted to Tranche Comte, a sort of super- 
 numerary prophet, with whom his nation hardly knows 
 what to do, seeing that she loves neither enigmas nor 
 ecstasy nor inflation of language, and that the intoxication 
 of the tripod bores her. 
 
 The real excellence of Quinet seems to me to lie in his 
 historical works ("Marnix," "L'ltalie," "LesRoumains"), 
 and especially in his studies of nationalities. He was born, 
 to understand these souls, at once more vast and more 
 sublime than individual souls. 
 
 (Later). I have been translating into verse that page of 
 Goethe's "Faust" in which is contained his pantheistic 
 confession of faith. The translation is not bad, I think. 
 But what a difference between the two languages in the 
 matter of precision! It is like the difference between 
 stump and graving-tool the one shoAving the effort, the 
 other noting the result of the act; the one making you feel 
 all that is merely dreamed or vague, formless or vacant, the 
 other determining, fixing, giving shape even to the indefi- 
 nite; the one representing the cause, the force, the limbo 
 whence things issue, the other the things themselves. 
 German has the obscure depth of the infinite, French the 
 clear brightness of the finite. 
 
 May 5, 1860. To grow old is more difficult than to die, 
 because to renounce a good once and for all, costs less than 
 to renew the sacrifice day by day and in detail. To bear 
 with one's own decay, to accept one's own lessening 
 capacity, is a harder and rarer virtue than to face death. 
 
 * Joseph Gcerres, a German mystic and disciple of Schelling. He 
 published, among other works, " Mythengeschichte der Asiatischen 
 Welt," and " Christliche Mystik.'""
 
 98 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 There is a halo round tragic and premature death ; there 
 is but a long sadness in declining strength. But look 
 closer: so studied, a resigned and religious old age will 
 often move us more than the heroic ardor of young years. 
 The maturity of the soul is worth more than the first 
 brilliance of its faculties, or the plentitude of its strength, 
 and the eternal in us can but profit from all the ravages 
 made by time. There is comfort in this thought. 
 
 May 22, 1860. There is in me a secret incapacity for 
 expressing my true feeling, for saying what pleases others, 
 for bearing witness to the present a reserve which I have 
 often noticed in myself with vexation. My heart never 
 dares to speak seriously, either because it is ashamed of 
 being thought to flatter, or afraid lest it should not find 
 exactly the right expression. I am always trifling with 
 the present moment. Feeling in me is retrospective. My 
 refractory nature is slow to recognize the solemnity of the 
 hour in which I actually stand. An ironical instinct, 
 born of timidity, makes me pass lightly over what I have 
 on pretence of waiting for some other thing at some other 
 time. Fear of being carried away, and distrust of myself 
 pursue me even in moments of emotion; by a sort of 
 invincible pride, I can never persuade myself to say to any 
 particular instant: "Stay! decide for me; be a supreme 
 moment! stand out from the monotonous depths of eter- 
 nity and mark a unique experience in my life !" I trifle, 
 even with happiness, out of distrust of the future. 
 
 May 27, 1860. (Sunday). I heard this morning a ser- 
 mon on the Holy Spirit good but insufficient. Why was 
 I not edified? Because there was no unction. Why was. 
 there no unction? Because Christianity from this rational- 
 istic point of view ia a Christianity of dignity, not of hu- 
 mility. Penitence, the struggles of weakness, austerity, 
 find no place in it. The law is effaced, holiness and mys- 
 ticism evaporate ; the specifically Christian accent is want- 
 ing. My impression is always the same faith is made a 
 dull poor thing by these attempts to reduce it to simple 
 moral psychology. I am oppressed by a feeling of inap-
 
 A Ml EL'S JO URN A L. 99 
 
 propriateness and malaise at the sight of philosophy in the 
 pulpit. " They have taken away my Saviour, and I know 
 not where they have laid him;" so the simple folk have a 
 right to say, and I repeat it with them. Thus, while 
 some shock me by their sacerdotal dogmatism, others repel 
 me by their rationalizing laicism. It seems to me that 
 good preaching ought to combine, as Schleiermacher did, 
 perfect moral humility with energetic independence of 
 thought, a profound sense of sin with respect for criticism 
 and a passion for truth. 
 
 The free being who abandons the conduct of himself, 
 yields himself to Satan; in the moral world there is no 
 ground without a master, and the waste lands belong to 
 the Evil One. 
 
 The poetry of childhood consists in simulating and fore- 
 stalling the future, just as the poetry of mature life con- 
 sists often in going backward to some golden age. Poetry 
 is always in the distance. The whole art of moral govern- 
 ment lies in gaining a directing and shaping hold over the 
 poetical ideals of an age. 
 
 January 9, 1861. I have just come from the inaugural 
 lecture of Victor Cherbuliez in a state of bewildered ad- 
 miration. As a lecture it was exquisite : if it was a recita- 
 tion of prepared matter, it was admirable; if an extem- 
 pore performance, it was amazing. In the face of supe- 
 riority and perfection, says Schiller, we have but one 
 resource to love them, which is what I have done. I had 
 the pleasure, mingled with a little surprise, of feeling in 
 myself no sort of jealousy toward this young conqueror. 
 
 March 15th. This last lecture in Victor Cherbuliez's 
 course on "Chivalry," which is just over, showed the same 
 magical power over his subject as that with which he began 
 the series two months ago. It was a triumph and a har- 
 vest of laurels. Cervantes, Ignatius Loyola, and the heri- 
 tage of chivalry that is to say, individualism, honor, the 
 poetry of the present and the poetry of contrasts, modern 
 liberty and progress have been the subjects of this 
 lecture.
 
 100 A KIEL'S JO URNAL. 
 
 The general impression left upon me all along has been 
 one of admiration for the union in him of extraordinary 
 skill in execution with admirable cultivation of mind. 
 With what freedom of spirit he uses and wields his vast 
 erudition, and what capacity for close attention he must 
 have to be able to carry the weight of a whole improvised 
 speech with the same ease as though it were a single sen- 
 tence ! I do not know if I am partial, but I find no occa- 
 sion for anything but praise in this young wizard and his 
 lectures. The fact is, that in my opinion we have now 
 one more first rate mind, one more master of language 
 among us. This course, with the " Causeries Atheniennes," 
 seems to me to establish Victor Cherbuliez's position at 
 Geneva. 
 
 March 17, 1861. This afternoon a homicidal languor 
 seized hold upon me disgust, weariness of life, mortal sad- 
 ness. I wandered out into the churchyard, hoping to find 
 quiet and peace there, and so to reconcile myself with 
 duty. Vain dream ! The place of rest itself had become 
 inhospitable. Workmen were stripping and carrying away 
 the turf, the trees were dry, the wind cold, the sky gray 
 something arid, irreverent, and prosaic dishonored the 
 resting-place of the dead. I was struck with something 
 wanting in our national feeling respect for the dead, the 
 poetry of the tomb, the piety of memory. Our churches 
 are too little open ; our churchyards too much. The result 
 in both cases is the same. The tortured and trembling 
 heart which seeks, outside the scene of its daily miseries, 
 to find some place where it may pray in peace, or pour out 
 its grief before God, or meditate in the presence of eternal 
 things, with us has nowhere to go. Our church ignores 
 these wants of the soul instead of divining and meeting 
 them. She shows very little compassionate care for her 
 children, very little wise consideration fov the more deli- 
 cate griefs, and no intuition of the deeper mysteries of ten- 
 derness, no religious suavity. Under a pretext of spiritual- 
 ity we are always checking legitimate aspirations. We 
 have lost the mystical sense; and what is religion without 
 mysticism? A rose without perfume.
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 101 
 
 The words repentance and sanctification are always on 
 our lips. But adoration and consolation are also two 
 essential elements in religion, and we ought perhaps to 
 make more room for them than we do. 
 
 April 28, 1861. In the same way as a dream transforms 
 according to its nature, the incidents of sleep, so the soul 
 converts into psychical phenomena the ill-defined impressions 
 of the organism. An uncomfortable attitude becomes night- 
 mare ; an atmosphere charged with storm becomes moral 
 torment. Not mechanically and by direct causality; but 
 imagination and conscience engender, according to their 
 own nature, analogous effects; they translate into their 
 own language, and cast into their own mold, whatever 
 reaches them from outside. Thus dreams may be helpful 
 to medicine and to divination, and states of weather may 
 stir up and set free within the soul vague and hidden 
 evils. The suggestions and solicitations which act upon 
 life come from outside, but life produces nothing but 
 itself after all. Originality consists in rapid and clear 
 reaction against these outside influences, in giving to them 
 our individual stamp. To think is to withdraw, as it 
 were, into one's impression to make it clear to one's self, 
 and then to put it forth in the shape of a personal judg- 
 ment. In this also consists self-deliverance, self-enfran- 
 chisement, self-conquest. All that comes from outside is 
 a question to which we owe an answer a pressure to be 
 met by counter-pressure, if we are to remain free and 
 living agents. The development of our unconscious 
 nature follows the astronomical laws of Ptolemy; every- 
 thing in it is change cycle, epi-cycle, and metamorphosis. 
 
 Every man then possesses in himself the analogies and 
 rudiments of all things, of all beings, and of all forms of 
 life. He who knows how to divine the small beginnings, 
 the germs and symptoms of things, can retrace in himself 
 the universal mechanism, and divine by intuition the 
 series which he himself will not finish, such as vegetable 
 and animal existences, human passions and crises, the 
 diseases of the soul and those of the body. The mind 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALlK.Kr -A 
 
 RARRARA COLLEGE LIBRARY
 
 102 AMIKL'H JOURNAL. 
 
 which is subtle and powerful may penetrate all these poten- 
 tialities, and make every point flash out the world which 
 it contains. This is to be conscious of and to possess the 
 general life, this is to enter into the divine sanctuary of. 
 contemplation. 
 
 September 12, 1861. In me an intellect which would 
 fain forget itself in things, is contradicted by a heart 
 which yearns to live in human beings. The uniting link of 
 the two contradictions is the tendency toward self-aban- 
 donment, toward ceasing to will and exist for one's self, 
 toward laying down one's own personality, and losing 
 dissolving one's self in love and contemplation. What I 
 lack above all things is character, will, individuality. 
 But, as always happens, the appearance is exactly the 
 contrary of the reality, and my outward life the reverse of 
 my true and deepest aspiration. I whose whole being 
 heart and intellect thirsts to absorb itself in reality, in its 
 neighbor man, in nature and in God, I, whom solitude 
 devours and destroys, I shut myself up in solitude and 
 seem to delight only in myself and to be sufficient for my- 
 self. Pride and delicacy of soul, timidity of heart, have 
 made me thus do violence to all my instincts and invert 
 the natural order of my life. It is not astonishing that 
 I should be unintelligible to others. In fact I have always 
 avoided what attracted me, and turned my back upon the 
 point where secretly I desired to be. 
 
 " Deux instincts sont en moi: vertige et deraison; 
 J'ai 1'effroi du bonbeur et la soif du poison." 
 
 It is the Nemesis which dogs the steps of life, the secret 1 
 instinct and power of death in us, which labors continually 
 for the destruction of all that seeks to be, to take form, to 
 exist; it is the passion for destruction, the tendency 
 toward suicide, identifying itself with the instinct of self- 
 preservation. This antipathy toward all that does one 
 good, all that nourishes and heals, is it not a mere varia- 
 tion of the antipathy to moral light and regenerative 
 truth? Does not sin also create a thirst for death, a grow-
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 103 
 
 ing passion for what does harm? Discouragement has 
 been my sin. Discouragement is an act of unbelief. 
 Growing weakness has been the consequence of it; the 
 principle of death in me and the influence of the Prince 
 of Darkness have waxed stronger together. My . will in 
 abdicating has yielded up the scepter to instinct; and as 
 the corruption of the best results in what is worst, love of 
 the ideal, tenderness, unworldliness, have led me to a .state 
 in which I shrink from hope and crave for annihilation. 
 Action is my cross. 
 
 October 11, 1861. (Heidelberg}. After eleven days jour- 
 ney, here I am under the roof of my friends, in their hos- 
 pitable house on the banks of the Neckar, with its garden 
 climbing up the side of the Heiligenberg. . . Blazing 
 sun ; my room is flooded with light and warmth. Sitting 
 opposite the Geisberg, I write to the murmur of the 
 Neckar, which rolls its green waves, flecked with silver, 
 exactly beneath the balcony on which my room opens. A 
 great barge coming from Heilbron passes silently under 
 my eyes, while the wheels of a cart which I cannot see 
 are dimly heard on the road which skirts the river. Dis- 
 tant voices of children, of cocks, of chirping sparrows, the 
 clock of the Church of the Holy Spirit, which chimes the 
 hour, serve to gauge, without troubling, the general tran- 
 quility of the scene. One feels the hours gently slipping 
 by, and time, instead of flying, seems to hover. A peace 
 beyond words steals into my heart, an impression of morn- 
 ing grace, of fresh country poetry which brings back the 
 sense of youth, and has the true German savor. 
 Two decked barges carrying red flags, each with a train of 
 flat boats filled with coal, are going up the river and mak- 
 ing their way under the arch of the great stone bridge. 
 I stand at the window and see a whole perspective of boats 
 sailing in both directions; the Neckar is as animated as 
 the street of some great capital; and already on the slope 
 of the wooded mountain, streaked by the smoke-wreaths 
 of the town, the castle throws its shadow like a vast 
 drapery, and traces the outlines of its battlements and
 
 104 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 turrets. Higher up, in front of me, rises the dark profile 
 of the Molkenkur; higher still, in relief against the daz- 
 zling east, I can distinguish the misty forms of the two 
 towers of the Kaiserstuhl and the Trutzheinrich. 
 
 But enough of landscape. My host, Dr. George Weber, 
 tells me that his manual of history is translated into Polish, 
 Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and French, and that of his great 
 " Universal History" three volumes are already published. 
 What astonishing power of work, what prodigious tenacity, 
 what solidity ! deutscher Fleiss! 
 
 November 25, 1861. To understand a drama requires 
 the same mental operation as to understand an existence, a 
 biography, a man. It is a putting back of the bird into 
 the egg, of the plant into its seed, a reconstitution of the 
 whole genesis of the being in question. Art is simply the 
 bringing into relief of the obscure thought of nature; a 
 simplification of the lines, a falling into place of groups 
 otherwise invisible. The fire of inspiration brings out, as 
 it were, designs traced beforehand in sympathetic ink. 
 The mysterious grows clear, the confused plain; what is 
 complicated becomes simple what is accidental, necessary. 
 
 In short, art reveals nature by interpreting its' inten- 
 tions and formulating its desires. Every ideal is the key 
 of a long enigma. The great artist is the simplifier. 
 
 Every man is a tamer of wild beasts, and these wild 
 beasts are his passions. To draw their teeth and claws, to 
 muzzle and tame them, to turn them into servants and 
 domestic animals, fuming, perhaps, but submissive in 
 this consists personal education. 
 
 February 3, 1862. Self-criticism is the corrosive of all 
 oratorical or literary spontaneity. The thirst to know 
 turned upon the self is punished, like the curiosity of 
 Psyche, by the flight of the thing desired. Force should 
 remain a mystery to itself; as soon as it tries to penetrate 
 its own secret it vanishes away. The hen Avith the golden 
 eggs becomes unfruitful 'as soon as she tries to find out 
 why her eggs are golden. The consciousness of conscious-
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 105 
 
 ness is the term and end of analysis. True, but analysis 
 pushed to extremity devours itself, like the Egyptian 
 serpent. We must give it some external matter to crush 
 and dissolve if we wish to prevent its destruction by its ac- 
 tion upon itself. "We are, and ought to be, obscure to 
 ourselves," said Goethe, "turned outward, and working 
 upon the world which surrounds us." Outward radiation 
 constitutes health ; a too continuous concentration upon 
 what is within brings us back to vacuity and blank. It is 
 better that life should dilate and extend itself in ever- 
 widening circles, than that it should be perpetually dimin- 
 ished and compressed by solitary contraction. Warmth 
 tends to make a globe out of an atom ; cold, to reduce a 
 globe to the dimensions of an atom. Analysis has been to 
 me self-annulling, self -destroy ing. 
 
 April 23, 1862. (Mornex sur Saleve). I was awakened 
 by the twittering of the birds at a quarter to five, and saw, 
 as I threw open my windows, the yellowing crescent of the 
 moon looking in upon me, while the east was just faintly 
 whitening. An hour later it was delicious out of doors. 
 The anemones were still closed, the apple-trees in full 
 flower: 
 
 " Ces beaux poinmiers, coverts de leurs fleurs etoileeus, 
 Neige odorante du printemps." 
 
 The view was exquisite, and nature, in full festival, spread 
 freshness and joy around her. I breakfasted, read the 
 paper, and here I am. The ladies of the pension are still 
 under the horizon. I pity them for the loss of two or 
 three delightful hours. 
 
 Eleven o'clock. Preludes, scales, piano-exercises going 
 on under my feet. In the garden children's voices. I 
 have just finished Rosenkranz on "Hegel's Logic," and 
 
 have run through a few articles in the Reviews 
 
 The limitation of the French mind consists in the insuffi- 
 ciency of its spiritual alphabet, which does not allow it to 
 translate the Greek, German, or Spanish mind without 
 changing the accent. The hospitality of French manners
 
 1 06 AMIKU8 JO UHNA L, 
 
 is not completed by a real hospitality of thought* \ a -. 
 My nature is just the opposite. I am individual in the 
 presence of men, objective in the presence of things. I 
 attach myself to the object, and absorb msyelf in it; I 
 detach myself from subjects \i.e. persons], and hold myself 
 on my guard against them. I feel myself different from 
 the mass of men, and akin to the great whole of nature. 
 My way of asserting myself is in cherishing this sense of 
 sympathetic unity with life, which I yearn to understand, 
 and in repudiating the tyranny of commonplace. All that 
 is imitative and artificial inspires me with a secret repul- 
 sion, while the smallest true and spontaneous existence 
 (plant, animal, child) draws and attracts me. I feel 
 myself in community of spirit with the Goethes, the 
 Hegels, the Schleiermachers, the Leibnitzes, opposed as 
 they are among themselves; while the French mathema- 
 ticians, philosophers, or rhetoricians, in spite of their high 
 qualities, leave me cold, because there is in them no sense 
 of the whole, the sum of things* because they bave no 
 
 *Tbe following passage from Sainte-Beuve may be taken asakind 
 of answer by anticipation to this accusation, wbicb Amiel brings, 
 more than once in the course of the Journal : 
 
 " Toute nation livree & elle-meme et a son propre genie se fait une 
 critique litteraire qui y est conforme. La France en son beaii temps. 
 a eu la sienne, qui ne ressemble ni a celle de 1'Allemagne ni a celle 
 de ses autres voisins un peu plus superficielle, dira-t-on je ne le 
 crois pas : mais plus vive, moinschargee d'erudition, moins thorique 
 et systematique, plus confiante au sentiment immediat tin gout. Un 
 peu de chnque chose et rien de V ensemble, d la Franfaiw : telle etait la 
 devise de Montaigne et telle est aussi la devise de la critique 
 francaise. Nous ne sommes pas synthetigues, comme dira4ent les 
 Allemands; le mot meme n'est pas francaise. L'imagination de 
 detail nous suffit. Montaigne, La Fontaine Madame de Sevigne, 
 sont volontiers nos livres de chevet." 
 
 The French critic then goes on to give a rapid sketch of the au- 
 thors and the books, "qui ont peu a peu forme comme notre 
 rhetorique." French criticism of the old characteristic kind rests 
 ultimately upon the minute and delicate knowledge of a few Greek 
 and Latin classics. Arnauld, Boileau, Fenelcn, Rollir), Racine fils, 
 Voltaire, La Harpe, Marmontel, Delille, Fontanea, and Chateaubriand
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 10? 
 
 grasp of reality in its fullness, and therefore either cramp 
 and limit me or awaken my distrust. The French lack 
 that intuitive faculty to which the living unity of things 
 is revealed, they have very little sense of what is sacred, 
 very little penetration into the mysteries of being. What 
 they excel in is the construction of special sciences; the 
 art of writing a book, style, courtesy, grace, literary 
 models, perfection and urbanity; the spirit of order, the 
 art of teaching, discipline, elegance, truth of detail, power 
 of arrangement; the desire and the gift for proselytism, 
 the vigor necessary for practical conclusions. But if you 
 wish to travel in the " Inferno" or the " Paradiso" you must 
 take other guides. Their home is on the earth, in the 
 region of the finite, the changing, the historical, and the 
 diverse. Their logic never goes beyond the category of 
 mechanism nor their metaphysic beyond dualism. When 
 they undertake anything else they are doing violence to 
 themselves. 
 
 April 24th. (Noon}. All around me profound peace, the 
 silence of the mountains in spite of a full house and a 
 neighboring village. No sound is to be heard but the 
 
 in one aspect, are the typical names of this tradition, the creators and 
 rnaintainers of this common literary fan ds, this "sorte de circulation 
 courante a 1'usage des gens instruits. J'avoue ma faiblesse : nous 
 sommes devenus bien plus forts dans la dissertation erudite, mais 
 j'aurais un eternel regret pour cette moyenne et plus libre habitude 
 litteraire qui laissait a 1'imagination tout son espace et a 1'esprit tout 
 son jeu; qui formait une atmosphere saine et facile ou le talent 
 respirait et se mouvait a son gre: cette atmosphere-la, je ne la trouvo 
 plus, et je la regrette." (Chateaubriand et son Groupe Litteraire, 
 vol. i. p. 811.) 
 
 The following pensee of La Bruyere 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 hornme ne Chretien et Francois se trouve contraint dans la 
 satyre; les grands sujets lui sont defendus, il les entame quelquefois, 
 et se detourne ensuite sur de petites choses qu'il releve par la beaute 
 de son genie et de son style." Les Caracteres, etc., " Des Outrages- 
 de V Esprit."
 
 108 -4 Ml EL'S JO URNAL. 
 
 murmur of the flies. There is something very striking m 
 this calm. The middle of the day is like the middle of 
 the night. Life seems suspended just when it is most in- 
 tense. These are the moments in which one hears the 
 infinite and perceives the ineffable. Victor Hugo, in his 
 "Contemplations," has been carrying me from world to 
 world, and since then his contradictions have reminded me 
 of the convinced Christian with whom I was talking yes- 
 terday in a house near by. . . The same sunlight floods 
 both the book and nature, the doubting poet and the be- 
 lieving preacher, as well as the mobile dreamer, who, in 
 the midst of all these various existences, allows himself to 
 be swayed by every passing breath, and delights, stretched 
 along the car of his balloon, in floating aimlessly through 
 all the sounds and shallows of the ether, and in realizing 
 within himself all the harmonies and dissonances of the 
 soul, of feeling, and of thought. Idleness and contempla- 
 tion! Slumber of the will, lapses of the vital force, indo- 
 lence of the whole being how well I know you ! To love, 
 to dream, to feel, to learn, to understand all these are 
 possible to me if only I may be relieved from willing. 7.t 
 is my tendency, my instinct, my fault, my sin. I have a 
 sort of primitive horror of ambition, of struggle, of hatred, 
 of all which dissipates the soul and makes it dependent 
 upon external things and aims. The joy of becoming once 
 more conscious of myself, of listening to the passage of 
 time and the flow of the universal life, is sometimes enongh 
 to make me forget every desire, and to quench in me both 
 the wish to produce and the power to execute. Intellec- 
 tual Epicureanism is always threatening to overpowei me. 
 I can only combat it by the idea of duty; it is as the poet 
 has said : 
 
 " Ceux qui vivent, ce sont ceux qui lattent; ce sont 
 Ceux dont un dessein ferine emplit I'aine etle front, 
 Ceux qui d'un haut destin gravissent Fapre cime, 
 Ceux qui marchent pensifs, epris d'un but sublime, 
 Ayant devant les yeux sans cesse, nuit et jour, 
 Ou quelque saint labeur ou quelque grand amour! " * 
 
 * Victor Hugo, " Lea Cbatiments."
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 Five o'clock. In the afternoon our little society met in 
 general talk upon the terrace. Some amount of familiarity 
 and friendliness begins to show itself in our relations to 
 each other. I read over again with emotion some passages 
 of " Jocelyn." How admirable it is! 
 
 " II se fit de sa vie line plus male idee: 
 
 Sa douleur d'un seul trait ne 1'avait pas videe: 
 Mais, adorant de Dieu le severe desseiu, 
 II sut la porter pleine et pure dans son sein, 
 Et ne se batant pas de la repandre toute, 
 Sa resignation 1'epancba goutte a goutte, 
 Selon la circonstance et le besoin d'autrui, 
 Pour tout vivifier sur terre autour de lui." * 
 
 The true poetry is that which raises you, as this does, 
 toward heaven, and fills you with divine emotion; which 
 sings of love and death, of hope and sacrifice, and awakens 
 the sense of the infinite. "Jocelyn" always stirs in me 
 impulses of tenderness which it would be hateful to me to 
 see profaned by satire. As a tragedy of feeling, it has no 
 parallel in French, for purity, except " Paul et Virginie," 
 and I think that I prefer "Jocelyn." To be just, one 
 ought to read them side by side. 
 
 Six o'clock. One more day is drawing to its close. 
 With the exception of Mont Blanc, all the mountains have 
 already lost their color. The evening chill succeeds the 
 heat of the afternoon. The sense of the implacable flight 
 of things, of the resistless passage of the hours, seizes upon 
 me afresh and oppresses me. . 
 
 " Nature au front serein, comme vous oubliez! " 
 
 In vain we cry with the poet, "0 time, suspend thy 
 flight!". . . And what days, after all, would we keep 
 and hold? Not only the happy days, but the lost days! 
 The first have left at least a memory behind them, the 
 others nothing but a regret which is almost a remorse. . 
 
 Eleven o^clock. A gust of wind. A few clouds in the 
 sky. The nightingale is silent. On the other hand, the 
 cricket and the river are still singing. 
 
 * Epilogue of " Jocelyn."
 
 HO AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 August 9, 1862. Life, which seeks its own contiun 
 ance, tends to repair itself without our help. It mends its 
 spider's webs when they have been torn; it re-establishes 
 in us the conditions of health, and itself heals the injuries 
 inflicted upon it; it binds the bandage again upon our 
 eyes, brings back hope into our hearts, breathes health 
 once more into our organs, and regilds the dream of our 
 imagination. But for this, experience would have hope- 
 lessly withered and faded us long before the time, and the 
 .youth would be older than the centenarian. The wise 
 part of us, then, is that which is unconscious of itself; and 
 what is most reasonable in man are those elements in him 
 which do not reason. Instinct, nature, a divine, an imper- 
 sonal activity, heal in us the wounds made by our own 
 follies; the invisible genius of our life is never tired of 
 providing material for the prodigalities of the self. The 
 essential, maternal basis of our conscious life, is therefore 
 that unconscious life which we perceive no more than the 
 outer hemisphere of the moon perceives the earth, while 
 all the time indissolubly and eternally bound to it. It 
 is our a.v rixftoov, to speak with Pythagoras. 
 
 November 7, 1862. How malign, infectious, and un- 
 wholesome is the eternal smile of that indifferent criti- 
 cism, that attitude of ironical contemplation, which cor- 
 rodes and demolishes everything, that mocking pitiless 
 temper, which .holds itself aloof from every personal duty 
 and every vulnerable affection, and cares only to under- 
 stand without committing itself to action ! Criticism be- 
 come a habit, a fashion, and a system, means the destruc- 
 tion of moral energy, of faith, and of all spiritual force. 
 One of my tendencies leads me in this direction, but I 
 recoil before its results when I come across more emphatic 
 types of it than myself. And at least I cannot reproach 
 myself with having ever attempted to destroy the moral 
 force of others ; my reverence for life forbade it, and my 
 self-distrust has taken from me even the temptation to it. 
 
 This kind of temper is very dangerous among us, for it 
 flatters all the worst instincts of men indiscipline, irrev-
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. Ill 
 
 erence, selfish individualism and it ends in social atom- 
 ism* Minds inclined to mere negation are only harmless 
 in great political organisms, which go without them and in 
 spite of them. The multiplication of them among our- 
 selves will bring about the ruin of our little countries, for 
 small states only live by faith and will. Woe to the society 
 where negation rules, for life is an affirmation; and a 
 society, a country, a nation, is a living whole capable of 
 death. No nationality is possible without prejudices, for 
 public spirit and national tradition are but webs woven out 
 of innumerable beliefs which have been acquired, admitted, 
 and continued without formal proof and without discus- 
 sion. To act, we must believe ; to believe, we must make 
 up our minds, affirm, decide, and in reality prejudge the 
 question. He who will only act upon a full scientific cer- 
 titude is unfit for practical life. But we are made for 
 action, and we cannot escape from duty. Let us not, 
 then, condemn prejudice so long as we have nothing but 
 doubt to put in its place, or laugh at' thosi whom we 
 should be incapable of consoling! This, at least, is my 
 point of view. 
 
 Beyond the element which is common to all men there 
 is an element which separates them. This element may 
 be religion, country, language, education. But all these 
 being supposed common, there still remains something 
 which serves as a line of demarcation namely, the ideal. 
 To have an ideal or to have none, to have this ideal or that 
 this is what digs gulfs between men, even between those 
 who live in the same family circle, under the same roof or 
 in the same room. You must love with the same love, 
 think with the same thought as some one else, if you are 
 to escape solitude. 
 
 Mutual respect implies discretion and reserve even in 
 love itself; it means preserving as much liberty as possible 
 to those whose life we share. We must distrust our 
 instinct of intervention, for the desire to make one's own 
 will prevail is often disguised under the mask of solicitude.
 
 1 ] 2 A MIEV8 JO URN A L. 
 
 How many times we become hypocrites simply by 
 remaining the same outwardly and toward others, when 
 we know that inwardly and to ourselves we are different. 
 It is not hypocrisy in the strict sense, for we borrow no 
 other personality than our own; still, it is a kind of decep- 
 tion. The deception humiliates us, and the humiliation 
 is a chastisement which the mask inflicts upon the face, 
 which our past inflicts upon our present. Such humilia- 
 tion is good for us; for it produces shame, and shame 
 gives birth to repentance. Thus in an upright soul good 
 springs out of evil, and it falls only to rise again. 
 
 January 8, 1863. This evening I read through the 
 "Cid" and "Rodogune." My impression is still a mixed 
 and confused one. There is much disenchantment in my 
 admiration, and a good deal of reserve in my enthusiasm. 
 What displeases me in this dramatic art, is the mechanical 
 abstraction of the characters, and the scolding, shrewish 
 tone of the interlocutors. I had a vague impression of 
 listening to gigantic marionettes, perorating through a 
 trumpet, with the emphasis of Spaniards. There is power 
 in it, but we have before us heroic idols rather than human 
 beings. The element of artificiality, of strained pomposity 
 and affectation, which is the plague of classical tragedy, is 
 everywhere apparent, and one hears, as it were, the cords 
 and pulleys of these majestic colossi creaking and groaning. 
 I much prefer Racine and Shakespeare; the one from the 
 point of view of aesthetic sensation, the other from that of 
 psychological sensation. The southern theater can never 
 free itself from masks. Comic masks are bearable, but in 
 the case of tragic heroes, the abstract type, the mask, 
 make one impatient. I can laugh with personages of tin 
 and pasteboard : I can only weep with the living, or what 
 resembles them. Abstraction turns easily to caricature; 
 it is apt to engender mere shadows on the wall, mere 
 ghosts and puppets. It is psychology of the first degree 
 elementary pyschology just as the colored pictures of 
 Germany are elementary painting. And yet with all this.
 
 AMIEL'S JO URNAL. 1 13 
 
 you have a double-distilled and often sophistical refine- 
 ment : just as savages are by no means simple. The fine 
 Bide of it all is the manly vigor, the bold frankness of 
 ideas, words, and sentiments. Why is it that we find so 
 large an element of factitious grandeur, mingled with true 
 grandeur, in this drama of 1640, from which the whole 
 dramatic development of monarchical France was to 
 spring? Genius is there, but it is hemmed round by a 
 conventional civilization, and, strive as he may, no man 
 wears a wig with impunity. 
 
 January 13, 1863. To-day it has been the turn of 
 "Polyeucte" and "La Morte de Pompee." Whatever 
 one's objections may be, there is something grandiose in 
 the style of Corneille which reconciles you at last even to 
 his stiff, emphatic manner, and his over-ingenious rhetoric. 
 But it is the dramatic genre which is false. His heroes 
 are roles rather than men. They pose as magnanimity, 
 virtue, glory, instead of realizing them before us. They 
 are always en scene, studied by others, or by themselves. 
 With them glory that is to say, the life of ceremony and 
 of affairs, and the opinion of the public replaces nature 
 becomes nature. They never speak except ore rotunda, 
 in cothurnus, or sometimes on stilts. And what con- 
 summate advocates they all are ! The French drama is an 
 oratorical tournament, a long suit between opposing 
 parties, on a day which is to end with the death of some- 
 body, and where all the personages represented are in haste 
 to speak before the hour of silence strikes. Elsewhere, 
 speech serves to make action intelligible; in French 
 tragedy action is but a decent motive for speech. It is the 
 procedure calculated to extract the finest possible speeches 
 from the persons who are engaged in the action, and who 
 represent different perceptions of it at different moments 
 and from different points of view. Love and nature, duty 
 and desire, and a dozen other moral antitheses, are the 
 limbs moved by the wire of the dramatist, who makes 
 them fall into all the tragic attitudes. What is really 
 curious and amusing is that the people of all others the
 
 114 AMIKL'8 JOURNAL. 
 
 most vivacious, gay, and intelligent, should have always 
 understood the grand style in this pompous, pedantic 
 fashion. But it was inevitable. 
 
 April 8, 1863. I have been turning over the 3,500 
 pages of " Les Miserables," trying to understand the guid- 
 ing idea of this vast composition. The fundamental idea 
 of " Les Miserables " seems to be this. Society engenders 
 certain frightful evils prostitution, vagabondage, rogues, 
 thieves, convicts, war, revolutionary clubs and barricades. 
 She ought to impress this fact on her mind, and not treat 
 all those who come in contact with her law as mere mon- 
 sters. The task before us is to humanize law and opinion, 
 to raise the fallen as well as the vanquished, to create a 
 social redemption. How is this to be done? By enlight- 
 ening vice and lawlessness, and so diminishing the sum of 
 them, and by bringing to bear upon the guilty the healing 
 influence of pardon. At bottom is it not a Christianiza- 
 tion of society, this extension of charity from the sinner to 
 the condemned criminal, this application to our present 
 life of what the church applies more readily to the other? 
 Struggle to restore a human soul to order and to righteous- 
 ness by patience and by love, instead of crushing it by 
 your inflexible vindictiveness, your savage justice! Such 
 is the cry of the book. It is great and noble, but it is a 
 little optimistic and Rousseau-like. According to it the 
 individual is always innocent and society always respon- 
 sible, and the ideal before us for the twentieth century is a 
 sort of democratic age of gold, a universal republic from 
 which war, capital punishment, and pauperism will have 
 disappeared. It is the religion and the city of progress ; 
 in a word, the Utopia of the eighteenth century revived on 
 a great scale. There is a great deal of generosity in it, 
 mixed with not a little fanciful extravagance. The fan- 
 cifulness consists chiefly in a superficial notion of evil. 
 The author ignores or pretends to forget the instinct of 
 perversity, the love of evil for evil's sake, which is con- 
 tained in the human heart. 
 
 The great and salutary idea of the book, is that honesty
 
 A MIKL'S JO URNAL. 115 
 
 before the law is a cruel hypocrisy, in so far as it arrogates 
 to itself the right of dividing society according to its own 
 standard into elect and reprobates, and thus confounds the 
 relative with the absolute. The leading passage is that in 
 which Javert, thrown off the rails, upsets the whole moral 
 system of the strict Javort, half spy, half priest of the 
 irreproachable police-officer. In this chapter the writer 
 shows us social charity illuminating and transforming a 
 harsh and unrighteous justice. Suppression of the social 
 hell, that is to say, of all irreparable stains, of all social 
 outlawries for which there is neither end nor hope it is 
 an essentially religious idea. 
 
 The erudition, the talent, the brilliancy of execution, 
 shown in the book are astonishing, bewildering almost. Its 
 faults are to be found in the enormous length allowed to 
 digressions and episodical dissertations, in the exaggera- 
 tion of all the combinations and all the theses, and, finally, 
 in something strained, spasmodic, and violent in the style, 
 which is very different from the style of natural eloquence 
 or of essential truth. Effect is the misfortune of Victor 
 Plugo, because he makes it the center of his aesthetic sys- 
 tem; and hence exaggeration, monotony of emphasis, 
 theatricality of manner, a tendency to force and over-drive. 
 A powerful artist, but one with whom you never forget 
 the artist; and a dangerous model, for the master himself 
 is already grazing the rock of burlesque, and passes from 
 the sublime to the repulsive, from lack of power to produce 
 one harmonious impression of beauty. It is natural 
 enough that he should detest Racine. 
 
 But what astonishing philological and literary power hae 
 Victor Hugo! He is master of all the dialects contained 
 m our language, dialects of the courts of law, of the stock- 
 exchange, of war, and of the sea, of philosophy and the 
 convict-gang, the dialects of trade and of archaeology, of 
 the antiquarian and the scavenger. All the bric-a-brac of 
 history and of manners, so to speak, all the curiosities of 
 soil, and subsoil, are known and familiar to him. He 
 seems to have turned his Paris over and over, and to know
 
 116 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 it body and soul as one knows the contents of one's pocket. 
 What a prodigious memory and what a lurid imagination ! 
 He is at once a visionary and yet master of his dreamte; he 
 summons up and handles at will the hallucinations of 
 opium or of hasheesh, without ever becoming their dupe; 
 he makes of madness one of his tame animals, and bestrides, 
 with equal coolness, Pegasus or Nightmare, the Hippogritf 
 or the Chimera. As a psychological phenomenon he is of 
 the deepest interest. Victor Hugo draws in sulphuric 
 acid, he lights his pictures with electric light. He deafens, 
 blinds, and bewilders his reader rather than he charms or 
 persuades him. Strength carried to such a point as this is 
 a fascination; without seeming to take you captive, it 
 makes you its prisoner; it does not enchant you, but it 
 holds you spellbound. His ideal is the extraordinary k the 
 gigantic, the overwhelming, the incommensurable. His 
 most characteristic words are immense, colossal, enormous, 
 huge, monstrous. He finds a way of making even child- 
 nature extravagant and bizarre. The only thing which 
 seems impossible to him is to be natural. In short, his 
 passion is grandeur, his fault is excess; his distinguishing 
 mark is a kind of Titanic power with strange dissonances 
 of puerility in its magnificence. Where he is weakest is, 
 in measure, taste, and sense of humor: he fails in esprit, 
 in the subtlest sense of the word. Victor Hugo is a galli- 
 cized Spaniard, or rather he unites all the extremes of 
 south and north, the Scandinavian and the African. Gaul 
 has less part in him than any other country. And yet, by 
 a caprice of destiny, he is one of the literary geniuses of 
 France in the nineteenth century ! His resources are inex- 
 haustible, and age seems to have no power over him. 
 What an infinite store of words, forms, and ideas he carries 
 about with him, and what a pile of works he has left be- 
 hind him to mark his passage ! His eruptions are like 
 those of a volcano; and, fabulous workman that he is, he 
 goes on forever raising, destroying, crushing, and rebuild 
 ing a world of his own creation, and a world rather Hindc i 
 than Hellenic.
 
 ANIEV8 JO URNAL. 117 
 
 He amazes me : and yet I prefer those men of genius 
 who awaken in me the sense of truth, and who increase 
 the sum of one's inner liberty. In Hugo one feels the 
 effort of the laboring Cyclops ; give me rather the sonorous 
 bow of Apollo, and the tranquil brow of the Olympian 
 Jove. His type is that of the Satyr in the " Legende des 
 Siecles," who crushes Olympus, a type midway between 
 the ugliness of the faun and the overpowering sublimity 
 of the great Pan. 
 
 May 23, 1863. Dull, cloudy, misty weather; it rained 
 in the night and yet the air is heavy. This somber reverie 
 of earth and sky has a sacredness of its own, but it fills 
 the spectator with a vague and stupefying ennui. Light 
 brings life: darkness may bring thought, but a dull day- 
 light, the uncertain glimmer of a leaden sky, merely make 
 one restless and weary. These indecisive and chaotic states 
 of nature are ugly, like all amorphous things, like smeared 
 colors, or bats, or the viscous polyps of the sea. The 
 source of all attractiveness is to be found in character, in 
 sharpness of outline, in individualization. All that is con- 
 fused and indistinct, without form, or sex, or accent, is 
 antagonistic to beauty ; for the mind's first need is light; 
 light means order, and order means, in the first place, the 
 distinction of the parts, in the second, their regular ac- 
 tion. Beauty is based on reason. 
 
 August 7, 1863. A walk after supper, a sky sparkling 
 with stars, the Milky Way magnificent. Alas ! all the same 
 my heart is heavy. At bottom I am always brought up 
 against an incurable distrust of myself and of life, which 
 toward my neighbor has become indulgence, but for my- 
 self has led to a regime of absolute abstention. All or 
 nothing! This is my inborn disposition, my primitive 
 stuff, my "old man." And yet if some one will but give 
 me a little love, will but penetrate a little into my inner 
 feeling, I am happy and ask for scarcely anything else. A 
 child's caresses, a friend's talk, are enough to make me 
 gay and expansive. So then I aspire to the infinite, and 
 yet a very little contents me; everything disturbs me and
 
 118 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 the least thing calms me. I have often surprised in my 
 self the wish for death, and yet my ambitions for happi- 
 ness scarcely go beyond those of the bird : wings ! sun ! a 
 nest! I persist in solitude because of a taste for it, so 
 people think. No, it is from distaste, disgust, from shame 
 at my own need of others, shame at confessing it, a fear of 
 passing into bondage if I do confess it. 
 
 September 2, 1863. How shall I find a name for that 
 subtle feeling which seized hold upon me this morning in the 
 twilight of waking? It was a reminiscence, charming 
 indeed, but nameless, vague, and featureless, like the 
 figure of a woman seen for an instant by a sick man in the 
 uncertainty of delirium, and across the shadows of his 
 darkened room. I had a distinct sense of a form which I 
 had seen somewhere, and which had moved and charmed 
 me once, and then had fallen back with time into the 
 catacombs of oblivion. But all the rest was confused: 
 place, occasion, and the figure itself, for I saw neither the 
 face nor its expression. The whole was like a fluttering 
 veil under which the enigma the secret, of happiness 
 might have been hidden. And I was awake enough to be 
 sure that it was not a dream. 
 
 In impressions like these we recognize the last trace of 
 things v-jhich are sinking out of sight and call within us, of 
 memories which are perishing. It is like a shimmering 
 marsh-light falling upon some vague outline of which one 
 scarcely knows whether it represents a pain or a pleasure 
 a gleam upon a grave. How strange ! One might al- 
 most call such things the ghosts of the soul, reflections of 
 past happiness, the manes of our dead emotions. If, as 
 the Talmud, I think, says, every feeling of love gives 
 birth involuntarily to an invisible genius or spirit which 
 yearns to complete its existence, and these glimmering 
 phantoms, which have never taken to themselves form and 
 reality, are still wandering in the limbo of the soul, what 
 is there to astonish us in the strange apparitions which 
 sometimes come to visit our pillow? At any rate, the fact 
 remains that I was not able to force the phantom to tell me its
 
 A MIEUS JO URNAL. lift- 
 
 name, nor to give any shape or distinctness to my remi- 
 niscence. 
 
 What a melancholy aspect life may wear to us when we 
 are floating down the current of such dreamy thoughts as- 
 these! It seems like some vast nocturnal shipwreck in 
 which a hundred loving voices are clamoring for help, 
 while the pitiless mounting wave is silencing all the cries 
 one by one, before we have been able, in this darkness of 
 death, to press a hand or give the farewell kiss. From 
 such a point of view destiny looks harsh, savage, and 
 cruel, and the tragedy of life rises like a rock in the midst 
 of the dull waters of daily triviality. It is impossible not 
 to be serious under the weight of indefinable anxiety pro- 
 duced in us by such a spectacle. The surface of things 
 may be smiling or commonplace, but the depths below are 
 austere and terrible. As soon as we touch upon eternal 
 things, upon the destiny of the soul, upon truth or duty, 
 upon the secrets of life and death, we become grave 
 whether we will or no. 
 
 Love at its highest point love sublime, unique, invin- 
 cible leads us straight to the brink of the great abyss, for 
 it speaks to us directly of the infinite and of eternity. It 
 is eminently religious; it may even become religion. 
 When all around a man is wavering and changing, when 
 everything is growing dark and featureless to him in the 
 far distance of an unknown future, when the world seems 
 but a fiction or a fairy tale, and the universe a chimera, 
 when the whole edifice of ideas vanishes in smoke, and all 
 realities are penetrated with doubt, what is the fixed point 
 which may still be his? The faithful heart of a woman! 
 There he may rest his head; there he will find strength 
 to live, strength to believe, and, if need be, strength to 
 die in peace with a benediction on his lips. Who knows 
 if love and its beatitude, clear manifestation as it is of the 
 universal harmony of things, is not the best demonstra- 
 tion of a fatherly and understanding God, just as it is the- 
 shortest road by which to reach him? Love is a faith, and", 
 one faith leads to another. And this faith is happiness,
 
 120 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 light and force. Only by it does a man enter into the 
 series of the living, the awakened, the happy, the redeemed 
 of those true men who know the value of existence and 
 who labor for the glory of God and of the truth. Till 
 then we are but babblers and chatterers, spendthrifts of 
 our time, our faculties and our gifts, without aim, without 
 real joy weak, infirm, and useless beings, of no account 
 in the scheme of things. Perhaps it is through love that 
 I shall find my way back to faith, to religion, to energy, to 
 concentration. It seems to me, at least, that if I could 
 but find my work-fellow and my destined companion, all 
 the rest would be added unto me, as though to confound 
 my unbelief and make me blush for my despair. Believe, 
 then, in a fatherly Providence, and dare to love! 
 
 November 25, 1863. Prayer is the essential weapon of 
 all religions. He who can no longer pray because he 
 doubts whether there is a being to whom prayer ascends 
 and from whom blessing descends, he indeed is cruelly 
 solitary and prodigiously impoverished. And you, what 
 do you believe about it? At this moment I should find it 
 very difficult to say. All my positive beliefs are in the 
 crucible ready for any kind of metamorphosis. Truth 
 above all, even when it upsets and overwhelms us! But 
 what I believe is that the highest idea we can conceive of 
 the principle of things will be the truest, and that the 
 truest truth is that which makes man the most wholly 
 good, wisest, greatest, and happiest. 
 
 My creed is in transition. Yet I still believe in God, 
 and the immortality of the soul. I believe in holiness, 
 truth, beauty; I believe in the redemption of the soul by 
 fait! in forgiveness. I believe in love, devotion, honor. 
 I believe in duty and the moral conscience. I believe 
 even in prayer. I believe in the fundamental intuitions 
 of the human race, and in the great affirmations of the 
 inspired of all ages. I believe that our higher nature is 
 our truer nature. 
 
 Can one get a theology and a theodicy out of this? 
 Probably, but just now I do not see it distinctly. It is so
 
 AMIEL'8 JOURNAL. 12 i 
 
 long since I have ceased to think about my own meta- 
 physic, and since I have lived in the thoughts of others, 
 that I am ready even to ask myself whether the crystalliza- 
 tion of my beliefs is necessary. Yes, for preaching and 
 acting; less for studying, contemplating and learning. 
 
 December 4, 1863. The whole secret of remaining 
 young in spite of years, and even of gray hairs, is to cher- 
 ish enthusiasm in one's self by poetry, by contemplation, 
 by charity that is, in fewer words, by the maintenance 
 of harmony in the soul. When everything is in its right 
 place within us, we ourselves are in equilibrium with the 
 whole work of God. Deep and grave enthusiasm for the 
 eternal beauty and the eternal order, reason touched with 
 emotion and a serene tenderness of heart these surely are 
 the foundations of wisdom. 
 
 Wisdom ! how inexhaustible a theme ! A sort of peace- 
 ful aureole surrounds and illumines this thought, in which 
 are summed up all the treasures of moral experience, and 
 which is the ripest fruit of a well-spent life. Wisdom 
 never grows old, for she is the expression of order itself 
 that is, of the Eternal. Only the wise man draws from 
 life, and from every stage of it, its true savor, because 
 only he feels the beauty, the dignity, and the value of life. 
 The flowers of youth may fade, but the summer, the 
 autumn, and even the winter of human existence, have 
 their majestic grandeur, which the wise man recognizes 
 and glorifies. To see all things in God ; to make of one's 
 own life a journey toward the ideal ; to live with gratitude, 
 with devoutness, with gentleness and courage; this was 
 the splendid aim of Marcus Aurelius. And if you add to 
 it the humility which kneels, and the charity which gives, 
 you have the whole wisdom of the children of God, the 
 immortal joy which is the heritage of the true Christian. 
 But what a false Christianity is that which slanders wis- 
 dom and seeks to do without it! In such a case I am on 
 the side of wisdom, which is, as it were, justice done to 
 God, even in this life. The relegation of life to some 
 distant future, and the separation of the holy man from
 
 AHIEL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 the virtuous man, are the signs of a false religious concep- 
 tion. This error is, in some degree, that of the whole 
 Middle Age, and belongs, perhaps, to the essence of 
 Catholicism. But the true Christianity must purge itself 
 from so disastrous a mistake. The eternal life is not the 
 future life; it is life in harmony with the true order of 
 things life in God. We must learn to look upon time as 
 a movement of eternity, as an undulation in the ocean of 
 being. To live, so as to keep this consciousness of ours in 
 perpetual relation with the eternal, is to be wise; to live, 
 so as to personify and embody the eternal, is to be 
 religious. 
 
 The modern leveler, after having done away with con- 
 ventional inequalities, with arbitrary privilege and histori- 
 cal injustice, goes still farther, and rebels against the 
 inequalities of merit, capacity, and virtue. Beginning 
 with a just principle, he develops it into an unjust one. 
 Inequality may be as true and as just as equality: it 
 depends upon what you mean by it. But this is precisely 
 what nobody cares to find out. All passions dread the 
 light, and the modern zeal for equality is a disguised hatred 
 which tries to pass itself off as love. 
 
 Liberty, equality bad principles! The only true prin- 
 ciple for humanity is justice, and justice toward the feeble 
 becomes necessarily protection or kindness. 
 
 April 2, 1864. To-day April has been displaying her 
 showery caprices. We have had floods of sunshine fol- 
 lowed by deluges of rain, alternate tears and smiles from 
 the petulant sky, gusts of wind and storms. The weather 
 is like a spoiled child whose wishes and expression change 
 twenty times in an hour. It is a blessing for the plants, 
 and means an influx of life through all the veins of the 
 spring. The circle of mountains which bounds the valley 
 is covered with white from top to toe, but two hours of 
 sunshine would melt the snow away. The snow itself is
 
 AM1KUS JOURNAL. 123 
 
 but a new caprice, a simple stage decoration ready to dis- 
 appear at the signal of the scene-shifter. 
 
 How sensible I am to the restless change which rules the 
 world. To appear, and to vanish there is the biography 
 of all individuals, whatever may be the length of the 
 cycle of existence which they describe, and the drama of 
 the universe is nothing more. All life is the shadow of a 
 smoke-wreath, a gesture in the empty air, a hieroglyph 
 traced for an instant in the sand, and effaced a moment 
 afterward by a breath of wind, an air-bubble expanding 
 and vanishing on the surface of the great river of being 
 an appearance, a vanity, a nothing. But this nothing is, 
 however, the symbol of the universal being, and this pass- 
 ing bubble is the epitome of the history of the world. 
 
 The man who has, however imperceptibly, helped in 
 the work of the universe, has lived; the man who has 
 been conscious, in however small a degree, of the cosmical 
 movement, has lived also. The plain man serves the 
 world by his action and as a wheel in the machine; the 
 thinker serves it by his 'intellect, and as a light upon its 
 path. The man of meditative soul, who raises and com- 
 forts and sustains his traveling companions, mortal and 
 fugitive like himself, plays a nobler part still, for he 
 unites the other two utilities. Action, thought, speech, 
 are the three modes of human life. The artisan, the sa- 
 vant, and the orator, are all three God's workmen. To 
 do, to discover, to teach these three things are all labor, 
 all good, all necessary. Will-o'-the-wisps that we are, we 
 may yet leave a trace behind us; meteors that we are, we 
 may yet prolong our perishable being in the memory of 
 men, or at least in the contexture of after events. Every- 
 thing disappears, but nothing is lost, and the civilization 
 or city of man is but an immense spiritual pyramid, built 
 up out of the work of all that has ever lived under the 
 forms of moral being, just as our calcareous mountains 
 are made of the debris of myriads of nameless creatures 
 who have lived under the forms of microscopic animal life. 
 
 April 5, 1864. I have been reading "Prince Vitale"
 
 124 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 for the second time, and have been lost in admiration of 
 it. What wealth of color, facts, ideas what learning, 
 what fine-edged satire, what esprit^ science, and talent, 
 and what an irreproachable finish of style so limpid, and 
 yet so profound ! It is not heartfelt and it is not spontane- 
 ous, but all other kinds of merit, culture, and cleverness 
 the author possesses. It would be impossible to be more 
 penetrating, more subtle, and less fettered in mind, than 
 this wizard of language, with his irony and his chameleon- 
 like variety. Victor Cherbuliez, like the sphinx, is able 
 to play all lyres, and takes his profit from them all, with a 
 Goethe-like serenity. It seems as if passion, grief, and 
 error had no hold on this impassive soul. The key of 
 his thought is to be looked for in Hegel's " Phenomenology 
 of Mind," remolded by Greek and French influences. 
 
 His faith, if he has one, is that of Strauss Humanism. 
 But he is perfectly master of himself and of his utter- 
 ances, and will take good care never to preach anything 
 prematurely. 
 
 What is there quite at the bottom of this deep spring? 
 
 In any case a mind as free as any can possibly be from 
 stupidity and prejudice. One might almost say that 
 Cherbuliez knows all that he wishes to know, without the 
 trouble of learning it. He is a calm Mephistopheles, 
 with perfect manners, grace, variety, and an exquisite 
 urbanity; and Mephisto is a clever jeweler; and this 
 jeweler is a subtle musician ; and this fine singer and story- 
 teller, with his amber-like delicacy and brilliancy, is mak- 
 ing mock of us all the while. He takes a malicious 
 pleasure in withdrawing his own personality from scrutiny 
 and divination, while he himself divines everything, and 
 he likes to make us feel that although he holds in his hand 
 the secret of the universe, he will only unfold his prize at 
 his own time, and if it pleases him. Victor Cherbuliez 
 is a little like Proudhon and plays with paradoxes, to 
 shock the bourgeois. Thus he amuses himself with run- 
 ning down Luther and the Reformation in favor of the 
 Renaissance. Of the troubles of conscience he seems to
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 125 
 
 know nothing. His supreme tribunal is reason. At bot- 
 tom he is Hegelian and intellectualist. But it is a splendid 
 organization. Only sometimes he must be antipathetic to 
 those men of duty who make renunciation, sacrifice, and 
 humility the measure of individual worth. 
 
 July, 1864. Among the Alps I become a child again, 
 with all the follies and naivete of childhood. Shaking oif 
 the weight of years, the trappings of office, and all the 
 tiresome and ridiculous caution with which one lives, I 
 plunge into the full tide of pleasure, and amuse myself 
 sans fapon, as it comes. In this careless light-hearted 
 mood, my ordinary formulas and habits fall away from me 
 so completely that I feel myself no longer either towns- 
 man, or professor, or savant, or bachelor, and I remember 
 no more of my past than if it were a dream. It is like a 
 bath in Lethe. 
 
 It makes me really believe that the smallest illness would 
 destroy my memory, and wipe out all my previous exist- 
 ence, when I see with what ease I become a stranger to 
 tayself, and fall back once more into the condition of a 
 <')lank sheet, a tabula rasa. Life wears such a dream- 
 tspect to me that I can throw myself without any difficulty 
 into the situation of the dying, before whose eyes all this 
 tumult of images and forms fades into nothingness. I 
 have the inconsistency of a fluid, a vapor, a cloud, and all 
 is easily unmade or transformed in me; everything passes 
 and is effaced like the waves which follow each other on 
 the sea. When I say all, I mean all that is arbitrary, in- 
 different, partial, or intellectual in the combinations of 
 one's life. For I feel that the things of the soul, our im- 
 mortal aspirations, our deepest affections, are not drawn 
 into this chaotic whirlwind of impressions. It is the finite 
 things which are mortal and fugitive. Every man feels it 
 on his deathbed. I feel it during the whole of life; that 
 is the only difference between me and others. Excepting 
 only love, thought, and liberty, almost everything is now 
 a matter of indifference to me, and those objects which 
 excite the desires of most men, rouse in me little more
 
 J26 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 than curiosity. What does it mean detachment of soul, 
 disinterestedness, weakness, or wisdom? 
 
 September 19, 1864. I have been living for two hours 
 with a noble soul with Eugenie de Guerin, the pious hero- 
 ine of fraternal love. How many thoughts, feelings, griefs, 
 in this journal of six years! How it makes one dream, 
 think and live ! It produces a certain homesick impression 
 on me, a little like that of certain forgotten melodies 
 whereof the accent touches the heart, one knows not why. 
 It is as though far-off paths came back to me, glimpses of 
 youth, a confused murmur of voices, echoes from my past. 
 Purity, melancholy, piety, a thousand memories of a past 
 existence, forms fantastic ?nd intangible, like the fleeting 
 shadows of a dream at waking, began to circle round the 
 astonished reader. 
 
 September 20, 1864. Read Eugenie de Guerin's vol- 
 ume again right and left with a growing sense of attrac- 
 tion. Everything is heart, force, impulse, in these pages 
 which have the power of oiucerity and a brilliance of 
 suffused poetry. A great and strong soul, a clear mind, 
 distinction, levation, the freedom of unconscious talent, 
 reserve and depth nothing is wanting for this Sevigne of 
 the fields, who has to hold herself in with both hands lest 
 she should write verse, so strong in her is the artistic 
 impulse. 
 
 October 16, 1864. I have just read a part of Eugenie 
 de Gueriu's journal over again. It charmed me a little 
 less than the first time. The nature seemed to me as 
 beautiful, but the life of Eugenie was too empty, and the 
 circle of ideas which occupied her, too narrow. 
 
 It is touching and wonderful to see how little space is 
 enough for thought to spread its wings in, but this per- 
 petual motion within the four walls of a cell ends none the 
 less by becoming wearisome to minds which are accustomed 
 to embrace more objects in their field of vision. Instead 
 of a garden, the world; instead of a library, the whole of 
 literature; instead of three or four faces, a whole people 
 and all history this is what the virile, the philosophic
 
 A MIEL'S JO URN A L. 127 
 
 temper demands. Men must have more air, more room, 
 more horizon, more positive knowledge, and they end by 
 suffocating in this little cage where Eugenie lives and 
 moves, though the breath of heaven blows into it and the 
 radiance of the stars shines down upon it. 
 
 October 27, 1864. (Promenade de la Treille). The air 
 this morning was so perfectly clear and lucid that one 
 might have distinguished a figure on the Vouache.* This 
 level and brilliant sun had set fire to the whole range of 
 autumn colors; amber, saffron, gold, sulphur, yellow 
 ochre, orange, red, copper-color, aquamarine, amaranth, 
 shone resplendent on the leaves which were still hanging 
 from the boughs or had already fallen beneath the trees. It 
 was delicious. The martial step of our two battalions going 
 out to their drilling-ground, the sparkle of the guns, the 
 song of the bugles, the sharp distinctness of the house 
 outlines, still moist with the morning dew, the trans- 
 parent coolness of all the shadows every detail in the 
 scene was instinct with a keen and wholesome gayety. 
 
 There are two forms of autumn: there is the misty 
 and dreamy autumn, there is the vivid and brilliant 
 autumn: almost the difference between the two sexes. 
 The very word autumn is both masculine and feminine. 
 Has not every season, in some fashion, its two sexes? Has 
 it not its minor and its major key, its two sides of light 
 and shadow, gentleness and force? Perhaps. All that 
 is perfect is double; each face has two profiles, each coin 
 two sides. The scarlet autumn stands for vigorous activ- 
 ity : the gray autumn for meditative feeling. The one is 
 expansive and overflowing; the other still and withdrawn. 
 Yesterday our thoughts were with the dead. To-day we 
 are celebrating the vintage. 
 
 November 16, 1864. Heard of the death of . Will 
 
 and intelligence lasted till there was an effusion on the 
 brain which stopped everything. 
 
 A bubble of air in the blood, a drop of water in the 
 
 * The Voudche is the hill which bounds the horizon of Geneva to 
 the south-west.
 
 A Ml EL'S JO URNAL 
 
 brain, and a man is out of gear, his machine falls to pieces, 
 his thought vanishes, the world disappears from him like a 
 dream at morning. On what a spider thread is hung our 
 individual existence! Fragility, appearance, nothingness. 
 '* If it were for our powers of self-detraction and forgetful- 
 ness, all the fairy world which surrounds and draws us 
 would seem to us but a broken spectre in the darkness, 
 an empty appearance, a fleeting hallucination. Appeared 
 disappeared there is the whole history of a man, or of 
 a world, or of an infusoria. 
 
 Time is the supreme illusion. It is but the inner 
 prism by which we decompose being and life, the mode 
 under which we perceive successively what is simultaneous 
 in idea. The eye does not see a sphere all at once 
 although the sphere exists all at once. Either the sphere 
 must turn before the eye which is looking at it, or the eye 
 must go round the sphere. In the first case it is the world 
 which unrolls, or seems to unroll in time; in the second 
 case it is our thought which successively analyzes and 
 recomposes. For the supreme intelligence there is no 
 time; what will be, is. Time and space are fragments of 
 the infinite for the use of finite creatures. God permits 
 them, that he may not be alone. They are the mode 
 under which creatures are possible and conceivable. Let 
 us add that they are also the Jacob's ladder of innumer- 
 able steps by which the creation reascends to its Creator, 
 participates in being, tastes of life, perceives the absolute, 
 and can adore the fathomless mystery of the infinite 
 "divinity. That is the other side of the question. Our 
 life is nothing, it is true, but our life is divine. A breath 
 of nature annihilates us, but we surpass nature in pene- 
 trating far beyond her vast phantasmagoria to the change- 
 less and the eternal. To escape by the ecstasy of inward 
 vision from the whirlwind of time, to see one's self sub specie 
 eterni is the word of command of all the great religions of 
 the higher races; and this psychological possibility is the 
 foundation of all great hopes. The soul may be immortal 
 because she is fitted to rise toward that which is neither
 
 AMIEL' 8 JOURNAL. 129 
 
 born nor dies, toward that which exists substantially, 
 necessarily, invariably, that is to say toward God. 
 
 To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. 
 To attain it we must be able to guess what will interest; 
 we must learn to read the childish soul as we might a piece 
 of music. Then, by simply changing the key, we keep 
 up the attraction and vary the song. 
 
 The germs of all things are in every heart, and the 
 greatest criminals as well as the greatest heroes are but 
 different modes of ourselves. Only evil grows of itself, 
 while for goodness we want effort and courage. 
 
 Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the 
 end of all rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world 
 where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall 
 love must die? Is death, then, the secret of life? The 
 gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, 
 every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the 
 universe. 
 
 A man takes to "piety" from a thousand different 
 reasons from imitation or from eccentricity, from bravado 
 or from reverence, from shame of the past or from terror 
 of the future, from weakness and from pride, for pleasure's 
 sake or for punishment's sake, in order to be able to judge, 
 or in order to escape being judged, and for a thousand 
 other reasons; but he only becomes truly religious for 
 religion's sake. 
 
 January 11, 1865. It is pleasant to feel nobly that 
 is to say, to live above the lowlands of vulgarity. Manu- 
 facturing Americanism and Csesarian democracy tend 
 equally to the multiplying of crowds, governed by appetite, 
 applauding charlatanism, vowed to the worship of mam- 
 mon and of pleasure, and adoring no other God than force. 
 What poor samples of mankind they are who make up this 
 growing majority! Oh, let us remain faithful to the altar*
 
 130 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 of the ideal! It is possible that the spiritualists may 
 become the stoics of a new epoch of Caesarian rule. 
 Materialistic naturalism has the wind in its sails, and a 
 general moral deterioration is preparing. No matter, so 
 long as the salt does not lose its savor, and so long as the 
 friends of the higher life maintain the fire of Vesta. 
 The wood itself may choke the flame, but if the flame 
 persists, the fire will only be the more splendid in the end. 
 The great democratic deluge will not after all be able to 
 effect what the invasion of the barbarians was powerless to 
 bring about; it will not' drown altogether the results of 
 the higher culture; but we must resign ourselves to the 
 fact that it tends in the beginning to deform and vulgarize 
 everything. It is clear that aesthetic delicacy, elegance, 
 distinction, and nobleness that atticism, urbanity, what- 
 ever is suave and exquisite, fine and subtle all that 
 makes the charm of the higher kinds of literature and of 
 aristocratic cultivation vanishes simultaneously with the 
 society which corresponds to it. If, as Pascal,* I think, 
 says, the more one develops, the more difference one ob- 
 serves between man and man, then we cannot say that the 
 democratic instinct tends to mental development, since it 
 tends to make a man believe that the pretensions nave 
 only to be the same to make the merits equal also. 
 
 March 20, 1865. I have just heard of fresh cases of 
 insubordination among the students. Our youth become 
 less and less docile, and seem to take for their motto, 
 " Our master is our enemy." The boy insists upon having 
 the privileges of the young man, and the young man 
 tries to keep those of the gamin. At bottom all this is 
 the natural consequence of our system of leveling democ- 
 racy. As soon as difference of quality is, in politics, 
 officially equal to zero, the authority of age, of knowledge, 
 and of function disappears. 
 
 * The saying of Pascal's alluded to is in the Pensecs, 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 difference 
 entre les homines."
 
 AMIEUS JOURNAL. 131 
 
 The only counterpoise of pure equality is military dis- 
 cipline. In military uniform, in the police court, in 
 prison, or on the execution ground, there is no reply pos- 
 sible. But is it not curious that the regime of individual 
 right should lead to nothing but respect for brute 
 strength? Jacobinism brings with it Caesarism; the rule 
 of the tongue leads to the rule of the sword. Democracy 
 and liberty are not one but two. A republic supposes a 
 high state of morals, but no such state of morals is pos- 
 sible without the habit of respect; and there is no respect 
 without humility. Now the pretension that every man 
 has the necessary qualities of a citizen, simply because 
 he was born twenty-one years ago, is as much as to say 
 that labor, merit, virtue, character, and experience are to 
 count for nothing ; and we destroy humility when we pro- 
 claim that a man becomes the equal of all other men, by 
 the mere mechanical and vegetative process of natural 
 growth. Such a claim annihilates even the respect for 
 age; for as the elector of twenty-one is worth as much as 
 the elector of fifty, the boy of nineteen has no serious 
 reason to believe himself in any way the inferior of his 
 elder by one or two years. Thus the fiction on which the 
 political order of democracy is based ends in something 
 altogether opposed to that which democracy desires: its 
 aim was to increase the whole sum of liberty; but the 
 result is to diminish it for all. 
 
 The modern state is founded on the philosophy of atom- 
 ism. Nationality, public spirit, tradition, national man- 
 ners, disappear like so many hollow and worn-out entities ; 
 nothing remains to create movement but the action of 
 molecular force and of dead weight. In such a theory 
 liberty is identified with caprice, and the collective reason 
 and age-long tradition of an old society are nothing more 
 than soap-bubbles which the smallest urchin may shiver 
 with a snap of the fingers. 
 
 Does this mean that I am an opponent of democracy? 
 Not at all. Fiction for fiction, it is the least harmful. 
 But it is well not to confound its promises with realities.
 
 1 32 A MIEL'S JO URNAL. 
 
 The fiction consists in the postulate of all democratic 
 government, that the great majority of the electors in a 
 state are enlightened, free, honest, and patriotic whereas 
 such a postulate is a mere chimera. The majority in any 
 state is necessarily composed of the most ignorant, the 
 poorest, and the least capable ; the state is therefore at the 
 mercy of accident and passion, and it always ends by suc- 
 cumbing at one time or another to the rash conditions 
 which have been made for its existence. A man who con- 
 demns himself to live upon the tight-rope must inevitably 
 fall ; one has no need to be a prophet to foresee such a 
 result. 
 
 "Aptdror nkv vS<ap, said Pindar; the best thing in the 
 world is wisdom, and, in default of wisdom, science. 
 States, churches, society itself, may fall to pieces; science 
 alone has nothing to fear until at least society once more 
 falls a prey to barbarism. Unfortunately this triumph of 
 barbarism is not impossible. The victory of the socialist 
 Utopia, or the horrors of a religious war, reserve for us 
 perhaps even this lamentable experience. 
 
 April 3, 1865. What doctor possesses such curative 
 resources as those latent in a spark of happiness or a single 
 ray of hope? The mainspring of life is in the heart. Joy 
 is the vital air of the soul, and grief is a kind of asthma 
 complicated by atony. Our dependence upon surrounding 
 circumstances increases with our own physical weakness, 
 and on the other hand, in health there is liberty. Health 
 is the first of all liberties, and happiness gives us the 
 energy which is the basis of health. To make any one 
 happy, theij, is strictly to augment his store of being, to 
 double the intensity of his life, to reveal him to himself, 
 to ennoble him and transfigure him. Happiness does 
 away with ugliness, and even makes the beauty of beauty. 
 The man who doubts it, can never have watched the first 
 gleams of tenderness dawning in the clear eyes of one who 
 loves; sunrise itself is a lesser marvel. In paradise, then, 
 everybody will be beautiful. For, as the righteous soul is 
 naturally beautiful, as the spiritual body is but the
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 133 
 
 visibility of the soul, its impalpable and angelic form, and 
 as happiness beautifies all that it penetrates or even 
 touches, ugliness will have no more place in the universe, 
 and will disappear with grief, sin, and death. 
 
 To the materialist philosopher the beautiful is a mere 
 accident, and therefore rare. To the spiritualist philoso- 
 pher the beautiful is the rule, the law, the universal 
 foundation of things, to which every form returns as soor 
 as the force of accident is withdrawn. Why are we ugly? 
 Because we are not in the angelic state, because we are 
 evil, morose, and unhappy. 
 
 Heroism, ecstasy, prayer, love, enthusiasm, weave a 
 halo round the brow, for they are a setting free of the 
 soul, which through them gains force to make its envelope 
 transparent and shine through upon all around it. Beauty 
 is, then, a phenomenon belonging to the spiritualization 
 of matter. It is a momentary transfiguration of the privi- 
 leged object or being a token fallen from heaven to earth 
 in order to remind us of the ideal world. To study it, is 
 to Platonize almost inevitably. As a powerful electric 
 current can render metals luminous, and reveal their 
 essence by the color of their flame, so intense life and 
 supreme joy can make the most simple mortal dazzlingly 
 beautiful. Man, therefore, is never more truly man than 
 in these divine states. 
 
 The ideal, after all, is truer than the real: for the ideal 
 is the eternal element in perishable things: it is their 
 type, their sum, their raison d'etre, their formula in the 
 book of the Creator, and therefore at once the most exact 
 and the most condensed expression of them. 
 
 April 11, 1865. I have been measuring and making a 
 trial of the new gray plaid which is to take the place of 
 my old mountain shawl. The old servant which has been 
 my companion for ten years, and which recalls to me so 
 many poetical and delightful memories, pleases me better 
 than its brilliant successor, even though this last has been 
 a present from a friendly hand. But can anything take 
 the place of the nast and have not even the inanimate
 
 134 AMIK1SS JOURNAL. 
 
 witnesses ef our life voice and language for us? Glion, 
 Villars, Albisbrunnen, the Righi, the Chamossaire, and a 
 hundred other places, have loft something of themselves 
 behind them in the meshes of this woolen stuff which 
 makes a part of my most intimate history. The shawl, 
 besides, is the only chivalrous article of dress which is still 
 left to the modern traveler, the only thing about him 
 which may be useful to others than himself, and by means 
 of which he may still do his devoir to fair women! How 
 many times mine has served them for a cushion, a cloak, 
 a shelter, on the damp grass of the Alps, on seats of hard 
 rock, or in the sudden cool of the pinewood, during the 
 walks, the rests, the readings, and the chats of mountain 
 life! How many kindly smiles it has won for me! Even 
 its blemishes are dear to me, for each darn and tear has its 
 story, each scar is an armorial bearing. This tear was 
 made by a hazel tree under Jaman that by the buckle of 
 a strap on the Frohnalp that, again, by a bramble at 
 Charnex; and each time fairy needles have repaired the 
 injury. 
 
 " Mon vieux rnanteau, que je vous remercie 
 Car c'est a vous que je dois ces plaisirs! " 
 
 And has it not been to me a friend in suffering, a com- 
 panion in good and evil fortune? It reminds me of that 
 centaur's tunic which could not be torn off without carry- 
 ing away the flesh and blood of its wearer. I am unwilling 
 to give it up; whatever giatitude for the past, and what- 
 ever piety toward my vanished youth is in me, seem to 
 forbid it. The warp of this rag is woven out of Alpine 
 joys, and its woof out of human affections. It also says 
 to me in its own way : 
 
 "Pauvre bouquet, fleurs aujourd'hui fanees! " 
 
 And the appeal is one of those which move the heart, 
 although profane ears neither hear it nor understand it. 
 What a stab there is in those words, thou hast been! 
 when the sense of them becomes absolutely clear to us. 
 One feels one's self sinking gradually into one's grave, and
 
 AMIEUS JO URN A L. 135 
 
 the past tense sounds the knell of our illusions as to our- 
 selves. What is past is past : gray hairs will never become 
 black curls again; the forces, the gifts, the attractions of 
 youth, have vanished with our young days. 
 
 "Plus d'amour; partant plus de joie." 
 
 How hard it is to grow old, when we have missed our 
 life, when we have neither the crown of completed man- 
 hood nor of fatherhood ! How sad it is to feel the mind 
 declining before it has done its work, and the body grow- 
 ing weaker before it has seen itself renewed in those who 
 might close our eyes and honor our name! The tragic 
 solemnity of existence strikes us with terrible force, on 
 that morning when we wake to find the mournful word 
 too late ringing in our ears ! " Too late, the sand is turned, 
 the hour is past! Thy harvest is unreaped too late! 
 Thou hast been dreaming, forgetting, sleeping so much 
 the worse! Everyman rewards or punishes himself. To 
 whom or of whom wouldst thou complain? " Alas! 
 
 April 21, 1865. (Mornex). A morning of intoxicating 
 beauty, fresh as the feelings of sixteen, and crowned with 
 flowers like a bride. The poetry of youth, of innocence, 
 and of love, overflowed my soul. Even to the light mist 
 hovering over the bosom of the plain image of that ten- 
 der modesty which veils the features and shrouds in mys- 
 tery the inmost thoughts of the maiden everything that 
 I saw delighted my eyes and spoke to my imagination. It 
 was a sacred, a nuptial day ! and the matin bells ringing in 
 some distant village harmonized marvelously with the 
 hymn of nature. "Pray," they said, "and love! Adore 
 a fatherly and beneficent God." They recalled to me the 
 accent of Haydn; there was in them and in the landscape 
 a childlike joyousness, a naive gratitude, a radiant heavenly 
 joy innocent of pain and sin, like the sacred, simple-hearted 
 ravishment of Eve on the first day of her awakening in 
 the new world. How good a thing is feeling, admiration.' 
 It is the bread of angels, the eternal food of cherubim and 
 seraphim.
 
 136 AMIEVS JO URNAL. 
 
 I have not yet felt the air so pure, so life-giving, so ethereal, 
 during the five days that I have been here. To breathe is 
 a beatitude. One understands the delights of a bird's 
 existence that emancipation from all encumbering weight 
 that luminous and empyrean life, floating in blue space, 
 and passing from one horizon to another with a stroke of 
 the wing. One must have a great deal of air below one 
 before one can be conscious of such inner freedom as this, 
 such lightness of the whole being. Every element has its 
 poetry, but the poetry of air is liberty. Enough ; to your 
 work, dreamer! 
 
 May 30, 1865. All snakes fascinate their prey, and pure 
 wickedness seems to inherit the power of fascination 
 granted to the serpent. It stupefies and bewilders the 
 simple heart, which sees it without understanding it, 
 which touches it without being able to believe in it, and 
 which sinks engulfed in the problem of it, like Empedocles 
 in Etna, fi/on possum capere te, cape me, says the 
 Aristotelian motto. Every diminutive of Beelzebub is an 
 abyss, each demoniacal act is a gulf of darkness. Natural 
 cruelty, inborn perfidy and falseness, even in animals, cast 
 lurid gleams, as it were, into that fathomless pit of Satanic 
 perversity which is a moral reality. 
 
 Nevertheless behind this thought there rises another 
 which tells me that sophistry is at the bottom of human 
 wickedness, that the majority of monsters like to justify 
 themselves in their own eyes, and that the first attribute 
 of the Evil One is to be the father of lies. Before crime 
 is committed conscience must be corrupted, and every bad 
 man who succeeds in reaching a high point of wickedness 
 begins with this. It is all very well to say that hatred is 
 murder; the man who hates is determined to see nothing 
 in it but an act of moral hygiene. It is to do himself 
 good that he does evil, just as a mad dog bites to get rid 
 of his thirst. 
 
 To injure others while at the same time knowingly 
 injuring one's self is a step farther; evil then becomes a 
 frenzy, which, in its turn, sharpens into a cold ferocity-
 
 AMIEUS JOURNAL. 137 
 
 Whenever a man, under the influence of such a diabolical 
 passion, surrenders himself to these instincts of the wild or 
 venomous beast lie must seem to the angels a madman a 
 lunatic, who kindles his own Gehenna that he may con- 
 sume the world in it, or as much of it as his devilish 
 desires can lay hold upon. Wickedness is forever begin- 
 ning a new spiral which penetrates deeper still into the 
 abysses of abomination, for the circles of hell have this 
 property that they have no end. It seems as though 
 divine perfection were an infinite of the first degree, but as 
 though diabolical perfection were an infinite of unknown 
 power. But no; for if so, evil would be the true God, 
 and hell would swallow up creation. According to the 
 Persian and the Christian faiths, good is to conquer evil, 
 and perhaps even Satan himself will be restored to grace 
 which is as much as to say that the divine order will be 
 everywhere re-established. Love will be more potent than 
 hatred ; God will save his glory, and his glory is in his 
 goodness. But it is very true that all gratuitous wicked- 
 ness troubles the soul, because it seems to make the great 
 lines of the moral order tremble within us by the sudden 
 withdrawal of the curtain which hides from us the action 
 of those dark corrosive forces which have ranged them- 
 selves in battle against the divine plan. 
 
 June 26, 1865. One may guess the why and wherefore 
 of a tear and yet find it too subtle to give any account of. 
 A tear may be the poetical resume of so many simultaneous 
 impressions, the quintessence of so many opposing thoughts ! 
 It is like a drop of one of those precious elixirs of the 
 East which contain the life of twenty plants fused into a 
 single aroma. Sometimes it is the mere overflow of the 
 soul, the running over of the cup of reverie. All that one 
 cannot or will not say, all that one refuses to confess even 
 to one's self confused desires, secret trouble, suppressed 
 grief, smothered conflict, voiceless regret, the emotions 
 we have struggled against, the pain we have sought to 
 hide, our superstitious fears, our vague sufferings, our rest- 
 less presentiments, our unrealized dreams, the wound?
 
 a 38 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 inflicted upon our ideal, the dissatisfied languor, the va:.s 
 hopes, the multitude of small indiscernible ills which 
 accumulate slowly in a corner of the heart like water 
 dropping noiselessly from the roof of a cavern all these 
 mysterious movements of the inner life end in an instant 
 of emotion, and the emotion concentrates itself in a tear 
 just visible en the edge of the eyelid. 
 
 For the rest, tears express joy as well as sadness. They 
 are the symbol of the powerlessness of the soul to restrain 
 its emotion and to remain mistress of itself. Speech 
 implies analysis; when we are overcome by sensation or 
 by feeling analysis ceases, and with it speech and liberty. 
 Our only resource, after silence and stupor, is the language 
 of action pantomime. Any oppressive weight of thought 
 carries us back to a stage anterior to humanity, to a ges- 
 ture, a cry, a sob, and at last to swooning and collapse; 
 that is to say, incapable of bearing the excessive strain of 
 sensation as men, we fall back successively to the stage of 
 mere animate being, and then to that of the vegetable. 
 Dante swoons at every turn in his journey through hell, 
 and nothing paints better the violence of his emotions and 
 the ardor of his piety. 
 
 . . . And intense joy? It also withdraws into itself 
 and is silent. To speak is to disperse and scatter. Words 
 isolate and localize life in a single point; they touch only 
 the circumference of being; they analyze, they treat one 
 thing at a time. Thus they decentralize emotion, and 
 chill it in doing so. The heart would fain brood over its 
 feeling, cherishing and protecting it. Its happiness is 
 silent and meditative; it listens to its own beating and 
 feeds religiously upon itself. 
 
 Augusts, 1865. (Gryonsur Bex). Splendid moonlight 
 without a cloud. The night is solemn and majestic. The 
 regiment of giants sleeps while the stars keep sentinel. 
 In the vast shadow of the valley glimmer a few scattered 
 roofs, while the torrent, organ-like, swells its eternal note 
 in the depths of this mountain cathedral which has the 
 heavens for roof.
 
 JOURNAL. 139- 
 
 A last look at this blue night and boundless landscape. 
 Jupiter is just setting on the counterscarp of the Dent 
 du Midi. From the starry vault descends an invisible 
 snow-shower jot dreams, calling us to a pure sleep. 
 Nothing of voluptuous or enervating in this nature. All 
 is strong, austere and pure. Good night to all the world ! 
 to the unfortunate and to the happy. Eest and refresh- 
 ment, renewal and hope; a day is dead vive le lendemain! 
 Midnight is striking. Another step made toward the 
 tomb. 
 
 August 13, 1865. I have just read through again the 
 letter of J. J. Rousseau to Archbishop Beaumont with a 
 little less admiration than I felt for it was it ten or 
 twelve years ago? This emphasis, this precision, which 
 never tires of itself, tires the reader in the long run. The 
 intensity of the style produces on one the impression of a 
 treatise on mathematics. One % feels the need of relaxation 
 after it in something easy, natural, and gay. The 
 language of Rousseau demands an amount of labor which 
 makes one long for recreation and relief. 
 
 But how many writers and how many books descend 
 from our Rousseau! On my way I noticed the points; 
 of departure of Chateaubriand, Lamennais, Proudhon. 
 Proudhon, for instance, modeled the plan of his great 
 work, "De la Justice dans 1'Eglise et dans la Revolution," 
 upon the letter of Rousseau to Beaumont; his three vol- 
 umes are a string of letters to an archbishop ; eloquence, 
 daring, and elocution are all fused in a kind of persiflage* 
 which is the foundation of the whole. 
 
 How many men we may find in one man, how many 
 styles in a great writer! Rousseau, for instance, has 
 created a number of different genres. Imagination trans- 
 forms him, and he is able to play the most varied parts 
 with credit, among them even that of the pure logician. 
 But as the imagination is his intellectual axis his master 
 faculty he is, as it were, in all his works only hall 
 sincere, only half in earnest. We feel that his talent has 
 laid him the wager of Carneades; it will lose no cause.
 
 140 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 however bad, as soon as the point of honor is engaged. It 
 is indeed the temptation of all talent to subordinate things 
 to itself and not itself to things; to conquer for the sake of 
 conquest, and to put self-love in the place.of conscience. 
 Talent is glad enough, no doubt, to triumph in a good 
 cause; but it easily becomes a free lance, content, what- 
 ever the cause, so long as victory follows its banner. I do 
 not know even whether success in a weak and bad cause is 
 not the most flattering for talent, which then divides the 
 honors of its triumph with nothing and no one. 
 
 Paradox is the delight of clever people and the joy of 
 talent. It is so pleasant to pit one's self against the world, 
 and to overbear mere commonplace good sense and vulgar 
 platitudes! Talent and love of truth are then not iden- 
 tical; their tendencies and their paths are different. In 
 order to make talent obey when its instinct is rather to 
 command, a vigilant moral, sense and great energy of char- 
 acter are needed. The Greeks those artists of the spoken 
 or written word were artificial by the time of Ulyspes, 
 sophists by the time of Pericles, cunning, rhetorical, and 
 versed in all the arts of the courtier down to the end of 
 the lower empire. From the talent of the nation sprang 
 its vices. 
 
 For a man to make his mark, like Rousseau by polemics, 
 is to condemn himself to perpetual exaggeration and con- 
 flict. Such a man expiates his celebrity by a double 
 bitterness; he is never altogether true, and he is never 
 able to recover the free disposal of himself. To pick a 
 quarrel with the world is attractive, but dangerous. 
 
 J. J. Rousseau is an ancestor in all things. It was he 
 who founded traveling on foot before Topffer, reverie 
 before " Rene," literary botany before George Sand, the wor- 
 ship of nature before Bernardin de S. Pierre, the demo- 
 cratic theory before the Revolution of 1789, political dis- 
 cussion and theological discussion before Mirabeau and 
 Renan, the science of teaching before Pestalozzi, and 
 Alpine description before De Saussure. He made music 
 the fashion, and created the taste for confessions to th
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. Ul 
 
 public. He formed a new French style the close, chas- 
 tened, passionate, interwoven style we know so well. 
 Nothing indeed of Eousseau has been lost, and nobody has 
 had more influence than he upon the French Revolution, 
 for he was the demigod of it, and stands between Neckar 
 and Napoleon. Nobody, again, has had more than he 
 upon the nineteenth century, for Byron, Chateaubriand, 
 Madame de Stae'l, and George Sand all descend from him. 
 
 And yet, with these extraordinary talents, he was an 
 extremely unhappy man why? Because he always 
 allowed himself to be mastered by his imagination and his 
 sensations; because he had no judgment in deciding, no 
 self-control in acting. Regret indeed on this score would 
 be hardly reasonable, for a calm, judicious, orderly Rous- 
 seau would never have made so great an impression. He- 
 came into collision with his time: hence his eloquence 
 and his misfortunes. His naive confidence in life and 
 himself ended in jealous misanthropy and hypochondria. 
 
 What a contrast to Goethe or Voltaire, and how differ- 
 ently they understood the practical wisdom of life and the 
 management of literary gifts! They were the able men 
 Rousseau is a visionary. They knew mankind as it is he 
 always represented it to himself either whiter or blacker 
 than it is; and having begun by taking life the wrong 
 way, he ended in madness. In the talent of Rousseau 
 there is always something unwholesome, uncertain, stormy, 
 and sophistical, which destroys the confidence of the reader; 
 and the reason is no doubt that we feel passion to have 
 been the governing force in him as a writer: passion 
 stirred his imagination, and ruled supreme over his reason. 
 
 Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an uncon~ 
 scious apology for our faults a gigantic scaffolding whose 
 object is to hide from us our favorite sin. 
 
 The unfinished is nothing. 
 
 Great men are the true men, the men in whom nature
 
 142 A Mim:S JO URN A L. 
 
 has succeeded. They are not extraordinary they are in 
 the true order. It is the other species of men who are not 
 what they ought to be. 
 
 January 7, 1866. Our life is but a soap-bubble hanging 
 from a reed ; it is formed, expands to its full size, clothes 
 itself with the loveliest colors of the prism, and even 
 escapes at moments from the law of gravitation ; but soon 
 the black speck appears in it, and the globe of emerald 
 and gold vanishes into space, leaving behind it nothing 
 'but a simple drop of turbid water. All the poets have 
 made this comparison, it is so striking and so true. To 
 appear, to shine, to disappear; to be born, to suffer, and 
 to die; is it not the whole sum of life, for a butterfly, for 
 a nation, for a star? 
 
 Time is but the measure of the difficulty of a concep- 
 tion. Pure thought has scarcely any need of time, since 
 it perceives the two ends of an idea almost at the same 
 moment. The thought of a planet can only be worked 
 out by nature with labor and effort, but supreme intelli- 
 gence sums up the whole in an instant. Time is then the 
 successive dispersion of being, just as speech is the suc- 
 cessive analysis of an intuition or of an act of will. In 
 itself it is relative and negative, and disappears within the 
 absolute being. God is outside time because he thinks all 
 thought at once; Nature is within time because she is 
 only speech the discursive unfolding of each thought 
 contained within the infinite thought. But nature exhausts 
 herself in this impossible task, for the analysis of the 
 infinite is a contradiction. With limitless duration, bound- 
 less space, and number without end, Nature does at least 
 what she can to translate into visible form the wealth of 
 the creative formula. By the vastness of the abysses into 
 which she penetrates, in the effort the unsuccessful effort 
 to house and contain the eternal thought, we may meas- 
 ure the greatness of the divine mind. For as soon as this 
 mind goes out of itself and seeks to explain itself, the 
 effort at utterance heaps universe upon universe, during
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 143 
 
 myriads of centuries, and still it is not expressed, and the 
 great harangue must go on for ever and ever. 
 
 The East prefers immobility as the form of the Infinite : 
 the West, movement. It is because the West is infected 
 by the passion for details, and sets proud store by indi- 
 vidual worth. Like a child upon whom a hundred thous- 
 and francs have been bestowed, he thinks she is multiply- 
 ing her fortune by counting it out in pieces of twenty sous, 
 or five centimes. Her passion for progress is in great part 
 the product of an infatuation, which consists in forgetting 
 f ,he goal to be aimed at, and absorbing herself in the pride 
 and delight of each tiny step, one after the other. Child 
 that she is, she is even capable of confounding change 
 with improvement beginning over again, with growth in 
 perfectness. 
 
 At the bottom of the modern man there is always a 
 great thirst for self-f orgetf ulness, self -distraction ; he has a 
 secret horror of all which makes him feel his own little- 
 ness; the eternal, the infinite, perfection, therefore scare 
 and terrify him. He wishes to approve himself, to admire 
 and congratulate himself; and therefore he turns away 
 from all those problems and abysses which might recall to 
 him his own nothingness. This is what makes the real 
 pettiness of so many of our great minds, and accounts for 
 the lack of personal dignity among us civilized parrots 
 that we are as compared with the Arab of the desert; or 
 explains the growing frivolity of our masses, more and 
 more educated, no doubt, but also more and more super- 
 ficial in all their conceptions of happiness. 
 
 Here, then, is the service which Christianity the 
 oriental element in our culture renders to us Westerns. 
 It checks and counterbalances our natural tendency toward 
 the passing, the finite, and the changeable, by fixing the 
 mind upon the contemplation of eternal things, and by 
 Platonizing our affections, which otherwise would have 
 too little outlook upon the ideal world. Christianity leads 
 us back from dispersion to concentration, from worldliness 
 to self-recollection. It restores to our souls, fevered with a
 
 1 44 AMIRL'S JO URNAL. 
 
 
 
 thousand sordid desires, nobleness, gravity, and calm. 
 Just as sleep is a bath of refreshing for our actual life, 
 so religion is a bath of refreshing for our immortal being. 
 What is sacred has a purifying virtue; religious emotion 
 crowns the brow with an aureole, and thrills the heart with 
 an ineffable joy. 
 
 I think that the adversaries of religion as such deceive 
 themselves as to the needs of the western man, and that 
 the modern world will lose its balance as soon as it has 
 passed over altogether to the crude doctrine of progress. 
 We have always need of the infinite, the eternal, the abso- 
 lute; and since science contents itself with what is relative, 
 it necessarily leaves a void, which it is good for man to fill 
 with contemplation, worship, and adoration. "Religion," 
 said Bacon, " is the spice which is meant to keep life from 
 corruption," and this is especially true to-day of religion 
 taken in the Platonist and oriental sense. A capacity for 
 self-recollection for withdrawal from the outward to the 
 inward is in fact the condition of all noble and useful 
 activity. 
 
 This return, indeed, to what is serious, divine, and 
 sacred, is becoming more and more difficult, because of the 
 growth of critical anxiety within the church itself, the 
 increasing worldliness of religious preaching, and the uni- 
 versal agitation and disquiet of society. But such a return 
 is more and more necessary. Without it there is no inner 
 life, and the inner life is the only means whereby we may 
 oppose a profitable resistance to circumstance. If the 
 sailor did not carry with him his own temperature he 
 could not go from the pole to the equator, and remair 
 himself in spite of all. The man who has no refuge in 
 himself, who lives, so to speak, in his front rooms, in the 
 outer whirlwind of things and opinions, is not properly a 
 personality at all; he is not distinct, free, original, a cause 
 in a word, some one. He is one of a crowd, a taxpayer, 
 an elector, an anonymity, but not a man. He helps to 
 make up the mass to fill np the number of human con- 
 sumers or producers; but he interests nobody but the
 
 AMIEL'8 JOURNAL. 145 
 
 economist and the statistician, who take the heap of sand 
 as a whole into consideration, without troubling them- 
 selves about the uninteresting uniformity of the individual 
 grains. The crowd counts only as a massive elementary 
 force why? because its constituent parts are individually 
 insignificant: they are all like each other, and we add 
 them up like the molecules of water in a river, gauging 
 them by the fathom instead of appreciating them as indi- 
 viduals. Such men are reckoned and weighed merely as 
 so many bodies: they have never been individualized by 
 conscience, after the manner of souls. 
 
 He who floats wi th the current, who does not guide him- 
 self according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no 
 convictions such a man is a mere article of th*e world's 
 furniture a thing moved, instead of a living and moving 
 being an echo, not a voice. The man who has no inner 
 life is the slave of his surroundings, as the barometer is 
 the obedient servant of the air at rest, and the weather- 
 cock the humble servant of the air in motion. 
 
 January 21, 1866. This evening after supper I did not 
 know whither to betake my solitary self. I was hungry 
 for conversation, society, exchange of ideas. It occurred 
 
 to me to go and see our friends, the s ; they were at 
 
 supper. Afterward we went into the salon : mother and 
 daughter sat down to the piano and sang a duet by 
 Boi'eldieu. The ivory keys of the old grand piano, which 
 the mother had played on before her marriage, and which 
 has followed and translated into music the varying fortunes 
 of the family, were a little loose and jingling; but the 
 poetry of the past sang in this faithful old servant, which 
 had been a friend in trouble, a companion in vigils, and 
 the echo of a lifetime of duty, affection, piety and virtue. 
 I was more moved than I can say. It was like a scene of 
 Dickens, and I felt a rush of sympathy, untouched either 
 by egotism or by melancholy. 
 
 Twenty-five years! It seems to me a dream as far as I 
 am concerned, and I can scarcely believe my eyes, or this 
 inanimate witness to so many lustres passed away. How
 
 1 46 A KIEL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 strange a thing to have lived, and to feel myself so far 
 from a past which yet is so present to me! One does not 
 know whether one is sleeping or waking. Time is but the 
 :space between our memories; as soon as we cease to per- 
 ceive this space, time has disappeared. The whole life of 
 an old man may appear to him no longer than an hour, or 
 less still; and as soon as time is but a moment to us, we 
 have entered upon eternity. Life is but the dream of a 
 .shadow ; I felt it anew this evening with strange intensity. 
 
 January 29, 1866. (Nine o'clock in the morning]. The 
 gray curtain of mist has spread itself again over the town ; 
 everything is dark and dull. The bells are ringing in the 
 distance for some festival ; with this exception everything 
 is calm and silent. Except for the crackling of the fire, 
 no noise disturbs my solitude in this modest home, the 
 shelter of my thoughts and of my work, where the man of 
 middle age carries on the life of his student-youth without 
 the zest of youth, and the sedentary professor repeats day 
 by day the habits which he formed as a traveler. 
 
 What is it which makes the charm of this existence out- 
 wardly so barren and empty? Liberty! What does the 
 absence of comfort and of all else that is wanting to these 
 rooms matter to me? These things are indifferent to me. 
 I find under this roof light, quiet, shelter. I am near to 
 a sister and her children, whom I love; my material life is 
 
 assured that ought to be enough for a bachelor 
 
 Am I not, besides, a creature of habit? more attached to 
 the ennuis I know, than in love with pleasures unknown 
 to me. I am, then, free and not unhappy. Then I am 
 well off here, and I should be ungrateful to complain. 
 Nor do I. It is only the heart which sighs and seeks for 
 something more and better. The heart is an insatiable 
 glutton, as we all know and for the rest, who is without 
 yearnings? It is our destiny here below. Only some go 
 through torments and troubles in order to satisfy them- 
 selves, and all without success; others foresee the inevi- 
 table result, and by a timely resignation save themselves a 
 barren and fruitless effort. Since we cannot be happy,
 
 A Ml EL' 8 JO URN A L. 147 
 
 why give ourselves so much trouble? It is best to limit 
 one's self to what is strictly necessary, to live austerely 
 and by rule, to content one's self with a little, and to 
 attach no value to anything but peace of conscience and 
 a sense of duty done. 
 
 It is true that this itself is no small ambition, and that 
 it only lands us in another impossibility. No the sim- 
 plest course is to submit one's self wholly and altogether 
 to God. Everything else, as saith the preacher, is but 
 vanity and vexation of spirit. 
 
 It is a long while now since this has been plain to me, 
 and since this religious renunciation has been sweet and 
 familiar to me. It is the outward distractions of life, the 
 examples of the world, and the irresistible influence exerted 
 upon us by the current of things which make us forget 
 the wisdom we have acquired and the principles we have 
 adopted. That is why life is such weariness! This 
 eternal beginning over again is tedious, even to repulsion. 
 It would be so good to go to sleep when we have gathered 
 the fruit of experience* when we are no longer in opposi- 
 tion to the supreme will, when we have broken loose from 
 self, when we are at peace with all men. Instead of this, 
 the old round of temptations, disputes, ennuis, and for- 
 gettings, has to be faced again and again, and we fall back 
 into prose, into commonness, into vulgarity. How melan- 
 choly, how humiliating! The poets are wise in withdraw- 
 ing their heroes more quickly from the strife, and in not 
 dragging them after victory along the common rut of 
 barren days. " Whom the gods love die young," said the 
 proverb of antiquity. 
 
 Yes, but it is our secret self-love which is set upon thk 
 favor from on high; such may be our, desire, but such is 
 not the will of God. We are. to be exercised, humbled, 
 tried, and tormented to the end. It is our patience which 
 is the touchstone of our virtue. To bear with life even 
 when illusion and hope are gone; to accept this position 
 of perpetual war, while at the same time loving only peace ; 
 to stay patiently in the world, even when it repels us as a
 
 148 AMIEIS8 JOURNAL. 
 
 place of low company, and seems to us a mere arena of bad 
 passions; to remain faithful to one's own faith without 
 breaking with the followers of the false gods; to make no 
 attempt to escape from the human hospital, long-suffering 
 and patient as Job upon his dung hill this is duty. 
 When life ceases to be a promise it does not cease to be a 
 task ; its true name even is trial. 
 
 April 2, 1866. (Mornex). The snow is melting and a 
 damp fog is spread over everything. The asphalt gallery 
 which runs along the salon is a sheet of quivering water 
 starred incessantly by the hurrying drops falling from the 
 sky. It seems as if one could touch the horizon with one's 
 hand, and the miles of country which were yesterday 
 visible are all hidden under a thick gray curtain. 
 
 This imprisonment transports me to Shetland, to Spitz- 
 bergett, to Norway, to the Ossianic countries jof mist, 
 where man, thrown back upon himself, feels his heart beat 
 more quickly and his thought expand more freely so long, 
 at least, as he is not frozen and congealed by cold. Fog 
 has certainly a poetry of its own a grace, a dreamy 
 charm. It does for the daylight what a lamp does for us 
 at night; it turns the mind toward meditation; it throws 
 the soul back on itself. The sun, as it were, sheds us 
 abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us; mist draws us 
 together and concentrates us it is cordial, homely, charged 
 with feeling. The poetry of the sun has something of the 
 epic in it; that of fog and mist is elegaic and religious. 
 Pantheism is the child of light; mist engenders faith m 
 near protectors. When the great world is shut oif from 
 us, the house becomes itself a small universe. Shrouded 
 in perpetual mist, men love each other better; for the only 
 reality then is the family, and, within the family, the 
 heart; and the greatest thoughts come from the heart so 
 says the moralist. 
 
 "April 6, 1866. The novel by Miss Mulock, "John 
 Halifax, Gentleman," is a bolder book than it seems, for 
 it attacks in the English way the social problem of equality. 
 And the solution reached is that every one may become a
 
 A MIEUS JO URN A L. 149 
 
 gentleman, even though he may be born in the gutter. In 
 its way the story protests against conventional superiorities, 
 and shows that true nobility consists in character, in per- 
 sonal merit, in moral distinction, in elevation of feeling 
 and of language, in dignity of life, and in self-respect. 
 This is better than Jacobinism, and the opposite of the 
 mere brutal passion for equality. Instead of dragging 
 everybody down, the author simply proclaims the right of 
 every one to rise. A man may be born rich and noble he 
 is not born a gentleman. This word is the Shibboleth of 
 England; it divides her into two halves, and civilized 
 society into two castes. Among gentlemen courtesy, 
 equality, and politeness; toward those below contempt, 
 disdain, coldness and indifference. It is the old separation 
 between the ingenui and all others; between the ihevQepoi 
 and the /Scfvav&ot, the continuation of the feudal division 
 between the gentry and the roturiers. 
 
 What, then, is a gentleman? Apparently he is the free 
 man, the man who is stronger than things,and believes in 
 personality as superior to all the accessory attributes of 
 fortune, such as rank and power, and as constituting what 
 is essential, real, and intrinsically valuable in the indi- 
 vidual. Tell me what you are, and I will tell you what 
 you are worth. "God and my Eight; " there is the only 
 motto he believes in. Such an ideal is happily opposed to 
 that vulgar ideal which is equally English, the ideal of 
 wealth, with its formula, " How much is he worth? " In a 
 country where poverty is a crime, it is good to be able to 
 say that a nabob need not as such be a gentleman. The 
 mercantile ideal and the chivalrous ideal counterbalance 
 each other; and if the 0119 produces the ugliness of 
 English society and its brutal side, the other serves as a 
 compensation. 
 
 The gentleman, then, is the man who is master of him- 
 self, who respects himself, and makes others respect him. 
 The essence of gentlemanliness is self-rule, the sovereignty 
 of the soul. It means a character which possesses itself, 
 9 force which governs itself, a liberty which affirms and
 
 1 50 A KIEL'S JO URNAL. 
 
 regulates itself, according to the type of true dignity. 
 Such an ideal is closely akin to the Roman type of dig nit as 
 cum auctoritate. It is more moral than intellectual, and 
 is particularly suited to England, which is pre-eminently 
 the country of will. But from self-respect a thousand 
 other things are derived such as the care of a man's per- 
 son, of his language, of his manners; watchfulness over his 
 body and over his soul; dominion over his instincts and 
 hin passions; the effort to be self-sufficient; the pride which 
 will accept no favor; carefulness not to expose himself to 
 any humiliation or mortification, and to maintain himself 
 independent of any human caprice; the constant protection 
 of his honor and of his self-respect. Such a condition of 
 sovereignty, insomuch as it is only easy to the man who is 
 well-born, well-bred, and rich, was naturally long identi- 
 fied with birth, rank, and above all with property. The 
 idea "gentleman" is, then, derived from feudality; it is, 
 as it were, a milder version of the seigneur. 
 
 In order to lay himself open to no reproach, a gentleman 
 will keep himself irreproachable; in order to be treated 
 with consideration, he will always be careful himself to 
 observe distances, to apportion respect, and to observe all 
 the gradations of conventional politeness, according to 
 rank, age, and situation. Hence it follows that he will be 
 imperturbably cautious in the presence of a stranger, whose 
 name and worth are unknown to him, and to whom he 
 might perhaps show too much or too little courtesy. He 
 ignores and avoids him; if he is approached, he turns 
 away, if he is addressed, he answers shortly and with 
 hauteur. His politeness is not human and general, but 
 indiridual and relative to persons. This is why every 
 Englishman contains two different men one turned toward 
 the world, and another. The first, the outer man, is a 
 citadel, a cold and angular wall ; the other, the inner man, 
 is a sensible, affectionate, cordial, and loving creature. 
 Such a type is only formed in a moral climate full of 
 icicles, where, in the face of an indifferent world, the 
 hearth alone is hospitable
 
 AM1EUS JOURNAL. 151 
 
 So that an analysis of the national type of gentlemen 
 reveals to us the nature and the history of the nation, as 
 the fruit reveals the tree. 
 
 April 7, 1866. If philosophy is the art of understanding, 
 it is evident that it must begin by saturating itself with 
 facts and realities, and that premature abstraction kills it, 
 just as the abuse of fasting destroys the body at the age of 
 growth. Besides, we only understand that which is 
 already within us. To understand is to possess the thing 
 understood, first by sympathy and then by intelligence. 
 Instead, then, of first dismembering and dissecting the 
 object to be conceived, we should begin by laying hold of 
 it in its ensemble, then in its formation, last of all in its 
 parts. The procedure is the same, whether we study a watch 
 or a plant, a work of art or a character. We must study, 
 respect, and question what we want to know, instead of 
 massacring it. We must assimilate ourselves to things and 
 surrender ourselves to them ; we must open our minds with 
 docility to their influence, and steep ourselves in their 
 spirit and their distinctive form, before we offer violence to 
 them by dissecting them. 
 
 April 14, 1866. Panic, confusion, sauve qui pent on 
 the Bourse at Paris. In our epoch of individualism, and 
 of "each man for himself and God for all," the movements 
 of the public funds are all that now represent to us the 
 beat of the common heart. The solidarity of interests 
 which they imply counterbalances the separateness of 
 modern affections, and the obligatory sympathy they im- 
 pose upon us recalls to one a little the patriotism which 
 bore the forced taxes of old days. We feel ourselves 
 bound up with and compromised in all the world's affairs, 
 and we must interest ourselves wnetner we will or no in 
 the terrible machine whose wheels may crush us at 'any 
 moment. Credit produces a restless society, trembling 
 perpetually for the security of its artificial basis. Some- 
 times society may forget for awhile that it is dancing 
 upon a volcano, but the least rumor of war recalls the fact 
 to it inexorably. Card-houses are easily ruined.
 
 152 A MIEUS JO URNAL. 
 
 All this anxiety is intolerable to those tiumoie .itne 
 investors who, having no wish to be rich, ask only to be 
 able to go about their work in peace. But no; tyrant that 
 it is, the world cries to us, "Peace, peace there is no 
 peace: whether you will or no you shall suffer and tremble 
 with me!" To accept humanity, as one does nature, and 
 to resign one's self to the will of an individual, as one does 
 to destiny, is not easy. We bow to the government of 
 God, but we turn against the despot. No man likes to 
 share in the shipwreck of a vessel in which he has been 
 embarked by violence, and which has been steered con- 
 trary to his wish and his opinion. And yet such is perpet- 
 ually the case in life. We all of us pay for the faults of 
 the few. 
 
 Human solidarity is a fact more evident and more cer- 
 tain than personal responsibility, and even than individual 
 liberty. Our dependence has it over our independence; 
 for we are only independent in will and desire, while we 
 are dependent upon our health, upon nature and society ; 
 in short, upon everything in us and without us. Our 
 liberty is confined to one single point. We may protest 
 against all these oppressive and fatal powers; we may say, 
 Crush me you will never win my consent ! We may, by 
 an exercise of will, throw ourselves into opposition to 
 necessity, and refuse it homage and obedience. In that 
 consists our moral liberty. But except for that, we belong, 
 body and goods, to the world. We are its playthings, as 
 the dust is the plaything of the wind, or the dead leaf of 
 the floods. God at least respects our dignity, but the 
 world rolls us contemptuously along in its merciless waves, 
 in order to make it plain that we are its thing and its 
 chattel. 
 
 All theories of the nullity of the individual, all pantheis- 
 tic and materialist conceptions, are now but so much 
 forcing of an open door, so much slaying of the slain. As 
 eoon as we cease to glorify this imperceptible point of con- 
 science, and to uphold the value of it, the individual be- 
 somes naturally a mere atom in the human mass, which i
 
 AMIEVS JOURNAL'. 153 
 
 but an atom in the planetary mass, which is a mere 
 nothing in the universe. The individual is then but a 
 nothing of the third power, with a capacity for measuring 
 its nothingness ! Thought leads to resignation. Self-doubt 
 leads to passivity, and passivity to servitude. From this a 
 voluntary submission is the only escape, that is to say, a 
 state of dependence religiously accepted, a vindication ol 
 ourselves as free beings, bowed before duty only. Duty 
 thus becomes our principle of action, our source of energy, 
 the guarantee of our partial independence of the world, 
 the condition of our dignity, the sign of our nobility. The 
 world can neither make me will nor make me will my 
 duty; here I am my own and only master, and treat with 
 it as sovereign with sovereign. It holds my body in its 
 clutches; but my soul escapes and braves it. My thought 
 and my love, my faith and my hope, are beyond its reach. 
 My true being, the essence of my nature, myself, remain 
 inviolate and inaccessible to the world's attacks. In this 
 respect we are greater than the universe, which has mass 
 and not will; we become once more independent even in 
 relation to the human mass, which also can destroy nothing 
 more than our happiness, just as the mass of the universe 
 can destroy nothing more than our body. Submission, 
 then, is not defeat; on the contrary, it is strength. 
 
 April 28, 1866. I have just read the proems-verbal of 
 the Conference of Pastors held on the 15th and 16th of 
 April at Paris. The question of the supernatural has split 
 the church of France in two. The liberals insist upon 
 individual right; the orthodox upon the notion of a 
 church. And it is true indeed that a church is an affirma- 
 tion, that it subsists by the positive element in it, by defi- 
 nite belief; the pure critical element dissolves it. Protes- 
 tantism is a combination of two factors the authority of 
 the Scriptures and free inquiry; as soon as one of these 
 factors is threatened or disappears, Protestantisni dis- 
 appears; a new form of Christianity succeeds it, as, for 
 example, the church of the Brothers of the Holy Ghost, or 
 that of Christian Theism. As far as I am concerned, I see
 
 1 54 AMtKL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 nothing objectionable in such a result, but I think the 
 friends of the Protestant church are logical in their 
 refusal to abandon the apostle's creed, and the individual- 
 ists are illogical in imagining that they can keep Protes- 
 tantism and do away with authority. 
 
 It is a question of method which separates the two 
 camps. I am fundamentally separated from both. As 1 
 understand it, Christianity is above all religions, and 
 religion is not a method, it is a life, a higher and super- 
 natural life, mystical in its root and practical in its fruits, 
 a communion with God, a calm and deep enthusiasm, a 
 love which radiates, a force which acts, a happiness which 
 overflows. Religion, in short, is a state of the soul. 
 These quarrels as to method have their value, but it is a 
 secondary value; they will never console a heart or edify 
 a conscience. This is why I feel so little interest in theso 
 ecclesiastical struggles. Whether the one party or the 
 other gain the majority and the victory, what is essen- 
 tial is in no way profited, for dogma, criticism, the church, 
 are not religion ; and it is religion, the sense of a divine 
 life, which matters. " Seek ye first the kingdom of God 
 and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added 
 unto you." The most holy is the most Christian; this 
 will always be the criterion which is least deceptive. " By 
 this ye shalj know my disciples, if they have love one to 
 another. " 
 
 As is the worth of the individual, so is the worth of his 
 religion. Popular instinct and philosophic reason are at 
 one on this point. Be good and pious, patient and heroic, 
 faithful and devoted, humble and charitable; the cate- 
 chism which has taught you these things is beyond the 
 reach of blame. By religion we live in God; but all these 
 quarrels lead to nothing but life with men or with cassocks. 
 There is therefore no equivalence between the two points 
 of view. 
 
 Perfection as an end a noble example for sustenance on 
 the way the divine proved by its own excellence, is not 
 this the whole of Christianity? God manifest in all men, 
 is ;x>t this its true goal and consummation?
 
 AMIEU s JOURNAL: 155 
 
 September 20, 1866. My old friends are, I am afraid, 
 disappointed in me ; they think that I do nothing, that I 
 have deceived their expectations and their hopes. I, too, 
 am disappointed. All that would restore my self-respect 
 and give me a right to be proud of myself, seems to me 
 unattainable and impossible, and I fall back upon triviali- 
 ties, gay talk, distractions. I am always equally lacking 
 in hope, in faith, in resolution. The only difference is 
 that my weakness takes sometimes the form of despairing 
 .nelancholy and sometimes that of a cheerful quietism. 
 And yet I read, I talk, I teach, I write, but to no effect; 
 it is as though I were walking in my sleep. The Buddhist 
 tendency in me blunts the faculty of free self-government 
 and weakens the power of action; self-distrust kills all 
 desire, and reduces me again and again to a fundamental 
 skepticism. I care for nothing but the serious and the 
 real, and I can take neither myself nor my circumstances 
 seriously. I hold my own personality, my own aptitudes, 
 my own aspirations, too cheap. I am forever making 
 light of myself in the name of all that is beautiful and ad- 
 mirable. In a word, I bear within me a perpetual self- 
 detractor, and this is what takes all spring out of my life. 
 I have been passing the evening with Charles Heim, who, 
 in his sincerity, has never paid me any literary compli- 
 ment. As I love and respect him, he is forgiven. Self- 
 love has nothing to do with it and yet it would be sweet 
 to be praised by so upright a friend ! It is depressing to 
 feel one's self silently disapproved of; I will try to satisfy 
 him, and to think of a book which may please both him 
 and Scherer. 
 
 October 6, 1866. I have just picked up on the stairs a 
 little yellowish cat, ugly and pitiable. Now, curled up in 
 & chair at my side, he seems perfectly happy, and as if he 
 wanted nothing more. Far from being wild, nothing will 
 induce him to leave me, and he has followed me from room 
 to room all day. I have nothing at all that is eatable in 
 the house, but what I have I give him that is to say, a 
 look and a caress and that seems to be enough for him,
 
 1,^6 AMI BUS JOURNAL. 
 
 at least for the moment. Small animals, small children, 
 young lives they are all the same as far as the need of 
 protection and of gentleness is concerned. . . . People 
 have sometimes said to me that weak and feeble creatnres 
 are happy with me. Perhaps such a fact has to do with 
 some special gift or beneficent force which flows from one 
 when one is in the sympathetic state. I have often a direct 
 perception of such a force; but I am no ways proud of it, 
 nor do I look upon it as anything belonging to me, but 
 simply as a natural gift. It seems to me sometimes as 
 though I could woo the birds to build in my beard as they 
 do in the headgear of some cathedral saint! After all, this 
 is the natural state and the true relation of man toward all 
 inferior creatures. If man was what he ought to be he 
 would be adored by the animals, of whom he is too often 
 the capricious and sanguinary tyrant. The legend of Saint 
 Francis of Assisi is not so legendary as we think ; and it is 
 not so certain that it was the wild beasts who attacked 
 man first. . . . But to exaggerate nothing, let us 
 leave on one side -the beasts of prey, the carnivora, and 
 those that live by rapine and slaughter. How many other 
 species are there, by thousands and tens of thousands, who 
 ask peace from us and with whom we persist in waging a 
 brutal war? Our race is by far the most destructive, the 
 most hurtful, and the most formidable, of all the species 
 of the planet. It has even invented for its own use the 
 right of the strongest a divine right which quiets its 
 conscience in the face of the conquered and the oppressed; 
 we have outlawed all that lives except ourselves. Revolt- 
 ing and manifest abuse; notorious and contemptible breach 
 of the law of justice! The bad faith and hypocrisy of it 
 are renewed on a small scale by all successful usurpers. 
 We are always making God our accomplice, that so we 
 may legalize our own iniquities. Every successful mas- 
 sacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have 
 never been wanting in benedictions for any victorious 
 enormity. So that what, in the beginning, was the rela- 
 tion of man to the animal becomes that of people to 
 people and man to man.
 
 AMIEUS JOURNAL. 15? 
 
 If so, we have before us an expiation too seldom noticed 
 but altogether just. All crime must be expiated, and 
 slavery is the repetition among men of the sufferings 
 brutally imposed by man upon other living beings; it is 
 the theory bearing its fruits. The right of man over the 
 animal seems to me to cease with the need of defense and 
 of subsistence. So that all unnecesasry murder and tor- 
 ture are cowardice and even crime. The animal renders a 
 service of utility; man in return owes it a meed of protec- 
 tion and of kindness. In a word, the animal has claims on 
 man, and the man has duties to the animal. Buddhism, no 
 doubt, exaggerates this truth, but the Westerns leave it out 
 of count altogether. A day will come, however, when our 
 standard will be higher, our humanity more exacting, 
 than it is to-day. Homo homini lupus, said Hobbes: the 
 time will come when man will be humane even for the 
 wolf homo lupo homo. 
 
 December 30, 1866. Skepticism pure and simple as the 
 only safeguard of intellectual independence such is the 
 point of view of almost all our young men of talent. 
 Absolute freedom from credulity seems to them the glory 
 of man. My impression has always been that this exces- 
 sive detachment of the individual from all received preju- 
 dices and opinions in reality does the work of tyranny. 
 This evening, in listening to the conversation of some of 
 our most cultivated men, I thought of the Eenaissance, of 
 the Ptolemies, of the reign of Louis XV., of all those 
 times in which the exultant anarchy of the intellect has 
 had despotic government for its correlative, and, on the 
 other hand, of England, of Holland, of the United States, 
 countries in which political liberty is bought at the price 
 of necessary prejudices and a priori opinions. 
 
 That society may hold together at all, we must have a 
 principle of cohesion that is to say, a common belief, 
 principles recognized and undisputed, a series of practical 
 axioms and institutions which are not at the mercy of 
 every caprice of public opinion. By treating everything as 
 if it were an open question, we endanger everything.
 
 158 A MILL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 Doubt is the accomplice of tyranny. " If a people will not 
 believe it must obey," said Tocqueville. All liberty im- 
 plies dependence, and has its conditions ; this is what nega- 
 tive and quarrelsome minds are apt to forget. They think 
 they can do away with religion ; they do not know that 
 religion is indestructible, and that the question is simply, 
 Which will you have? Voltaire plays the game of Loyola, 
 and vice versd. Between these two there is no peace, nor 
 can there be any for the society which has once thrown 
 itself into the dilemma. The only solution lies in a free 
 religion, a religion of free choice and free adhesion. 
 
 December 23, 1866. It is raining over the whole sky 
 as far at least as I can see from my high point of observa- 
 tion. All is gray from the Saleve to the Jura, and from 
 the pavement to the clouds; everything that one sees or 
 touches is gray; color, life, and gayety are dead each 
 living thing seems to lie hidden in its own particular shell. 
 What are the birds doing in such weather as this? We 
 who have food and shelter, fire on the hearth, books around 
 us, portfolios of engravings close at hand, a nestful of 
 dreams in the heart, and a whirlwind of thoughts ready to 
 rise from the ink-bottle we find nature ugly and triste^ 
 and turn away our eyes from it; but you, poor sparrows, 
 what can you be doing? Bearing and hoping and wait- 
 ing? After all, is not this the task of each one of us? 
 
 I have just been reading over a volume of this Journal, 
 and feel a little ashamed of the languid complaining tone 
 of so much of it. These pages reproduce me very imper- 
 fectly, and there are many things in me of which I find 
 no trace in them. I suppose it is because, in the first 
 place, sadness takes up the pen more readily than joy ; 
 and in the next, because I depend so much upon surround- 
 ing circumstances. When there is no call upon me, and 
 nothing to put me to the test, I fall back into melancholy ; 
 and so the practical man, the cheerful man, the literary 
 man, does not appear in these pages. The portrait is lack- 
 ing in proportion and breadth ; it is one-sided, and wants 
 a center; it has, as it were, been painted from too near.
 
 A MIEL'S JO URN A L. 159 
 
 The true reason why we know ourselves so little lies in 
 the difficulty we find in standing at a proper distance from 
 ourselves, in taking up the right point of view, so that 
 the details may help rather than hide the general effect. 
 We must learn to look at ourselves socially and historically 
 if we wish to have an exact idea of our relative worth, and 
 to look at our life as a whole, or at least as one complete 
 period of life, if we wish to know what we are and what 
 we are not. The ant which crawls to and fro over a face, 
 the fly perched upon the forehead of a maiden, touch them 
 indeed, but do not see them, for they never embrace the 
 whole at a glance. 
 
 Is it wonderful that misunderstandings should play so 
 great a part in the world, when one sees how difficult it is 
 to produce a faithful portrait of a person whom one has 
 been studying for more than twenty years? Still, the 
 effort has not been altogether lost; its reward has been the 
 sharpening of one's perceptions of the outer world. If I 
 have any special power of appreciating different shades of 
 mind, I owe it no doubt to the analysis I have so per- 
 petually and unsuccessfully practiced on myself. In fact, 
 I have always regarded myself as matter for study, and 
 what has interested me most in myself has been the pleas- 
 ure of having under my hand a man, a person, in whom, 
 as an authentic specimen of human nature, I could follow, 
 without importunity or indiscretion, all the metamor- 
 phoses, the secret thoughts, the heart-beats, and the 
 temptations of humanity. My attention has been drawn 
 to myself impersonally and philosophically. One uses what 
 one has, and one must shape one's arrow out of one's own 
 wood. 
 
 To arrive at a faithful portrait, succession must be con- 
 rerted into simultaneousness, plurality into unity, and all 
 the changing phenomena must be traced back to their 
 essence. There are ten men in rne, according to time, 
 place, surrounding, and occasion; and in their restless 
 diversity I am forever escaping myself. Therefore, what- 
 ever I may reveal of my past, of my Journal, or of myself,
 
 160 ^ MIEL'S JO URNAL. 
 
 is of no use to him who is without the poetic intuition, and 
 cannot recompose me as a whole, with or in spite of the 
 elements which I confide to him. 
 
 I feel myself a chameleon, a kaleidoscope, a Proteus; 
 changeable in every way, open to every kind of polariza- 
 tion; fluid, virtual, and therefore latent latent even in 
 manifestation, and absent even in presentation. I am 
 spectator, so to speak, of the molecular whirlwind which 
 men call individual life; I am conscious of an incessant 
 metamorphosis, an irresistible movement of existence, 
 which is going on within me. I am sensible of the flight, 
 the revival, the modification, of all the atoms of my being, 
 all the particles of my river, all the radiations of my 
 special force. 
 
 This phenomenology of myself serves both as the magic 
 lantern of my own destiny, and as a window opened upon 
 the mystery of the world. I am, or rather, my sensible 
 consciousness is concentrated upon this ideal standing- 
 point, this invisible threshold, as it were, whence one hears 
 the impetuous passage of time, rushing and foaming as it 
 flows out into the changeless ocean of eternity. After all 
 the bewildering distractions of life, after having drowned 
 myself in a multiplicity of trifles and in the caprices of 
 this fugitive existence, yet without ever attaining to self- 
 intoxication or self-delusion, I come again upon the 
 fathomless abyss, the silent and melancholy cavern where 
 dwell "Die Mutter,"* where sleeps that which neither 
 
 * ' 'Die Mutter " an allusion to a strange and enigmatical, but very 
 effective conception in " Faust " (Part II. Act I. Scene v.) Die Mutter 
 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, Mutter, die ihr thront 
 Im Qranzenlosen, ewig einsam wohnt, 
 Und doch gesellig! Euer haupt umschweben 
 Des Lebens Bilder. regsam, ohne Leben.
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 161 
 
 lives nor dies, that which has neither movement, nor 
 change, nor extension, nor form, and which lasts when all 
 else passes away. 
 
 " Dans 1'eternel azur de 1'insondable espace 
 S'enveloppe de paix notre globe agitee: 
 Homme, enveloppe ainsi tes jours, reve qui passe, 
 Du caline firmament de ton eternite." 
 
 (H. F. AMIEL, Penseroto.) 
 
 Geneva, January 11, 1867. 
 
 " Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, 
 Labuntur anni. ..." 
 
 I hear the drops of my life falling distinctly one hy one 
 into the devouring abyss of eternity. I feel my days flying 
 before the pursuit of death. All that remains to me of 
 weeks, or months, or years, in which I may drink in the 
 light of the sun, seems to me no more than a single night, 
 a summer night, which scarcely counts, because it will so 
 soon be at an end. 
 
 Death! Silence! Eternity! What mysteries, what names 
 of terror to the being who longs for happiness, immortality, 
 perfection! Where shall I be to-morrow in a little while 
 when the breath of life has forsaken me? Where will 
 those be whom I love ? Whither are we all going? The 
 eternal problems rise before us in their implacable 
 solemnity. Mystery on all sides ! And faith the only star 
 in this darkness and uncertainty ! 
 
 No matter ! so long as the world is the work of eternal 
 goodness, and so long as conscience has not deceived us. 
 To give happiness and to do good, there is our only law, 
 our anchor of salvation, our beacon light, our reason for 
 existing. All religious may crumble away; so long as this 
 survives we have still an ideal, and life is worth living. 
 
 Nothing can lessen the dignity and value of humanity 
 
 Was einrnal war, in allem Glanz und Scbein, 
 Es regt sich dort; denn es will ewig sein. 
 Und ibr vertbeilt es, allgewaltige Macbte, 
 Zurn Zelt des Tages, zum Gewo'lb' der Nfichte."
 
 162 ^ MIKL'S JO URNAL. 
 
 so long as the religion of love, of unselfishness and devotion 
 endures; and none can destroy the altars of this faith for 
 us so long as we feel ourselves still capable of love. 
 
 April 15, 1867. (Sevens. M.). Rain storms in the night 
 the weather is showing its April caprice. From the 
 window one sees a gray and melancholy sky, and roofs glis- 
 tering with rain. The spring is at its work. Yes, and 
 the implacable flight of time is driving us toward the grave. 
 Well each has his turn ! 
 
 " Allez, allez, 6 jeunes filles, 
 Cueillir des bleuets dans les blesl " 
 
 I am overpowered with melancholy, languor, lassitude. 
 A longing for the last great sleep has taken possession of 
 me, combated, however, by a thirst for sacrifice sacrifice 
 heroic and long-sustained. Are not both simply ways of 
 escape from one's self ? "Sleep, or self-surrender, that I 
 may die to self!" such is the cry of the heart. Poor 
 heart ! 
 
 April 17, 1867. Awake, thou that sleepest, and rise 
 from the dead. 
 
 What needs perpetually refreshing and renewing in me 
 is my store of courage. By nature I am so easily disgusted 
 with life, I fall a prey so readily to despair and pessimism. 
 
 " The happy man, as this century is able to produce 
 
 him," according to Madame , is a Weltmude, one who 
 
 keeps a brave face before the world, and distracts himself 
 as best he can from dwelling upon the thought which is 
 hidden at his heart a thought which has in it the sadness 
 of death the thought of the irreparable. The outward 
 peace of such a man is but despair well masked; his gayety 
 is the carelessness of a heart which has lost all its illusions, 
 and has learned to acquiesce in an indefinite putting off of 
 happiness. His wisdom is really acclimatization to sacri- 
 fice, his gentleness should be taken to mean privation 
 patiently borne rather than resignation. In a word, he 
 submits to an existence in which he frels no joy, and he 
 cannot hide from himself that all the alleviations with
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 163 
 
 which it is strewn cannot satisfy the soul. The thirst for 
 the infinite is never appeased. God is wanting. 
 
 To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed, 
 pardoned, and sustained by a supreme power, to feel him- 
 self in the right road, at the point where God would have 
 him be in order with God and the universe. This faith 
 gives strength and calm. I have not got it. All that is, 
 seems to me arbitrary and fortuitous. It may as well not 
 be, as be. Nothing in my own circumstances seems to me 
 providential. All appears to me left to my own responsi- 
 bility, and it is this thought which disgusts me with the 
 government of my own life. I longed to give myself up 
 wholly to some great love, some noble end; I would wil- 
 lingly have lived and died for the ideal that is to say, for 
 a holy cause. But once the impossibility of this made 
 clear to me, I have never since taken a serious interest in 
 anything, and have, as it were, but amused myself with 
 a destiny of which I was no longer the dupe. 
 
 Sybarite and dreamer, will you go on like this to the end 
 forever tossed backward and forward between duty and 
 happiness, incapable of choice, of action? Is not life 
 the test of our moral force, and all these inward waver- 
 ings, are they not temptations of the soul? 
 
 September 6, 1867, Weissenstein.* (Ten o'clock in the 
 morning}. A marvelous view of blinding and bewildering 
 beauty. Above a milky sea of cloud, flooded with morning 
 light, the rolling waves of which are beating up against 
 the base of the wooded steeps of the Weissenstein, the vast 
 circle of the Alps soars to a sublime height. The eastern 
 side of the horizon is drowned in the splendors of the 
 rising mists; but from the Todi westward, the whole 
 chain floats pure and clear between the milky plain and the 
 pale blue sky. The giant assembly is sitting in council 
 above the valleys and the lakes still submerged in vapor. 
 The Clariden, the Spannorter, the Titlis, then the Bernese 
 colossi from the Wetterhorn to the Diablerets, then the 
 
 * Weissenstein is a high point in the Jura, above Soleure.
 
 164 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 peaks of Vaud, Valais, and Fribourg, and beyond these 
 high chains the two kings of the Alps, Mont Blanc, of a 
 pale pink, and the bluish point of Monte Rosa, peering 
 out through a cleft in the Doldenhorn such is the com- 
 position of the great snowy amphitheatre. The outline 
 of the horizon takes all possible forms: needles, ridges, 
 battlements, pyramids, obelisks, teeth, fangs, pincers, 
 horns, cupolas; the mountain profile sinks, rises again, 
 twists and sharpens itself in a thousand ways, but always 
 so as to maintain an angular and serrated line. Only the 
 inferior and secondary groups of mountians show any large 
 curves or sweeping undulations of form. The Alps are 
 more than an upheaval; they are a tearing and gashing of 
 the earth's surface. Their granite peaks bite into the sky 
 instead of caressing it. The Jura, on the contrary, 
 spreads its broad back complacently under the blue dome 
 of air. 
 
 Eleven o'clock. The sea of vapor has risen and attacked 
 the mountains, which for a long time overlooked it like 
 so many huge reefs. For awhile it surged in vain over 
 the lower slopes of the Alps. Then rolling back upon 
 itself, it made a more successful onslaught upon the Jura, 
 and now we are enveloped in its moving waves. The 
 milky sea has become one vast cloud, which has swallowed 
 up the plain and the mountains, observatory and observer. 
 Within this cloud one may hear the sheep-bells ringing, 
 and see the sunlight darting hither and thither. Strange 
 and fanciful sight! 
 
 The Hanoverian pianist has gone; the family from 
 Colmar has gone; a young girl and her brother have 
 arrived. The girl is very pretty, and particularly dainty 
 and elegant in all her ways; she seems to touch things only 
 with the tips of her fingers; one compares her to an 
 ermine, a gazelle. But at the same time she has no inter- 
 ests, does not know how to admire, and thinks of herself 
 more than of anything else. This perhaps is a drawback 
 inseparable from a beauty and a figure which attract all 
 eyes. She is, besides, a tovvnswoman to the core, and
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 165 
 
 feels herself out of place in this great nature, which prob- 
 ably seems to her barbarous and ill-bred. At any rate she 
 does not let it interfere with her in any way, and parades 
 herself on the mountains with her little bonnet and her 
 scarcely perceptible sunshade, as though she were on the 
 boulevard. She belongs to that class of tourists so amus- 
 ingly drawn by Topffer. Character : naive conceit. Coun- 
 try: France. Standard of life : fashion. Some cleverness 
 but no sense of reality, no understanding of nature, no 
 consciousness of the manifold diversities of the world and 
 of the right of life to be what it is, and to follow its own 
 way and not ours. 
 
 This ridiculous element in her is connected with the 
 same national prejudice which holds France to be the cen- 
 ter point of the world, and leads Frenchmen to neglect 
 geography and languages. The ordinary French towns- 
 man is really deliciously stupid in spite of all his natural 
 cleverness, for he understands nothing but himself. His 
 pole, his axis, his center, his all is Paris or even less 
 Parisian manners, the taste of the day, fashion. Thanks 
 to this organized fetishism, we have millions of copies of 
 one single original pattern ; a whole people moving together 
 like bobbins in the same machine, or the legs of a single 
 corps d* armee. The result is wonderful but wearisome; 
 wonderful in point of material strength, wearisome 
 psychologically. A hundred thousand sheep are not more 
 instructive than one sheep, but they furnish a hundred 
 thousand times more wool, meat, and manure. This is all, 
 you may say, that the shepherd that is, the master 
 requires. Very well, but one can only maintain breeding- 
 farms or monarchies on these principles. For a republic 
 you must have men: it cannot get on without indi- 
 vidualities. 
 
 Noon. An exquisite effect. A great herd of cattle are 
 running across the meadows under my window, which is 
 just illuminated by a furtive ray of sunshine. The picture 
 has a ghostly suddenness and brilliancy; it pierces the 
 mists which close upon it, like the slide of a magic lantern.
 
 166 AMIEL'8 JO URN A L. 
 
 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 under- 
 standing 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 center 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. 
 
 January 10, 1868. (Eleven p. M.). We have had a phil- 
 osophical meeting at the house of Edouard Claparede.* 
 The question on the order of the day was the nature of 
 sensation. Claparede pronounced for the absolute subjec- 
 tivity of all experience in other words, for pure idealism 
 
 * Edouard Claparede. a Qenevese naturalist, born 1832. died 1871.
 
 AMIKL'S JO URNAL. 167 
 
 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 with- 
 out suspecting it, believing all the time that we are 
 lookers-on. It is our noiimenon 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 conscious- 
 ness. In 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 1'ombre d'un esprit 
 Qui tracjait 1'ombre d'un systeme 
 Avec 1'ombre de 1'ombre meine." 
 
 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 illusion, 
 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 responsi- 
 bility 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 cos- 
 mogonic 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
 
 168 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 ubiquity, liberty and omniscience. Are we then less 
 ingenious and inventive awake than asleep? 
 
 January 25, 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 one's self 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 hori- 
 zontal position. 
 
 What is to become of us when everything leaves us 
 health, joy, affections, the freshness of sensation, memory, 
 capacity for work when the sun seems to us to have lost 
 its warmth, and life is stripped of all its charm? What is 
 to become of us without hope? Must we either harden or 
 forget? There is but one answer keep close to duty. 
 Never mind the future, if only you have peace of con-
 
 A MIEL'S JO URNAL. 169 
 
 science, if you feel yourself reconciled, and in harmony 
 with the order of things. Be what you ought to be; the 
 rest is God's affair. It is for him to know what is best, to 
 take care of his own glory, to ensure the happiness of what 
 depends on him, whether by another life or by annihila- 
 tion. And supposing that there were no good and holy 
 God, nothing but universal being, the law of the all, an 
 ideal without hypostasis or reality, duty would still be the 
 key of the enigma, the pole-star of a wandering humanity. 
 
 " Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra." 
 
 January 26, 1868. Blessed be childhood, which brings 
 down something of heaven into the midst of our rough earth- 
 liness. These eighty thousand daily births, of which statis- 
 tics tell us, represent as it were an effusion of innocence and 
 freshness, struggling not only against the death of tlxe 
 race, but against human corruption, and the universal 
 gangrene of sin. All the good and wholesome feeling 
 which is intertwined with childhood and the cradle is one 
 of the secrets of the providential government of the world. 
 Suppress this life-giving dew, and human society would be 
 scorched and devastated by selfish passion. Supposing that 
 humanity had been composed of a thousand millions of 
 immortal beings, whose number could neither increase nor 
 diminish, where should we be, and what should we be! A 
 thousand times more learned, no doubt, but a thousand 
 times more evil. There would have been a vast accumula- 
 tion of science, but all the virtues engendered by suffering 
 and devotion that is to say, by the family and society 
 would have no existence. And for this there would be no 
 compensation. 
 
 Blessed be childhood for the good that it does, and for 
 the good which it brings about carelessly and unconsciously 
 by simply making us love it and letting itself be loved. 
 What little of paradise we see still on earth is due to its 
 presence among us. Without fatherhood, without mother- 
 hood, I think that love itself would not be enough to pre- 
 vent men from devouring each other men, that is to say,
 
 170 AMiEtis JOURNAL. 
 
 such fts human passions have made them, The angels 
 have no need of birth and death as foundations for theif 
 life, because their life is heavenly. 
 
 February 16, 1868. I have been finishing About's 
 "Mainfroy (Les Manages de Province)." What subtlety, 
 what cleverness, what verve, what aplomb! About is a 
 master of epithet, of quick, light-winged satire. For all 
 his cavalier freedom of manner, his work is conceived at 
 bottom in a spirit of the subtlest irony, and his detach- 
 ment of mind is so great that he is able to make sport of 
 everything, to mock at others and himself, while all the 
 time amusing himself extremely with his own ideas and 
 inventions. This is indeed the characteristic mark, the 
 common signature, so to speak, of esprit like his. 
 
 Irrepressible mischief, indefatigable elasticity, a power 
 of luminous mockery, delight in the perpetual discharge 
 of innumerable arrows from an inexhaustible quiver, the 
 unquenchable laughter of some little earth-born demon, 
 perpetual gayety, and a radiant force of epigram there 
 are all these in the true humorist. Stulti sunt innumer- 
 abiles, said Erasmus, the patron of all these dainty 
 mockers. Folly, conceit, foppery, silliness, affectation,, 
 hypocrisy, attitudinizing and pedantry of all shades, and 
 in all forms, everything that poses, prances, bridles, struts, 
 bedizens, and plumes itself, everything that takes itself 
 seriously and tries to impose itself on mankind all this is 
 the natural prey of the satirist, so many targets ready for 
 his arrows, so many victims offered to his attack. And 
 we all know how rich the world is in prey of this kind ! 
 An alderman's feast of folly is served up to him in per- 
 petuity; the spectacle of society offers him an endless noce 
 de Gamache.* With what glee he raids through his 
 domains, and what signs of destruction and massacre mark 
 the path of the sportsman ! His hand is infallible like his 
 glance. The spirit of sarcasm lives and thrives in the 
 
 * Nocede Qamache "repastressomptueux." Littre. The allusion, 
 of course, is to Don Quixote, Part II. chap. xx. " Donde se cuentan-. 
 las bodas de Baraacho el ricb. con el suceso de Basilio el pobre."
 
 AMIEISS JOURNAL. 171 
 
 midst of universal wreck; its balls are enchanted and 
 itself invulnerable, and it braves retaliations and reprisals 
 because itself is a mere flash, a bodiless and magical 
 nothing. 
 
 Clever men will recognize and tolerate nothing but 
 cleverness; every authority rouses their ridicule, every 
 superstition amuses them, every convention moves them to 
 contradiction. Only force finds favor in their eyes, and 
 they have no toleration for anything that is not purely 
 natural and spontaneous. And yet ten clever men are not 
 worth one man of talent, nor ten men of talent worth one 
 man of genius. And in the individual, feeling is more 
 than cleverness, reason is worth as much as feeling, and 
 conscience has it over reason. If, then, the clever man is 
 not mockable, he may at least be neither loved, nor con- 
 sidered, nor esteemed. He may make himself feared, it is 
 true, and force others to respect his independence; but 
 this negative advantage, which is the result of a negative 
 superiority, brings no happiness with it. Cleverness is 
 serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing. 
 
 March 8, 1868. Madame kept me to have tea with 
 
 three young friends of hers three sisters, I think. The 
 two youngest are extremely pretty, the dark one as pretty 
 as the blonde. Their fresh faces, radiant with the 
 bloom of youth, were a perpetual delight to the eye. 
 This electric force of beauty has a beneficent effect 
 upon the man of letters; it acts as a real restora- 
 tive. Sensitive, impressionable, absorbent as I am, the 
 neighborhood of health, of beauty, of intelligence. and of 
 goodness, exercises a powerful influence upon my whole 
 being; and in the same way I am troubled and affected 
 just as easily by the presence near me of troubled lives or 
 
 diseased souls. Madame said of me that I must be 
 
 "superlatively feminine" in all my perceptions. This 
 ready sympathy rnd sensitiveness is the reason of it. If I 
 had but desired it ever so little, I should have had the 
 magical clairvoyance of the somnambulist, and could have 
 reproduced in myself a number of strange phenomena. I
 
 172 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 know it, but I have always been on my guard against it, 
 whether from indifference or from prudence. When I 
 think of the intuitions of every kind which have come to 
 me since my youth, it seems to me that I have lived a 
 multitude of lives. Every characteristic individuality 
 shapes itself ideally in me, or rather molds me for the mo- 
 ment into its own image; and I have only to turn my 
 attention upon myself at such a time to be able to under- 
 stand a new mode of being, a new phase of human nature. 
 In this way I have been, turn by turn, mathematician, 
 musician, savant, monk, child, or mother. In these states 
 of universal sympathy I have even seemed to myself some- 
 times to enter into the condition of the animal or the 
 plant, and even of an individual animal, of a given plant. 
 This faculty of ascending and descending metamorphosis, 
 this power of simplifying or of adding to one's individual- 
 ity, has sometimes astounded my friends, even the most 
 subtle of them. It has to do no doubt with the extreme 
 facility which I have for impersonal and objective thought, 
 and this again accounts for the difficulty which I feel in 
 realizing my own individuality, in being simply one man 
 having his proper number and ticket. To withdraw 
 within my own individual limits has always seemed to me 
 a strange, arbitrary, and conventional process. I seem to 
 myself to be a mere conjuror's apparatus, an instrument of 
 vision and perception, a person without personality, a sub- 
 ject without any determined individuality- -an instance, 
 to speak technically, of pure " determinability " and 
 "formability," and therefore I can only resign myself with 
 difficulty to play the purely arbitrary part of a private citi- 
 zen, inscribed upon the roll of a particular town or a par- 
 ticular country. In action I feel myself out of place; my 
 true milieu is contemplation. Pure virtuality and perfect 
 equilibrium in these I am most at home. There I feel 
 myself free, disinterested, and sovereign. Is it a call or a 
 temptation? 
 
 It represents perhaps the oscillation between the two 
 geniuses, the Greek and the Roman, the eastern and the
 
 A Ml EL' '8 JO URNAL. 
 
 western, the ancient and the Christian, or the struggle 
 between the two ideals, that of liberty and that of holiness. 
 Liberty raises us to the gods; holiness prostrates us on the 
 ground. Action limits us; whereas in the state of con- 
 templation we are endlessly expansive. Will localizes us; 
 thought universalizes us. My soul wavers between half a 
 dozen antagonistic general conceptions, because it is 
 responsive to all the great instincts of human nature, and 
 its aspiration is to the absolute, which is only to be reached 
 through a succession of contraries. It has taken me a 
 great deal of time to understand myself, and I frequently 
 find myself beginning over again the study of the oft-solved 
 problem, so difficult is it for us to maintain any fixed point 
 within us. I love everything, and detest one thing only 
 the hopeless imprisonment of my being within a single 
 arbitrary form, even were it chosen by myself. Liberty 
 for the inner man is then the strongest of my passions 
 perhaps my only passion. Is such a passion lawful? It 
 has been my habit to think so, but intermittently, by fits, 
 and starts. I am not perfectly sure of it. 
 
 March 17, 1868. Women wish to be loved without a 
 why or a wherefore; not because they are pretty, or good, 
 or well bred, or graceful, or intelligent, but because they 
 are themselves. All analysis seems to them to imply a loss 
 of consideration, a subordination of their personality to 
 something which dominates and measures it. They will 
 have none of it; and their instinct is just. As soon as we- 
 can give a reason for a feeling we are no longer under the 
 spell of it; we appreciate, we weigh, we are free, at least 
 in principle. Love must always remain a fascination, a 
 witchery, if the empire of woman is to endure. Once the 
 mystery gone, the power goes with it. Love must always 
 seem to us indivisible, insoluble, superior to all analysis, if 
 it is to preserve that appearance of infinity, of something 
 supernatural and miraculous, which makes its chief beauty. 
 The majority of beings despise what they understand, and 
 bow only before the inexplicable. The feminine triumph 
 par excellence is to convict of obscurity that virile intelli-
 
 174 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 gence which makes so much pretense to enlightenment 
 And when a woman inspires love, it is then especially that 
 .she enjoys this proud triumph. I admit that her exulta- 
 tion has its grounds. Still, it seems to me that love true 
 and profound love should be a source of light and calm, 
 a religion and a revelation, in which there is no place left 
 for the lower victories of vanity. Great souls care only 
 for what is great, and to the spirit which hovers in the 
 jsight of the Infinite, any sort of artifice seems a disgraceful 
 puerility. 
 
 March 19, 1868. What we call little things are merely 
 the causes of great things; they are the beginning, the 
 embryo, and it is the point of departure which, generally 
 speaking, decides the whole future of an existence. One 
 single black speck may be the beginning of a gangrene, 
 of a storm, of a revolution. From one insignificant mis- 
 understanding hatred and separation may finally issue. 
 An enormous avalanche begins by the displacement of one 
 atom, and the conflagration of a town by the fall of a 
 match. Almost everything comes from almost nothing, 
 one might think. It is only the first crystallization which 
 is the affair of mind ; the ultimate aggregation is the affair 
 of mass, of attraction, of acquired momentum, of mechani- 
 cal acceleration. History, like nature, illustrates for us 
 the application of the law of inertia and agglomeration 
 which is put lightly in the proverb, "Nothing succeeds like 
 success." Find the right point at starting; strike straight, 
 begin well; everything depends on it. Or more simply 
 still, provide yourself with good luck for accident plays 
 a vast part in human affairs. Those who have succeeded 
 most in this world (Napoleon or Bismarck) confess it; 
 calculation is not without its uses, but chance makes mock 
 of calculation, and the result of a planned combination is 
 in no wise proportional to its merit. From the super- 
 natural point of view people say: "This chance, as you 
 call it, is, in reality, the action of providence. Man may 
 give himself what trouble he will God leads him all the 
 same." Only, unfortunately, this supposed intervention
 
 AMIEL'8 JO URNAL. 1 75. 
 
 as often as not ends in the defeat of zeal, virtue, and 
 devotion, and the success of crime, stupidity, and selfish- 
 ness. Poor, sorely-tried Faith ! She has but one way out 
 of the difficulty the word Mystery ! It is in the origins 
 of things that the great secret of destiny lies hidden, 
 although the breathless sequence of after events has oftenj 
 many surprises for us too. So that at first sight history 
 seems to us accident and confusion; looked at for the 
 second time, it seems to us logical and necessary; looked 
 at for the third time, it appears to us a mixture of neces- 
 sity and liberty; on the fourth examination we scarcely 
 know what to think of it, for if force is the source of right, 
 and chance the origin of force, we come back to our first 
 explanation, only with a heavier heart than when we 
 began. 
 
 Is Democritus right after all? Is chance the foundation 
 of everything, all laws being but the imaginations of our 
 reason, which, itself born of accident, has a certain power 
 of self-deception and of inventing laws which it believes to 
 be real and objective, just as a man who dreams of a meal 
 thinks that he is eating, while in reality there is neither 
 table, nor food, nor guest nor nourishment? Every thing- 
 goes on as if there were order and reason and logic- in the 
 world, while in reality everything is fortuitous, accidental, 
 and apparent. The universe is but the kaleidoscope 
 which turns within the mind of the so-called thinking 
 being, who is himself a curiosity without a cause, an acci- 
 dent conscious of the great accident around him, and who 
 amuses himself with it so long as the phenomenon of his 
 vision lasts. Science is a lucid madness occupied in tabu- 
 lating its own necessary hallucinations. The philosopher 
 laughs, for he alone escapes being duped, while he sees 
 other men the victims of persistent illusion. He is like 
 some mischievous spectator of a ball who has cleverly 
 taken all the strings from the violins, and yet sees musi- 
 cians and -dancers moving and pirouetting before him as 
 though the music were still going on. Such an experience 
 would delight him as proving that the universal St. Vitus'
 
 176 -4 MIEISS JO URN A L. 
 
 dance is also nothing but an aberration of the inner con- 
 sciousness, and that the philosopher is in the right of it as 
 against the general credulity. Is it not even enough sim- 
 ply to shut one's ears in a ballroom, to believe one's self in 
 a madhouse? 
 
 The multitude of religions on the earth must have very 
 much the same effect upon the man who has killed the 
 ^eligious idea in himself. But it is a dangerous attempt, 
 this repudiation of the common law of the race this 
 claim to be in the right, as against all the world. 
 
 It is not often that the philosophic scoffers forget them- 
 selves for others. Why should they? Self-devotion is a 
 serious thing, and seriousness would be inconsistent with 
 their role of mockery. To be unselfish we must love; to 
 love we must believe in the reality of what we love; we 
 must know how to suffer, how to forget ourselves, how to 
 jield ourselves up in a word, how to be serious. A spirit 
 of incessant mockery means absolute isolation; it is the 
 sign of a thoroughgoing egotism. If we wish to do good 
 to men we must pity and not despise them. We must 
 learn to say of them, not "What fools! " but "What unfor- 
 tunates ! " The pessimist or the nihilist seems to me less 
 cold and icy than the mocking atheist. He reminds me of 
 the somber words of " Ahasverus :" 
 
 " Vous qui manque/- de charite, 
 Tremblez a mon supplice etrange: 
 Ce n'est point sa divinite, 
 C'est 1'humanite que Dieu venge! "* 
 
 It is oetter to be lost than to be saved all alone; and it is a 
 wrong to one's kind to wish to be wise without making 
 others share our wisdom. It is, besides, an illusion to sup- 
 pose that such a privilege is possible, when everything 
 
 * The quotation is from Quinet's "Ahasverus " (first published 1833), 
 that strange Welt-gedicht, which the author himself described as 
 " 1'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.
 
 A KIEL'S JO URN A L. 177 
 
 proves the solidarity of individuals, and when no one can 
 think at all except by means of the general store of 
 thought, accumulated and refined by centuries of cultiva- 
 tion and experience. Absolute individualism is an absurd- 
 ity. A man may be isolated in his own particular and 
 temporary milieu, but every one of our thoughts or feel- 
 ings finds, has found, and will find, its echo in humanity. 
 Such an echo is immense and far-resounding in the case ol 
 those representative men who have been adopted by great 
 fractions of humanity as guides, revealers, and reformers; 
 but it exists for everybody. Every sincere utterance of 
 the soul, every testimony faithfully borne to a personal 
 conviction, is of use to some one and some thing, even 
 when you know it not, and when your mouth is stopped 
 by violence, or the noose tightens round your neck. A 
 word spoken to some one preserves an indestructible influ- 
 ence, just as any movement whatever may be metamor- 
 phosed, but not undone. Here, then, is a reason for not 
 mocking, for not being silent, for affirming, for acting. 
 We must have faith in truth ; we must seek the true and 
 spread it abroad; we must love men and serve them. 
 
 April 9, 1868. I have been spending three hours over 
 Lotze's big volume ("Geschichte der Aesthetikin Deutsch- 
 land"). It begins attractively, but the attraction wanes, 
 and by the end I was very tired of it. Why? Because 
 the noise of a mill-wheel sends one to sleep, and these 
 pages without paragraphs, these interminable chapters, 
 and this incessant, dialectical clatter, affect me as though 
 I were listening to a word-mill. I end by yawning like 
 any simple non -philosophical mortal in the face of all this 
 heaviness and pedantry. Erudition, and even thought, 
 are not everything. An occasional touch of esprit, a little 
 sharpness of phrase, a little vivacity, imagination, and 
 grace, would spoil neither. Do these pedantic books leave 
 a single image or formula, a single new or striking fact 
 behind them in the memory, when one puts them down? 
 No ; nothing but confusion and fatigue. Oh for clearness, 
 terseness, brevity! Diderot. Voltaire, and even Galiani!
 
 378 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 A short article by Sainte-Beuve, Scherer, Kenan, Victor 
 Oherbuliez, gives one more pleasure, and makes one think 
 niul reflect more, than a thousand of these heavy German 
 pages, stuffed to the brim, and showing rather the work 
 itself than its results. The Germans gather fuel for the 
 pile: it is the French who kindle it. For heaven's sake,' 
 spare me your lucubrations; give me facts or ideas. Keep 
 your vats, your must, your dregs, in the background. 
 What I ask is wine wine which will sparkle in the glass, 
 and stimulate intelligence instead of weighing it down. 
 
 April 11, 1868. (Mornex sur Saleve). I left town in a 
 great storm of wind, which was raising clouds of dust 
 along the suburban roads, and two hours later I found 
 myself safely installed among the mountains, just like last 
 year. I think of staying a week here. . . . The 
 sounds of the village are wafted to my open window, 
 barkings of distant dogs, voices of women at the fountain, 
 the songs of birds in the lower orchards. The green car- 
 pet of the plain is dappled by passing shadows thrown 
 upon it by the clouds ; the landscape has the charm of deli- 
 cate tint and a sort of languid grace. Already I am full 
 of a sense of well-being, I am tasting the joys of that con- 
 templative state in which the soul, issuing from itself, 
 becomes as it were the soul of a country or a landscape, 
 and feels living within it a multitude of lives. Here is 
 no more resistance, negation, blame ; everything is affirma- 
 tive; I feel myself in harmony with nature and with sur- 
 roundings, of which I seem to myself the expression. The 
 heart opens to the immensity of things. This is what I 
 love ! Nam mihires, non me rebus submitters conor. 
 
 April 12, 1868. (Easter Day], Mornex Eight A. M. 
 The day has opened solemnly and religiously. There is a 
 tinkling of bells from the valley : even the fields seem to be 
 breathing forth a canticle of praise. Humanity must 
 have a worship, and, all things considered, is not the 
 Christian worship the best among those which have ex- 
 isted on a large scale? The religion of sin, of repentance, 
 and reconciliation the religion of the new birth and
 
 AMIEVS JOURNAL. 179 
 
 of eternal life is not a religion to be ashamed of. In 
 spite of all the aberrations of fanaticism, all the supersti- 
 tions of formalism, all the ugly superstructures of 
 hypocrisy, all the fantastic puerilities of theology, the gos- 
 pel has modified the world and consoled mankind. Chris- 
 tian humanity is not much better than pagan humanity, 
 but it would be much worse without a religion, and with= 
 out this religion. Every religion proposes an ideal and a 
 model; the Christian ideal is sublime, and its model of a 
 divine beauty. We may hold aloof from the churches, 
 and yet bow ourselves before Jesus. We may be suspicious 
 of the clergy, and refuse to have anything to do with cate- 
 chisms, and yet love the Holy and the Just, who came to 
 save and not to curse. Jesus will always supply us with 
 the best criticism of Christianity, and when Christianity 
 has passed away the religion of Jesus will in all probability 
 survive. After Jesus as God we shall come back to faith 
 in the God of Jesus. 
 
 Five o'clock p. M. I have been for a long walk through 
 Cezargues, Eseri, and the Yves woods, returning by the 
 Pont du Loup. The weather was cold and gray. A 
 great popular merrymaking of some sort, with its multi- 
 tude of blouses, and its drums and fifes, has been going on 
 riotously for an hour under my window. The crowd has 
 sung a number of songs, drinking songs, ballads, 
 romances, but all. more or less heavy and ugly. The muse 
 has never touched our country people, and the Swiss race 
 is not graceful even in its gayety. A bear in high spirits 
 this is what one thinks of. The poetry it produces, too, is 
 desperately vulgar and commonplace. Why? In the first 
 place, because, in spite of the pretenses of our democratic 
 philosophies, the classes whose backs are bent with manual 
 labor are aesthetically inferior to the others. In the next 
 place, because our old rustic peasant poetry is dead, and 
 the peasant, when he tries to share the music or the poetry 
 of the cultivated classes, only succeeds in caricaturing it, 
 and not in copying it. Democracy, by laying it down that 
 there is but one class for all men, has in fact done a wrong
 
 180 A MIEL'S JO URNAL. 
 
 to everything that is not first-rate. As we can no longer 
 without offense judge meii according to a certain recog- 
 nized order, we can only compare them to the best that 
 exists, and then they naturally seem to us more mediocre, 
 more ugly, more deformed than before. If the passion for 
 equality potentially raises the average, it really degrades 
 nineteen-twentieths of individuals below their former 
 place. There is a progress in the domain of law and a 
 falling back in the domain of art. And meanwhile the 
 artists see multiplying before them their bete-noire, the 
 bourgeois, the Philistine, the presumptuous ignoramus, the 
 quack who plays at science, and the feather-brain who 
 thinks himself the equai of the intelligent. 
 
 "Commonness will prevail," as De Candolle said in 
 speaking of the graminaceous plants. The era of equality 
 means the triumph of mediocrity. It is disappointing, 
 but inevitable; for it is one of time's revenges. Humanity, 
 after having organized itself on the basis of the dissimi- 
 larity of individuals, is now organizing itself on the basis 
 of their similarity, and the one exclusive principle is about 
 as true as the other. Art no doubt will lose, but justice 
 will gain. Is not universal leveling-down the law of 
 nature, and when all has been leveled will not all have 
 been destroyed? So that the world is striving with all its 
 force for the destruction of what it has itself brought 
 forth. Life is the blind pursuit of its own negation; as 
 has been said of the wicked, nature also works for her 
 own disappointment, she labors at what she hates, she 
 weaves her own shroud, and piles up the stones of her own 
 tomb. God may well forgive us, for '" we know not what 
 to do." 
 
 Just as the sum of force is always identical in the mate- 
 rial universe, and presents a spectacle not of diminution 
 nor of augmentation but simply of constant metamor- 
 phosis, so it is not impossible that the sum of good is in 
 reality always the same, and that therefore all progress on 
 one side is compensated inversely on another side. If this 
 were so we ought never to say that period or a people is
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 181 
 
 absolutely and as a whole superior to another time or another 
 people, but only that there is superiority in certain points. 
 The great difference between man and man would, on. 
 these principles, consist in the art of transforming vitality 
 into spirituality, and latent power into useful energy. 
 4 The same difference would hold good between nation and 
 nation, so that the object of the simultaneous or succes- 
 sive competition of mankind in history would be the ex- 
 traction of the maximum of humanity from a given 
 amount of animality. Education, morals, and politics 
 would be only variations of the same art, the art of living 
 that is to say, of disengaging the pure form and subtlest 
 essence of our individual being. 
 
 April 26, 1868. (Sunday, Mid-day}. A gloomy morn- 
 ing. On all sides a depressing outlook, and within, dis- 
 gust with self. 
 
 Ten P. M. Visits and a walk. I have spent the evening 
 alone. Many things to-day have taught me lessons of wis- 
 dom. I have seen the hawthorns covering themselves with 
 blossom, and the whole valley springing up afresh under 
 the breath of the spring. I have been the spectator of 
 faults of conduct on the part of old men who will not 
 grow old, and whose heart is in rebellion against the 
 natural law. I have watched the working of marriage in 
 its frivolous and commonplace forms, and listened to 
 trivial preaching. I have been a witness of griefs without 
 hope, of loneliness that claimed one's pity. I have lis- 
 tened to pleasantries on the subject of madness, and to the 
 merry songs of the birds. And everything has had the 
 same message for me : " Place yourself once more in har- 
 , mony with the universal law; accept the will of God; 
 make a religious use of life ; work while it is yet day ; be 
 at once serious and cheerful; know how to repeat with 
 the apostle, ' I have learned in whatsoever state I am 
 therewith to be content.' " 
 
 August 26, 1868. After all the storms of feeling within 
 and the organic disturbances without, which during these 
 latter months ha~v a pinned me so closely to my own indi-
 
 182 A MIKL'S JO URNAL. 
 
 vidnal existence, shall I ever be able to reascend into the 
 region of pure intelligence, to enter again upon the disin- 
 terested and impersonal life, to recover my old indifference 
 toward subjective miseries, and regain a purely scientific 
 and contemplative state of mind? Shall I ever succeed 
 la forgetting all the needs which bind me to earth an(} 
 to humanity? Shall I ever become pure spirit? Alas 
 I cannot persuade myself to believe it possible for au 
 inatant. I see infirmity and weakness close upon me, I 
 feel I cannot do without affection, and I know that I have 
 no ambition, and that my faculties are declining. I 
 remember that I am forty-seven years old, and that all my 
 brood of youthful hopes has flown away. So that there 
 is no deceiving myself as to the fate which awaits me: 
 increasing loneliness, mortification of spirit, long-con- 
 tinued regret, melancholy neither to be consoled nor con- 
 fessed, a mournful old age, a slow decay, a death in the 
 desert ! 
 
 Terrible dilemma ! Whatever is still possible to me has 
 lost its savor, while all that I could still desire escapes me, 
 and will always escape me. Every impulse ends in weari- 
 ness and disappointment. Discouragement, depression, 
 weakness, apathy ; there is the dismal series which must 
 be forever begun and re-begun, while we are still rolling 
 up the Sisyphean rock of life. Is it not simpler and 
 shorter to plunge head-foremost into the gulf? 
 
 No, rebel as we may, there is but one solution to sub- 
 mit to the general order, to accept, to resign ourselves, 
 and to do still what we can. It is our self-will, our aspira- 
 tions, our dreams, that must be sacrificed. We must give 
 np the hope of happiness once for all ! Immolation of the 
 self ueath to self this is the only suicide which is either 
 useful or permitted. In my present mood of indifference 
 and disinterestedness, there is some secret ill-humor, some 
 wounded pride, a little rancor; there is selfishness in 
 short, since a premature claim for rest is implied in it. 
 Absolute disinterestedness is only reached in that perfect 
 humility which tramples the self under foot for the glcry 
 of God. 

 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 183 
 
 I have no more strength left, I wish for nothing; but 
 that is not what is wanted. I must wish what God wishes; 
 I must pass from indifference to sacrifice, and from sacri- 
 fice to self-devotion. The cup which i would fain put 
 away from me is the misery of living, the shame of exist- 
 ing and suffering as a common creature who has missed his 
 vocation; it is the bitter and increasing humiliation of 
 declining power, of growing old under the weight of one's 
 >own disapproval, and the disappointment of one's friends! 
 "Wilt thou be healed?" was the text of last Sunday's 
 sermon. " Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy- 
 laden, and I will give you rest. " " And if our heart con- 
 demn us, God is greater than our heart." 
 
 August 27, 1868. To-day I took up the " Penseroso"* 
 again. I have often violated its maxims and forgotten its 
 lessons. Still, this volume is a true son of my soul, and 
 breathes the true spirit of the inner life. Whenever I 
 wish to revive my consciousness of my own tradition, it is 
 pleasant to me to read over this little gnomic collection 
 which has had such scant justice done to it, and which, 
 were it another's, I should often quote. I. like to feel 
 that in it I have attained to that relative truth which may 
 be defined as consistency with self, the harmony of appear- 
 ance with reality, of thought with expression in other 
 words, sincerity, ingenuousness, inwardness. It is personal 
 experience in the strictest sense of the word. 
 
 September 21, 1868. ( Villars). A lovely autumn effect. 
 Everything was veiled in gloom this morning, and a gray 
 mist of rain floated between us and the whole circle of 
 mountains. Now the strip of blue sky which made its 
 appearance at first behind the distant peaks has grown 
 
 * " II Penseroso," poesies-maximes par H. F. Amiel: Geneve, 1858. 
 This little book, which contains one hundred and thirty-three maxims, 
 several of which are quoted in the Jorunal Intime, is prefaced fey a 
 motto translated from Shelley "Ce n'est pas la science qui nous 
 manque, a nous modernes; nous 1'avons surabondamment. . . . 
 Mais ce que nous avons absorbe nous absorbe. . . . C qui nrais 
 manque c'est la poesie de la vie."
 
 1 84 AMIKL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 larger, has mounted to the zenith, and the dome of 
 heaven, swept almost clear of cloud, sends streaming down 
 upon us the pale rays of a convalescent sun. The day 
 now promises kimdly, and all is well that ends well. 
 
 Thus after a season of tears a sober and softened joy may 
 .return to us. Say to yourself that you are entering upon 
 the autumn of your life; that the graces of spring and 
 the splendors of summer are irrevocably gone, but that 
 autumn too has its beauties. The autumn weather is 
 often darkened by rain, cloud, and mist, but the air is 
 still soft, and the sun still delights the eyes, and touches 
 the yellowing leaves caressingly ; it is the time for fruit, 
 for harvest, for the vintage, the moment for making pro- 
 vision for the winter. Here the herds of milch-cows have 
 already come down to the level of the clidlet, and next 
 week they will be lower than we are. This living barom- 
 eter is a warning to us that the time has come to say fare- 
 well to the mountains. There is nothing to gain, and 
 everything to lose, by despising the example of nature, and 
 making arbitrary rules of life for one's self. Our liberty, 
 wisely understood, is but a voluntary 'obedience to the 
 universal laws of life. My life has reached its month of 
 September. May I recognize it in time, and suit thought 
 and action to the fact! 
 
 November 13, 1868. I am reading part of two books 
 by Charles Socretan* "Recherches sur la Methode," 1857; 
 " Precis elementaire de Philosophic, " 1868. The philosophy 
 of Secretan is the philosophy of Christianity, considered as 
 the one true religion. Subordination of nature to intelli- 
 gence, of intelligence to will, and of will to dogmatic faith 
 such is its general framework. Unfortunately there are 
 no signs of critical, or comparative, or historical study in 
 it, and as an apologetic in which satire is curiously mingled 
 "with glorification of the religion of love it leaves upon one 
 
 * diaries Secretan, a Lausanne professor, the friend of Vinet 
 born 1819. He published " Lemons sur la Philosophic de Leibnitz," 
 " Philosophic de la Liberte," " La liaison et le Christ ianisme," etc.
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 185 
 
 an impression of parti pris. A philosophy of religion,- 
 apart from the comparative science of religions, and apart 
 also from a disinterested and general philosophy of history, 
 must always be more or less arbitrary and factitious. It is 
 only pseudo-scientific, this reduction of human life to three 
 spheres industry, law, and religion. The author seems 
 to me to possess a vigorous and profound mind, rather 
 than a free mind. Not only is he dogmatic, but he dogma- 
 tizes in favor of a given religion, to which his whole 
 allegiance is pledged. Besides, Christianity being an X 
 which each church defines in its own way, the author takes 
 the same liberty, and defines the X in his way ; so that he 
 is at once too free and not free enough; too free in respect 
 to historical Christianity, not free enough in respect to 
 Christianity as a particular church. He does not satisfy 
 the believing Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed Churchman, 
 or Catholic; and he does not satisfy the freethinker. 
 This Schellingian type of speculation, which cbnsists in 
 logically deducing a particular religion that is to say, in 
 making philosophy the servant of Christian theology is a 
 legacy from the Middle Ages. 
 
 After belief comes judgment; but a believer is not a 
 judge. A fish lives in the ocean, but it cannot see all 
 around it; it cannot take a view of the whole; therefore it 
 cannot judge what the ocean is. In order to understand 
 Christianity we must put it in its historical place, in its 
 proper framework; we must regard it as a part of the 
 religious development of humanity, and so judge it, not 
 from a Christian point of view, but from a human point 
 of view, sine ira nee studio. 
 
 December 16, 1868. I am in the most painful state of 
 anxiety as to my poor kind friend, Charles Heim. . . . 
 Since the 30th of November I have had no letter from the 
 dear invalid, who then said his last farewell to me. How 
 long these two weeks have seemed to me and how keenly 
 I have realized that strong craving which many feel for the 
 last words, the last looks, of those they love! Such words 
 laid looks are a kind of testament. They have a solemn
 
 186 AMIfSL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 and sacred character which is not merely an effect of our 
 imagination. For that which is on the brink of death 
 already participates to some extent in eternity. A dying 
 man seems to speak to us from beyond the tomb ; what he 
 says has the effect upon us of a sentence, an oracle, an 
 injunction; we look upon him as one endowed with 
 second sight. Serious and solemn words come naturally 
 to the man who feels life escaping him, and the grave 
 opening before him. The depths of his nature are then 
 revealed ; the divine within him need no longer hide itself. 
 Oh, do not let us wait to be just or pitiful or demonstra- 
 tive toward those we love until they or we are struck down 
 by illness or threatened with death ! Life is short and we 
 have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of 
 those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh, 
 be swift to love, make haste to be kind ! 
 
 December 26, 1868. My dear friend died this morning 
 at Hyeres. A beautiful soul has returned to heaven. So 
 he has ceased to suffer! Is he happy now? 
 
 If men are always more or less deceived on the subject 
 of women, it is because they forget that they and women 
 do not speak altogether the same language, and that 
 words have not the same weight or the same meaning for 
 them, especially in questions of feeling. Whether from 
 shyness or precaution or artifice, a woman never speaks 
 out ^her whole thought, and moreover what she herself 
 knows of it is but a part of what it really is. Complete 
 frankness seems to be impossible to her, and complete 
 self-knowledge seems to be forbidden her. If she is a 
 sphinx to us, it is because she is a riddle of doubtful 
 meaning even to herself. She has no need of perfidy, for 
 she is mystery itself. A woman is something fugitive, 
 irrational, indeterminable, illogical, and contradictory. 
 A great deal of forbearance ought to be shown her, and a 
 good deal of prudence exercised with regard to her, for 
 she may bring about innumerable evils without knowing 
 it. Capable of all kinds of devotion, and of all kinds of
 
 AM1KIS8 JOURNAL. 187 
 
 treason, "monstre incomprehensible," raised to the second 
 power, she is at once the delight and the terror of man. 
 
 The more a man loves, the more he suffers. The sum 
 of possible grief for each soul is in proportion to its degree 
 of perfection. 
 
 He who is too much afraid of being duped has lost the 
 power of being magnanimous. 
 
 Doubt of the reality of love ends by making us doubt 
 everything. The final result of all deceptions and dis- 
 appointments is atheism, which may not always yield up 
 its name and secret, but which lurks, a masked specter, 
 within the depths of thought, as the last supreme ex- 
 plainer. "Man is what his love is," and follows the for- 
 tunes of his love. 
 
 The beautiful souls of the world have an ai t of saintly 
 alchemy, by which bitterness is converted into kindness, 
 the gall of human experience into gentleness, ingratitude 
 into benefits, insults into pardon. And the transforma- 
 tion ought to become so easy and habitual that the 
 lookers-on may think it spontaneous, and nobody give us 
 credit for it. 
 
 January 27, 1869. What, then, is the service rendered 
 to the world by Christianity? The proclamation of "good 
 news." And what is this "good news? " The pardon of 
 sin. The God of holiness loving the world and reconciling 
 it to himself by Jesus, in order to establish the kingdom 
 of God, the city of souls, the life of heaven upon earth 
 here you have the whole of it; but in this is a revolution. 
 " Love ye one another, as I have loved you ; " " Be ye one 
 with me, as I am one with the Father : " for this is lif a 
 eternal, here is perfection, salvation, joy. Faith in the 
 fatherly love of God, who punishes and pardons for our 
 good, and who desires not the death of the sinner, but 
 his conversion and his life here is the motive power of the 
 redeemed.
 
 188 AMI EL' 8 JOURNAL. 
 
 What we call Christianity is a vast ocean, into which flow 
 a number of spiritual currents of distant and various 
 origin ; certain religions, that is to say, of Asia and of 
 Europe, the great ideas of Greek wisdom, and especially 
 those of Platonism. Neither its doctrine nor its morality, 
 as they have been historically developed, are new or spon- 
 taneous. What is essential and original in it is the prac- 
 tical demonstration that the human and the divine nature 
 may co-exist, may become fused into one sublime flame; 
 that holiness and pity, justice and mercy, may meet 
 together and become one, in man and in God. What is 
 specific in Christianity is Jesus the religious conscious- 
 ness of Jesus. The sacred sense of his absolute union with 
 God through perfect love and self-surrender, this pro- 
 found, invincible, and tranquil faith of his, has become a 
 religion ; the faith of Jesus has become the faith of mil- 
 lions and millions of men. From this torch has sprung a 
 vast conflagration. And such has been the brilliancy and 
 the radiance both of revealer and revelation, that the 
 astonished world has forgotten its justice in its admiration, 
 and has referred to one single benefactor the whole of 
 those benefits which are its heritage from the past. 
 
 The conversion of ecclesiastical and confessional Chris- 
 tianity into historical Christianity is the work of biblical 
 science. The conversion of historical Christianity into 
 philosophical Christianity is an attempt which is to some 
 extent an illusion, since faith cannot be entirely resolved 
 into science. The transference, however, of Christianity 
 from the region of history to the region of psychology is 
 the great craving of our time. What we are trying to 
 arrive at is the eternal gospel. But before we can reach 
 it, the comparative history and philosophy of religions 
 must assign to Christianity its true place, and must judge 
 it. The religion, too, which Jesus professed must be dis- 
 entangled from the religion which has taken Jesus for its 
 object. And when at last we are able to point out the 
 state of consciousness which is the primitive cell, the prin- 
 ciple of the eternal gospel, we shall have reached our goal, 
 for in it is the punctum saliens of pure religion.
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 189 
 
 Perhaps the extraordinary will take the place of the 
 supernatural, and the great geniuses of the world will come 
 to be regarded as the messengers of God in history, as the 
 providential revealers through whom the spirit of God 
 works upon the human mass. What is perishing is not 
 the admirable and the adorable; it is simply the arbitrary, 
 the accidental, the miraculous. Just as the poor illumina- 
 tions of a village fete, or the tapers of a procession, are put 
 out by the great marvel of the sun, so the small local 
 miracles, with their meanness and doubtfulness, will sink 
 into insignificance beside the law of the world of spirits, 
 the incomparable spectacle of human history, led by that 
 all-powerful Dramaturgus whom we call God. Utinam! 
 
 March 1, 1869. Impartiality and objectivity are as rare 
 as justice, of which they are but two special forms. Self- 
 interest is an inexhaustible source of convenient illusions. 
 The number of beings who wish to see truly is extra- 
 ordinarily small. What governs men is the fear of truth, 
 unless truth is useful to them, which is as much as to say 
 that self-interest is the principle of the common philosophy 
 or that truth is made for us but not we for truth. As 
 this fact is humiliating, the majority of people will neither 
 recognize nor admit it. And thus a prejudice of self-love 
 protects all the prejudices of the understanding, which 
 are themselves the result of a stratagem of the ego. 
 Humanity has always slain or persecuted those who have 
 disturbed this selfish repose of hers. She only improves 
 in spite of herself. The only progress which she desires 
 is an increase of enjoyments. All advances in justice, in 
 morality, in holiness, have been imposed upon or forced 
 from her by some noble violence. Sacrifice, which is the 
 passion of great souls, has never been the law of societies. 
 It is too often by employing one vice against another for 
 example, vanity against cupidity, greed against idleness 
 that the great agitators have broken through routine. In 
 a word, the human world is almost entirely directed by the 
 law of nature, and the law of the spirit, which is the leaven 
 of its coarse paste, has but rarely succeeded in raising it 
 into generous expansion*
 
 190 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 From the point of view of the ideal, humanity is trlstt> 
 and ugly. But if we compare it with its probable origins, 
 we see that the human race has not altogether wasted its 
 time. Hence there are three possible views of history, 
 the view of the pessimist, who starts from the ideal; the 
 view of the optimist, who compares the past with the 
 present; and the view of the hero-worshiper, who sees 
 that all progress whatever has cost oceans of blood and 
 ' tears. 
 
 European hypocrisy veils its face before the voluntary 
 suicide of those Indian fanatics who throw themselves 
 under the wheels of their goddess' triumphal car. And 
 yet these sacrifices are but the symbol of what goes on in 
 Europe as elsewhere, of that offering of their life which is 
 made by the martyrs of all great causes. We may even say 
 that the fierce and sanguinary goddess is humanity itself, 
 which is only spurred to progress by remorse, and repents 
 only when the measure of its crimes runs over. The 
 fanatics who sacrifice themselves are an eternal protest 
 against the universal selfishness. We have only overthrown 
 those idols which are tangible and visible, but perpetual 
 sacrifice still exists everywhere, and everywhere the elite 
 of each generation suffers for the salvation of the multi- 
 tude. It is the austere, bitter, and mysterious law of 
 solidarity. Perdition and redemption in and through each 
 other is the destiny of men. 
 
 March 18, 1869 (Thursday}. Whenever I come back 
 from a walk outside the town I am disgusted and repelled 
 by this cell of mine. Out of doors, sunshine, birds, spring, 
 beauty, and life; in here, ugliness, piles of paper, melan- 
 choly, and death. And yet my walk was one of the saddest 
 possible. I wandered along the Rhone and the Arve, and 
 all the memories of the past, all the disappointments of 
 the present and all the anxieties of the future laid siege 
 to my heart like a whirlwind of phantoms. I took 
 account of my faults, and they ranged themselves in battle 
 against me. The vulture of regret gnawed at my heart, 
 and the sense of the irreparable choked me like the iron
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 191 
 
 collar of the pillory. It seemed to me that I had failed in 
 the task of life, and that now life was failing me. Ah ! 
 how terrible spring is to the lonely ! All the needs which 
 had been lulled to sleep start into life again, all the 
 sorrows which had disappeared are reborn, and the old man 
 which had been gagged and conquered rises once more and 
 makes his groans heard. It is as though all the old 
 wounds opened and bewailed themselves afresh. Just 
 when one had ceased to think, when one had succeeded in 
 deadening feeling by work or by amusement, all of a 
 sudden the heart, solitary captive that it is, sends a cry 
 from its prison depths, a cry which shakes to its founda- 
 tions the whole surrounding edifice. 
 
 Even supposing that one had freed one's self from all 
 other fatalities, there is still one yoke left from which it is 
 impossible to escape that of Time. I have succeeded in 
 avoiding all other servitudes, but I had reckoned without 
 the last the servitude of age. Age comes, and its weight 
 is equal to that of all other oppressions taken together. 
 Man, under his mortal aspect, is but a species of ephemera. 
 
 As I looked at the banks of the Ehone, which have seen 
 the river flowing past them some ten or twenty thousand 
 years, or at the trees forming the avenue of the cemetery, 
 which, foi* two centuries, have been the witnesses of so 
 many funeral processions ; as I recognized the walls, the 
 dykes, the paths, which saw me playing as a child, and 
 watched other children running over that grassy plain of 
 Plain Palais which bore my own childish steps I had the 
 sharpest sense of the emptiness of life and the flight of 
 things. I felt the shadow of the upas tree darkening over 
 me. I gazed into the great implacable abyss in which are 
 swallowed up all those phantoms which call themselves 
 living beings. I saw that the living are but apparitions 
 hovering for a moment over the earth, made out of the 
 ashes of the dead, and swiftly re-absorbed by eternal night, 
 as the will-o'-the-wisp sinks into the marsh. The nothing- 
 ness of our joys, the emptiness of our existence, and the 
 futility of our ambitions, filled me with a quiet disgust.
 
 1 92 AMI EL' 8 JO URNAL. 
 
 From regret to disenchantment I floated on to Buddhism, 
 to universal weariness. Ah, the hope of a blessed immor 
 tality would be better worth having ! 
 
 With what different eyes one looks at life at ten, at 
 twenty, at thirty, at sixty! Those who live alone are 
 specially conscious of this psychological metamorphosis. 
 Another thing, too, astonishes them; it is the universal 
 conspiracy which exists for hiding the sadnoss of the 
 world, for making men forget suffering, sickness, and 
 death, for smothering the wails and sobs which issue from 
 every house, for painting and beautifying the hideous face 
 of reality. Is it out of tenderness for childhood and 
 youth, or is it simply from fear, that we are thus careful 
 to veil the sinister truth? Or is it from a sense of 
 equity ? and does life contain as much good as evil per- 
 haps more? However it may be, men feed themselves 
 rather upon illusion than upon truth. Each one unwinds 
 his own special reel of hope, and as soon as he has come to 
 the end of it he sits him down to die, and lets his sons and 
 his grandsons begin the same experience over again. We 
 all pursue happiness, and happiness escapes the pursuit 
 of all. 
 
 The only viaticum which can help us in the journey ot 
 life is that furnished by a great duty and some serious 
 affections. And even affections die, or at least their 
 objects are mortal; a friend, a wife, a child, a country, a 
 church, may precede us in the tomb; duty alone lasts as 
 , long as we. 
 
 This maxim exorcises the spirits of revolt, of anger, dis- 
 conragement, vengeance, indignation, and ambition, which 
 rise one after another to tempt and trouble the heart, 
 swelling with the sap of the spring. all ye saints of the 
 East, of antiquity, of Christianity, phalanx of heroes! Ye 
 too drank deep of weariness and agony of soul, but ye 
 triumphed over both. Ye who have come forth victors 
 from the strife, shelter us under your palms, fortify us by 
 your example ! 
 . April 6, 1869. Magnificent weather. The Alps are
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL 193 
 
 dazzling under their silver haze. Sensations 01 afl kinds 
 have been crowding upon me ; the delights of a walk under 
 the rising sun, the charms of a wonderful view, longing- 
 for travel, and thirst for joy, hunger for work, for emo- 
 tion, for life, dreams of happiness and of love. A passion- 
 ate wish to live, to feel, to express, stirred the depths of 
 my heart. It was a sudden re-awakening of youth, a flash 
 of poetry, a renewing of the soul, a fresh growth of the 
 wings of desire. I was overpowered by a host of conquer- 
 ing, vagabond, adventurous aspirations. I forgot my age, 
 my obligations, my duties, my vexations, and youth leaped 
 within me as though life were beginning again. It was as 
 though something explosive had caught fire, and one's 
 soul were scattered to the four winds; in such a mood one 
 would fain devour the whole world, experience everything, 
 see everything. Faust's ambition enters into one, universal 
 desire a horror of one's own prison cell. One throws off 
 one's hair shirt, and one would fain gather the whole of 
 nature into one's arms and heart. ye passions, a ray of 
 sunshine is enough to rekindle you all ! The cold black 
 mountain is a volcano once more, and melts its snowy 
 crown with one single gust of flaming breath. It is the 
 spring which brings about these sudden and improbable 
 resurrections, the spring which, sending a thrill and 
 tumult of life through all that lives, is the parent of impet- 
 uous desires, of overpowering inclinations, of unforeseen 
 and inextinguishable outbursts of passion. It breaks 
 through the rigid bark of the trees, and rends the mask 
 on the face of asceticism ; it makes the monk tremble in 
 the shadow of his convent, the maiden behind the curtains 
 of her room, the child sitting on his school bench, the old 
 man bowed under his rheumatism. 
 
 " O Hymen, Hymemee! " 
 
 April 24, 1869. Is Nemesis indeed more real than 
 Providence, the jealous God more true than the good 
 God? grief more certain than joy? darkness more secure 
 of victory than light? Is it pessimism or optimism which
 
 104 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 is nearest the truth, and which Leibnitz or Schopenhauei 
 has best understood the universe? Is it the healthy 
 man or the sick man who sees best to the bottom of 
 things? which is in the right? 
 
 Ah ! the problem of grief and evil is and will be always 
 the greatest enigma of being, only second to the exist- 
 ence of being itself. The common faith of humanity has 
 assumed the victory of good over evil. But if good consists 
 not in the result of victory, but in victory itself, then good 
 implies an incessant and infinite contest, interminable 
 struggle, and a success forever threatened. And if this 
 is life, is not Buddha right in regarding life as synonymous 
 with evil since it means perpetual restlessness and endless 
 war? Repose according to the Buddhist is only to be found in 
 annihilation. The art of self-annihilation, of escaping the 
 world's vast machinery of suffering, and the misery of 
 renewed existence the art of reaching Nirvana, is to him 
 the supreme art, the only means of deliverance. The 
 Christian says to God: Deliver us from evil. The 
 Buddhist adds: And to that end deliver us from finite 
 existence, give us back to nothingness! The first believes 
 that when he is enfranchised from the body he will enter 
 upon eternal happiness; the second believes that individual- 
 ity is the obstacle to all repose, and he longs for the dissolu- 
 tion of the soul itself. The dread of the first is the paradise 
 of the second. 
 
 One thing only is necessary the committal of the soul 
 to God. Look that thou thyself art in order, and leave to 
 God the task of unraveling the skein of the world and of 
 destiny. Whafe do annihilation or immortality matter? 
 What is to be, will be. And what will be, will be for the 
 best. Faith in good perhaps the individual wants 
 nothing more for his passage through life. Only he must 
 have taken sides with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and 
 Zeno, against materialism, against the religion of accident 
 and pessimism. Perhaps also he must make up his mind 
 against the Buddhist nihilism, because a man's system of 
 conduct is diametrically opposite according as he labors to
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 195 
 
 increase his life or to lessen it, according as he aims at 
 cultivating his faculties or at systematically deadening 
 them. 
 
 To employ one's individual efforts for the increase of 
 good in the world this modest ideal is enough for us. To 
 help forward the victory of good has been the common aim 
 of saints and sages. Socii Dei sumus was the word of 
 Seneca, who had it from Cleanthus. 
 
 April 30, 1869. I have just finished Vacherot's* book 
 "La Eeligion," 1869, and it has set me thinking. I 
 have a feeling that his notion of religion is not rigorous 
 and exact, and that therefore his logic is subject to correc- 
 tion. If religion is a psychological stage, anterior to that 
 of reason, it is clear that it will disappear in man, but if, 
 on the contrary, it is a mode of the inner life, it may and 
 must last, as long as the need of feeling, and alongside 
 the need of thinking. The question is between theism and 
 non-theism. If God is only the category of the ideal, 
 religion will vanish, of course, like the illusions of youth. 
 But if Universal Being can be felt and loved at the same 
 time as conceived, the philosopher may be a religious man 
 just as he may be an artist, an orator, or a citizen. He 
 may attach himself to a worship or ritual without deroga- 
 tion. I myself incline to this solution. To me religion is 
 hfe before God and in God. 
 
 And even if God were defined as the universal life, so 
 
 * Etienne Vaclierot, a French philosophical writer, who owed his 
 first successes in life to the friendship of Cousin, and was later 
 brought very much into notice by his controversy with the Abbe 
 Gratry, by the prosecution brought against him in consequence of 
 his book, " La Democratic " (1859), and by his rejection at the hands of 
 the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1865, for the same 
 kind of reasons which had brought about the exclusion of Littre in 
 the preceding year. In 1868, however, he became a member of the 
 Institute in succession to Cousin. A Liberal of the old school, he 
 has separated himself from the republicans since the war, and has 
 made himself felt asasevere critic of republican blunders in the Revue 
 des deux Mondes. La Religion, which discusses the psychological 
 origins of the religious sense, was published in 1868.
 
 196 AMIEUS JOURNAL. 
 
 long as this life is positive and not negative, the soul 
 penetrated with the sense of the infinite is in the religious 
 state. Religion differs from philosophy as the simple and 
 spontaneous self differs from the reflecting self, as synthetic 
 intuition differs from intellectual analysis. We are 
 initiated into the religious state by a sense of voluntary 
 dependence on, and joyful submission to the principle of 
 order and of goodness. Religious emotion makes man 
 conscious of himself; he finds his own place within the 
 infinite unity, and it is this perception which is sacred. 
 
 But in spite of these reservations I am much impressed 
 by the book, which is a fine piece of work, ripe and 
 serious in all respects. 
 
 May 13, 1869. A break in the clouds, and through the 
 blue interstices a bright sun throws flickering and uncer- 
 tain rays. Storms, smiles, whims, anger, tears it is May, 
 and nature is in its feminine phase! She pleases our fancy, 
 stirs our heart, and wears out our reason by the endless 
 succession of her caprices and the unexpected violence of 
 her whims. 
 
 This recalls to me the 213th verse of the second book of 
 the Laws of Manou. " It is in the nature of the feminine 
 sex to seek here below to corrupt men, and therefore wise 
 men never abandon themselves to the seductions of 
 women." The same code, however, says: "Wherever 
 women are honored the gods are satisfied." And again: 
 " In every family where the husband takes pleasure in his 
 wife, and the wife in her husband, happiness is ensured." 
 And again: " One mother is more venerable than a thous- 
 and fathers." But knowing what stormy and irrational 
 elements there are in this fragile and delightful creature, 
 Manou concludes: "At no age ought a woman to be 
 allowed to govern herself as she pleases." 
 
 Up to the present day, in several contemporary and 
 neighboring codes, a woman is a minor all her life. Why? 
 Because of her dependence upon nature, and of her sub- 
 jection to passions which are the diminutives of madness; 
 in other words, because the soul of a woman has some-
 
 AMIKL'S JO URNAL. 197 
 
 thing obscure and mysterious in it, which lends itself to 
 all superstitions and weakens the energies of man. To 
 man belong law, justice, science, and philosophy, all that 
 is disinterested, universal, and rational. Women, on the 
 contrary, introduce into everything favor, exception, and 
 personal prejudice. As soon as a man, a people, a litera- 
 ture, an epoch, become feminine in type, they sink in the 
 scale of things. As soon as a woman quits the state of 
 subordination in which her merits have free play, we see a 
 rapid increase in her natural defects. Complete equality 
 with man makes her quarrelsome; a position of supremacy 
 makes her tyrannical. To honor her and to govern her 
 will be for a long time yet the best solution. When educa- 
 tion has formed strong, noble, and serious women in whom 
 conscience and reason hold sway over the effervescence of 
 fancy and sentimentality, then we shall be able not only 
 to honor woman, but to make a serious end of gaining her 
 consent and adhesion. Then she will be truly an equal, 
 a work-fellow, a companion. At present she is so only in 
 theory. The moderns are at work upon the problem, and 
 have not solved it yet. 
 
 June 15, 1869. The great defect of liberal Christianity* 
 is that its conception of holiness is a frivolous one, or, what 
 comes to the same thing, its conception of sin is a super- 
 ficial one. The defects of the baser sort of political 
 liberalism recur in liberal Christianity; it is only half 
 serious, and its theology is too much mixed with worldli- 
 ness. The sincerely pious folk look upon the liberals as 
 persons whose talk is rather profane, and who offend 
 religious feelings by making sacred subjects a theme for 
 rhetorical display. They shock the convenances of senti- 
 ment, and affront the delicacy of conscience by the indis- 
 creet familiarities they take with the great mysteries of 
 the inner life. They seem to be mere clever special 
 
 * At this period the controversy between the orthodox party and 
 " Liberal Christianity " was at ; .ts height, both in Geneva and 
 throughout Switzerland
 
 ]98 A MIEL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 pleaders, religious rhetoricians like the Greek sophists, 
 rather than guides in the narrow road which leads to 
 salvation. 
 
 It is not to the clever folk, nor even to the scientific 
 folk, that the empire over souls belongs, but to those who 
 impress us as having conquered nature by grace, passed 
 through the burning bush, and as speaking, not the lan- 
 guage of human wisdom, but that of the divine will. In 
 religious matters it is holiness which gives authority; it is 
 love, or the power of devotion and sacrifice, which goes to 
 the heart, which moves and persuades. 
 
 What all religious, poetical, pure, and tender souls are 
 least able to pardon is the diminution or degradation of 
 their ideal. We must never rouse an ideal against us; our 
 business is to point men to another ideal, purer, higher, 
 more spiritual than the old, and so to raise behind a lofty 
 summit one more lofty still. In this way no one is 
 despoiled; we gain men's confidence, while at the same 
 time forcing them to think, and enabling those minds 
 which are already tending toward change to perceive new 
 objects and goals for thought. Only that which is replaced 
 is destroyed, and an ideal is only replaced by satisfying the 
 conditions of the old with some advantages over. 
 
 Let the liberal Protestants offer us a spectacle of Chris- 
 tian virtue of a holier, intenser, and more intimate kind 
 than before; let us see it active in their persons and in 
 their influence, and they will have furnished the proof 
 demanded by the Master ; the tree will be judged by its 
 fruits. 
 
 June 22, 1869 (Nine A.. M). Gray and lowering 
 weather. A fly lies dead of cold on the page of my book, 
 in full summer! What is life? I said to myself, as I 
 looked at the tiny dead creature. It is a loan, as move- 
 ment is. The universal life is a sum total, of which th* 
 units are visible here, there, and everywhere, just as an 
 electric wheel throws off sparks along its whole surface. 
 Life passes through us; we do not possess it. Him
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 199 
 
 admits three ultimate principles:* the atom, the force, 
 the soul; the force which acts upon atoms, the soul which 
 acts upon force. Probably he distinguishes between anony 
 mous souls and personal souls. Then my fly would be an 
 anonymous soul. 
 
 (Same day}. The national churches are all up in arms 
 against so-called Liberal Christianity; Basle and Zurich 
 began the fight, and now Geneva has entered the lists too. 
 Gradually it is becoming plain that historical Protestantism 
 has no longer a raison d'etre between pure liberty and 
 pure authority. It is, in fact, a provisional stage, founded 
 on the worship of the Bible that is to say, on the idea of 
 a written revelation, end of a book divinely inspired, and 
 therefore authoritative. When once this thesis has been 
 relegated to the rank of a fiction Protestantism crumbles 
 away. There is nothing for it but to retire upon natural 
 religion, or the religion of the moral consciousness. M. M. 
 Reville, Coquerel, Fontan6s, Buisson,f accept this logical 
 outcome. They are the advance-guard of Protestantism 
 And the laggards of free thought. 
 
 Their mistake is in not seeing that all institutions rest 
 upon a legal fiction, and that every living thing involves 
 
 * Gustave-Adolphe Him, a French physicist, born near Colraar, 
 1815, became a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in 
 1867. The book of his to which Amiel refers is no doubt Conse- 
 quences philosophiques et metaphysiques de la thermodyuamique, 
 Analyse elementaire de Vunivers (1869). 
 
 f The name of M. Albert Reville, the French Protestant theologian, 
 is more or less familiar in England, especially since his delivery of 
 the Hibbert lectures in 1884. Athanase Coquerel, born 1820, died 
 1876, the well-known champion of liberal ideas in the French 
 Protestant Church, was suspended from his pastoral functions by 
 the Consistory of Paris, on account of his review of M. Kenan's 
 " Vie de Jesus " in 1864. Ferdinand-Edouard Buisson, a liberal Protes- 
 tant, originally a professor at Lausanne, was raised to the important 
 functions of Director of Primary Instruction by M. Ferry in 1879. 
 He was denounced by Bishop Dupanloup, in the National Assembly 
 of 1871, as the author of certain liberal pamphlets on the dangers 
 connected with Scripture-teaching in schools, and, for the time, lost 
 his employment under the Ministry of Education.
 
 200 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 a logical absurdity. It may be logical to demand a church 
 based on free examination and absolute sincerity; but to 
 realize it is a different matter. A church lives by what is 
 positive, and this positive element necessarily limits inves- 
 tigation. People confound the right of the individual, 
 which is to be free, with the duty of the institution, which 
 is to be something. They take the principle of science to 
 be the same as the principle of the church, which is a 
 m atake. They will not see that religion is different from 
 philosophy, and that the one seeks union by faith, while the 
 other upholds the solitary independence of thought. That 
 the bread should be good it must have leaven ; but the 
 leaven is not the bread. Liberty is the means whereby 
 we arrive at an enlightened faith granted; but an assem- 
 bly of people agreeing only upon this criterion and this 
 method could not possibly found a church, for they might 
 differ completely as to the results of the method. Sup- 
 pose a newspaper the writers of which were of all possible 
 parties it would no doubt be a curiosity in journalism, 
 but it would have no opinions, no faith, no creed. A 
 drawing-room filled with refined people, carrying on polite 
 discussion, is not a church, and a dispute, however cour- 
 teous, is not worship. It is a mere confusion of kinds. 
 
 July 13, 1869. Lamennais, Heine the one the victim 
 of a mistaken vocation, the other of a tormenting craving 
 to astonish and mystify his kind. The first was wanting 
 in common sense; the second was wanting in seriousness. 
 The Frenchman was violent, arbitrary, domineering; the 
 German was a jesting Mephistopheles, with a horror of 
 Philistinism. The Breton was all passion and melancholy; 
 the Hamburger all fancy and satire. Neither developed 
 freely nor normally. Both of them, because of an initial 
 mistake, threw themselves into an endless quarrel with 
 the world. Both were revolutionists. They were not 
 fighting for the good cause, for impersonal truth; both 
 were rather the champions of their own pride. Both 
 suffered greatly, and died isolated, repudiated, and reviled. 
 Men of magnificent talents, both of them, but men of
 
 A MIEL'S JO URNAL. 201 
 
 small wisdom, who did more harm than good to themselves 
 and to others! It is a lamentable existence which wears 
 itself out in maintaining a first antagonism, or a first 
 blunder. The greater a man's intellectual power, the 
 more dangerous is it for him to make a false start and to 
 begin life badly. 
 
 July 20, 1869. I have been reading over again five or 
 six chapters, here and there, of Kenan's "St. Paul." An- 
 alyzed to the bottom, the writer is a freethinker, but a free 
 thinker whose flexible imagination still allows him the deli- 
 cate epicurism of religious emotion. In his eyes the man 
 who will not lend himself to these graceful fancies is vul- 
 gar, and the man who takes them seriously is prejudiced. 
 He is entertained by the variations of conscience, but he is 
 too clever to laugh at them. The true critic neither con- 
 cludes nor excludes; his pleasure is to understand without 
 believing, and to profit by the results of enthusiasm, while 
 still maintaining a free mind, unembarrassed by illusion. 
 Such a mode of proceeding has a look of dishonesty; it is 
 nothing, however, but the good-tempered irony of a 
 highly-cultivated mind, which will neither be ignorant of 
 anything nor duped by anything. It is the dilettantism 
 of the Kenaissance in its perfection. At the same time 
 what innumerable proofs of insight and of exultant 
 scientific power ! 
 
 August 14, 1869.- In the name of heaven, who art thou? 
 what wilt thou wavering inconstant creature? What 
 future lies before thee? What duty or what hope appeals 
 to thee? 
 
 My longing, my search is for love, for peace, for some- 
 thing to fill my heart ; an idea to defend ; a work to which 
 I might devote the rest of my strength; an affection which 
 might quench this inner thirst; a cause for which I might 
 die with joy. But shall I ever find them? I long for all 
 that is impossible and inaccessible: for true religion, 
 serious sympathy, the ideal life ; for paradise, immortality, 
 holiness, faith, inspiration, and I know not what besides ! 
 What I really want is to die and to be born again, trans-
 
 202 AMI ED 8 JOURNAL. 
 
 formed myself, and in a different world. And I can 
 neither stifle these aspirations nor deceive myself as to the 
 possibility of satisfying them. I seem condemned to roll 
 forever the rock of Sisyphus, and to feel that slow wear- 
 ing away of the mind which befalls the man whose voca- 
 tion and destiny are in perpetual conflict. " A Christian 
 heart and a pagan head," like Jacobi; tenderness and 
 pride ; width of mind and feebleness of will ; the two men 
 of St. Paul; a seething chaos of contrasts, antinomies, 
 and contradictions; humility and pride; childish simplicity 
 and boundless mistrust; analysis and intuition; patience 
 and irritability; kindness and dryness of heart ; carelessness 
 and anxiety; enthusiasm and languor; indifference and 
 passion ; altogether a being incomprehensible and intoler- 
 able to myself and to others ! 
 
 Then from a state of conflict I fall back into the fluid, 
 vague, indeterminate state, which feels all form to be a 
 mere violence and disfigurement. All ideas, principles, 
 acquirements, and habits are effaced in me like the ripplea 
 on a wave, like the convolutions of a cloud. My personal- 
 ity has the least possible admixture of individuality. I 
 am to the great majority of men what the circle is to rectili- 
 near figures; I am everywhere at home, because I have no 
 particular and nominative self. Perhaps, on the whole, 
 this defect has good in it. Though I am less of a man, I 
 am perhaps nearer to the man ; perhaps rather more man. 
 There is less of the individual, but more of the species, in 
 me. My nature, which is absolutely unsuited for practical 
 life, shows great aptitude for psychological study. It 
 prevents me from taking sides, but it allows me to under- 
 stand all sides. It is not only indolence which prevents 
 me from drawing conclusions; it is a sort of a secret aver- 
 sion to all intellectual proscription. I have a feeling that 
 something of everything is wanted to make a world, that 
 all citizens have a right in the state, and that if every 
 opinion is equally insignificant in itself, all opinions have 
 some hold upon truth. To live and let live, think and 
 tet think, are maxims which are equally dear to me. My
 
 AMI fiV 8 JOURNAL. 20S 
 
 tendency is always to the whole, to the totality, to the 
 general balance of things. What is difficult to me is to 
 exclude, to condemn, to say no; except, indeed, in the 
 presence of the exclusive. I am always fighting for the 
 absent, for the defeated cause, for that portion of truth 
 which seems to me neglected; my aim is to complete every 
 thesis, to see round every problem, to study a thing from 
 all its possible sides. Is this skepticism? Yes, in its result, 
 but not in its purpose. It is rather the sense of the abso- 
 lute and the infinite reducing to their proper value and 
 relegating to their proper place the finite and the relative. 
 But here, in the same way, my ambition is greater than 
 my power; my philosophical perception is superior to my 
 speculative gift. I have not the energy of my opinions; 
 I have far greater width than inventiveness of thought, 
 and, from timidity, I have allowed the critical intelligence 
 in me to swallow up the creative genius. Is it indeed 
 from timidity? 
 
 Alas! with a little more ambition, or a little more good 
 luck, a different man might have been made out of me, 
 and such as my youth gave promise of. 
 
 August 16, 1869. I have been thinking over Schopen- 
 hauer. It has struck me and almost terrified me to see 
 how well I represent Schopenhauer's typical man, for 
 whom "happiness is a chimera and suffering a reality," 
 for whom " the negation of will and of desire is the only 
 road to deliverance," and "the individual life is a misfor- 
 tune from which impersonal contemplation is the only 
 enfranchisement," etc. But the principle that life is an 
 evil and annihilation a good lies at the root of the system, 
 and this axiom I have never dared to enunciate in any 
 general way, although I have admitted it here and there 
 in individual cases. What I still like in the misanthrope 
 of Frankfort, is his antipathy to current prejudice, to 
 European hobbies, to western hypocrisies, to the successes 
 of the day. Schopenhauer is a man of powerful mind, 
 who has put away from him all illusions, who professes 
 Buddhism in the full flow of modern Germany, and abso-
 
 204 AMIKISS JOURNAL. 
 
 lute detachment of mind in the very midst of the nine- 
 teenth-century orgie. His great defects are barrenness of 
 soul, a proud and perfect selfishness, an adoration of 
 genius which is combined with complete indifference to 
 the rest of the world, in spite of all his teaching of resigna- 
 tion and sacrifice. He has no sympathy, no humanity, no 
 love. And here I recognize the unlikeness between us. 
 Pure intelligence and solitary labor might easily lead me to 
 his point of view ; but once appeal to the heart, and I feel 
 the contemplative attitude untenable. Pity, goodness, 
 charity, and devotion reclaim theii rights, and insist even 
 upon the first place. 
 
 August 29, 1869. Schopenhauer preaches imperson- 
 ality, objectivity, pure contemplation, the negation of will, 
 calmness, and disinterestedness, an aesthetic study of the 
 world, detachment from life, the renunciation of all desire, 
 solitary meditation, disdain of the crowd, and indifference 
 to all that the vulgar covet. He approves all my defects, 
 my childishness, my aversion to practical life, my antipathy 
 to the utilitarians, my distrust of all desire. In a word, 
 he flatters all my instincts; he caresses and justifies them. 
 
 This pre-established harmony between the theory of 
 Schopenhauer and my own natural man causes me pleasure 
 mingled with terror. I might indulge myself in the 
 pleasure, but that I fear to delude and stifle conscience. 
 Besides, I feel that goodness has no tolerance for this 
 contemplative indifference, and that virtue consists in self- 
 conquest. 
 
 August 30, 1869. Still some chapters of Schopenhauer. 
 Schopenhauer believes in the unchangeableness of innate 
 tendencies in the individual, and in the invariability of the 
 primitive disposition. He refuses to believe in the new 
 man, in any real progress toward perfection, or in any posi- 
 tive improvement in a human being. Only the appear- 
 ances are refined; there is no change below the surface. 
 Perhaps he confuses temperament, character, and indi- 
 viduality? I incline to think that individuality is fatal 
 and primitive, that temperament reaches far back, but ia
 
 A \1 1 KL't* JO URNAL. 205 
 
 alternable, and that character is more recent and susceptible 
 of voluntary or involuntary modifications. Individuality 
 is a matter of psychology, temperament, a matter of sensa- 
 tion or aesthetics; character alone is a matter of morals. 
 Liberty and the use of it count for nothing in the first 
 two elements of our being ; character is a historical fruit, 
 and the result of a man's biography. For Schopenhauer, 
 character is identified with temperament just as will with 
 passion. In short, he simplifies too much, and looks at 
 man from that more elementary point of view which is 
 only sufficient in the case of the animal. That spontaneity 
 which is vital or merely chemical he already calls will. 
 Analogy is not equation; a comparison is not reason; 
 similes and parables are not exact language. Many of 
 Schopenhauer's originalities evaporate when we come to 
 translate them into a more close and precise terminology. 
 
 Later. One has merely to turn over the "Licht- 
 strahlem " of Herder to feel the difference between him and 
 Schopenhauer. The latter is full of marked features and 
 of observations which stand out from the page and leave a 
 clear and vivid impression. Herder is much less of a 
 writer; his ideas are entangled in his style, and he has no 
 brilliant condensations, no jewels, no crystals. While he 
 proceeds by streams and sheets of thought which have no 
 definite or individual outline, Schopenhauer breaks the 
 current of his speculation with islands, striking, original, 
 and picturesque, which engrave themselves in the memory. 
 It is the same difference as there is between Nicole and 
 Pascal, between Bayle and Satin-Simon. 
 
 What is the faculty which gives relief, brilliancy, and 
 incisiveness to thought? Imagination. Under its influ- 
 ence expression becomes concentrated, colored, and strength- 
 ened, and by the power it has of individualizing all it 
 touches, it gives life and permanence to the material on 
 which it works. A writer of genius changes sand into glass 
 and glass into crystal, ore into iron and iron into steel; 
 he marks with his own stamp every idea he gets hold of. 
 He borrows much from the common stock, and gives back
 
 206 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 nothing; but even his robberies are willingly reckoned to 
 him as private property. He has, as it were, carte blanche, 
 and public opinion allows him to take what he will. 
 
 August 31, 1869. I have finished Schopenhauer. My 
 mind has been a tumult of opposing systems Stoicism, 
 Quietism, Buddhism, Christianity. Shall I never be at 
 peace with myself? If impersonality is a good, why am I 
 not consistent in the pursuit of it? and if it is a tempta- 
 tion, why return to it, after having judged and con- 
 quered it? 
 
 Is happiness anything more than a conventional fiction? 
 The deepest reason for my state of doubt is that the 
 supreme end and aim of life seems to me a mere lure and 
 deception. The individual is an eternal dupe, who never 
 obtains what he seeks, and who is forever deceived by 
 hope. My instinct is in harmony with the pessimism of 
 Buddha and of Schopenhauer. It is a doubt which never 
 leaves me even in my moments of religions fervor. Nature 
 is indeed for me a Mai'a; and I look at her, as it were, 
 with the eyes of an artist. My intelligence remains skep- 
 tical. What, then, do I believe in? I do not know. And 
 what is it I hope for? It would be difficult to say. Folly! 
 I believe in goodness, and I hope that good will prevail. 
 Deep within this ironical and disappointed being of mine 
 there is a child hidden a frank, sad, simple creature, who 
 believes in the ideal, in love, in holiness, and all heavenly 
 superstitions. A whole millennium of idylls sleeps in my 
 heart; I am a pseudo-skeptic, a pseudo-scoffer. 
 
 " Borne dans sa nature, infini dans ses vceux, 
 L'homme est un dieu tombe qui se souvient des cieux." 
 
 October 14, 1869. Yesterday, Wednesday, death of 
 Sainte Beuve. What a loss! 
 
 October 16, 1869. Laboremus seems to have been the 
 motto of Sainte-Beuve, as it was that of Septimius Se7erus. 
 He died in harness, and up to the evening before his last 
 day he still wrote, overcoming the sufferings of the body
 
 AMIEDS JOURNAL. 207 
 
 by the energy of the mind. To-day, at this very moment, 
 they are laying him in the bosom of mother earth. He 
 refused the sacraments of the church ; he never belonged 
 to any confession ; he was one of the " great diocese " 
 that of the independent seekers of truth, and he allowed 
 himself no final moment of hypocrisy. He would have 
 nothing to do with any one except God only or rather 
 the mysterious Isis beyond the veil. Being unmarried, he 
 died in the arms of his secretary. He was sixty-five years 
 old. His power of work and of memory was immense and 
 intact. What is Scherer thinking about this life and this 
 death? 
 
 October 19, 1869. An admirable article by Edmond 
 Scherer on Sainte-Beuve in the Temps. He makes him 
 the prince of French critics and the last representative of 
 the epoch of literary taste, the future belonging to the 
 bookmakers and the chatterers, to mediocrity and to 
 violence. The article breathes a certain manly melan- 
 choly, befitting a funeral oration over one who was a mas- 
 ter in the things of the mind. The fact is, that Sainte- 
 Beuve leaves a greater void behind him than either 
 Beranger or Lamartine; their greatness was already dis- 
 tant, historical; he was still helping us to think. The true 
 critic acts as a fulcrum for all the world. He represents 
 the public judgment, that is to say the public reason, the 
 touchstone, the scales, the refining rod, which tests the 
 value of every one and the merit of every work. Infalli- 
 bility of judgment is perhaps rarer than anything else, so 
 fine a balance of qualities does it demand qualities both 
 natural and acquired, qualities of mind and heart. What 
 years of labor, what study and comparison, are needed to 
 bring the critical judgment to maturity! Like Plato's 
 sage, it is only at fifty that the critic rises to the true 
 height of his literary priesthood, or, to put it less 
 pompously, of his social function. By then only can he 
 hope for insight into all the modes of being, and for mas- 
 tery of all possible shades of appreciation. And Sainte 
 Beuve joined to this infinitely refined culture a prodigious
 
 208 A MIKL'S JO URNAL. 
 
 memory, and an incredible multitude of facts and anecdote* 
 stored up for the service of his thought. 
 
 December 8, 1869. Everything has chilled me this 
 morning; the cold of the season, the physical immobility 
 around me, but, above all, Hartman's "Philosophy of the 
 Unconscious." This book lays down the terrible thesis 
 that creation is a mistake; being, such as it is, is not as 
 good as non-being, and death is better than life. 
 
 I felt the same mournful impression that Obermann left 
 upon me in my youth. The black melancholy of Bud- 
 dhism encompassed and overshadowed me. If, in fact, it 
 is only illusion which hides from us the horror of existence 
 and makes life tolerable to us, then existence is a snare 
 and life an evil. Like the Greek Annikeris, we ought to 
 counsel suicide, or rather with Buddha and Schopenhauer 
 we ought to labor for the radical extirpation of hope and 
 desire the causes of life and resurrection. Not to rise 
 again; there is the point, and there is the difficulty. 
 Death is simply a beginning again, whereas it is annihila- 
 tion that we have to aim at. Personal consciousness being 
 the root of all our troubles, we ought to avoid the tempta- 
 tion to it and the possibility of it as diabolical and abomi- 
 nable. What blasphemy! And yet it is all logical; it is 
 the philosophy of happiness carried to its farthest point. 
 Epicurism must end in despair. The philosophy of duty 
 is less depressing. But salvation lies in the conciliation of 
 duty and happiness, in the union of the individual will 
 with the divine will, and in the faith that this supreme 
 will is directed by love. 
 
 It is as true that real happiness is good, as that the good 
 become better under the purification of trial. Those who 
 have not suffered are still wanting in depth ; but a man 
 who has not got happiness cannot impart it. We can only 
 give what we have. Happiness, grief, gayety, sadness, are 
 by nature contagious. Bring your health and your 
 strength to the weak and sickly, and so you will be of use 
 to them. Give them, not your weakness, but your energy,
 
 AMIEUS JOURNAL. 2b. 
 
 BO you will revive and lift them up. Life alone can 
 rekindle life. What others claim from us is not our thirst 
 and our hunger, but our bread and our gourd. 
 
 The benefactors of humanity are those who have thought 
 great thoughts about her; but her masters and her idols 
 are those who have flattered and despised her, those who 
 have muzzled and massacred her, inflamed her with 
 fanaticism or used her for selfish purposes. Her bene- 
 factors are the poets, the artists, the inventors, the apostles 
 and all pure hearts. Her masters are the Caesars, the 
 Constan tines, the Gregory VII. 's, the Innocent III.'s, the 
 Borgias, the Napoleons. 
 
 Every civilization is, as it were, a dream of a thousand 
 years, in which heaven and earth, nature and history, 
 appear to men illumined by fantastic light and represent- 
 ing a drama which is nothing but a projection of the soul 
 itself, influenced by some intoxication I was going to say 
 hallucination or other. Those who are widest awake 
 still see the real world across the dominant illusion of their 
 race or time. And the reason is that the deceiving light 
 starts from our own mind: the light is our religion. Every- 
 thing changes with it. It is religion which gives to our 
 kaleidoscope, if not the material of the figures, at least 
 their color, their light and shade, and general aspect. 
 Every religion makes men see the world and humanity 
 under a special light; it is a mode of apperception, which 
 can only be scientifically handled when we have cast it 
 aside, and can only be judged when we have replaced it 
 by a better. 
 
 February 23, 1870. There is in man an instinct of 
 revolt, an enemy of all law, a rebel which will stoop to no 
 yoke, not even that of reason, duty, and wisdom. This 
 element in us is the root of all sin das radicale Bose of 
 Kant. The independence which is the condition of indi- 
 viduality is at the same time the eternal temptation of the 
 individual. That which makes us beings makes us also 
 sinners.
 
 ^ 1 AMIEL'8 JO URNAL. 
 
 Sin is, then, in our very marrow, it circulates in us like 
 the blood in our veins, it is mingled with all our substance.* 
 Or rather 1 am wrong: temptation is our natural state, 
 but sin is not necessary. Sin consists in the voluntary 
 confusion of the independence which is good with the 
 independence which is bad ; it is caused by the half-indul 
 gence granted to a first sophism. We shut our eyes to the 
 beginnings of evil because they are small, and in this 
 weakness is contained the germ of our defeat. Prlncipiis 
 vbsta this maxim dutifully followed would preserve ua 
 from almost all our catastrophes. 
 
 We will have no other master but our caprice that is 
 to say, our evil self will have no God, and the foundation 
 of our nature is seditious, impious, insolent, refractory, 
 opposed to, and contemptuous of all that tries to rule it, 
 
 * This is one of the passages which rouses M. Kenan's wonder. 
 "Voila la grande difference," he writes, " entre 1'education catho- 
 lique et 1'education protestante. Ceux qui comme moi ont recju une 
 education catholique en ont garde de profonds vestiges. Mais ces 
 vestiges ne sont pas des dogmes, ce sont des reves. Uuefois ce grand 
 rideau de drap d'or, bariole de sole, d'indienne et de calicot, par 
 lequel le catholicisme nous masque la vue du monde, une fois, dis-je 
 ce rideau dechire, on voit 1'univers en sa splendeur infinie, la nature 
 en sa haute et pleine majeste. Le protestant le plus libre garde 
 souvent quelque chose de triste, un fond d'austferite intellectuelle 
 analogue au pessimisine slave." (Journal des Debate, September 30, 
 1884). 
 
 One is reminded of Mr. Morley's criticism of Emerson. Emerson, 
 he points out, has almost nothing to say of death, and " little to say 
 of that horrid burden and impediment on the soul which the 
 churches call sin, and which, by whatever name we call it, is a very 
 real catastrophe in the moral nature of man the courses of nature, 
 and the prodigious injustices of man in society affect him with 
 neither horror nor awe. He will see no monster if he can help 
 it." 
 
 Here, then, we have the eternal difference between the two orders 
 of temperament the men whose overflowing energy forbids them to 
 realize the ever-recurring defeat of the human spirit at the hands of 
 circumstance, like Renan and Emerson, and the men for whom 
 " horror and awe " are interwoven witb experience, like Amiel.
 
 AMIEUS JOURNAL. 211 
 
 and therefore contrary to order, ungovernable and nega- 
 tive. It is this foundation which Christianity calls the 
 natural man. But the savage which is within us, and con- 
 stitutes the primitive stuff of us, must be disciplined and 
 civilized in order to produce a man. And the man must 
 be patiently cultivated to produce a wise man, and the 
 wise man must be tested and tried if he is to become 
 righteous. And the righteous man must have substituted 
 the will of God for his individual will, if he is to become a 
 saint. And this new man, this regenerate being, is the 
 spiritual man, the heavenly man, of which the Vedas 
 speak as well as the gospel, and the Magi as well as the 
 Neo-Platonists. 
 
 March 17, 1870. This morning the music of a brass 
 band which had stopped under my windows moved me 
 almost to tears. It exercised an indefinable, nostalgic 
 power over me; it set me dreaming of another world, of 
 infinite passion and supreme happiness. Such impressions 
 are the echoes of paradise in the soul ; memories of ideal 
 spheres, whose sad sweetness ravishes and intoxicates the 
 heart. Plato! Pythagoras! ages ago you heard these 
 harmonies surprised these moments of inward ecstasy 
 knew these divine transports ! If music thus carries us to 
 heaven, it is because music is harmony, harmony is perfec- 
 tion, prefection is our dream, and our dream is heaven. 
 This world of quarrels and of bitterness, of selfishness, 
 ugliness, and misery, makes us long involuntarily for the 
 eternal peace, for the adoration which has no limits, and 
 the love which has no end. It is not so much the infinite 
 as the beautiful that we yearn for. It is not being, or the 
 limits of being, which weigh upon us; it is evil, in us and 
 without us. It is not at all necessary to be great, so long 
 as we are in harmony with the order of the universe. 
 Moral ambition has no pride; it only desires to fill its 
 place, and make its note duly heard in the universal con- 
 cert of the God of love. 
 
 March 30, 1870. Certainly, nature is unjust and shame- 
 less, wthout probity, and without faith. Her only alterna-
 
 212 A KIEL'S JO URNAL. 
 
 tives are gratuitous favor or mad aversion, and her onlj 
 way of redressing an injustice is to commit another. The 
 happiness of the few is expiated by the misery of the 
 greater number. It is useless to accuse a blind force. 
 
 The human conscience, however, revolts against this law 
 of nature, and to satisfy its own instinct of justice it has 
 imagined two hypotheses, out of which it has made for 
 itself a religion the idea of an individual providence, and 
 the hypothesis of another life. 
 
 In these we have a protest against nature, which is thus 
 declared immoral and scandalous to the moral sense. Man 
 believes in good, and that he may ground himself on jus- 
 tice be maintains that the injustice all around him is but 
 an appearance, a mystery, a cheat, and that justice will be 
 done. Fiat justitia, pereat mundus ! 
 
 It is a great act of faith. And since humanity has not 
 made itself, this protest has some chance of expressing a 
 truth. If there is conflict between the natural world and 
 the moral world, between reality and conscience, con- 
 science must be right. 
 
 It is by no means necessary that the universe should 
 exist, but it is necessary that justice should be done, and 
 atheism is bound to explain the fixed obstinacy of con- 
 science on this point. Nature is not just; we are the pro- 
 ducts of nature . why are we always claiming and prophesy- 
 ing justice? why does the effect rise up against its cause? 
 It is a singular phenomenon. Does the protest come 
 from any puerile blindness of human vanity? No, it is 
 the deepest cry of our being, and it is for the honor of 
 God that the cry is uttered. Heaven and earth may pass 
 away, but good ought to be, and injustice ought not to 
 be. Such is the creed of the human race. Nature will 
 be conquered by spirit; the eternal will triumph over 
 time. 
 
 April 1, 1870. I am inclined to believe that for a 
 woman love is the supreme authority that which judges 
 the rest and decides what is good or evil. For a man, love 
 is subordinate to right. It is a gieat passion, but it is
 
 AMIEL'8 JO URNAL. 21 3 
 
 not the source of order, the synonym of reason, the 
 criterion of excellence. It would seem, then, that a 
 woman places her ideal in the perfection of love, and a 
 man in the perfection of justice. It was in this sense that 
 St. Paul was able to say, " The woman is the glory of the 
 man, and the man is the glory of God." Thus the woman 
 who absorbs herself in the object of her love is, so to 
 speak, in the line of nature; she is truly woman, she 
 realizes her fundamental type. On the contrary, the man 
 who should make life consist in conjugal adoration, and 
 who should imagine that he has lived suificiently when he 
 has made himself the priest of a beloved woman, such a 
 one is but half a man; he is despised by the world, and 
 perhaps secretly disdained by women themselves. The 
 woman who loves truly seeks to merge her own individual- 
 ity in that of the man she loves. She desires that her love 
 should make him greater, stronger, more masculine, and 
 more active. Thus each sex plays its appointed part: the 
 woman is first destined for man, and man is destined for 
 society. "Woman owes herself to one, man owes himself 
 to all; and each obtains peace and happiness only when he 
 or she has recognized this law and accepted this balance 
 of things. The same thing may be a good in the woman 
 and an evil in the man, may be strength in her, weakness 
 in him. 
 
 There is then a feminine and a masculine morality 
 preparatory chapters, as it were, to a general human moral- 
 ity. Below the virtue which is evangelical and sexless, 
 there is a virtue of sex. And this virtue of sex is the occa- 
 sion of mutual teaching, for each of the two incarnations 
 of virtue makes it its business to convert the other, the 
 first preaching love in the ears of justice, the second jus- 
 tice in the ears of love. And so there is produced an 
 oscillation and an average which represent a social state, 
 an epoch, sometimes a whole civilization. 
 
 Such at least is our European idea of the harmony of the 
 sexes in a graduated order of functions. America is on 
 the road to revolutionize this ideal by the introduction of
 
 214 A MIKL'S JO ITIINA L. 
 
 the democratic principle of the equality of individuals in a 
 general equality of functions. Only, when there is nothing 
 left but a multitude of equal individualities, neither young 
 nor old, neither men nor women, neither benefited nor 
 benefactors all social difference will turn upon money. 
 The whole hierarchy will rest upon the dollar, and the 
 most brutal, the most hideous, the most inhuman of 
 inequalities will be the fruit of the passion for equality. 
 What a result! Plutolatry the worship of wealth, the 
 madness of gold to it will be confided the task of chastis- 
 ing a false principle and its followers. And plutocracy 
 will be in its turn executed by equality. It would be a 
 strange end for it, if Anglo-Saxon individualism were 
 ultimately swallowed up in Latin socialism. 
 
 It is my prayer that the discovery of an equilibrium 
 between the two principles may be made in time, before 
 the social war, with all its terror and ruin, overtakes us. 
 But it is scarcely likely. The masses are always ignorant 
 and limited, and only advance by a succession of contrary 
 errors. They reach good only by the exhaustion of evil. 
 They discover the way out, only after having run their 
 heads against all other possible issues. 
 
 April 15, 1870. Crucifixion! That is the word we 
 have to meditate to-day. Is it not Good Friday? 
 
 To curse grief is easier than to bless it, but to do so is 
 to fall back into the point of view of the earthly, the 
 carnal, the natural man. By what has Christianity sub- 
 dued the world if not by the apotheosis of grief, by its 
 marvelous transmutation of suffering into triumph, of the 
 crown of thorns into the crown of glory, and of a gibbet 
 into a symbol of salvation? What does the apotheosis of 
 the Cross mean, if not the death of death, the defeat of 
 sin, the beatification of martyrdom, the raising to the skies 
 of voluntary sacrifice, the defiance of pain? "0 Death, 
 where is thy sting? Grave, where is thy victory?" By 
 Jong brooding over this theme the agony of the just, 
 peace in the midst of agony, and the heavenly beauty of 
 such peace -humanity came to understand that a new
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 215 
 
 religion was born a new mode, that is to say, of explain- 
 ing life and of understanding suffering. 
 
 Suffering was a curse from which man fled; now it 
 becomes a purification of the soul, a sacred trial sent 
 by eternal love, a divine dispensation meant to sanctify 
 and ennoble us, an acceptable aid to faith, a strange 
 initiation into happiness. power of belief ! All remains 
 the same, and yet all is changed. A new certitude arises 
 to deny the apparent and the tangible; it pierces through 
 the mystery of things, it places an invisible Father behind 
 visible nature, it shows us joy shining through tears, and 
 makes of pain the beginning of joy. 
 
 And so, for those who have believed, the tomb becomes 
 heaven, and on the funeral pyre of life they sing the 
 hosanna of immortality; a sacred madness has renewed 
 the face of the world for them, and when they wish to 
 explain what they feel, their ecstasy makes them incom- 
 prehensible; they speak with tongues. A wild intoxication 
 of self-sacrifice, contempt for deach, the thirst for eternity, 
 the delirium of love these are what the unalterable 
 gentleness of the Crucified has had power to bring forth. 
 By his pardon of his executioners, and by that unconquer- 
 abe sense in him of an indissoluble union with God, Jesus, 
 on his cross, kindled an inextinguishable fire and revolu- 
 tionized the world. He proclaimed and realized salvation 
 by faith in the infinite mercy, and in the pardon granted 
 to simple repentance. By his saying, "There is more joy 
 in heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over 
 ninety and nine just persons who need no repentance," 
 he made humility the gate of entrance into paradise. 
 
 Crucify the rebellious self, mortify yourself wholly, 
 give up all to God, and the peace which is not of this 
 world will descend upon you. For eighteen centuries 
 no grander word has been spoken; and although hu- 
 manity is forever seeking after a more exact and complete 
 application of justice, yet her secret faith is not in justice 
 but in pardon, for pardon alone conciliates the spotless 
 purity of perfection with the infinite pity due to weakness
 
 216 AMIKL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 that is to say, it aione preserves and aeiends the idea of 
 holiness, while it allows full scope to that of love. The 
 gospel proclaims the ineffable consolation, the good news, 
 which disarms all earthly griefs, and robs even death of its 
 terrors the news of irrevocable pardon, that is to say, of 
 eternal life. The Cross is & 'j*fTarantee of the gospel. 
 
 Therefore it has been its standard. 
 
 May 7, 1870. The faith which clings to its idols and 
 resists all innovation is a retarding and conservative force; 
 but it is the property of all religion to serve as a curb to 
 our lawless passion for freedom, and to steady and quiet 
 our restlessness of temper. Curiosity is the expansive 
 force, which, if it were allowed an unchecked action upon 
 us, would disperse and volatilize us ; belief represents the 
 force of gravitation and cohesion which makes separate 
 bodies and individuals of us. Society lives by faith, 
 develops by science. Its basis then is the mysterious, the 
 unknown, the intangible religion while the fermenting 
 principle in it is the desire of knowledge. Its permanent 
 substance is the uncomprehended or the divine; its chang- 
 ing form is the result of its intellectual labor. The uncon- 
 scious adhesions, the confused intuitions, the obscure pre- 
 sentiments, which decide the first faith of a people, are 
 then of capital importance in its history. All history 
 moves between the religion which is the genial instinctive 
 and fundamental philosophy of a race, and the philosophy 
 which is the ultimate religion the clear perception, that 
 is to say, of those principles which have engendered the 
 whole spiritual development of humanity. 
 
 It is always the same thing which is, which was, and 
 which will be; but this thing the absolute betrays with 
 more or less transparency and profundity the law of its life 
 and of its metamorphoses. In its fixed aspect it is called 
 God; in its mobile aspect the world or nature. God is 
 present in nature, but nature is not God ; there is a nature 
 in God, but it is not God himself. I am neither for imma- 
 nence nor for transcendence taken alone. 
 
 May 9, 1870. Disraeli, in his new novel, "Lothair,"
 
 AMIEL'8 JOURNAL. 217 
 
 shows that the two great rorces 01 tne present are Kevolu- 
 tion and Catholicism, and that the free nations are lost if 
 either of these two forces triumphs. It is exactly my own 
 idea. Only, while in France, in Belgium, in Italy, and 
 in all Catholic societies, it is only by checking one of these 
 forces by the other that the state and civilization can .be 
 maintained, the Protestant countries are better off; in 
 them there is a third force, a middle faith between the 
 two other idolatries, which enables them to regard liberty 
 not as a neutralization of two contraries, but as a moral 
 reality, self-subsistent, and possessing its own center of 
 gravity and motive force. In the Catholic world religion 
 and liberty exclude each other. In the Protestant world 
 they accept each other, so that in the second case there is 
 a smaller waste of force. 
 
 Liberty is the lay, the philosophical principle. It ex- 
 presses the juridical and social aspiration of the race. But 
 as there is no society possible without regulation, without 
 control, without limitations on individual liberty, above all 
 without moral limitations, the peoples which are legally the 
 freest do well to take their religious consciousness for 
 check and ballast. In mixed states, Catholic or free- 
 thinking, the limit of action, being a merely penal one, 
 invites incessant contravention. 
 
 The puerility of the freethinkers consists in believing 
 that a free society can maintain itself and keep itself 
 together without a common faith, without a religious 
 prejudice of some kind. Where lies the will of God? Is 
 it the common reason which expresses it, or rather, are a 
 clergy or a church the depositories of it? So long as the 
 response is ambiguous and equivocal in the eyes of half or 
 the majority of consciences and this is the case in all 
 Catholic states public peace is impossible, and public law 
 is insecure. If there is a God, we must have him on our 
 side, and if there is not a God, it would be necessary first 
 of all to convert everybody to the same idea of th lawful 
 and the useful, to reconstitute, that is to say, a lay reli- 
 gion, before anything politically solid could be built.
 
 218 AM I BUS JOURNAL. 
 
 Liberalism is merely feeding upon abstractions, when it 
 persuades itself that liberty is possible without free indi- 
 viduals, and when it will not recognize that liberty in the 
 individual is the fruit of a foregoing education, a moral 
 education, which presupposes a liberating religion. To 
 preach liberalism to a population jesuitized by education, 
 is to press the pleasures of dancing upon a man who has 
 lost a leg. How is it possible for a child who has never 
 been out of swaddling clothes to walk? How can the abdi- 
 cation of individual conscience lead to the government of 
 individual conscience? To be free, is to guide one's self, 
 to have attained one's majority, to be emancipated, master 
 of one's actions, and judge of good and evil; but ultra- 
 montane Catholicism never emancipates its disciples, who 
 are bound to admit, to believe, and to obey, as they are 
 told, because they are minors in perpetuity, and the clergy 
 alone possess the law of right, the secret of justice, and 
 the measure of truth. This is what men are landed in b** 
 the idea of an exterior revelation, cleverly made use of by 
 a patient priesthood. 
 
 But what astonishes me is the short-sight of the states- 
 men of the south, who do not see that the question of ques- 
 tions is the religious question, and even now do not recog- 
 nize that a liberal state is wholly incompatible with an 
 anti-liberal religion, and almost equally incompatible with 
 the absence of religion. They confound accidental con- 
 quests and precarious progress with lasting results. 
 
 There is some probability that all this noise which is 
 made nowadays about liberty may end in the suppression 
 of liberty ; it is plain that the internationals, the irrecon- 
 cilables, and the ul tramontanes, are, all three of them, 
 aiming at absolutism, at dictatorial omnipotence. Happily 
 they are not one but many, and it will not be difficult to 
 turn them against each other. 
 
 If liberty is to be saved, it will not be by the doubters, 
 the men of science, or the materialists; it will be by 
 religious conviction, by the faith of individuals who be- 
 lieve that God wills man to be free but also pure; it wiU
 
 A Ml EL'S JO URN A L. 219 
 
 be by the seekers after holiness, by those old-fashioned 
 pious persons who speak of immortality and eternal life, 
 and prefer the soul to the whole world; it will be by the 
 enfranchised children of the ancient faith of the human 
 race. 
 
 June 5, 1870. The efficacy of religion lies precisely in 
 that which is not rational, philosophic, nor external ; its 
 efficacy lies in the unforeseen, the miraculous, the extra- 
 ordinary. Thus religion attracts more devotion in propor- 
 tion as it demands more faith that is to say, as it becomes 
 more incredible to the profane mind. The philosopher 
 aspires to explain away all mysteries, to dissolve them into 
 light. It is mystery, on the other hand, which the reli- 
 gious instinct demands and pursues; it is mystery which 
 constitutes the essence of worship, the power of prosely- 
 tism. When the cross became the "foolishness" of the 
 cross, it took possession of the masses. And in our own 
 day, those who wish to get rid of the supernatural, to 
 enlighten religion, to economize faith, find themselves 
 deserted, like poets who should declaim against poetry, or 
 women who should decry love. Faith consists in the 
 acceptance of the incomprehensible, and even in the pur- 
 suit of the impossible, and is self-intoxicated with its own 
 sacrifices, its own repeated extravagances. 
 
 It is the forgetfulness of this psychological law which 
 stultifies the so-called liberal Christianity. It is the 
 realization of it which constitutes the strength of Cathol- 
 icism. 
 
 Apparently no positive religion can survive the super- 
 natural element which is the reason for its existence. 
 Natural religion seems to be the tomb of all historic cults. 
 All concrete religions die eventually in the pure air of 
 philosophy. So long then as the life of nations is in need 
 of religion as a motive and sanction of morality, as food 
 foi faith, hope, and charity, so long will the masses turn 
 away from pure reason and naked truth, so long will they 
 adore mystery, so long and rightly so will they rest in 
 faith, the only region where the ideal presents itself tc 
 them in an attractive form.
 
 220 A MIRVS JO URN A L. 
 
 June 9, 1870. At bottom, everything depends upon the 
 presence or absence of one single element in the soul 
 hope. All the activity of man, all his efforts and all his 
 enterprises, presuppose a hope in him of attaining an end. 
 Once kill this hope and his movements become senseless, 
 spasmodic, and convulsive, like those of some one falling 
 from a height. To struggle with the inevitable has some- 
 thing childish in it. To implore the law of gravitation to 
 suspend its action would no doubt be a grotesque prayer. 
 Very well! but when a man loses faith in the efficacy of 
 his efforts, when he says to himself, " You are incapable 
 of realizing your ideal ; happiness is a chimera, progress is 
 an illusion, the passion for perfection is a snare; and sup- 
 posing all your ambitions were gratified, everything would 
 still be vanity," then he comes to see that a little blind- 
 ness is necessary if life is to be carried on, and that illusion 
 is the universal spring of movement. Complete disillu- 
 sion would mean absolute immobility. He who has 
 deciphered the secret and read the riddle of finite life 
 escapes from the great wheel of existence; he has left the 
 world of the living he is already dead. Is this the mean- 
 Ing of the old belief that to raise the veil of Isis or to 
 behold God face to face brought destruction upon the rash 
 mortal who attempted it? Egypt and Judea had recorded 
 the fact, Buddha gave the key to it; the individual life is 
 a nothing ignorant of itself, and as soon as this nothing 
 knows itself, individual life is abolished in principle. For 
 as soon as the illusion vanishes, Nothingness resumes its 
 eternal sway, the suffering of life is over, error has disap 
 peared, time and form have ceased to be for this enfran- 
 chised individuality; the colored air-bubble has burst in 
 the infinite space, and the misery of thought has sunk to 
 rest in the changeless repose of all-embracing Nothing. 
 The absolute, if it were spirit, would still be activity, 
 and it is activity, the daughter of desire, which is incom- 
 patible with the absolute. The absolute, then, must be 
 the zero of all determination, and the only manner of 
 being suited to it is Non-being.
 
 A MIEU8 JO URN A L. 221 
 
 July 2, 1870. One of the vices of France is the frivolity 
 which substitutes public conventions for truth, and abso- 
 lutely ignores personal dignity and the majesty of con- 
 science. The French are ignorant of the A B C of indi- 
 vidual liberty, and still show an essentially catholic intoler- 
 ance toward the ideas which have not attained universality 
 or the adhesion of the^ majority. The nation is an army 
 which can bring to bear mass, number, and force, but not 
 an assembly of free men in which each individual depends 
 for his value on himself. The eminent Frenchman 
 depends upon others for his value; if he possess stripe, 
 cross, scarf, sword, or robe in a word, function and 
 decoration then he is held to be something, and he feels 
 himself somebody. It is the symbol which establishes 
 his merit, it is the public which raises him from nothing, 
 as the sultan creates his viziers. These highly-trained 
 and social races have an antipathy for individual independ- 
 ence; everything with them must be founded upon 
 authority military, civil, or religious, and God himself is 
 non-existent until he has been established by decree. 
 Their fundamental dogma is that social omnipotence 
 which treats the pretension of truth to be true without 
 any official stamp, as a mere usurpation and sacrilege, and 
 scouts the claim of the individual to possess either a sepa- 
 rate conviction or a personal value. 
 
 July 20, 1870 (Bellalpe). A marvelous day. The pano- 
 rama before me is of a grandiose splendor ; it is a symphony 
 of mountains, a cantata of sunny Alps. 
 
 I am dazzled and oppressed by it. The feeling upper- 
 most is one of delight in being able to admire, of joy, that 
 is to say, in a recovered power of contemplation which is 
 the result of physical relief, in being able at last to forget 
 myself and surrender myself to things, as befits a man in 
 my state of health. Gratitude is mingled with enthu- 
 Biasm. I have just spent two hours of continuous delight 
 at the foot of the Sparrenhorn, the peak behind us. A 
 flood of sensations overpowered me. I could only look, 
 feel, dream, and think.
 
 222 A MIEUS JO URN A L. 
 
 Later. Ascent of the Sparrenhorn. The peak of it Is 
 not very easy to climb, because of the masses of loose 
 stones and the steepness of the path, which runs between 
 two abysses. But how great is one's reward! 
 
 The view embraces the whole series of the Valais Alps 
 from the Furka to the Combin; and even beyond the 
 Furka one sees a few peaks of the Ticino and the Rhaetian 
 Alps; while if you turn you see 'behind you a whole polar 
 world of snowfields and glaciers forming the southern side 
 of the enormous Bernese group of the Finsteraarahorn, the 
 Monch, and the Jungfrau. The near representative of 
 the group is the Aletschhorn, whence diverge like so many 
 ribbons the different Alefcsch glaciers which wind about 
 the peak from which I saw them. I could study the 
 different zones, one above another fields, woods, grassy 
 Alps, bare rock and snow, and the principle types of 
 mountain; the pagoda-shaped Mischabel, with its four 
 aretes as flying buttresses and its staff of nine clustered 
 peaks; the cupola of the Fletchhorn, the dome of Monte 
 Rosa, the pyramid of the Weisshorn, the obelisk of the 
 Cervin. 
 
 Round me fluttered a multitude of butterflies and 
 brilliant green-backed flies; but nothing grew except a 
 few lichens. The deadness and emptiness of the upper 
 Aletsch glacier, like some vast white street, called up the 
 image of an icy Pompeii. All around boundless silence. 
 On my way back I noticed some effects of sunshine the 
 close elastic mountain grass, starred with gentian, forget- 
 me-not, and anemones, the mountain cattle standing out 
 against the sky, the rocks just piercing the soil, various 
 circular dips in the mountain side, stone waves petrified 
 thousands of thousands of years ago, the undulating 
 ground, the tender quiet of the evening ; and I invoked 
 the soul of the mountains and the spirit of the heights ! 
 
 July 22, 1870 (Bellalpe). The sky, which was misty 
 and overcast this morning, has become perfectly blue again, 
 and the giants of the Valais are bathed in tranquil light. 
 
 Whence this solemn melancholy which oppresses and
 
 AMIEUS JOURNAL. 223 
 
 pursues me? I have just read a series of scientific books 
 (Bronn on the "Laws of Palaeontology," Karl Hitter on 
 the "Law of Geographical Forms"). Are they the cause 
 of this depression? or is it the majesty of this immense 
 landscape, the splendor of this setting sun, which brings 
 the tears to my eyes? 
 
 " Creature d'un jour qui t'agites une heure," 
 
 what weighs upon thee I know it well is the sense of 
 thine utter nothingness! . . . The names of great 
 men hover before my eyes like a secret reproach, and this 
 grand impassive nature tells me that to-morrow I shall 
 have disappeared, butterfly that I am, without having 
 lived. Or perhaps it is the breath of eternal things which 
 stirs in me the shudder of Job. What is man this weed 
 which a sunbeam withers? What is our life in the infinite 
 abyss? I feel a sort of sacred terror, not only for myself, 
 but for my race, for all that is mortal. Like Buddha, I 
 feel the great wheel turning the wheel of universal illu- 
 sion and the dumb stupor which enwraps me is full of 
 anguish. Isis lifts the corner of her veil, and he who per- 
 ceives the great mystery beneath is struck with giddiness. 
 I can scarcely breathe. It seems to me that I am hanging 
 by a thread above the fathomless abyss of destiny. Is 
 this the Infinite face to face, an intuition of the last great 
 death? 
 
 " Creature d'un jour qui t'agites une heure, 
 
 Ton ame est immortelle et tes pleurs vont finir." 
 
 Finir? When depths of ineffable desire are opening in 
 the heart, as vast, as yawning as the immensity which 
 surrounds us? Genius, self-devotion, love all these crav- 
 ings quicken into life and torture me at once. Like the 
 shipwrecked sailor about to sink under the waves, I am 
 conscious of a mad clinging to life, and at the same time 
 of a rush of despair and repentance, which forces from me 
 a cry for pardon. And then all this hidden agony dissolves 
 in wearied submission. "Resign yourself to the inevi- 
 table! Shroud away out of sight the flattering delusions of
 
 224 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 youth! Live and die in the shade! Like the insects 
 humming in the darkness, offer up your evening prayer. 
 Be content to fade out of life without a murmur whenever 
 the Master of life shall breathe upon your tiny flame ! It 
 is out of myriads of unknown lives that every clod of 
 earth is built up. The infusoria do not count until they 
 are millions upon millions. Accept your nothingness." 
 Amen! 
 
 But there is no peace except in order, in law. Am I in 
 order? Alas, no! My changeable and restless nature will 
 torment me to the end. I shall never see plainly what I 
 ought to do. The love of the better will have stood 
 between me and the good. Yearning for the ideal will 
 have lost me reality. Vague aspiration and undefined 
 desire will have been enough to make my talents useless, 
 and to neutralize my powers. Unproductive nature that I 
 am, tortured by the belief that production was required of 
 me, may not my very remorse be a mistake and a super- 
 fluity? 
 
 Scherer's phrase come? back to me, "We must accept 
 ourselves as we are." 
 
 September 8, 1870 (Zurich). All the exiles are return- 
 ing to Paris Edgar Quinet, Louis Blanc, Victor Hugo. 
 By the help of their united experience will they succeed in 
 maintaining the republic? It is to be hoped so. But the 
 past makes it lawful to doubt. While the republic is in 
 reality a fruit, the French look uj3on.it as a seed-sowing. 
 Elsewhere such a form of - '-gdi iCftWiieirt presupposes free 
 men; in France it is anjd^a^ust bean instrument of instruc- 
 tion and protection P^^ice has once more placed sover- 
 eignty in the hands of universal suffrage, as though the 
 multitude were already enlightened, judicious, and reason- 
 able, and now her task is to train and discipline the force 
 which, by a fiction, is master. 
 
 The ambition of France is set upon self-government, 
 but her capacity for it has still to be proved. For eighty 
 years she has confounded revolution with liberty; will she 
 now give proof of amendment and of wisdom? Such a
 
 A MIEUS JO URNAL. 225 
 
 change is not impossible. Let us wait for it with sympathy, 
 but also with caution. 
 
 September 12, 1870 (Basle). The old Rhine is mur- 
 muring under my window. The wide gray stream rolls its 
 great waves along and breaks against the arches of the 
 bridge, just as it did ten years or twenty years ago; the 
 red cathedral shoots its arrow-like spires toward heaven; 
 the ivy on the terraces which fringe the left bank of the 
 Rhine hangs over the walls like a green mantle ; the inde- 
 fatigable ferry-boat 'goes and comes as it did of yore ; in a 
 word, things seem to .be eternal, while man's hair turns 
 gray and his heart grows old. I came here first as a stu- 
 dent, then as a professor. Now I return to it at the down- 
 ward turn of middle age, and nothing in the landscape has 
 changed except myself. 
 
 The melancholy of memory may be commonplace and 
 puerile all the same it is true, it is inexhaustible, and the 
 poets of all times have been open to its attacks. 
 
 At bottom, what is individual life? A variation of an 
 eternal theme to be born, to live, to feel, to hope, to 
 love, to suffer, to weep, to die. Some would add to these, 
 to grow rich, to think, to conquer; but in fact, whatever 
 frantic efforts one may make, however one may strain and 
 excite one's self, one can but cause a greater or slighter 
 undulation in the line of one's destiny. Supposing a man 
 renders the series of fundamental phenomena a little more 
 evident to others or a little more distinct to himself, what 
 does it matter? The whole is still nothing but a fluttering 
 of the infinitely little, the insignificant repetition of an 
 invariable theme. In truth, whether the individual exists 
 or no, the difference is so absolutely imperceptible in the 
 whole of things that every complaint and every desire is 
 ridiculous. Humanity in its entirety is but a flash in the 
 duration of the planet, and the planet may return to the 
 gaseous state without the sun's feeling it even for a 
 second. The individual is the infinitesimal of nothing. 
 
 What, then, is nature? Nature is Maia that is to say, 
 an incessant, fugitive, indifferent series of phenomena, the
 
 226 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 manifestation of all possibilities, the inexhaustible play ol 
 all combinations. 
 
 And is Maia all the while performing for the amusement 
 of somebody, of some spectator Brahma? Or is Brahma 
 working out some serious and unselfish end? From the 
 theistic point of view, is it the purpose of God to make 
 souls, to augment the sum of good and wisdom by the 
 multiplication of himself in free beings facets which may 
 flash back to him his own holiness and beauty? This con- 
 ception is far more attractive to the heart. But is it more 
 true? The moral consciousness affirms it. If man is 
 capable of conceiving goodness, the general principle of 
 things, which cannot be inferior to man, must be good. 
 The philosophy of labor, of duty, of effort, is surely 
 superior to that of phenomena, chance, and universal 
 indifference. If so, the whimsical Mai'a would be subor- 
 dinate to Brahma, the eternal thought, and Brahma would 
 be in his turn subordinate to a holy God. 
 
 October 25, 1870 (Geneva). "Each function to the 
 most worthy:" this maxim governs all constitutions, and 
 serves to test them. Democracy is not forbidden to apply 
 it, but democracy rarely does apply it, because she holds, 
 for example, that the most worthy man is the man who 
 pleases her, whereas he who pleases her is not always the 
 most worthy, and because she supposes that reason guides 
 the masses, whereas in reality they are most commonly led 
 by passion. And in the end every falsehood has to be 
 expiated, for truth always takes its revenge. 
 
 Alas, whatever one may say or do, wisdom, justice, 
 reason, and goodness will never be anything more than 
 special cases and the heritage of a few elect souls. Moral 
 and intellectual harmony, excellence in all its forms, will 
 always be a rarity of great price, an isolated chef d'ceuvre. 
 All that can be expected from the most perfect institutions 
 is that they should make it possible for individual excel- 
 lence to develop itself, not that they should produce the 
 excellent individual. Virtue and genius, grace and beauty, 
 will always constitute a noblesse such as no form of govern-
 
 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 22? 
 
 ment can manufacture. It is of no use, therefore, to ex- 
 cite one's self for or against revolutions which have only an 
 importance of the second order an importance which I 
 do not wish either to diminish or to ignore, but an impor- 
 tance which, after all, is mostly negative. The political 
 life is but the means of the true life. 
 
 October 26, 1870. Sirocco. A bluish sky. The leafy 
 crowns of the trees have dropped at their feet; the finger 
 of winter has touched them. The errand-woman has just 
 brought me my letters. Poor little woman, what a life ! 
 She spends her nights in going backward and forward 
 from her invalid husband to her sister, who is scarcely less 
 helpless, and her days are passed in labor. Kesigned and 
 indefatigable, she goes on without complaining, till she 
 drops. 
 
 Lives such as hers prove something : that the true igno- 
 rance is moral ignorance, that labor and suffering are the 
 lot of all men, and that classification according to a 
 greater or less degree of folly is inferior to that which 
 proceeds according to a greater or less degree of virtue. 
 The kindgom of God belongs not to the most enlightened 
 but to the best; and the best man is the most unselfish 
 man. Humble, constant, voluntary self-sacrifice this is 
 what constitutes the true dignity of man. And therefore 
 is it written, "The last shall be first." Society rests upon 
 conscience and not upon science. Civilization is first and 
 foremost a moral tiling. Without honesty, without 
 respect for law, without the worship of duty, without the 
 love of one's neighbor in a word, without virtue the 
 whole is menaced and falls into decay, and neither letters 
 nor art, neither luxury nor industry, nor rhetoric, nor the 
 policeman, nor the custom-house officer, can maintain 
 erect and whole an edifice of which the foundations are 
 unsound. 
 
 A state founded upon interest alone and cemented by 
 fear is an ignoble and unsafe construction. The ultimate 
 ground upon which every civilization rests is the average 
 morality of the masses, and a sufficient amount of prac-
 
 228 A MIKUS JOURNAL. 
 
 tical righteousness. Duty is what upholds all. So that 
 those who humbly and unobtrusively fulfill it, and set a good 
 example thereby, are the salvation and the sustenance of 
 this brilliant world, which knows nothing about them. 
 Ten righteous men would have saved Sodom, but thous- 
 ands and thousands of good homely folk are needed to 
 preserve a people from corruption and decay. 
 
 If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, 
 it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady 
 of the cultivated classes. The modern separation of 
 enlightenment and virtue, of thought and conscience, of 
 the intellectual aristocracy from the honest and vulgar 
 crowd, is the greatest danger that can threaten liberty. 
 When any society produces an increasing number of literary 
 exquisites, of satirists, skeptics, and beaux esprits, some 
 chemical disorganization of fabric may be inferred. Take, 
 for example, the century of Augustus, and that oi Louis 
 XV. Our cynics and railers are mere egotists, who stand 
 aloof from the common duty, and in their indolent remote- 
 ness are of no service to society against any ill which may 
 attack it. Their cultivation consists in having got rid of 
 feeling. And thus they fall farther and farther away from 
 true humanity, and approach nearer to the demoniacal 
 nature. What was it that Mephistopheles lacked? Not 
 intelligence certainly, but goodness. 
 
 October 28, 1870. It is strange to see how completely 
 justice is forgotten in the presence of great international 
 struggles. Even the great majority of the spectators are 
 no longer capable of judging except as their own personal 
 tastes, dislikes, fears, desires, interests, or passions may 
 dictate that is to say, their judgment is not a judgment 
 at all. How many people are capable of delivering a fair 
 verdict on the struggle now going on? Very few! This 
 horror of equity, this antipathy to justice, this rage 
 against a merciful neutrality, represents a kind of eruption 
 of animal passion in man, a blind fierce passion, which is 
 absurd enough to call itself a reason, whereas it is nothing 
 but a force.
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 229 
 
 November 16, 1870. We are struck by something bewil- 
 dering and ineffable when we look down into the depths of 
 an abyss; and every soul is an abyss, a mystery of love 
 and piety. A sort of sacred emotion descends upon me 
 whenever I penetrate the recesses of this sanctuary of man, 
 and hear the gentle murmur of the prayers, hymns, and 
 supplications which rise from the hidden depths of the 
 heart. These involuntary confidences fill me with a ten- 
 der piety and a religious awe and shyness. The whole ex- 
 perience seems to me as wonderful as poetry, and divine 
 with the divineness of birth and dawn. Speech fails me, 
 I bow myself and adore. And, whenever I am able, I 
 strive also to console and fortify. 
 
 December 6, 1870. "Dauer im Wechsel" "Persistence 
 in change." This title of a poem by Goethe is the sum- 
 ming up of nature. Everything changes, but with such 
 unequal rapidity that one existence appears eternal to 
 another. A geological age, for instance, compared to the 
 duration of any living being, the duration of a planet com- 
 pared to a geological age, appear eternities our life, too, 
 compared to the thousand impressions which pass across us 
 in an hour. Wherever one looks, one feels one's self over- 
 whelmed by the infinity of infinites. The universe, 
 seriously studied, rouses one's terror. Everything seems 
 so relative that it is scarcely possible to distinguish whether 
 anything has a real value. 
 
 Where is the fixed point in this boundless and bottom- 
 less gulf? Must it not be that which perceives the relations 
 of things in other words, thought, infinite thought? 
 The perception of ourselves within the infinite thought, 
 the realization of ourselves in God, self-acceptance in 
 him, the harmony of our will with his in a word, religion 
 here alone is firm ground. Whether this thought be 
 free or necessary, happiness lies in identifying one's self 
 with it. Both the stoic and the Christian surrender 
 themselves to the Being of beings, which the one calls 
 sovereign wisdom and the other sovereign goodness. St. 
 John says, "God is Light." "God is Love." The Brahmin
 
 230 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 says, "God is the inexhaustible fount of poetry." Let us 
 say, "God is perfection." And man? Man, for all his 
 inexpressible insignificance and frailty, may still apprehend 
 the idea of perfection, may help forward the supreme will, 
 and die with Hosanna on his lips ! 
 
 All teaching depends upon a certain presentiment and 
 preparation in the taught ; we can only teach others prof- 
 itably what they already virtually know ; we can only give 
 them what they had already. This principle of education 
 is also a law of history. Nations can only be developed on 
 the lines of their tendencies and aptitudes. Try them on 
 any other and they are rebellious and incapable of improve- 
 ment. 
 
 By despising himself too much a man comes to be worthy 
 of his own contempt. 
 
 Its way of suffering is the witness which a soul bears to 
 itself. 
 
 The beautiful is superior to the sublime because it lasts 
 and does not satiate, while the sublime is relative, tempo- 
 rary and violent. 
 
 February 4, 1871. Perpetual effort is the characteristic 
 of modern morality. A painful process has taken the 
 place of the old harmony, the old equilibrium, the old joy 
 and fullness of being. We are all so many fauns, satyrs, 
 or Silenuses, aspiring to become angels; so many deformi- 
 ties laboring for our own embellishment; so many clumsy 
 chrysalises each working painfully toward the development 
 of the butterfly within him. Our ideal is no longer a 
 serene beauty of soul ; it is the agony of Laocoon struggling 
 with the hydra of evil. The lot is cast irrevocably. There 
 are no more happy whole-natured men among us, nothing 
 but so manv candidates for heaven, galley-slaves on earth.
 
 AMIEL'S JO URNAL. 23 1 
 
 "Nous ramons notre vie en attendant le port." 
 
 Moliere said that reasoning banished reason. It is pos- 
 sible also that the progress toward perfection we are so 
 proud of is only a pretentious imperfection. Duty seems 
 now to be more negative than positive; it means lessening 
 evil rather than actual good; it is a generous discontent, 
 but not happiness; it is an incessant pursuit of an unattain- 
 able goal, a noble madness, but not reason; it is homesick- 
 ness for the impossible pathetic and pitiful, but still not 
 wisdom. 
 
 The being which has attained harmony, and every being 
 may attain it, has found its place in the order of the uni- 
 verse, and represents the divine thought at least as clearly 
 as a flower or a solar system. Harmony seeks nothing out- 
 side itself. It is what it ought to be; it is the expression 
 of right, order, law, and truth; it is greater than time, 
 and represents eternity. 
 
 February 6, 1871. I am reading Juste Olivier's " Chan- 
 sons du Soir" over again, and all the melancholy of the 
 poet seems to pass into my veins. It is the revelation of a 
 complete existence, and of a whole world of melancholy 
 reverie. 
 
 How much character there is in "Musette," the 
 "Chanson de 1'Alouette," the "Chant du Eetour," and 
 the "Gaite," and how much freshness in "Lina," and 
 "A ma fille! " But the best pieces of all are " Au dela," 
 "Homunculus," "La Trompeuse," and especially "Frere 
 Jacques," its author's masterpiece. To these may be 
 added the " Marionettes" and the national song, " Helvetic." 
 Serious purpose and intention disguised in gentle gayety 
 and childlike badinage, feeling hiding itself under a smile 
 of satire, a resigned and pensive wisdom expressing itself in 
 rustic round or ballad, the power of suggesting everything 
 in a nothing these are the points in which the Vaudois 
 poet triumphs. On the reader's side there is emotion and 
 surprise, and on the author's a sort of pleasant slyness 
 which seems to delight in playing tricks upon you, only
 
 232 AMI EL' 8 JOURNAL. 
 
 tricks of the most dainty and brilliant kind. Juste Olivier 
 has the passion we might imagine a fairy to have for deli- 
 cate mystification. He hides his gifts. He promises 
 nothing and gives a great deal. His generosity, which is 
 prodigal, has a surly air; his simplicity is really subtlety; 
 his malice pure tenderness; and his whole talent is, as it 
 were, the fine flower of the Vaudois mind in its sweetest 
 and dreamiest form. 
 
 February 10, 1871. My reading for this morning has 
 been some vigorous chapters of Taine's "History of 
 English Literature." Taine is a writer whose work always 
 produces a disagreeable impression upon me, as though of 
 a creaking of pulleys and a clicking of machinery; there 
 is a smell of the laboratory about it. His style is the style 
 of chemistry and technology. The science of it is inex- 
 orable; it is dry and forcible, penetrating and hard, strong 
 and harsh, but altogether lacking in charm, humanity, 
 nobility, and grace. The disagreeable effect which it 
 makes on one's taste, ear, and heart, depends probably 
 upon two things: upon the moral philosophy of the 
 author and upon his literary principles. The profound 
 contempt for humanity which characterizes the physiolog- 
 ical school, and the intrusion of technology into literature 
 inaugurated by Balzac and Stendhal, explain the underly- 
 ing aridity of which one is sensible in these pages, and 
 which seems to choke one like the gases from a manufac- 
 tory of mineral products. The book is instructive in the 
 hightst degree, but instead of animating and stirring, it 
 parches, corrodes, and saddens its reader. It excites no 
 feeling whatever; it is simply a means of information. I 
 imagine this kind of thing will be the literature of the 
 future a literature a V Americaine, as different as possible 
 from Greek art, giving us algebra instead of life, the for- 
 mula instead of the image, the exhalations of the cruciblo 
 instead of the divine madness of Apollo. Cold vision will 
 replace the joys of thought, and we shall see the death of 
 poetry, flayed and dissected by science. 
 
 February 15, 1871. Without intending it, nations edu-
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 233 
 
 cate each other, while having apparently nothing in view 
 but their own selfish interests. It was France who made 
 the Germany of the piresent, by attempting its destruction 
 during ten generations; it is Germany who will regenerate 
 contemporary France, by the effort to crush her. Revolu- 
 tionary France will teach equality to the Germans, who are 
 by nature hierarchical. Germany will teach the French 
 that rhetoric is not science, and that appearance is not as 
 valuable as reality. The worship of prestige that is to 
 say, of falsehood ; the passion for vainglory that is to say, 
 for smoke and noise; these are what must die in the inter- 
 ests of the world. It is a false religion which is being 
 destroyed. I hope sincerely that this war will issue in a 
 new balance of things better than any which has gone be- 
 fore a new Europe, in which the government of the 
 individual by himself will be the cardinal principle of 
 society, in opposition to the Latin principle, which regards 
 the individual as a thing,- a means to an end, an instru- 
 ment of the church or of the state. 
 
 In the order and harmony which would result from free 
 adhesion and voluntary submission to a common ideal, we 
 should see the rise of a new moral world. It would be an 
 equivalent, expressed in lay terms, to the idea of a universal 
 priesthood. The model state ought to resemble a great 
 musical society in which every one submits to be organized, 
 subordinated, and disciplined for the sake of art, and for 
 the sake of producing a masterpiece. Nobody is coerced, 
 nobody is made use of for selfish purposes, nobody plays a 
 hypocritical or selfish part. All \ ring their talent to the 
 common stock, and contribute knowingly and gladly to 
 the common wealth. Even self-love itself is obliged to 
 help on the general action, under pain of rebuff should it 
 make itself apparent. 
 
 February 18, 1871. It is in the novel that the average 
 vulgarity of German society, and its inferiority to the 
 societies of France and England, are most clearly visible. 
 The notion of " bad taste " seems to have no place in Ger- 
 man aesthetics. Their elegance has no grace in it; and
 
 234 AMltiL'B JOURNAL. 
 
 they cannot understand the enormous difference there is 
 between distinction (what is gentlemanly, ladylike), and 
 their stiff vornehmlichkeit. Their imagination lacks style, 
 training, education, and knowledge of the world; it has 
 an ill-bred air even in its Sunday dress. The race is 
 poetical and intelligent, but common and ill-mannered. 
 Pliancy and gentleness, manners, wit, vivacity, taste, 
 dignity, and charm, are qualities which belong to others. 
 
 Will that inner freedom of soul, that profound harmony 
 of all the faculties which I have so often observed among 
 the best Germans, ever come to the surface? Will the 
 conquerors of to-day ever learn to civilize and soften their 
 forms of life? It is by their future novels that we shall 
 be able to judge. As soon as they are capable of the novel 
 of " good society " they will have excelled all rivals. Till 
 then, finish, polish, the maturity of social culture, are 
 beyond them ; they may have humanity of feeling, but the 
 delicacies, the little perfections of life, are unknown to 
 them. They may be honest and well-meaning, but they 
 are utterly without savoir vivre. 
 
 February 22, 1871. Soiree at the M . About 
 
 thirty people representing our best society were there, a 
 happy mixture of sexes and ages. There were gray heads, 
 young girls, bright faces the whole framed in some 
 Aubusson tapestries which made a charming background, 
 and gave a soft air of distance to the brilliantly-dressed 
 groups. 
 
 In society people are expected to behave as if they lived 
 on ambrosia and concerned themselves with nothing but 
 the loftiest interests. Anxiety, need, passion, have no exist- 
 ence. All realism is suppressed as brutal. In a word, 
 what we call " society " proceeds for the moment on the 
 flattering illusory assumption that it is moving in an 
 ethereal atmosphere and breathing the air of the gods. 
 All vehemence, all natural expression, all real suffering, all 
 careless familiarity, or any frank sign of passion, are start- 
 ling and distasteful in this delicate milieu ; they at once 
 destroy the common work, the cloud palace, the magical
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 235 
 
 architectural whole, which has been raised by the general 
 consent and effort. It is like the sharp cock-crow which 
 breaks the spell of all enchantments, and puts the fairies 
 to flight. These select gatherings produce, without know- 
 ing it, a sort of concert for eyes and ears, an improvised 
 work of art. By the instinctive collaboration of every- 
 body concerned, intellect and taste hold festival, and the 
 associations of reality are exchanged for the associations of 
 imagination. So understood, society is a form of poetry; 
 the cultivated classes deliberately recompose the idyll of 
 the past and the buried world of Astrea. Paradox or no, 1 
 believe that these fugitive attempts to reconstruct a dream 
 whose only end is beauty represent confused reminiscences 
 of an age of gold haunting the human heart, or rather 
 aspirations toward a harmony of things which every daj 
 reality denies to us, and of which art alone gives us a 
 glimpse. 
 
 April 28, 1871. For a psychologist it is extremely inter- 
 esting to be readily and directly conscious of the complica- 
 tions of one's own organism and the play of its several 
 parts. It seems to me that the sutures of my being are be- 
 coming just loose enough to allow me at once a clear percep- 
 tion of myself as a whole and a distinct sense of my own brit- 
 tleness. A feeling like this makes personal existence a 
 perpetual astonishment and curiosity. Instead of only 
 seeing the world Avhich surrounds me, I analyze myself. 
 Instead of being single, all of a piece, I become legion, mul- 
 titude, a whirlwind a very cosmos. Instead of living on 
 the surface, I take possession of my inmost self , I apprehend 
 myself, if not in my cells and atoms, at least so far as my 
 groups of organs, almost my tissues, are concerned. In 
 other words, the central monad isolates itself from all the 
 subordinate monads, that it may consider them, and finds 
 its harmony again in itself. 
 
 Health is the perfect balance between our organism, 
 with all its component parts, and the outer world; it serves, 
 us especially for acquiring a knowledge of that world. 
 Organic disturbance obliges us to set up a fresh and more
 
 236 AMJKL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 spiritual equilibrium, to withdraw within the soul. 
 Thereupon our bodily constitution itself becomes the ob- 
 ject of thought. It is no longer we, although it may 
 belong to us; it is nothing more than the vessel in which 
 we make the passage of life, a vessel of which we study the 
 weak points and the structure without identifying it with 
 our own individuality. 
 
 Where is the ultimate residence of the self? In thought, 
 or rather in consciousness. But below consciousness there 
 is its germ, the punctum saliens of spontaneity; for con- 
 sciousness is not primitive, it becomes. The question is, 
 can the thinking monad return into its envelope, that is 
 to say, into pure spontaneity, or even into the dark abyss 
 of virtuality? I hope not. The kingdom passes; the 
 king remains; or rather is it the royalty alone which sub- 
 sists that is to say, the idea the personality begin in its 
 turn merely the passing vesture of the permanent idea? Is 
 Leibnitz or Hegel right? Is the individual immortal 
 under the form of the spiritual body? Is he eternal under 
 the form of the individual idea? Who saw most clearly, 
 St. Paul or Plato? The theory of Leibnitz attracts me 
 most because it opens to us an infinite of duration, of mul- 
 titude, and evolution. For a monad, which is the virtual 
 universe, a whole infinite of time is not too much to develop 
 the infinite within it. Only one must admit exterior 
 actions and influences which affect the evolution of the 
 monad. Its independence must be a mobile and increasing 
 quantity between zero and the infinite, without ever reach- 
 ing either completeness or nullity, for the monad can be 
 neither absolutely passive nor entirely free. 
 
 June 21, 1871. The international socialism of the 
 ouvriers, ineffectually put down in Paris, is beginning to 
 celebrate its approaching victory. For it there is neither 
 country, nor memories, nor property, nor religion. There 
 is nothing and nobody but itself. Its dogma is equality, 
 its prophet is Mably, and Babceuf is its god.* 
 
 * Mably, the Abbe Mably, 1709-85, one of the precursors of the 
 revolution, the professor of a cultivated and classical communisn
 
 A MJKL'S JO URNAL. 23 7 
 
 How is the conflict to be solved, since there is no longer 
 one single common principle between the partisans and the 
 enemies of the existing form of society, between liberalism 
 and the worship of equality? Their respective notions of 
 man,duty,happiness that is to say,of life and its end differ 
 radically. I suspect that the communism of the Interna- 
 tionale is merely the pioneer of Eussian nihilism, which 
 will be the common grave of the old races and the servile 
 races, the Latins and the Slavs. If so, the salvation of 
 humanity will depend upon individualism of the brutal 
 American sort. I believe that the nations of the present 
 are rather tempting chastisement than learning wisdom. 
 Wisdom, which means balance and harmony, is only met 
 with in individuals. Democracy, which means the rule of 
 the masses, gives preponderance to instinct, to nature, to 
 the passions that is to say, to blind impulse, to elemental 
 gravitation, to generic fatality. Perpetual vacillation 
 between contraries becomes its only mode of progress, be- 
 cause it represents that childish form of prejudice which 
 falls in love and cools, adores, and curses, with the same 
 haste and unreason. A succession of opposing follies 
 gives an impression of change which the people readily 
 identify with improvement, as though Enceladus was 
 more at ease on his left side than on his right, the weight 
 of the volcano remaining the same. The stupidity of 
 Demos is only equaled by its presumption. It is like a 
 youth with all his animal and none of his reasoning powers 
 developed. 
 
 Luther's comparison of humanity to a drunken peasant, 
 always ready to fall from his horse on one side or the 
 other, has always struck me as a particularly happy one. 
 It is not that I deny the right of the democracy, but I 
 
 based on a study of antiquity, which Babeuf and others like him, 
 in the following generation, translated into practical experiment. 
 " Caius Gracchus" Babeuf, born 1764, and guillotined in 1797 for a con- 
 spiracy against the Directory, is sometimes called the first French 
 socialist. Perhaps socialist doctrines, properly so called, may be said 
 to make their first entry into the region of popular debate and practi- 
 cal agitation with his " Manifesto des figaux," issued April 1796.
 
 ^ MIEL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 ihave no sort of illusion as to the use it will make of its 
 right, so long, at any rate, as wisdom is the exception and 
 conceit the rule. Numbers make law, but goodness has 
 nothing to do with figures. Every fiction is self-expiating, 
 and democracy rests upon this legal fiction, that the 
 majority has not only force but reason on its side that it 
 possesses not only the right to act but the wisdom neces* 
 sary for action. The fiction is dangerous because of its 
 flattery; the demagogues have always flattered the private 
 feelings of the masses. The masses will always be below 
 the average. Besides, the age of majority will be lowered, 
 the barriers of sex will be swept away, and democracy will 
 finally make itself absurd by handing over the decision of 
 all that is greatest to all that is most incapable. Such an 
 end will be the punishment of its abstract principle of 
 equality, which dispenses the ignorant man from the 
 necessity of self -train ing, the foolish man from that of 
 .self-judgment, and tells the child that there is no need for 
 him to become a man, and the good-for-nothing that self- 
 improvement is of no account. Public law, founded upon 
 virtual equality, will destroy itself by its consequences. It 
 will not recognize the inequalities of worth, of merit, and 
 of experience; in a word, it ignores individual labor, and 
 it will end in the triumph of platitude and the residuum. 
 The regime of the Parisian Commune has shown us what 
 kind of material comes to the top in these days of frantic 
 vanity and universal suspicion. 
 
 Still, humanity is tough, and survives all catastrophes. 
 Only it makes one impatient to see the race always taking 
 the longest road to an end, and exhausting all possible 
 faults before it is able to accomplish one definite step 
 'toward improvement. These innumerable follies, that are 
 to be and must be, have an irritating effect upon me. The 
 more majestic is the history of science, the more intoler- 
 able is the history of politics and religion. The mode of 
 progress in the moral world seems an abuse of the patience 
 of God. 
 
 Enough ! There is no help in misanthropy and pessi-
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 239 
 
 mism. If our race vexes us, let us keep a decent silence on 
 the matter. We are imprisoned on the same ship, and we 
 shall sink with it. Pay your own debt, and leave the rest 
 to God. Sharer, as you inevitably are, in the sufferings 
 of your kind, set a good example; that is all which is 
 asked of you. Do all the good you can, and say all the 
 truth you know or believe; and for the rest be patient, 
 resigned, submissive. God does his business, do yours. 
 
 July 29, 1871. So long as a man is capable of self- 
 renewal he is a living being. Goethe, Schleiermacher and 
 Humboldt, were masters of the art. If we are to remain 
 among the living there must be a perpetual revival of 
 youth within us, brought about by inward change and by 
 love of the Platonic sort. The soul must be forever 
 recreating itself, trying all its various modes, vibrating in 
 all its fibres, raising up new interests for itself. 
 
 The " Epistles " and the " Epigrams " of Goethe which 
 I have been reading to-day do not make one love him. 
 Why? Because he has so little soul. His way of under- 
 standing love, religion, duty, and patriotism has something 
 mean and repulsive in it. There is no ardor, no generosity 
 in him. A secret barrenness, an ill-concealed egotism, 
 makes itself felt through all the wealth and flexibility of 
 his talent. It is true that the egotism of Goethe has at 
 least this much that is excellent in it, that it respects the 
 liberty of the individual, and is favorable to all originality. 
 But it will go out of its way to help nobody; it will give 
 itself no trouble for anybody; it will lighten nobody else's 
 burden; in a word, it does away with charity, the great 
 Christian virtue. Perfection for Goethe consists in per- 
 sonal nobility, not in love; his standard is aesthetic, not 
 moral. He ignores holiness, and has never allowed him- 
 self to reflect on the dark problem of evil. A Spinozist 
 to the core, he believes in individual luck, not in liberty, 
 nor in responsibility. He is a Greek of the great time, to 
 whom the inward crises of the religious consciousness are 
 unknown. He represents, then, a state of soul earlier than 
 or subsequent to Christianity, what the prudent critics of
 
 240 A MIEL'S JO URNAL. 
 
 our time call the "modern spirit; " and only one tendency 
 of the modern spirit the worship of nature. For Goethe 
 stands outside all the social and political aspirations of the 
 generality of mankind; he takes no more interest than 
 Nature herself in the disinherited, the feeble, and the 
 oppressed. . . . 
 
 The restlessness of our time does not exist for Goethe and 
 his school. It is explicable enough. The deaf have no sense 
 of dissonance. The man who knows nothing of the voice 
 of conscience, the voice of regret or remorse, cannot even 
 guess at the troubles of those who live under two masters 
 and two laws, and belong to two worlds that of nature 
 and that of liberty. For himself, his choice is made. But 
 humanity cannot choose and exclude. All needs are vocal 
 at once in the cry of her suffering. She hears the men of 
 science, but she listens to those who talk to her of religion; 
 pleasure attracts her, but sacrifice moves her; and she 
 hardly knows whether she hates or whether she adores the 
 crucifix. 
 
 Later. Still re-reading the sonnets and the miscellaneous 
 poems of Goethe. The impression left by this part of the 
 " Gedichte " is much more favorable than that made upon 
 me by the "Elegies " and the "Epigrams." The "Water 
 Spirits " and " The Divine " are especially noble in feeling. 
 One must never be too hasty in judging these complex 
 natures. Completely lacking as he ia in the sense of obli- 
 gation and of sin, Goethe nevertheless finds his way to 
 seriousness through dignity. Greek sculpture has been 
 his school of virtue. 
 
 August 15, 1871. Re-read, for the second time, Kenan's 
 "Vie de Jesus," in the sixteenth popular edition. The 
 most characteristic feature of this analysis of Christianity 
 is that sin plays no part at all in it. Now, if anything 
 explains the success of the gospel among men, it is that it 
 brought them deliverance from sin in a word, salvation. 
 A man, however, is bound to explain a religion seriously, 
 and not to shirk the very center of his subject. This 
 white-marble Christ is not the Christ who inspired the
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 241 
 
 martyrs and has dried so many tears. The author lacks 
 moral seriousness, and confounds nobility of character 
 with holiness. He speaks as an artist conscious of a 
 pathetic subject, but his moral sense is not interested in 
 the question. It is not possible to mistake the epicurean- 
 ism of the imagination, delighting itself in an aesthetic 
 spectacle, for the struggles of a soul passionately in search 
 of truth. In Eenan there are still some remains of priestly 
 ruse; he strangles with sacred cords. His tone of con- 
 temptuous indulgence toward a more or less captious clergy 
 might be tolerated, but he should have shown a more 
 respectful sincerity in dealing with the sincere and the 
 spiritual. Laugh at Pharisaism as you will, but speak 
 simply and plainly to honest folk.* 
 
 Later. To understand is to be conscious of the funda- 
 mental unity of the thing to be explained that is to say, to 
 conceive it in its entirety both of life and development, to 
 be able to remake it by a mental process without making a 
 mistake, without adding or omitting anything. It means, 
 first, complete identification of the object, and then the 
 power of making it clear to others by a full and just inter- 
 pretation. To understand is more difficult than to judge, 
 for understanding is the transference of the mind into the 
 conditions of the object, whereas judgment is simply the 
 enunciation of the individual opinion. 
 
 Augustus, 1871. (Charnex-sur-Montreux). Magnificent 
 weather. The morning seems bathed in happy peace, and 
 a heavenly fragrance rises from mountain and shore; it is 
 as though a benediction were laid upon us. No vulgar 
 intrusive noise disturbs the religious quiet of the scene. 
 One might believe one's self in a church a vast temple in 
 which every being and every natural beauty has its place. 
 T dare not breathe for fear of putting the dream to flight 
 a dream traversed by angels. 
 
 * " 'Persifflez les pharisa'ismes, niais parlez droit aux honnetes 
 gens ' me dit Amiel, avec ;;ne certaine aigreur. Mon Dieu, que les 
 honnetes gens sont souvent exposes a etre des pkarisiens sans le 
 eavoirl " -(M. Kenan's article, already quoted).
 
 342 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 " Comme autrefois j 'en tends dans leather infini 
 La inusique da temps et I'kosanna des mondes." 
 
 In these heavenly moments the cry of Pauline rises to 
 one's lips.* "I feel! I believe! I see!" All the miseries, 
 the cares, the vexations of life, are forgotten ; the universal 
 joy absorbs us; we enter into the divine order, and into, 
 the blessedness of the Lord. Labor and tears, sin, pain, 
 and death have passed away. To exist is to bless ; life is 
 happiness. In this sublime pause of things all dissonances 
 have disappeared. It is as though creation were but one 
 vast symphony, glorifying the God of goodness with an 
 inexhaustible wealth of praise and harmony. We question 
 no longer whether it is so or not. We have ourselves be- 
 come notes in the great concert; and the soul breaks the 
 silence of ecstasy only to vibrate in unison with the 
 eternal joy. 
 
 September 22, 1871. (Charnex). Gray sky a melan- 
 choly day. A friend has left me, the sun is unkind and 
 capricious. Everything passes away, everything forsakes 
 us. And in place of all we have lost,* age and gray hairs! 
 
 . . . After dinner I walked to Ohailly between two 
 showers. A rainy landscape has a great charm for me; 
 the dark tints become more velvety, the softer tones more 
 ethereal. The country in rain is like a face with traces of 
 tears upon it less beautiful no doubt, but more expressive. 
 
 Behind the beauty which is superficial, gladsome, 
 radiant, and palpable, the aesthetic sense discovers another 
 order of beauty altogether, hidden, veiled, secret and mys- 
 erious, akin to moral beauty. This sort of beauty only 
 reveals itself to the initiated, and is all the more exquisite 
 for that. It is a little like the refined joy of sacrifice, like 
 the madness of faith, like the luxury of grief; it is not 
 
 * " Polyeucte," Act. V. Scene v. 
 
 ; Mon epoux en mourant m'a laisse ses luruieres; 
 Son sang dont tes bourreawx viennent de me couvrir 
 M'a dessille les yeux et me les vient d'ouvrir. 
 Je vois, je sais, je crois "
 
 AMI EL' 8 JOURNAL. 
 
 within the reach of all the world. Its attraction is pecu- 
 liar, and affects one like some strange perfume, or bizarre 
 melody. When once the taste for it is set up the mind 
 takes a special and keen delight in it, for one finds in it 
 
 " Son bien premierement, puis le dedain d'autrui," 
 
 and it is pleasant to one's vanity not to be of the same 
 opinion as the common herd. This, however, is not pos- 
 sible with things which are evident, and beauty which is 
 incontestable. Charm, perhaps, is a better name for the 
 esoteric and paradoxical beauty, which escapes the vulgar, 
 and appeals to our dreamy, meditative side. Classical 
 beauty belongs, so to speak, to all eyes; it has ceased to- 
 belong to itself. Esoteric beauty is shy and retiring. It 
 only unveils itself to unsealed eyes, and bestows its favors, 
 only upon love. 
 
 This is why my friend , who places herself imme- 
 diately in relation with the souls of those she meets, does, 
 not see the ugliness of people when once she is interested 
 in them. She likes and dislikes, and those she likes are 
 beautiful, those she dislikes are ugly. There is nothing 
 more complicated in it than that. For her, aesthetic con- 
 siderations are lost in moral sympathy ; she looks with her 
 heart only; she passes by the chapter of the beautiful, and 
 goes on to the chapter of charm. I can do the same; only 
 it is by reflection and on second thoughts; my friend does, 
 it involuntarily and at once; she has not the artistic fiber. 
 The craving for a perfect correspondence between the 
 inside and the outside of things between matter and form 
 is not in her nature. She does not suffer from ugliness, 
 she scarcely perceives it. As for me, I can only forget 
 what shocks me, I cannot help being shocked. All 
 corporal defects irritate me, and the want of beauty in 
 women, being something which ought not to exist, shocks 
 me like a tear, a solecism, a dissonance, a spot of ink in 
 a word, like something out of order. On the other hand,, 
 beauty restores and fortifies me like some miraculous food,, 
 like Olympian ambrosia.
 
 X>4 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 " Que le bon soit toujours camarade du beau 
 
 Des demain je chercherai femme. 
 Mais comme le divorce entre eux n'est pas nouveau, 
 Et que peu de beaux corps, hotes d'une belle ame, 
 
 Assemblent 1'un et 1'autre point " 
 
 I will not finish, for after all one mnst resign one's self. 
 A beautiful soul in a healthy body is already a rare and 
 blessed thing; and if one finds heart, common sense, intel- 
 lect, and courage into the bargain, one may well do with- 
 out that ravishing dainty which we call beauty, and almost 
 without that delicious seasoning which we call grace. We 
 do without with a sigh, as one does without a luxury. 
 Happy we, to possess what is necessary. 
 
 December 29, 1871. I have been reading Bahnsen 
 ("Critique de 1'evolutionismede Hegel-Hartmann, au nom 
 des principes de Schopenhauer"). What a writer! Like a 
 cuttle-fish in water, every movement produces a cloud of 
 ink which shrouds his thought in darkness. And what a 
 doctrine! A thoroughgoing pessimism, which regards the 
 world as absurd, "absolutely idiotic," and reproaches Hart- 
 mann for having allowed the evolution of the universe some 
 little remains of logic, while, on the contrary, this evolu- 
 tion is eminently contradictory, and there is no reason any- 
 where except in the poor brain of the reasoner. Of all 
 possible worlds that which exists is the worst. Its only 
 excuse is that it tends of itself to destruction. The hope 
 of the philosopher is that reasonable beings will shorten 
 their agony and hasten the return of everything to nothing. 
 It is the philosophy of a desperate Satanism, which has 
 not even the resigned perspectives of Buddhism to oifer 
 to the disappointed and disillusioned soul. The individual 
 can but protest and curse. This frantic Sivaism is devel- 
 oped from the conception which makes the world the pro- 
 duct of blind will, the principle of everything. 
 
 The acrid blasphemy of the doctrine naturally leads the 
 writer to indulgence in epithets of bad taste which prevent 
 our regarding his work as the mere challenge of a para- 
 doxical theorist. We have really to do with a theophobist,
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 245 
 
 whom faith in goodness rouses to a fury of contempt. In 
 order to hasten the deliverance of the world, he kills all 
 consolation, all hope, and all illusion in the germ, and 
 substitutes for the love of humanity which inspired 
 Oakyamouni, that Mephistophelian gall which defiles, 
 . .vi tliers, and corrodes everything it touches. 
 
 Evolutionism, fatalism, pessimism, nihilism how strange 
 . , is to see this desolate and terrible doctrine growing and 
 < Banding at the very moment when the German nation 
 i> celebrating its greatness and its triumphs! The con- 
 trust is so startling that it sets one thinking. 
 
 This orgieof philosophic thought, identifying error with 
 existence itself, and developing the axiom of Proudhon 
 "Evil is God," will bring back the mass of mankind to the 
 Christian theodicy, which is neither optimist nor pessimist, 
 but simply declares that the felicity which Christianity 
 calls eternal life is accessible to man. 
 
 Self-mockery, starting from a horror of stupidity and 
 hypocrisy, and standing in the way of all wholeness of 
 mind and all true seriousness this is the goal to which 
 intellect brings us at last, unless conscience cries out. 
 
 The mind must have for ballast the clear conception of 
 duty, if it is not to fluctuate between levity and despair. 
 
 Before giving advice we must have secured its accept- 
 ance, or rather, have made it desired. 
 
 If we begin by overrating the being we love, we shall 
 end by treating it with wholesale injustice. 
 
 It is dangerous to abandon one's self to the luxury of 
 grief; it deprives one of courage, and even of the wish for 
 recovery. 
 
 We learn to recognize a mere blunting of the conscience 
 in that incapacity for indignation which is not to be con- 
 founded with the gentleness of charity, or the reserve of 
 humility.
 
 246 AMIKL'S JO URN A L, 
 
 February 7, 1872. Without faith a man can do nothing. 
 
 But faith can stifle all science. 
 
 What, then, is this Proteus, and whence? 
 
 Faith is a certitude without proofs. Being a certitude, 
 it is an energetic principle of action. Being without 
 proof, it is the contrary of science. Hence its two aspects; 
 and its two effects. Is its point of departure intelligence? 
 No. Thought may shake or strengthen faith; it cannot 
 produce it. Is its origin in the will? No; good will may 
 favor it, ill-will may hinder it, but no one believes by will, 
 and faith is not a duty. Faith is a sentiment, for it is a 
 hope; it is an instinct, for it precedes all outward instruc- 
 tion. Faith is the heritage of the individual at birth; it 
 is that which binds him to the whole of being. The indi- 
 vidual only detaches himself with difficulty from the 
 maternal breast; he only isolates himself by an effort from 
 the nature around him, from the love which enwraps him, 
 the ideas in which he floats, the cradle in which he lies. 
 He is born in union with humanity, with the world, and 
 with God. The trace of this original union is faith. 
 Faith is the reminiscence of that vague Eden whence our 
 individuality issued, but which it inhabited in the som- 
 nambulist state anterior to the personal life. 
 
 Our individual life consists in separating ourselves from 
 our milieu; in so reacting upon it that we apprehend it 
 consciously, and make ourselves spiritual personalities 
 that is to say, intelligent and free. Our primitive faith is 
 nothing more than the neutral matter which our experi- 
 ence of life and things works up a fresh, and which may be 
 so affected by our studies of every kind as to perish com- 
 pletely in its original form. We ourselves may die before 
 we have been able to recover the harmony of a personal 
 faith which may satisfy our mind and conscience as well as 
 our hearts. But the need of faith never leaves us. It is 
 the postulate of a higher truth which is to bring all things 
 into harmony. It is the stimulus of research ; it holds out 
 to us the reward, it points us to the goal. Such at least is 
 the true, the excellent faith. That which is a mere preju-
 
 AMI KL'S JOURNAL. 247 
 
 dice of childhood, which has never known doubt, which 
 ignores science, which cannot respect or understand or 
 tolerate different convictions such a faith is a stupidity 
 and a hatred, the mother of all fanaticisms. We may then 
 repeat of faith what ^Esop said of the tongue 
 
 " Quid medius lingua, lingua quid pejus eadem?" 
 
 To draw the poison-fangs of faith in ourselves, we must 
 subordinate it to the love of truth. The supreme worship 
 of the true is the only means of purification for all religions 
 all confessions, all sects. Faith should only be allowed 
 the second place, for faith has a judge in truth. When 
 she exalts herself to the position of supreme judge the 
 world is enslaved: Christianity, from the fourth to the 
 seventeenth century, is the proof of it. . . Will the 
 enlightened faith ever conquer the vulgar faith? We 
 must look forward in trust to a better future. 
 
 The difficulty, however, is this. A narrow faith has 
 much more energy than an enlightened faith; the world 
 belongs to will much more than to wisdom. It is not 
 then certain that liberty will triumph over fanaticism; 
 and besides, independent thought will never have the force 
 of prejudice. The solution is to be found in a division of 
 labor. After those whose business it will have been to 
 hold up to the world th.e ideal of a pure and free faith, 
 will come the men of violence, who will bring the new 
 creed within the circle of recognized interests, preju- 
 dices, and institutions. Is not this just what happened to 
 Christianity? After the gentle Master, the impetuous 
 Paul and the bitter Councils. It is true that this is what 
 corrupted the gospel. But still Christianity has done 
 more good than harm to humanity, and so the world ad- 
 vances, by the successive decay of gradually improved 
 ideals. 
 
 June 19, 1872. The wrangle in the Paris Synod still 
 goes on.* The supernatural is the stone of stumbling. 
 
 * A synod of the Reformed churches of France was then occupied 
 in determining the constituent conditions of Protestant belief.
 
 248 -^ MIEL'S JO URNAL. 
 
 It might be possible to agree on the idea of the divine; 
 but no, that is not the question the chaff must be sepa- 
 rated from the good grain. The supernatural is miracle, 
 and miracle is an objective phenomenon independent of all 
 preceding casuality. Now, miracle thus understood can- 
 not be proved experimentally; and besides, the subjective 
 phenomena, far more important than all the rest, are left 
 out of account in the definition. Men will not see that 
 miracle is a perception of the soul; a vision of the divine 
 behind nature; a psychical crisis, analogous to that of 
 ^Eneas on the last day of Troy, which reveals to us the 
 heavenly powers prompting and directing human action. 
 For the indifferent there are no miracles. It is only the 
 religious souls who are capable of recognizing the finger 
 of God in certain given facts. 
 
 The minds which have reached the doctrine of imma- 
 nence are incomprehensible to the fanatics of transcend- 
 ence. They will never understand these last that the 
 panentheism of Krause is ten times more religious than their 
 dogmatic supernaturalism. Their passion for the facts 
 which are objective, isolated, and past, prevents them from 
 seeing the facts which are eternal and spiritual. They 
 can only adore what comes to them from without. As 
 soon as their dramaturgy is interpreted symbolically all 
 seems to them lost. They must have their local prodigies 
 their vanished unverifiable miracles, because for them the 
 divine is there and only there. 
 
 This faith can hardly fail to conquer among the races 
 pledged to the Cartesian dualism, who call the incompre- 
 hensible clear, and abhor what is profound. Women also 
 will always find local miracle more easy to understand 
 than universal miracle, and the visible objective interven- 
 tion of God more probable than his psychological and 
 inward action. The Latin world by its mental form is 
 doomed to petrify its abstractions, and to remain forever 
 outside the inmost sanctuary of life, that central hearth 
 where ideas are still undivided, without shape or deter- 
 mination. The Latin mind makes everything objective,
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 because it remains outside things, and outside itself. It is 
 like the eye which only perceives what is exterior to it, and 
 which cannot see itself except artificially, and from a dis- 
 tance, by means of the reflecting surface of a mirror. 
 
 August 30, 1872. A priori speculations weary me now 
 as much as anybody. All the different scholasticisms 
 make me doubtful of what they profess to demonstrate, 
 because, instead of examining, they affirm from the 
 beginning. Their object is to throw up entrenchments 
 around a prejudice, and not to discover the truth. They 
 accumulate that which darkens rather than that which 
 enlightens. They are descended, all of them, from the 
 Catholic procedure, which excludes comparison, informa- 
 tion, and previous examination. Their object is to trick 
 men into assent, to furnish faith with arguments, and to 
 suppress free inquiry. But to persuade me, a man must 
 have no parti pris, and must begin with showing a temper 
 of critical sincerity; he must explain to me how the matter 
 lies, point out to me the questions involved in it, their 
 origin, their difficulties, the different solutions attempted, 
 and their degree of probability. He must respect my 
 reason, my conscience, and my liberty. All scholasticism 
 is an attempt to take by storm ; the authority pretends to 
 explain itself, but only pretends, and its deference is 
 merely illusory. The dice are loaded and the premises are 
 pre-judged. The unknown is taken as known, and all the 
 rest is deduced from it. 
 
 Philosophy means the complete liberty of the mind, and 
 therefore independence of all social, political, or religious 
 prejudice. It is to begin with neither Christian nor 
 pagan, neither monarcchial nor democratic, neither socialist 
 nor individualist; it is critical and impartial; it loves one 
 thing only truth. If it disturbs the ready-made opinions 
 of the church or the state of the historical medium in 
 which the philosopher happens to have been born, so 
 much the worse, but there is no help for it. 
 
 " Est ut est aut non est."
 
 250 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 Philosophy means, first, doubt; and afterward the con- 
 sciousness of what knowledge means, the consciousness of 
 uncertainty and of ignorance, the consciousness of limit, 
 shade, degree, possibility. The ordinary man doubts 
 nothing and suspects nothing. The philosopher is ruore 
 cautious, but he is thereby unfitted for action, because, 
 although he sees the goal less dimly than others, he sees 
 his own weakness too clearly, and has no illusions as to his 
 chances of reaching it. 
 
 The philosopher is like a man fasting in the midst of 
 universal intoxication. He alone perceives the illusion of 
 which all creatures are the willing playthings; he is less 
 duped than his neighbor by his own nature. He judges 
 more sanely, he sees things as they are. It is in this that 
 his liberty consists in the ability to see clearly and soberly, 
 in the power of mental record. Philosophy has for its 
 foundation critical lucidity. The end and climax of it 
 would be the intuition of the universal law, of the first 
 principle and the final aim of the universe. Not to be 
 deceived is its first desire; to understand, its second. 
 Emancipation from error is the condition of real knowl- 
 edge. The philosopher is a skeptic sjeeking a plausible 
 hypothesis, which may explain to him the whole of his 
 experiences. When he imagines that he has found such a 
 key to life he offers it to, but does not force it on his fel- 
 low men. 
 
 October 9, 1872. I have been taking tea at the M's. 
 These English homes are very attractive. They are the 
 recompense and the result of a long-lived civilization, and 
 of an ideal untiringly pursued. What ideal? That of a 
 moral order, founded on respect for self and for others, 
 and on reverence for duty in a word, upon personal worth 
 and dignity. The master shows consideration to his 
 guests, the children are deferential to their parents, and 
 every one and everything has its place. They understand 
 both how to command and how to obey. The little world 
 is well governed, and seems to go of itself; duty is the 
 genius loci but duty tinged with a reserve and self-con-
 
 AMIRL'S JOURNAL. 251 
 
 trol which is the English characteristic. The children are 
 the great test of this domestic system ; they are happy, 
 smiling, trustful, and yet no trouble. One feels that they 
 know themselves to be loved, but that they know also 
 that they must obey. Our children behave like masters of 
 the house, and when any definite order comes to limit 
 their encroachments they see in it an abuse of power, an 
 arbitrary act. Why? Because it is their principle to be- 
 lieve that ererything turns round them. Our children 
 may be gentle and affectionate, but they are not grateful, 
 and they know nothing of self-control. 
 
 How do English mothers attain this result? By a 
 rule which is impersonal, invariable, and firm; in other 
 words, by law, which forms man for liberty, while arbi- 
 trary decree only leads to rebellion and attempts at emanci- 
 pation. This method has the immense advantage of form- 
 ing characters which are restive under arbitrary authority, 
 and yet amenable to justice, conscious of what is due to 
 them and what they owe to others, watchful over con- 
 science, and practiced in self-government. In every English 
 child one feels something of the national motto " God and 
 my right," and in every English household one has a sense 
 that the home is a citadel, or better still, a ship in which 
 every one has his place. Naturally in such a world the 
 value set on family life corresponds with the cost of pro- 
 ducing it; it is sweet to those whose efforts maintain it. 
 
 October 14,1872. The man who gives himself to con- 
 templation looks on at, rather than directs his life, is rather 
 a spectator than an actor, seeks rather to understand than 
 to achieve. Is this mode of existence illegitimate, im- 
 moral? Is one bound to act? Is such detachment an 
 idiosyncrasy to be respected or a sin to be fought against? I 
 have always hesitated on this point, and I have wasted years 
 in futile self-reproach and useless fits of activity. My west- 
 ern conscience, penetrated as it is with Christian morality, 
 has always persecuted my oriental quietism and Buddhist 
 tendencies. I have not dared to approve myself, I have 
 not known how to correct myself. In this, as in all else,
 
 252 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 I have remained divided and perplexed, wavering between 
 two extremes. So equilibrium is somehow preserved, but 
 the crystallization of action or thought becomes impos- 
 sible. 
 
 Having early a glimpse of the absolute, I have never had 
 the indiscreet effrontery of individualism. What right 
 have I to make a merit of a defect? I have never been 
 able to see any necessity for imposing myself upon others, 
 iior for succeeding. I have seen nothing clearly except 
 my own deficiencies and the superiority of others. That 
 is not the way to make a career. With varied aptitudes 
 and a fair intelligence, I had no dominant tendency, no 
 imperious faculty, so that while by virtue of capacity 
 I felt myself free, yet when free I could not discover what 
 was best. Equilibrium produced indecision, and indecision 
 has rendered all my faculties barren. 
 
 November 8, 1872. (Friday}. I have been turning over 
 the " Stoics " again. Poor Louisa Siefert!* Ah! we play 
 the stoic, and all the while the poisoned arrow in the side 
 pierces and wounds, lethalis arundo. What is it that, like 
 all passionate souls, she really craves for? Two things 
 which are contradictory glory and happiness. She adores 
 two incompatibles the Reformation and the Revolution, 
 France and the contrary of France; her talent itself is a 
 combination of two opposing qualities, inwardness and 
 brilliancy, noisy display and lyrical charm. She dislocates 
 the rhythm of her verse, while at the same time she has a 
 sensitive ear for rhyme. She is always wavering between 
 Valmore and Baudelaire, between Leconte de Lisle and 
 Sainte-Beuve that is to say, her taste is a bringing 
 together of extremes. She herself has described it: 
 
 " Toujours extreme en mes desirs, 
 Jadis, enfant joyeuse et folle, 
 Souvent une seule parole 
 Bouleversait tous mes plaisirs." 
 
 * Louise Siefert, a modern French poetess, died 1879. In addition 
 to "Les Stoi'ques," she published "L'Annee Republicaine," Paris 
 1869, and other works.
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 253 
 
 But what a fine instrument she possesses! what strength 
 of soul ! what wealth of imagination ! 
 
 December 3, 1872. What a strange dream! I was 
 under an illusion and yet not under it ; I was playing a 
 comedy to myself, deceiving my imagination without being 
 able to deceive my consciousness. This power which 
 dreams have of fusing incompatibles together, of uniting 
 what is exclusive, of identifying yes and no, is what is 
 most wonderful and most symbolical in them. In a dream 
 our individuality is not shut up within itself; it envelops, 
 so to speak, its surroundings; it is the landscape, and all 
 that it contains, ourselves included. But if our imagina- 
 tion is not our OAvn, if it is impersonal, then personality is 
 but a special and limited case of its general functions. A 
 fortiori it would be the same for thought. And if so, 
 thought might exist without possessing itself individually, 
 without embodying itself in an ego. In other words, dreams 
 lead us to the idea of an imagination enfranchised from 
 the limits of personality, and even of a thought which 
 should be no longer conscious. The individual who dreams 
 is on the way to become dissolved in the universal phantas- 
 magoria of Ma'ia. Dreams are excursions into the limbo 
 of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison. 
 The man who dreams is but the locale of various phenomena 
 of which he is the spectator in spite of himself ; he is pas- 
 sive and impersonal ; he is the plaything of unknown vibra- 
 tions and invisible sprites. 
 
 The man who should never issue from the state of dream 
 would have never attained humanity, properly so called, 
 but the man who had never dreamed would only know the 
 mind in its completed or manufactured state, and would 
 not be able to understand the genesis of personality; he 
 would be like a crystal, incapable of guessing what 
 crystallization means. So that the waking life issues from 
 the dream life, as dreams are an emanation from the nerv- 
 ous life, and this again is the fine flower of organic life. 
 Thought is the highest point of a series of ascending meta- 
 morphoses, which is called nature. Personality by means
 
 254 AMIRL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 of thought recovers in inward profundity what it has lost 
 in extension, and makes up for the rich accumulations of 
 receptive passivity by the enormous privilege of that em- 
 pire over self which is called liberty. Dreams, by confus- 
 ing and suppressing all limits, make us feel, indeed, the 
 severity of the conditions attached to the higher existence; 
 but conscious and voluntary thought alone brings knowl- 
 edge and allows us to act that is to say, is alone capable 
 of science and of perfection. Let us then take pleasure in 
 dreaming for reasons of psychological curiosity and mental 
 recreation; but let us never speak ill of thought, which is 
 our strength and our dignity. Let us begin as Orientals, 
 and end as Westerns, for these are the two halves of 
 wisdom. 
 
 December 11, 1872. A deep and dreamless sleep and 
 now I wake up to the gray, lowering, rainy sky, which has 
 kept us company for so long. The air is mild, the general 
 outlook depressing. I think that it is partly the fault of 
 my windows, which are not very clean, and contribute by 
 their dimness to this gloomy aspect of the outer world. 
 Rain and smoke have besmeared them. 
 
 Between us and things how many screens there are! 
 Mood, health, the tissues of the eye, the window-panes of 
 our cell, mist, smoke, rain, dust, and light itself and all 
 infinitely variable ! Heraclitus said : " No man bathes twice 
 in the same river." I feel inclined to say; No one sees the 
 same landscape twice over, for a window is one kaleido- 
 scope, and the spectator another. 
 
 What is madness? Illusion, raised to the second power. 
 A sound mind establishes regular relations, & modus vivendi^ 
 between things, men, and iteelf, and it is under the delu- 
 sion that it has got hold of stable truth and eternal fact. 
 Madness does not even see what sanity sees, deceiving itself 
 all the while by the belief that it sees better than sanity. 
 The sane mind or common sense confounds the fact of ex- 
 perience with necessary fact, and assumes in good faith 
 that what is, is the measure of what may be; while mad- 
 ness cannot perceive any difference between what is and 
 what it imagines it confounds its dreams with reality.
 
 AMIENS JOURNAL. #55 
 
 Wisdom consists in rising superior both to madness and 
 to common sense, and in lending one's self to the universal 
 illusion without becoming its dupe. It is best, on the 
 whole, for a man of taste who knows how to be gay with 
 the gay, and serious with the serious, to enter into the 
 game of Mai'a, and to play his part with a good grace in the 
 fantastic tragi-comedy which is called the Universe. It 
 seems to me that here intellectualism reaches its limit.* 
 The mind, in its intellectual capacity, arrives at the 
 intuition that all reality is but the dream of a dream. 
 What delivers us from the palace of dreams is pain, per- 
 sonal pain ; it is also the sense of obligation, or that which 
 combines the two, the pain of sin ; and again it is love ; in 
 short, the moral order. What saves us from the sorceries 
 of Mai'a is conscience ; conscience dissipates the narcotic 
 vapors, the opium-like hallucinations, the placid stupor of 
 contemplative indifference. It drives us into contact 
 with the terrible wheels within wheels of human suffering 
 and human responsibility; it is the bugle-call, the cock- 
 crow, which puts the phantoms to flight; it is the armed 
 archangel who chases man from an artificial paradise. 
 Intellectualism may be described as an intoxication con- 
 scious of itself; the moral energy which replaces it, on the 
 other hand, represents a state of fast, a famine and a sleep 
 less thirst. Alas ! Alas ! 
 
 * " We all believe in duty," says M. Renan, " and in the triumph 
 of righteousness;" but it is possible notwithstanding, " que tout le 
 contraire soit vrai et que le monde ne soit qu'une aruusante feerie 
 dont aucun dieu ne se soucie. II faut done nous arranger de maniere 
 a ceque, dans le cas ou le seconde hypothese serait la vraie, nous 
 n'ayons pas ete trop dupes." 
 
 This strain of remark, which is developed at considerable length, 
 is meant as a criticism of Amiel's want of sensitiveness to the irony 
 of things. But in reality, as the passage in the text shows, M. 
 Renan is only expressing a feeling with which Amiel was just as 
 familiar as his critic. Only he is delivered from this last doubt of all 
 by his habitual seriousness; by that sense of "horror and awe" 
 which M. Renan puts away from him. Conscience saves him " from 
 the sorceries of Mai'a "
 
 256 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 Those who have the most frivolous idea of sin are just 
 those who suppose that there is a fixed gulf between good 
 people and others. 
 
 The ideal which the wife and mother makes for herself, 
 the manner in which she understands duty and life, con- 
 tain the fate of the community. Her faith becomes the 
 star of the conjugal ship, and her love the animating prin- 
 ciple that fashions the future of all belonging to her. 
 Woman is the salvation or destruction of the family. She 
 carries its destinies in the folds of her mantle. 
 
 Perhaps it is not desirable that a woman should be free 
 in mind; she would immediately abuse her freedom. She 
 cannot become philosophical without losing her special 
 gift, which is the worship of all that is individual, the 
 defense of usage, manners, beliefs, traditions. Her r61e is 
 to slacken the combustion of thought It is analogous to 
 that of azote in vital air. 
 
 In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past a 
 pious guardian of some affection, of which the object has 
 disappeared. 
 
 January 6, 1873. I have been reading the seven 
 tragedies of JEschylus, in the translation of Leconte de 
 Lisle. The "Prometheus" and the "Eumenides" are 
 greatest where all is great; they have the sublimity of the 
 old prophets. Both depict a religious revolution a pro- 
 found crisis in the life of humanity. In " Prometheus " 
 it is civilization wrenched from the jealous hands of the 
 gods; in the "Eumenides" it is the transformation of the 
 idea of justice, and the substitution of atonement and par- 
 don for the law of implacable revenge. "Prometheus" 
 shows us the martyrdom which waits for all the saviors of 
 men ; the " Eumenides " is the glorification of Athens and 
 the Areopagus that is to say, of a truly human civiliza- 
 tion. How magnificent it is as poetry, and how small the 
 adventures of individual passion seem beside this colossal
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL 257 
 
 type of tragedy, of which the theme is the destinies of 
 nations ! 
 
 March 31, 1873. (4 p. M.) 
 
 " En quel songe 
 
 Se plonge 
 Mon coeur, et que veut-il? " 
 
 ji?or an hour past I have been the prey of a vague 
 anxiety; I recognize my old enemy. . . . It is a sense 
 of void and anguish; a sense of something lacking: what? 
 Love, peace God perhaps. The feeling is one of pure 
 want unmixed with hope, and there is anguish in it be- 
 cause I can clearly distinguish neither the evil nor its 
 remedy. 
 
 " O printemps sans pitie, dans 1'ame endolorie, 
 Avec tes chants d'oiseaux, tes brises, ton azur, 
 Tu creuses sourderaent, conspirateur obscur, 
 Le gouffre des langueurs et de la reverie." 
 
 Of all the hours of the day, in fine weather, the after- 
 noon, about 3 o'clock, is the time which to me is most 
 difficult to bear. I never feel more strongly than I do then, 
 "le vide effrayant de la vie," the stress of mental anxiety, 
 or the painful thirst for happiness. This torture born of 
 the sunlight is a strange phenomenon. Is it that the sun, 
 just as it brings out the stain upon a garment, the wrinkles 
 in a face, or the discoloration of the hair, so also it illu- 
 mines within exorable distinctness the scars and rents of the 
 heart? Does it rouse in us a sort of shame of existence? 
 In any case the bright hours of the day are capable of 
 flooding the whole soul with melancholy, of kindling in us 
 the passion for death, or suicide, or annihilation, or of 
 driving us to that which is next akin to death, the deaden- 
 ing of the senses by the pursuit of pleasure. They rouse 
 in the lonely man a horror of himself; they make him 
 long to escape from his own misery and solitude 
 " Le cceur trempe sept fois dans le neant divin." 
 
 People talk of the temptations to crime connected with 
 darkness, but the dumb sense of desolation which is often
 
 258 AMIJW8 JOURNAL. 
 
 the product of the most brilliant moment of daylight must 
 not be forgotten either. From the one, as from the other, 
 God is absent; but in the first case a man follows his senses 
 and the cry of his passion ; in the second, he feels himself 
 lost and bewildered, a creature forsaken by all the world. 
 
 " En nous sont deux instincts qui bravent la raison, 
 C'est 1'effroi du bonbeur et la soif du poison. 
 Cosur solitaire, a toi prends garde! " 
 
 April 3, 1873. I have been to see my friends . 
 
 Their niece has just arrived with two of her children, and 
 the conversation turned on Father Hyacinthe's lecture. 
 
 Women of an enthusiastic temperament have a curious 
 way of speaking of extempore preachers and orators. They 
 imagine that inspiration radiates from a crowd as such, 
 and that inspiration is all that is wanted. Could there be 
 a more naif and childish explanation of what is really a 
 lecture in which nothing has been left to accident, neither 
 the plan, nor the metaphors, nor even the length of the 
 whole, and where everything has been prepared with the 
 greatest care! But women, in their love of what is mar- 
 velous and miraculous, prefer to ignore all this. The 
 meditation, the labor, the calculation of effects, the art, in 
 a word, which have gone to the making of it, diminishes 
 for them the value of the thing, and they prefer to believe 
 it fallen from heaven, or sent down from on high. They 
 ask for bread, but cannot bear the idea of a baker. The 
 sex is superstitious, and hates to understand what it wishes 
 to admire. It would vex it to be forced to give the smaller 
 share to feeling, and the larger share to thought. It 
 wishes to believe that imagination can do the work of 
 reason, and feeling the work of science, and it never asks 
 itself how it is that women, so rich in heart and imagina- 
 tion, have never distinguished themselves as orators that is 
 to say, have never known how to combine a multitude of 
 facts, ideas, and impulses, into one complex unity. Enthu- 
 siastic women never even suspect the difference that there 
 is between the excitement of a popular harangue, which is 
 nothing but a mere passionate outburst, and the unfold-
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 259 
 
 ing of a didactic process, the aim of which is to prove 
 something and to convince its hearers. Therefore, for 
 them, study, reflection, technique, count as nothing; the 
 improvisatore mounts upon the tripod, Pallas all armed 
 issues from his lips, and conquers the applause of the 
 dazzled assembly. 
 
 Evidently women divide orators into two groups; the 
 artisans of speech, who manufacture their laborious dis- 
 courses by the aid of the midnight lamp, and the inspired 
 souls, who simply give themselves the trouble to be born. 
 They will never understand the saying of Quintilian, "Fit 
 <orator, nascitur poeta." 
 
 The enthusiasm which acts is perhaps an enlightening 
 force, but the enthusiasm which accepts is very like blind- 
 ness. For this latter enthusiasm confuses the value of 
 things, ignores their shades of difference, and is an obstacle 
 to all sensible criticism and all calm judgment. The 
 "Ewig-Weibliche " favors exaggeration, mysticism, senti- 
 mentalism all that excites and startles. It is the enemy 
 of clearness, of a calm and rational view of things, the 
 antipodes of criticism and of science. I have had only too 
 much sympathy and weakness for the feminine nature. 
 The very excess of my former indulgence toward it makes 
 me now more conscious of its infirmity. Justice and 
 science, law and reason, are virile things, and they come 
 before imagination, feeling, reverie, and fancy. When one 
 reflects that Catholic superstition is maintained by women, 
 one feels how needful it is not to hand over the reins to 
 the "Eternal Womanly." 
 
 May 23, 1873. The fundamental error of France lies in 
 her psychology. France has always believed that to say a 
 thing is the same as to do it, as though speech were action, 
 as though rhetoric were capable of modifying the tenden- 
 cies, habits, and character of real beings, and as though 
 verbiage were an efficient substitute for will, conscience, 
 and education. 
 
 France proceeds by bursts of eloquence, of cannonading, 
 or of law-making; she thinks that so she can change the
 
 260 AM1EU 8 JOURNAL. 
 
 nature of things; and she produces only phrases and ruins. 
 She has never understood the first line of Montesquieu : 
 " Laws are necessary relations, derived from the nature of 
 things." She will not see that her incapacity to organize 
 liberty comes from her own nature; from the notions 
 which she has of the individual, of society, of religion, of 
 law, of duty from the manner in which she brings up 
 children. Her way is to plant trees downward, and then 
 she is astonished at the result! Universal suffrage, with 
 a bad religion and a bad popular education, means perpet- 
 tual wavering between anarchy and dictatorship, between 
 the red and the black, between Dan ton and Loyola. 
 
 How many scapegoats will France sacrifice before it 
 occurs to her to beat her own breast in penitence? 
 
 August 18, 1873. (Scheveningeri). Yesterday, Sunday, 
 the landscape was clear and distinct, the air bracing, the 
 sea bright and gleaming, and of an ashy-blue color. There 
 were beautiful effects of beach, sea, and distance; and 
 dazzling tracks of gold upon the waves, after the sun had 
 sunk below the bands of vapor drawn across the middle 
 sky, and before it had disappeared in the mists of the sea 
 horizon. The place was very full. All Scheveningen and 
 the Hague, the village and the capital, had streamed out 
 on to the terrace, amusing themselves at innumerable 
 tables, and swamping the strangers and the bathers. The 
 orchestra played some Wagner, some Auber, and some 
 waltzes. What was all the world doing? Simply enjoy- 
 ing life. 
 
 A thousand thoughts wandered through my brain. I 
 thought how much history it had taken to make what I 
 saw possible; Judaea, Egypt. Greece, Germany. Gaul; all 
 the centuries from Moses to Napoleon, and all the zones 
 from Batavia to Guiana, had united in the formation of 
 this gathering. The industry, the science, the art, the 
 geography, the commerce, the religion of the whole human 
 race, are repeated in every human combination; and what 
 we see before our own eyes at any given moment i inex- 
 plicable without reference to all that has ever been. This
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 261 
 
 interlacing of the ten thousand threads which necessity 
 weaves into the production of one single phenomenon is a 
 stupefying thought. One feels one's self in the presence 
 of law itself allowed a glimpse of the mysterious work- 
 bhop of nature. The ephemeral perceives the eternal. 
 
 What matters the brevity of the individual span, seeing 
 ihat the generations, the centuries, and the worlds them- 
 selves are but occupied forever with the ceaseless repro- 
 duction of the hymn of life, in all the hundred thousand 
 modes and variations which make up the universal sym- 
 phony? The motive is always the same; the monad has 
 but one law: all truths are but the variation of one single 
 truth. The universe represents the infinite wealth of the 
 Spirit seeking in vain to exhaust all possibilities, and the 
 goodness of the Creator, who would fain share with the 
 created all that sleeps within the limbo of Omnipotence. 
 
 To contemplate and adore, to receive and give back, to 
 have uttered one's note and moved one's grain of sand, is 
 all which is expected from such insects as we are; it is 
 enough to give motive and meaning to our fugitive appari- 
 tion in existence. . . . 
 
 After the concert was over the paved esplanade behind 
 fhe hotels and the two roads leading to the Hague were 
 alive with people. One might have fancied one's self upon 
 one of the great Parisian boulevards just when the theaters 
 are emptying themselves there were so many carriages, 
 omnibuses, and cabs. Then, when the human tumult had 
 disappeared, the peace of the starry heaven shone out 
 resplendent, and the dreamy glimmer of the Milky Way 
 was only answered by the distant murmur of the ocean. 
 
 Later. What is it which has always come between real 
 life and me? What glass screen has, as it were, interposed 
 itself between me and the enjoyment, the possession, the 
 contact of things, leaving me only the r61e of the looker-on? 
 
 False shame, no doubt. I have been ashamed to desire. 
 Fatal result of timidity, aggravated by intellectual delu- 
 sion ! This renunciation beforehand of all natural ambi- 
 tions, this systematic cutting aside of all longings and all
 
 262 A MIEL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 desires, has perhaps been false in idea; it has been too 
 like a foolish, self-inflicted mutilation. 
 Fear, too, has had a large share in it 
 
 " La peur de ce que j'aiine est ma fatalite." 
 
 I very soon discovered that it was simpler for me to give 
 up a wish than to satisfy it. Not being able to obtain all 
 that my nature longed for, I renounced the whole en bloc, 
 without even taking the trouble to determine in detail 
 what might have attracted me ; for what was the good of 
 stirring up trouble in one's self and evoking images of 
 inaccessible treasure? 
 
 Thus I anticipated in spirit all possible disillusions, in 
 the true stoical fashion. Only, with singular lack of 
 logic, I have sometimes allowed regret to overtake me, and 
 I have looked at conduct founded upon exceptional prin- 
 ciples with the eyes of the ordinary man. I should have 
 been ascetic to the end ; contemplation ought to have been 
 enough for me, especially now, when the hair begins to 
 whiten. But, after all, I am a man, and not a theorem. 
 A system cannot suffer, but I suffer. Logic makes only 
 one demand that of consequence; but life makes a thous- 
 and ; the body wants health, the imagination cries out for 
 beauty, and the heart for love; pride asks for consideration, 
 the soul yearns for peace, the conscience for holiness; our 
 whole being is athirst for happiness and for perfection; 
 and we, tottering, mutilated, and incomplete, cannot 
 always feign philosophic insensibility; we stretch out our 
 arms toward life, and we say to it under our breath, " Why 
 why hast thou deceived me? " 
 
 August 19, 1873. (Scheveningen) . I have had a morning 
 walk. It has been raining in the night. There are large 
 clouds all round; the sea, veined with green and drab, has 
 put on the serious air of labor. She is about her business, 
 in no threatening but at the same time in no lingering 
 mood. She is making her clouds, heaping up her sands, 
 visiting her shores and bathing them with foam, gathering 
 up her floods for the tide, carrying the ships to their
 
 AMIEL'S JO URN A L. 263 
 
 destinations, and feeding the universal life. I found in a 
 hidden nook a sheet of fine sand which the water had fur- 
 rowed and folded like the pink palate of a kitten's mouth, 
 or like a dappled sky. Everything repeats itself by analogy, 
 and each little fraction of the earth reproduces in a smaller 
 and individual form all the phenomena of the planet. 
 Farther on I came across a bank of crumbling shells, and it 
 was borne in upon me that the sea-sand itself might well 
 be only the detritus of the organic life of preceding eras, a 
 vast monument or pyramid of immemorial age, built up 
 by countless generations of molluscs who have labored at 
 the architecture of the shores like good workmen of God. 
 If the dunes and the mountains are the dust of living 
 creatures who have preceded us, how can we doubt but 
 that our death will be as serviceable as our life, and that 
 nothing which has been lent is lost? Mutual borrowing 
 and temporary service seem to be the law of existence. 
 Only, the strong prey upon and devour the weak, and the 
 concrete inequality of lots within the abstract equality of 
 destinies wounds and disquiets the sense of justice. 
 
 Same day. A new spirit governs and inspires the 
 generation which will succeed me. It is a singular sensa- 
 tion to feel the grass growing under one's feet, to see one's 
 self intellectually uprooted. One must address one's con- 
 temporaries. Younger men will not listen to you. Thought, 
 like love, will not tolerate a gray hair. Knowledge herself 
 loves the young, as Fortune used to do in olden days. 
 Contemporary civilization does not know what to do with 
 old age; in proportion as it defies physical experiment, it 
 despises moral experience. One sees therein the triumph 
 of Darwinism ; it is a state of war, and war must have 
 young soldiers; it can only put up with age in its leaders 
 when they have the strength and the mettle of veterans. 
 
 In point of fact, one must either be strong or disappear, 
 either constantly rejuvenate one's self or perish. It is as 
 though the humanity of our day had, like the migratory 
 birds, an immense voyage to make across space; she can 
 no longer support the weak or help on the laggards. The
 
 264 A MIEUS JO URNAL. 
 
 great assault upon the future makes her hard and pitiless 
 to all who fall by the way. Her motto is, " The devil take 
 the hindmost." 
 
 The worship of strength has never lacked altars, but it 
 looks as though the more we talk of justice and humanity, 
 the more that other god sees his kingdom widen. 
 
 August 20, 1873. (Scheveningeri). I have now watched 
 the sea which beats upon this shore under many different 
 aspects. On the whole, I should class it with the Baltic. 
 As far as color, effect, and landscape go, it is widely differ- 
 ent from the Breton or Basque ocean, and, above all, from 
 the Mediterranean. It never attains to the blue-green of 
 the Atlantic, nor the indigo of the Ionian Sea. Its scale 
 of color runs from flint to emerald, and when it turns to 
 blue, the blue is a turquoise shade splashed with gray 
 The sea here is not amusing itself; it has a busy and 
 serious air, like an Englishman or a Dutchman. Neither 
 polyps nor jelly-fish, neither sea-weed nor crabs enliven 
 the sands at low water; the sea life is poor and meagre. 
 What is wonderful is the struggle of man against a miserly 
 and formidable power. Nature has done little for him, 
 but she allows herself to be managed. Stepmother though 
 she be, she is accommodating, subject to the occasional 
 destruction of a hundred thousand lives in a single inun- 
 dation. 
 
 The air inside the dune is altogether different from that 
 outside it. The air of the sea is life-giving, bracing, 
 oxydized; the air inland is soft, relaxing, and warm. In 
 the same way there are two Hollands in every Dutchman : 
 there is the man of the polder, heavy, pale, phlegmatic, 
 slow, patient himself, and trying to the patience of otheie, 
 and there is the man of the dune, of the harbor, the shore, 
 the sea, who is tenacious, seasoned, persevering, sunburned, 
 daring. Where the two agree is in calculating prudence, 
 and in methodical persistency of effort. 
 
 August 22, 1873. (Scheveningen). The weather is rainy, 
 the whole atmosphere gray; it is a time favorable to 
 thought and meditation. I have a liking for such days as
 
 AMIKU 8 JOURNAL. *65 
 
 these; they revive one's converse with one's self and make 
 it possible to live the inner life; they are quiet and peace- 
 ful, like a song in a minor key. We are nothing but 
 thought, but we feel our life to its very center. Our very 
 sensations turn to reverie. It is a strange state of mind; 
 it is like those silences in worship which are not the empty 
 moments of devotion, but the full moments, and which are 
 so because at such times the soul, instead of being polar- 
 ized, dispersed, localized, in a single impression or thought, 
 feels her own totality and is conscious of herself. She 
 tastes her own substance. She is no longer played upon, 
 colored, set in motion, affected, from without; she is in 
 equilibrium and at rest. Openness and self-surrender 
 become possible to her; she contemplates and she adores. 
 She sees the changeless and the eternal enwrapping all the 
 phenomena of time. She is in the religious state, in har- 
 mony with the general order, or at least in intellectual 
 harmony. Few holiness, indeed, more is wanted a har- 
 mony of will, a perfect self-devotion, death to self and 
 absolute submission. 
 
 Psychological peace that harmony which is perfect but 
 virtual is but the zero, the potentiality of all numbers; 
 it is not that moral peace which is victorious over all ills, 
 which is real, positive, tried by experience, and able to 
 face whatever fresh storms may assail it. 
 
 The peace of fact is not the peace of principle. There 
 are indeed two happinesses, that of nature and that of con- 
 quest two equilibria, that of Greece and that of Nazareth 
 two kingdoms, that of the natural man and that of the 
 regenerate man. 
 
 Later. (Scheveningeri). Why do doctors so often make 
 mistakes? Because they are not sufficiently individual in 
 their diagnoses or their treatment. They class a sick man 
 ander some given department of their nosology, whereas 
 every invalid is really a special case, a unique example. 
 How is it possible that so coarse a method of sifting should 
 produce judicious therapeutics? Every illness is a factor 
 simple or complex, which is multiplied by a second factor,
 
 263 4 MIEL'8 JO URN A L. 
 
 invariably complex the individual, that is to say, who is 
 suffering from it, so that the result is a special problem, 
 demanding a special solution, the more so the greater the 
 remoteness of the patient from childhood or from country 
 life. 
 
 The principal grievance which I have against the doctors 
 is that they neglect the real problem, which is to seize the 
 unity of the individual who claims their care. Their 
 methods of investigation are far too elementary ; a doctor 
 who does not read you to the bottom is ignorant of essen 
 tials. To me the ideal doctor would be a man endowed 
 with profound knowledge of life and of the soul, intuitively 
 divining any suffering or disorder of whatever kind, and 
 restoring peace by his mere presence. Such a doctor is 
 possible, but the greater number of them lack the higher 
 and inner life, they know nothing of the transcendent labor- 
 atories of nature; they seem to me superficial, profane, 
 strangers to divine things, destitute of intuition and sym- 
 pathy. The model doctor should be at once a genius, a 
 saint, a man of God. 
 
 September 11, 1873. (Amsterdam). The doctor has just 
 gone. He says I have fever about me, and does not think 
 that I can start for another three days without imprud- 
 ence. I dare not write to my Genevese friends and tell 
 them that I am coming back from the sea in a radically 
 worse state of strength and throat than when I went there, 
 and that I have only wasted my time, my trouble, my 
 money, and my hopes. . . . 
 
 This contradictory double fact on the one side an eager 
 hopefulness springing up afresh after all disappointments, 
 and on the other an experience almost invariably unfavor 
 able can be explained like all illusions by the whim of 
 nature, which either wills us to be deceived or wills us ^o 
 act as if we were so. 
 
 Skepticism is the wiser course, but in delivering us from 
 error it tends to paralyze life. Maturity of mind consists 
 in taking part in the prescribed game as seriously as though 
 one believed in it. Good-humored compliance, tempered
 
 AMTEL'8 JOURNAL. 267 
 
 by a smile, is, on the whole, the best line to tale; one 
 lends one's self to an optical illusion, and the voluntary 
 concession has an air of liberty. Once imprisoned in exist- 
 ence, we must submit to its laws with a good grace; to- 
 rebel against it only ends in impotent rage, when once we- 
 have denied ourselves the solution of suicide. 
 
 Humility and submission, or the religious point of view; 
 clear-eyed indulgence with a touch of irony, or the point 
 of view of worldly wisdom those two attitudes are pos- 
 sible. The second is sufficient for the minor ills of life, 
 the other is perhaps necessary in the greater ones. The- 
 pessimism of Schopenhauer supposes at least health and 
 intellect as means of enduring the rest of life. But opti- 
 mism either of the stoical or the Christian sort is needed to 
 make it possible for us to bear the worst sufferings of flesh,, 
 heart and soul. If we are to escape the grip of despair, we. 
 must believe either that the whole of things at least is good,, 
 or that grief is a fatherly grace, a purifying trial. 
 
 There can be no doubt that the idea of a happy immor- 
 tality, serving as a harbor of refuge from the tempests of 
 this mortal existence, and rewarding the fidelity, the 
 patience, the submission, and the courage of the travelers 
 on life's sea there can be no doubt that this idea, the 
 strength of so many generations, and the faith of the 
 church, carries with it inexpressible consolation to those- 
 who are wearied, burdened, and tormented by pain and 
 suffering. To feel one's self individually cared for and 
 protected by God gives a special dignity and beauty to life. 
 Monotheism lightens the struggle for existence. But does 
 the study of nature allow of the maintenance of those local 
 revelations which are called Mosaism, Christianity, Islam- 
 ism? These religions founded upon an infantine cosmogony, 
 and upon a chimerical history of humanity, can they bear 
 confronting with modern astronomy and geology? The 
 present mode of escape, which consists in trying to satisfy 
 the claims of both science and faith of the science which 
 contradicts all the ancient beliefs, and the faith which, in 
 the case of things that are beyond nature and incapable of
 
 268 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 verification, affirms them on her own responsibility only 
 this mode of escape cannot last forever. Every fresh 
 cosmical conception demands a religion which corre- 
 sponds to it. Our age of transition stands bewildered 
 between the two incompatible methods, the scientific 
 method and the religious method, and between the two 
 certitudes, which contradict each other. 
 
 Surely the reconciliation of the two must be sought for 
 in the moral law, which is also a fact, and every step of 
 which requires for its explanation another cosmos than the 
 cosmos of necessity. Who knows if necessity is not a par- 
 ticular case of liberty, and its condition? Who knows if 
 nature is not a laboratory for the fabrication of thinking 
 beings who are ultimately to become free creatures? 
 Biology protests, and indeed the supposed existence of souls, 
 independently of time, space, and matter, is a fiction of 
 faith, less logical than the Platonic dogma. But the ques- 
 tion remains open. We may eliminate the idea of purpose 
 from nature, yet, as the guiding conception of the highest 
 being of our planet, it is a fact, and a fact which postu- 
 lates a meaning in the history of the universe. 
 
 My thought is straying in vague paths: why? because I 
 have no creed. All my studies end in notes of interroga- 
 tion, and that I may not draw premature or arbitrary 
 conclusions I draw none. 
 
 Later on. My creed has melted away, but I believe in 
 good, in the moral order, and in salvation; religion for me 
 is to live and die in God, in complete abandonment to the 
 holy will which is at the root of nature and destiny. I 
 believe even in the gospel, the good news that is to say, 
 in the reconciliation of the sinner with God, by faith in the 
 love of a pardoning Father. 
 
 October 4, 1873. (Geneva). I have been dreaming a long 
 while in the moonlight, which floods my room with a 
 radiance, full of vague mystery. The state of mind 
 induced in us by this fantastic light is itself so dim and 
 ghost-like that analysis loses its way in it, and arrives at 
 nothing articulate. It is something indefinite and intau-
 
 AMIEL'8 
 
 gible, like the noise of waves which is made up of a thous- 
 and fused and mingled sounds. It is the reverberation of 
 all the unsatisfied desires of the soul, of all the stifled sor- 
 rows of the heart, mingling in a vague sonorous whole, and 
 dying away in cloudy murmurs. All those imperceptible 
 regrets, which never individually reach the consciousness, 
 accumulate at last into a definite result; they become the 
 voice of a feeling of emptiness and aspiration ; their tone is 
 melancholy itself. In youth the tone of these ^Eolian 
 vibrations of the heart is all hope a proof that these thou- 
 sands of indistinguishable accents make up indeed the 
 fundamental note of our being, and reveal the tone of 
 our whole situation. Tell me what you feel in your soli- 
 tary room when the full moon is shining in upon you and 
 your lamp is dying out, and I will tell you how old you 
 are, and I shall know if you are happy. 
 
 The best path through life is ..the high road, which 
 initiates us at the right moment into all experience. Ex- 
 ceptional itineraries are suspicious, and matter for anxiety. 
 What is normal is at once most convenient, most honest, 
 and most wholesome. Cross roads may tempt us for one 
 reason or another, but it is very seldom that we do not 
 come to regret having taken them. 
 
 Each man begins the world afresh, and not one fault of 
 the first man has been avoided by his remotest descendant. 
 The collective experience of the race accumulates, but 
 individual experience dies with the individual, and the 
 result is that institutions become wiser and knowledge as 
 such increases; but the young man, although more culti- 
 rated, is just as presumptuous, and not less fallible to-day 
 than he ever was. So that absolutely there is progress, 
 and relatively there is none. Circumstances improve, but 
 merit remains the same. The whole is better, perhaps, 
 but man is not positively better he is only different. His 
 defects and his virtues change li:eir form, but the total 
 balance does not show him to be the richer. A thousand
 
 270 , A MfKL'8 JO URN A L. 
 
 things advance, nine hundred and ninety-eight fall back 
 this is progress. There is nothing in it to be proud of, 
 but something, after all, to console one. 
 
 February 4, 1874. I am still reading the "Origines du 
 Christianisme " by Ernest Havet.* I like the book and I 
 dislike it. I like it for its independence and courage; I 
 dislike it for the insufficiency of its fundamental ideas, 
 and the imperfection of its categories. 
 
 The author, for instance, has no clear idea of religion; 
 and his philosophy of history is superficial. He is a 
 Jacobin. " The Republic and Free Thought " he cannot 
 get beyond that. This curt and narrow school of opinion 
 is the refuge of men of independent mind, who have been 
 scandalized by the colossal fraud of ultramontanism ; but 
 it leads rather to cursing history than to understanding 
 it. It is the criticism of the eighteenth century, of which 
 the general result is purely negative. But Voltairianism 
 is only the half of the philosophic mind. Hegel frees 
 thought in a very different way. 
 
 Havet, too, makes another mistake. He regards Chris- 
 tianity as synonymous with Roman Catholicism and with 
 the church. I know very well that the Roman Church 
 does the same, and that with her the assimilation is a mat- 
 ter of sound tactics; but scientifically it is inexact. We 
 ought not even to identify Christianity with the gospel, 
 nor the gospel with religion in general. It is the business 
 of critical precision to clear away these perpetual confu- 
 sions in which Christian practice and Christian preaching 
 abound. To disentangle ideas, to distinguish and limit 
 them, to fit them into their true place and order, is tho 
 first duty of science whenever it lays hands upon such 
 
 * Ernest Havet, born 1813, a distinguished French scholar and 
 professor. He became professor of Latin oratory at the College de 
 France in 1855, and a member of the Institute in January, 1880. His 
 admirable edition of the "Pensees de Pascal " is well-known. "L 
 Christianisme et ses Origines," an important book, in four volumes, 
 was developed from a series of articles in the Revue dea deux Mondes, 
 and the Revue Contemporaine.
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 271 
 
 chaotic and complex things as manners, idioms, or beliefs. 
 Entanglement is the condition of life; order and clearness 
 are the signs of serious and successful thought. 
 
 Formerly it was the ideas of nature which were a tissue 
 of errors and incoherent fancies; now it is the turn of 
 moral and psychological ideas. The best issue from the 
 present Babel would be the formation or the sketching out 
 of a truly scientific science of man. 
 
 February 16, 1874. The multitude, who already possess 
 force, and even, according to the Republican view, right, 
 have always been persuaded by the Cleons of the day that 
 enlightenment, wisdom, thought, and reason, are also 
 theirs. The game of these conjurors and quacks of uni- 
 versal suffrage has always been to flatter the crowd in order 
 to make an instrument of it. They pretend to adore the 
 puppet of which they pull the threads. 
 
 The theory of radicalism is a piece of juggling, for it 
 supposes premises of which it knows the falsity; it manu- 
 factures the oracle whose revelations it pretends to adore; 
 it proclaims that the multitude creates a brain for itself, 
 while all the time it is the clever man who is the brain of 
 the multitude, and suggests to it what it is supposed to 
 invent. To reign by flattery has been the common practice 
 of the courtiers of all despotisms, the favorites of all 
 tyrants; it is an old and trite method, but none the less 
 odious for that. 
 
 The honest politician should worship nothing but reason 
 and justice, and it is his business to preach them to the 
 masses, who represent, on an average, the age of childhood 
 and not that of maturity. We corrupt childhood if we tell 
 it that it cannot be mistaken, and that it knows more than 
 its elders. We corrupt the masses when we tell them that 
 they are wise and far-seeing and possess the gift of 
 infallibility. 
 
 It is one of Montesquieu's subtle remarks, that the more 
 wise men you heap together the less wisdom you will ob- 
 tain. Radicalism pretends that the greater number of 
 illiterate, passionate, thoughtless above all, young people,,
 
 272 AMI KL' 8 JOURNAL. 
 
 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. All 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 realizing 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 pro- 
 prietor. 
 
 February 27, 1874. Among the peoples, in whom the 
 social gifts are the 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, toe 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
 
 ANIEUS JOURNAL. 273 
 
 every appeal ; his caprice is law. What we does or says is 
 called custom, what it thinks is called opinion, what it be- 
 lieves 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. The individual finds 
 everything decided for him without his troubling about 
 it. 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. 
 
 April 29, 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. 
 Consciousness seems to be like a book, in which the leaves 
 turned by life successively cover and hide each other in 
 spite of their semi-transparency; 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 traveler 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 con- 
 cert and in the divine plan, would be the beginning of
 
 274 AMfKL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 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 
 labored under the conductor of the orchestra; and we 
 should find ourselves become surprised and delighted 
 hearers. We had seen nothing but our own little path in 
 the mist; and suddenly a marvelous panorama and bound- 
 less distances would open before our dazzled eyes. Why 
 not? 
 
 May 31, 1874. I have been reading the philosophical 
 poems of Madame Ackermann. She has rendered in fine 
 verse that sense of desolation which has been so often 
 stirred in me by the philosophy of Schopenhauer, of Hurt- 
 mann, Comte, and Darwin. What tragic force and power! 
 What thought and passion! She has courage for every- 
 thing, and attacks the most tremendous subjects. 
 
 Science is implacable; will it suppress all religions? All 
 those which start from a false conception of nature, cer- 
 tainly. But if the scientific conception of nature proves 
 incapable 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 notion of end or purpose is a real phenome- 
 non, although a limited one. Physical science may very 
 well be limited by moral science, and vice versd. .But if 
 these two conceptions of the world are in opposition, which 
 must give way? . 
 
 I still incline to believe that nature is the virtuality of 
 mind that the soul is the fruit of life, and liberty the 
 flower of necessity that all is bound together, and that 
 nothing can be done without. Our modern philosophy 
 has returned to the point of view of the lonians, the 
 tpvGixoi, or naturalist thinkers. But it will have to 
 pass once more through Plato and through Aristotle.
 
 AMI IW 8 JOURNAL. 275 
 
 through the philosophy of "goodness" and "purpose," 
 through the science of mind. 
 
 July 3, 1874. Kebellion against common sense is a piece 
 of childishness of which I am quite capable. But it does 
 not last long. I am soon brought back to the advantages 
 and obligations of my situation ; I return to a calmer self- 
 consciousness. It is disagreeable to me, no doubt, tc 
 realize all that is hopelsesly lost to me, all that is now and 
 will be forever denied to me ; but I reckon up my privileges 
 as well as my losses I lay stress on what I have, and not only 
 on what I want. And so I escape from that terrible 
 dilemma of "all or nothing," which for me always ends in 
 the adoption of the second alternative. It seems to me at 
 such times that a man may without shame content him- 
 self with being some thing and some one 
 
 " Ni si haut, ni si has . . ." 
 
 These brusque lapses into the formless, indeterminate 
 state, are the price of my critical faculty. All my former 
 habits become suddenly fluid; it seems tome that I am 
 beginning life over again, and that all my acquired capital 
 has disappeared at a stroke. I am forever new-born; I 
 am a mind which has never taken to itself a body, a coun- 
 try, an avocation, a sex, a species. Am I even quite sure 
 of being a man, a European, an inhabitant of this earth? 
 It seems to me so easy to be something else, that to be 
 what I am appears to me a mere piece of arbitrary choice. 
 I cannot possibly take an accidental structure of which the 
 value is purely relative, seriously. When once a man has 
 touched the absolute, all that might be other than what it 
 is seems to him indifferent. All these ants pursuing their 
 private ends excite his mirth. He looks down from the 
 moon upon his hovel; he beholds the earth from the 
 heights of the sun; he considers his life from the point of 
 view of the Hindoo pondering the days of Brahma; he 
 sees the finite from the distance of the infinite, and 
 thenceforward the insignificance of all those things which 
 men hold to be important makes effort ridiculoup, passion 
 burlesque, and prejudice absurd.
 
 276 A MIEL'fl Jfl URNAL. 
 
 August 7, 1874. (Clarens). A day perfectly beautiful, 
 luminous, limpid, brilliant. 
 
 I passed the morning in the churchyard; the "Oasis" 
 was delightful. Innumerable sensations, sweet and serious, 
 peaceful and solemn, passed over me. . . . Around 
 me Eussians, English, Swedes, Germans, were sleeping 
 their last sleep under the shadow of the Cubly. The land- 
 scape was one vast splendor; the woods were deep and mys- 
 terious, the roses full blown; all around me were butter- 
 flies a noise of wings the murmur of birds. I caught 
 glimpses through the trees of distant mists, of soaring 
 mountains, of the tender blue of the lake. . . A little 
 conjunction of things struck me. Two ladies were tend- 
 ing and watering a grave; two nurses were suckling their 
 children. This double protest against death had something 
 touching and poetical in it. "Sleep, you who are dead; 
 we, the living, are thinking of you, or at least carrying on 
 the pilgrimage of the race ! " such seemed to me the words 
 in my ear. It was clear to me that the Oasis of Clarens is 
 the spot in which I should like to rest. Here I am 
 surrounded with memories; here death is like a sleep a 
 sleep instinct with hope. 
 
 Hope is not forbidden us, but peace and submission are 
 the essentials. 
 
 September 1, 1874. (Clarens). On waking it seemed to 
 me that I was staring into the future with wide startled 
 eyes. Is it indeed to me that these things apply.* Inces- 
 sant and growing humiliation, my slavery becoming heavier, 
 my circle of action steadily narrower! . . . What is 
 hateful in my situation is that deliverance can never be 
 hoped for, and that one misery will succeed another in 
 such a way as to leave me no breathing space, not even in 
 the future, not even in hope. All possibilities are closed 
 to me, one by one. It is difficult for the natural man to 
 escape from a dumb rage against inevitable agony. 
 
 * Amiel bad just received at the hands of his doctor the medical 
 verdict, which was his arret de mort.
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 277 
 
 Noon. An indifferent nature? A Satanic principle of 
 things? A good and just God? Three points of view. 
 The second is improbable and horrible. The first appeals 
 to our stoicism. My organic combination has never been 
 anything but mediocre; it has lasted as long as it could. 
 Every man has his turn, and all must submit. To die 
 quickly is a privilege ; I shall die by inches. Well, submit. 
 Rebellion would be useless and senseless. After all, I 
 belong to the better-endowed half of human-kind, and my 
 lot is superior to the average. 
 
 But the third point of view alone can give joy. Only is 
 it tenable? Is there a particular Providence directing all 
 the circumstances of our life, and therefore imposing all 
 our trials upon us for educational ends? Is this heroic 
 faith compatible with our actual knowledge of the laws of 
 nature? Scarcely. But what this faith makes objective 
 we may hold as subjective truth. The moral being may 
 moralize his sufferings by using natural facts for his own 
 inner education. What he cannot change he calls the will 
 of God, and to will what God wills brings him peace. 
 
 To nature both our continued existence and our morality 
 are equally indifferent. But God, on the other hand, if 
 God is, desires our sanctifi cation ; and if suffering purifies 
 us, then we may console ourselves or suffering. This is 
 what makes the great advantage of the Christian faith; it 
 is the triumph over pain, the victory over death. There is 
 but one thing necessary death unto sin, the immolation 
 of our selfish will, the filial sacrifice of our desires. Evil 
 consists in living for self that is to say, for one's own 
 vanity, pride, sensuality, or even health. Righteousness 
 consists in willingly accepting one's lot, in submitting to, 
 and espousing the destiny assigned us, in willing what 
 God commands, in renouncing what he forbids us, in con- 
 senting to what he takes from us or refuses us. 
 
 In my own particular case, what has been taken from 
 me is health that is to say, the surest basis of all inde- 
 pendence; but friendship and material comfort are still 
 left to me; I am neither called upon to bear the slavery of 
 poverty nor the hell of absolute isolation.
 
 278 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 Health cut off, means marriage, travel, study, and 
 forbidden or endangered. It means life reduced in attrac- 
 tiveness and utility by five-sixths. 
 
 Thy will be done! 
 
 September 14, 1874. (Charnex). A long walk and con- 
 versation with . We followed a high mountain path. 
 
 Seated on the turf, and talking with open heart, our eyea 
 wandered over the blue immensity below us, and the smil- 
 ing outlines of the shore. All was friendly, azure-tinted, 
 caressing, to the sight. The soul I was reading was 
 profound and pure. Such an experience is like a flight 
 into paradise. A few light clouds climbed the broad 
 spaces of the sky, steamers made long tracks upon the 
 water at our feet, white sails were dotted over the vast dis- 
 tance of the lake, and sea-gulls like gigantic butterflies 
 quivered above its rippling surface. 
 
 September 21, 1874. (Charnez). A wonderful day! 
 Never has the lake been bluer, or the landscape softer. It 
 was enchanting. But tragedy is hidden under the 
 eclogue; the serpent crawls under the flowers. All the 
 future is dark. The phantoms which for three or four 
 weeks I have been able to keep at bay, wait for me behind 
 the door, as the Eumenides waited for Orestes. Hemmed 
 in on all sides ! 
 
 " On ne croit plu3 a son etoile, 
 On sent que derriere la toile 
 Sont le deuil, les maux et la mort." 
 
 For a fortnight I have been happy, and now this happi- 
 ness is going. 
 
 There are no more birds, but a few white or blue butter- 
 flies are still left. Flowers are becoming rare a few 
 daisies in the fields, some blue or yellow chicories and col- 
 chicums, some wild geraniums growing among fragments 
 of old walls, and the brown berries of the privet this is 
 all we were able to find. In the fields they are digging 
 potatoes, beating down the nuts, and beginning the apple 
 harvest. The leaves are thinning and changing color; I 
 watch them turning red on the pear-trees, gray on the
 
 AMIKUS JOURNAL. 
 
 plums, yellow on the walnut-trees, and tinging the 
 thickly-strewn turf with shades of reddish-brown. We 
 are nearing the end of the fine weather; the coloring is 
 the coloring of late autumn; there is no need now to keep 
 out of the sun. Everything is soberer, more measured, 
 more fugitive, less emphatic. Energy is gone, youth is 
 past, prodigality at an end, the summer over. The year 
 is on the wane and tends toward winter; it is once more 
 in harmony with my owi>. age and position, and next Sun- 
 day it will keep my birthday. All these different con- 
 sonances form a melancholy harmony. 
 
 The distinguishing mark of religion is not so much 
 liberty as obedience, and its value is measured by the sac- 
 rifices which it can extract from the individual. 
 
 A young girl's love is a kind of piety. We must approach 
 it with adoration if we are not to profane it, and with 
 poetry if we are to understand it. If there is anything 
 in the world which give& ns a sweet, ineffable impression 
 of the ideal, it is this trembling modest love. To deceive 
 it would be a crime. Merely xo watch its unfolding life 
 is bliss to the beholder ; he sees in it the birth of a divine 
 marvel. When the garland of youth fades on our brow, 
 let us try at least to have the virtues of maturity ; may we 
 grow better, gentler, graver, like the fruit of the vine, 
 while its leaf withers and falls. 
 
 To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, 
 and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of 
 living. 
 
 He who asks of life nothing but the improvement of his 
 cwu nature, and a continuous moral progress toward 
 inward contentment and religious submission, is less liable 
 than any one else to miss and waste life. 
 
 January 2, 1875. (Hyeres.) In spite of my sleeping 
 draught I have hau. a bad night. Once it seemed as if 1 
 must choke, for I could breathe neither way.
 
 280 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 Could I be more fragile, more sensitive, more vulner- 
 able! People talk to me as if there were still a creei 
 before me, while all the time I know that the ground ia 
 slipping from under me, and that the defense of my 
 health is already a hopeless task. At bottom, I am only 
 living on out of complaisance and without a shadow of 
 eelf-delusion. I know that not one of my desires will be 
 realized, and for a long time I have had no desires at all. 
 I simply accept what comes to me as though it were a bird 
 perching on my window. I smile at it, but I know very 
 well that my visitor has wings and will not stay long. 
 The resignation which comes from despair has a kind of 
 melancholy sweetness. It looks at life as a man sees it 
 from his death-bed, and judges it without bitterness and 
 without vain regrets. 
 
 I no longer hope to get well, or to be useful, or to be 
 happy. I hope that those who have loved me will love me 
 to the end; I should wish to have done them some good, 
 and to leave them a tender memory of myself. I wish to 
 die without rebellion and without weakness; that is about 
 all. Is this relic of hope and of desire still too much? 
 Let all be as God will. I resign myself into his hands. 
 
 January 22, 1875. (Hyeres). The French mind, accord- 
 ing to Gioberti, apprehends only the outward form of 
 truth, and exaggerates it by isolating it, so that it acts as 
 a solvent upon the realities with which it works. It takes 
 the shadow for the substance, the word for the thing, 
 appearance for reality, and abstract formula for truth. It 
 lives in a world of intellectual assignats. If you talk to a 
 Frenchman of art, of language, of religion, of the state, 
 of duty, of the family, you feel in his way of speaking 
 thai his thought remains outside the subject, that he 
 never penetrates into its substance, its inmost core. He 
 is not striving to understand it in its essence, but only to 
 say something plausible about it. On his lips the noblest 
 words become thin and empty; for example mind, idea, 
 religion. The French mind is superficial and yet not com- 
 prehensive; it has an extraordinarily fine edge, and yet no
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 281 
 
 penetrating power. Its desire is to enjoy its own resources 
 by the help of things, but it has none of the respect, the 
 disinterestedness, the patience, and the self-forgetfulness, 
 which are indispensable if we wish to see things as they are. 
 Far from being the philosophic mind, it is a mere counter- 
 feit of it, for it does not enable a man to solve any prob- 
 lem whatever, and remains incapable of understanding all 
 that is living, complex, and concrete. Abstraction is its 
 original sin, presumption its incurable defect, and plausi- 
 bility its fatal limit. 
 
 The French language has no power of expressing truths 
 of birth and germination; it paints effects, results, the 
 caput mortuum, but not the cause, the motive power, 
 the native force the development of any phenomenon what- 
 ever. It is analytic and descriptive, but it explains nothing, 
 for it avoids all beginnings and processes of formation. 
 With it crystallization is not the mysterious act itself by 
 which a substance passes from the fluid state to the solid 
 state. It is the product of that act. 
 
 The thirst for truth is not a French passion. In every- 
 thing appearance is preferred to reality, the outside to the 
 inside, the fashion to the material, that which shines to 
 that which profits, opinion to conscience. That is to say, 
 the Frenchman's center of gravity is always outside him 
 he is always thinking of others, playing to the gallery. To 
 him individuals are so many zeros; the unit which turns 
 them into a number must be added from outside ; it may 
 be royalty, the writer of the day, the favorite newspaper, 
 or any other temporary master of fashion. All this is 
 probably the result of an exaggerated sociability, which 
 weakens the soul's forces of resistence, destroys its capacity 
 for investigation and personal conviction, and kills in it 
 the worship of the ideal. 
 
 January 27, 1875. (Hyeres). The whole atmosphere has 
 a luminous serenity, a limpid clearness. The islands are 
 like swans swimming in a golden stream. Peace, splendor, 
 boundless space! . . . And I meanwhile look quietly 
 on while the soft hours glide away. I long to catch the
 
 282 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 wild bird, happiness, and tame it. Above all, I long S 
 share it with others. These delicious mornings impress 
 me indescribably. They intoxicate me, they carry me 
 away. I feel beguiled out of myself, dissolved in sunbeams, 
 breezes, perfumes, and sudden impulses of joy. And yet 
 all the time I pine for I know not what intangible Eden. 
 
 Lamartine in the " Preludes" has admirably described this 
 oppressive effect of happiness on fragile human nature. 
 I suspect that the reason for it is that the finite creature 
 feels itself invaded by the infinite, and the invasion pro- 
 duces dizziness, a kind of vertigo, a longing to fling one's 
 self into the great gulf of being. To feel life too intensely 
 is to yearn for death; and for man, to die means to become 
 like unto the gods to be initiated into the great mystery. 
 Pathetic and beautiful illusion. 
 
 Ten o'clock in the evening. From one end to the other 
 the day has been perfect, and my walk this afternoon to 
 Beau Vallon was one long delight. It was like an expedi- 
 tion into Arcadia. Here was a wild and woodland corner, 
 which would have made a fit setting for a dance of nymphs, 
 and there an ilex overshadowing a rock, which reminded 
 me of an ode of Horaca or a drawing of Tibur. I felt a 
 kind of certainty that the landscape had much that was 
 Greek in it. And what made the sense of resemblance 
 one more striking was the sea, which one feels to be always 
 near, though one may not see it, and which any turn of 
 the valley may bring into view. We found out a little 
 tower with an overgrown garden, of which the owner 
 might have been taken for a husbandman of the Odyssey. 
 He could scarcely speak any French, but was not without 
 a certain grave dignity. I translated to him the inscrip- 
 tion on his sun-dial, " Hora est benefaciendi," which is 
 beautiful, and pleased him greatly. It would be an 
 inspiring place to write a novel in. Only I do not know 
 whether the little den would have a decent room, and one 
 would certainly have to live upon eggs, milk, and figs, like 
 Philemon. 
 
 February 15, 1875. (Hyeres). I have just been reading
 
 AMIEL'S JO URNAL. 283 
 
 che two last " Discours " at the French Academy, -linger- 
 ing over every word and weighing every idea. This kind 
 of writing is a sort of intellectual dainty, for it is the art 
 "of expressing truth with all the courtesy and finesse pos- 
 sible; " the art of appearing perfectly at ease without the 
 smallest loss of manners; of being gracefully sincere, and 
 of making criticism itself a pleasure to the person criti- 
 cized. Legacy as it is from the monarchical tradition, this 
 particular kind of eloquence is the distinguishing mark 
 of those men of the world who are also men of breeding, 
 and those men of letters who are also gentlemen. Democ- 
 racy could never have invented it, and in this delicate 
 genre of literature France may give points to all rival 
 peoples, for it is the fruit of that refined and yet vigorous 
 social sense which is produced by court and drawing-room 
 life, by literature and good company, by means of a 
 mutual education continued for centuries. This compli- 
 cated product is as original in its way as Athenian elo- 
 quence, but it is less healthy and less durable. If ever 
 France becomes Americanized this genre at least will per- 
 ish, without hope of revival. 
 
 April 16, 1875. (Hyeres). I have already gone through 
 the various emotions of leave-taking. I have been wander- 
 ing slowly through the streets and up the castle hill, 
 gathering a harvest of images and recollections. Already 
 I am full of regret that I have not made a better study of 
 the country, in which I have now spent four montns and 
 more. It is like what happens when a friend dies; we 
 accuse ourselves of having loved him too little, or loved 
 him ill; or it is like our own death, when we look back 
 upon life and feel that it has been misspent. 
 
 August 16, 1875. Life is but a daily oscillation between 
 revolt and submission, between the instinct of the ego, 
 which is to expand, to take delight in its own tranquil 
 sense of inviolability, if not to triumph in its own sover- 
 eignty, and the instinct of the soul, which is to obey the 
 universal order, to accept the will of God. 
 
 The cold renunciation of disillusioned reason brings no
 
 284 AMIEDS JOURNAL. 
 
 real peace. Peace is only to be found in reconciliation with 
 destiny, when destiny seems, in the religious sense of the 
 word, good; that is to say, when man feels himself directly in 
 the presence of God. Then, and then only, does the will 
 acquiesce. Nay more, it only completely acquiesces when 
 it adores. The soul only submits to the hardness of fate 
 by virtue of its discovery of a sublime compensation the 
 loving kindness of the Almighty. That is to say, it can- 
 not resign itself to lack or famine, it shrinks from the 
 void around it, and the happiness either of hope or faith is 
 essential to it. It may very well vary its objects, but some 
 object it must have. It may renounce its former idols, 
 but it will demand another cult. The soul hungers and 
 thirsts after happiness, and it is in vain that everything 
 deserts it it will never submit to its abandonment. 
 
 August 28, 1875. (Geneva). A word used by Sainte- 
 Beuve a propos of Benjamin Constant has struck me : it is 
 the word consideration. To possess or not to possess 
 consideration was to Madame de Stae'l a matter of su- 
 preme importance the loss of it an irreparable evil, 
 the acquirement of it a pressing necessity. What, then, 
 is this good thing? The esteem of the public. And how 
 is it gained? By honorable character and life, combined 
 with a certain aggregate of services rendered and of suc- 
 cesses obtained. It is not exactly a good conscience, but it 
 is something like it, for it is the witness from without, if 
 not the witness from within. Consideration is not reputa- 
 tion, still less celebrity, fame, or glory; it has nothing to 
 do with savoir faire, and is not always the attendant of 
 talent or genius. It is the reward given to constancy in 
 duty, to probity of conduct. It is the homage rendered to 
 a life held to be irreproachable. It is a little more than 
 esteem, and a little less than admiration. To enjoy public 
 consideration is at once a happiness and a power. The 
 loss of it is a misfortune and a source of daily suffering. 
 Here am I, at the age of fifty-three, without ever having 
 given this idea the smallest place in my life. It is 
 curious, but the desire for consideration has been to me so
 
 AMIKL'8 JOURNAL. 285 
 
 !ittle of a motive that I have not even been conscious of 
 such an idea at all. The fact shows, I suppose, that for 
 me the audience, the gallery, the public, has never had 
 more than a negative importance. I have neither asked 
 nor expected anything from it, not even justice; and to be 
 a dependent upon it, to solicit its suffrages and its good 
 graces, has always seemed to me an act of homage and 
 flunkeyism against which my pride has instinctively 
 rebelled. I have never even tried to gain the good will of 
 a coterie or a newspaper, nor so much as the vote of an 
 elector. And yet it would have been a joy to me to be 
 smiled upon, loved, encouraged, welcomed, and to obtain 
 what I was so ready to give, kindness and good will. But 
 to hunt down consideration and reputation to force the 
 esteem of others seemed to me an effort unworthy of my- 
 self, almost a degradation. I have never even thought 
 of it. 
 
 Perhaps I have lost consideration by my indifference to 
 it. Probably I have disappointed public expectation by 
 thus allowing an over-sensitive and irritable consciousness 
 to lead me into isolation and retreat. I know that the 
 world, which is only eager to silence you when you do 
 speak, is angry with your silence as soon as its own action 
 has killed in you the wish to speak. No doubt, to be silent 
 with a perfectly clear conscience a man must not hold a 
 public office. I now indeed say to myself that a professor 
 is morally bound to justify his position by publication; 
 that students, authorities, and public are placed thereby in 
 a healthier relation toward him ; that it is necessary for his 
 good repute in the world, and for the proper maintenance 
 of his position. But this point of view has not been a 
 familiar one to me. I have endeavored to give conscien- 
 tious lectures, and I have discharged all the subsidiary 
 duties of my post to the best of my ability; but I have 
 never been able to bend myself to a struggle with hostile 
 opinion, for all the while my heart has been full of sadness 
 and disappointment, and I have known and felt that I 
 have been systematically and deliberately isolated. Prema-
 
 286 ARIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 ture despair and the deepest discouragement have been my 
 constant portion. Incapable of taking any interest in my 
 talents for my own sake, I let everything slip as soon as 
 the hope of being loved for them and by them had forsaken 
 me. A hermit against my will, I have not even found 
 peace in solitude, because my inmost conscience has not 
 been any better satisfied than my heart. 
 
 Does not all this make up a melancholy lot, a barren 
 failure of a life? What use have I made of my gifts, of 
 my special circumstances, of my half -century of existence? 
 What have 1 paid back to my country? Are all the docu- 
 ments I have produced, taken together, my correspond- 
 ence, these thousands of journal pages, my lectures, my 
 articles, my poems, my notes of different kinds, anything 
 better than withered leaves? To whom and to what have 
 I been useful? Will my name survive me a single day, 
 and will it ever mean anything to anybody? A life of no 
 account! A great many comings and goings, a great 
 many scrawls for nothing. When all is added up 
 nothing! And worst of all, it has not been a life used up 
 in the service of some adored object, or sacrificed to any 
 future hope. Its sufferings will have been vain, its renun- 
 ciations useless, its sacrifices gratuitous, its dreariness 
 without reward. . . . No, I am wrong; it will have 
 had .its secret treasure, its sweetness, its reward. It will 
 have inspired a few affections of great price ; it will have 
 given joy to a few souls; its hidden existence will have 
 had some value. Besides, if in itself it has been nothing, 
 it has understood much. If it has not been in harmony 
 with the great order, still it has loved it. If it has missed 
 happiness and duty, it has at least felt its own nothing- 
 ness, and implored its pardon. 
 
 Later on. There is a great affinity in me with the 
 Hindoo genius that mind, vast, imaginative, loving, 
 dreamy, and speculative, but destitute of ambition, person- 
 ality, and will. Pantheistic disinterestedness, the efface- 
 ment of the self in the great whole, womanish gentleness, 
 a horror of slaughter, antipathy to action these are all
 
 A MIEISS JO URNAL. 287 
 
 present in my nature, in the nature at least which has 
 been developed by years and circumstances. Still the West 
 has also had its part in me. What I have found difficult 
 is to keep up a prejudice in favor of any form, nationality, 
 or individuality whatever. Hence my indifference to my 
 own person, my own usefulness, interest, or opinions of 
 the moment. What does it all matter? Omnis determinatio 
 est negatio. Grief localizes us, love particularizes us, but 
 r/hought delivers us from personality. . . . To be a 
 -nan is a poor thing, to be a man is well ; to be the man 
 man in essence and in principle that alone is to be desird. 
 
 Yes, but in these Brahmanic aspirations what becomes 
 of the subordination of the individual to duty? Pleasure 
 may lie in ceasing to be individual, but duty lies in per- 
 forming the microscopic task allotted to us. The problem 
 set before us is to bring our daily task into the temple of 
 contemplation and ply it there, to act as in the presence 
 of God, to interfuse one's little part with religion. So 
 only can we inform the detail of life, all that is passing, 
 temporary, and insignificant, with beauty and nobility. 
 So may we dignify and consecrate the meanest of occupa- 
 tions. So may we feel that we are paying our tribute to 
 the universal work and the eternal will. So are we recon- 
 ciled with life and delivered from the fear of death. So 
 are we in order and at peace. 
 
 September 1, 1875. I have been working for some hours 
 at my article on Mme. de Stae'l, but with what labor, what 
 painful elfort! Wlien I write for publication every word 
 is misery, and my pen stumbles at every line, so anxious 
 am I to find the ideally best expression, and so great is the 
 number of possibilities which open before me at every 
 step. 
 
 Composition demands a concentration, decision, and 
 pliancy which I no longer possess. I cannot fuse together 
 materials and ideas. If we are to give anything a form, 
 we must, so to speak, be the tyrants of it.* We must 
 
 * Compare this paragraph from the "Pensees" of a new writer, 
 M. Joseph Roux. a country cure, living in a remote part ol the Ha*
 
 283 A MIKL'S JO URNAL. 
 
 treat our subject brutally, and not be always trembling 
 lest we are doing it a wrong. We must be able to trans- 
 mute and absorb it into our own substance. This sort of 
 confident effrontery is beyond me: my whole nature tends 
 to that impersonality which respects and subordinates 
 itself to the object; it is love of truth which holds me back 
 .from concluding and deciding. And then I am always 
 retracing my steps: instead of going forward I work in 
 a circle : I am afraid of having forgotten a point, of having 
 exaggerated an expression, of having used a word out of 
 place, while all the time I ought to have been thinking of 
 essentials and aiming at breadth of treatment. I do not 
 know how to sacrifice anything, how to give up anything 
 whatever. Hurtful timidity, unprofitable conscientious- 
 ness, fatal slavery to detail ! 
 
 In reality I have never given much thought to the art 
 of writing, to the best way of making an article, an essay, 
 a book, nor have I ever methodically undergone the 
 writer's apprenticeship ; it would have been useful to me, 
 and I was always ashamed of what was useful. I have felt, 
 as it were, a scruple agamst trying to surprise the secret of 
 the masters of literature, against picking chef-tfwuvres to 
 pieces. When I think that I have always postponed the 
 serious study of the art of writing, from a sort of awe of 
 it, and a secret love of its beauty, I am furious with my 
 own stupidity, and with my own respect. Practice and 
 routine would have given me that ease, lightness, and 
 assurance, without which the natural gift and impulse dies 
 away. But on the contrary, I have developed two opposed 
 habits of mind, the habit of scientific analysis which ex- 
 hausts the material offered to it, and the habit of imme- 
 diate notation of passing impressions. The art of compo- 
 sition lies between the two; you want for it both the 
 
 Limousin, whose thoughts have been edited and published this year 
 by M. Paul Marieton (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre): 
 
 " Le verbe ne souffre et ne connait que la volonte qui le dompte, 
 et n'einporte loin sans peril que 1'intelligence qui lui menage avec 
 empire 1'eperon et le frein."
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 039 
 
 living unity of the thing and the sustained operation of 
 thought. 
 
 October 25, 1875. I have been listening to M. Taine's 
 first lecture (on the "Ancien Kegime") delivered in the 
 university hall. It was an extremely substantial piece of 
 work clear, instructive, compact, and full of matter. 
 As a writer he shows great skill in the French method of 
 simplifying his subject by massing it in large striking divi- 
 sions ; his great defect is a constant straining after points ; 
 his principal merit is the sense he has of historical reality, 
 his desire to see things as they are. For the rest, he has 
 extreme openness of mind, freedom of thought, and 
 precision of language. The hall was crowded. 
 
 October 26, 1875. All origins are secret; the principle 
 of every individual or collective life is a mystery that is 
 to say, something irrational, inexplicable, not to be 
 defined. We may even go farther and say, Every indi- 
 viduality is an insoluble enigma, and no beginning ex- 
 plains it. In fact, all that has become may be explained 
 retrospectively, but the beginning of anything whatever 
 did not become. It represents always the "fiat lux," the 
 initial miracle, the act of creation; for it is the conse- 
 quence of nothing else, it simply appears among anterior 
 things which make a milieu, an occasion, a surrounding 
 for it, but which are witnesses of its appearance without 
 understanding whence it comes. 
 
 Perhaps also there are no true individuals, and, if so, no 
 beginning but one only, the primordial impulse, the first 
 movement. All men on this hypothesis would be but 
 man in two sexes; man again might be reduced to the 
 animal, the animal to the plant, and the only individuality 
 left would be a living nature, reduced to a living matter, 
 to the hylozoism of Thales. However, even upon this 
 hypothesis, if there were but one absolute beginning, rela- 
 tive beginnings would still remain to us as multiple sym- 
 bols of the absolute. Every life, called individual for con- 
 venience sake and by analogy, would represent in miniature 
 the history of the world, and would be to the eye of the 
 philosopher a miscroscopic compendium of it.
 
 290 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 The history of the formation of ideas is what frees the 
 mind. 
 
 A philosophic truth does not become popular until some 
 eloquent -soul has humanized it or some gifted personality 
 has translated and embodied it. Pure truth cannot be 
 assimilated by the crowd; it must be communicated by 
 contagion. 
 
 January 30, 1876. After dinner I went two steps off, to 
 Marc Monnier's, to hear the "Luthier de Cremone," a 
 one-act comedy in verse, read by the author, Franqois 
 Coppee. 
 
 It was a feast of fine sensations, of literary dainties. For 
 the little piece is a pearl. It is steeped in poetry, and 
 every line is a fresh pleasure to one's taste. 
 
 This young maestro is like the violin he writes about, 
 vibrating and passionate; he has, besides delicacy, point, 
 grace, all that a writer wants to make what is simple, naive, 
 heartfelt, and out of the beaten track, acceptable to a cul- 
 tivated society. 
 
 How to return to nature through art: there is the 
 problem of all highly composite literatures like our own. 
 Rousseau himself attacked letters with all the resources of 
 the art of writing, and boasted the delights of savage life 
 with a skill and adroitness developed only by the most 
 advanced civilization. And it is indeed this marriage of con- 
 traries which charms us; this spiced gentleness, this 
 learned innocence, this calculated simplicity, this yes and 
 no, this foolish wisdom. It is the supreme irony of such 
 combinations which tickles the taste of advanced and arti- 
 ficial epochs, epochs when men ask for two sensations at 
 once, like the contrary meanings fused by the smile of La 
 Gioconda. And our satisfaction, too, in work of this kind 
 is best expressed by that ambiguous curve of the lip which 
 says: I feel your charm, but I am not your dupe; I see the 
 illusion both from within and from without; I yield to 
 you, but I understand you; I am complaisant, but I am 
 proud ; I am open to sensations, yet not the slave of any ;
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL, 291 
 
 you have talent, I have subtlety of perception; we are 
 quits, and we understand each other. 
 
 February 1, 1876. This evening we talked of the infin- 
 itely great and the infinitely small. The great things of 
 
 the universe are for so much easier to understand 
 
 than the small, because all greatness is a multiple of her- 
 self, whereas she is incapable of analyzing what requires a 
 different sort of measurement. 
 
 It is possible for the thinking being to place himself in 
 all points of view, and to teach his soul to live under the 
 most different modes of being. But it must be confessed 
 that very few profit by the possibility. Men are in general 
 imprisoned, held in a vice by their circumstances almost 
 as the animals are, but they have very little suspicion of it 
 because they have so little faculty of self-judgment. It is 
 only the critic and the philosopher who can penetrate into 
 all states of being, and realize their life from within. 
 
 When the imagination shrinks in fear from the phan- 
 toms which it creates, it may be excused because it is 
 imagination. But when the intellect allows itself to be 
 tyrannized over or terrified by the categories to which 
 itself gives birth, it is in the wrong, for it is not allowed 
 to intellect the critical power of man to be the dupe of 
 anything. 
 
 Now, in the superstition of size the mind is merely the 
 dupe of itself, for it creates the notion of space. The 
 created is not more than the creator, the son not more than 
 the father. The point of view wants rectifying. The mind 
 has to free itself from space, which gives it a false notion 
 of itself, but it can only attain this freedom by reversing 
 things and by learning to see space in the mind instead of 
 the mind in space. How can it do this? Simply by 
 reducing space to its virtuality. Space is dispersion ; mind 
 is concentration. 
 
 And that is why God is present everywhere, without 
 taking up a thousand millions of cube leagues, nor a hun- 
 dred times more nor a hundred times less. 
 
 In the state of thought the universe occupies but a single
 
 292 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 point; but in the state of dispersion and analysis this 
 thought requires the heaven of heavens for its expansion. 
 
 In the same way, time and number are contained in the 
 mind. Man, as mind, is not their inferior, but their 
 superior. 
 
 It is true that before he can reach this state of freedom 
 his own body must appear to him at will either speck or 
 world that is to say, he must be independent of it. bo 
 long as the self still feels itself spatial, dispersed, corporeal, 
 it is but a soul, it is not a mind ; it is conscious of itself 
 only as the animal is, the impressionable, affectionate, 
 active and restless animal. 
 
 The mind being the subject of phenomena cannot be 
 itself phenomenal; the mirror of an image, if it was an 
 image, could not be a mirror. There can be no echo with- 
 out a noise. Consciousness means some one who experi- 
 ences something. And all the somethings together cannot 
 take the place of the some one. The phenomenon exists 
 only for a point which is not itself, and for which it is an 
 object. The perceptible supposes the perceiver. 
 
 May 15, 1876. This morning I corrected the proofs of 
 the "Etrangeres."* Here at least is one thing off my 
 hands. The piece of prose theorizing which ends the vol- 
 ume pleased and satisfied me a good deal more than my 
 new meters. The book, as a whole, may be regarded as an 
 attempt to solve the problem of French verse-translation 
 considered as a special art. It is science applied to poetry. 
 It ought not, I think, to do any discredit to a philosopher, 
 for, after all, it is nothing but applied psychology. 
 
 Do I feel any relief, any joy, pride, hope? Hardly. It 
 seems to me that I feel nothing at all, or at least my feel- 
 ing is so vague and doubtful that I cannot analyze it. 
 On the whole, I am rather tempted to say to myself, how 
 much labor for how small a result Much ado about 
 nothing! And yet the work in itself is good, is successful. 
 But what does verse- translation matter? Already my 
 
 * Les Etrangeres: Poesies traduites de diverges literatures, par H 
 F. Amiel, 1876.
 
 A MIEUS JO URN A L. 293 
 
 interest in it is fading; my mind and my energies clamor 
 for something else. 
 
 What will Edmond Scherer say to the volume? 
 
 To the inmost self of me this literary attempt is quite 
 indifferent a Lilliputian affair. In comparing my work 
 with other work of the same kind, I find a sort of relative 
 satisfaction; but I see the intrinsic futility of it, and the 
 insignificance of its success or failure. I do not believe 
 in the public; I do not believe in my own work; I have 
 no ambition, properly speaking, and I blow soap-bubbles 
 for want of something to do. 
 
 " Car le neant peut seal bien cafiaer rinfini." 
 
 Self-satire, disillusion, absence of prejudice, may be 
 freedom, but they are not strength. 
 
 July 12, 1876. Trouble on trouble. My cough has 
 been worse than ever. I cannot see that the fine weather 
 or the holidays have made any change for the better in my 
 state of health. On the contrary, the process of demoli- 
 tion seems more rapid. It is a painful experience, this 
 premature decay ! . . . " Apr&s tant de malheurs, que 
 vous reste-t-il? Moi." This "moi" is the central con- 
 sciousness, the trunk of all the branches which have been 
 cut away, that which bears every successive mutilation. 
 Soon I shall have nothing else left than bare intellect. 
 Death reduces us to the mathematical "point ;" the 
 destruction which precedes it forces us back, as it were, by 
 a series of ever-narrowing concentric circles to this last 
 inaccessible refuge. Already I have a foretaste of that 
 zero in which all forms and all modes are extinguished. 
 I see how we return into the night, and inversely I under- 
 stand how we issue from it. Life is but a meteor, of 
 which the whole brief course is before me. Birth, life, 
 death assume a fresh meaning to us at each phase of our 
 existence. To see one's self as a firework in the darkness 
 to become a witness of one's own fugutive phenomenon 
 this is practical psychology. I prefer indeed the spec-
 
 #94 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 tacle of the world, which is a vaster and more splendid 
 firework ; but when illness narrows my horizon and makes 
 me dwell perforce upon my own miseries, these miseries 
 are still capable of supplying food for my psychological 
 curiosity. What interests me in myself, in spite of my 
 repulsions is, that I find in my own case a genuine exam- 
 ple of human nature, and therefore a specimen of general 
 value. The sample enables me to understand a multitude 
 of similar situations, and numbers of my fellow-men. 
 
 To enter consciously into all possible modes of being 
 would be sufficient occupation for hundreds of centuries 
 at least for our finite intelligences, which are conditioned 
 by time. The progressive happiness of the process, indeed 
 may be easily poisoned and embittered by the ambition 
 which asks for everything at once, and clamors to reach 
 the absolute at a bound. But it may be answered that 
 aspirations are necessarily prophetic, for they could only 
 have come into being under the action of the 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 realized. 
 
 Thought itself is eternal. It is the consciousness of 
 thought which is gradually achieved through the long suc- 
 cession 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 begin 
 ning; it knows itself at the end. Or rather it advances in 
 rhe possession of itself with the gradual unfolding of crea- 
 tion. 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 one's self in the center of the universal 
 drama. There is comfort in the idea. Everything else 
 may be taken away from us, but if thought remains we
 
 A KIEL'S JO URNAL. 295 
 
 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 pres- 
 ence 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 eclair qui meurt dans son nuage, 
 Mais 1'eclair t'a sauve s'il t'a fait voir le ciel." 
 
 July 26, 1876. A private journal is a friend to idleness. 
 It frees us from the necessity of looking all round a sub- 
 ject, it puts up with every kind of repetition, it accom- 
 panies 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 practice 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 vial 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
 
 296 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 myself. So so what? I shall have lived iny 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 reali- 
 zation of the type is more complete, and the burden 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 vontl " 
 
 everything falls into the same gulf at last, and comes to 
 very much the same thing. 
 
 To rebel against fate to try to escape the inevitable 
 issue is almost puerile. When the duration of a cen- 
 tenarian 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 mean- 
 ing 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 cube-inch of chalk 
 do they matter much to us? and do the forty millions of 
 men who make up France matter any more to an inhabi- 
 tant of the moon or Jupiter? 
 
 To be a conscious monad a nothing which knows itself 
 to be the miscroscopic phantom of the universe : this is all 
 we can ever attain to. 
 
 September 12, 1876. What is your own particular ab- 
 surdity? Why, simply that you exhaust yourself in trying 
 to understand wisdom without practicing 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 skepticism, irresolution, not convinced 
 but incorrigible, weakness which will not accept itself and 
 cannot transform itself into strength there is your misery.
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 29? 
 
 The comic side of it lies in capacity to direct others, 
 becoming incapacity to direct one's self, in the dream of 
 the infinitely great stopped short by the infinitely little, 
 in what seems to be the utter r.selessness 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. 
 
 September 19, 1876. My reading to-day has been 
 Doudan's "Lettres et Melanges."* 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 Frenchman of the best type, 
 tin delicat n& sublime, to quote Sainte-Bevue's expression. 
 Fastidiousness of temper, and a too keen love of perfec- 
 tion, led him to withhold his talent from the public, but 
 while still living, and within his own circle, he was the 
 recognized equal of the best. He scarcely lacked any- 
 thing except that fraction of ambition, of brutality and 
 material force which are necessary to success in this world; 
 but he was appreciated by the best society of Paris, and 
 he cared for nothing else. He reminds me of Joubert. 
 
 September 20th. To be witty is to satisfy another's 
 wits by the bestowal on him of two pleasures, that of 
 understanding one thing and that of guessing another, 
 and so achieving a double stroke. 
 
 Thus Doudan scarcely ever speaks out his thought 
 directly; he disguises and suggests it by imagery, allusion, 
 hyperbole; he overlays it with light irony and feigned 
 anger, with gentle mischief and assumed humility. The 
 more the thing to be guessed differs from the thing said, 
 the more pleasant surprise there is for the interlocutor or 
 the correspondent concerned. These charming and deli- 
 
 * Ximenes Doudan, born in 1800, died 1872, the brilliant friend 
 and tutor of the De Broglie family, whose conversation was so much 
 sought after in life, and whose letters have been so eagerly read in 
 France since his death. Compare M. Scherer's two articles on 
 Doudan's " Lettres " and " Pensees" in his last published volume of 
 Assays.
 
 298 AMIKL'B JOURNAL. 
 
 cate ways of expression allow a man to teach what he will 
 without pedantry, and to venture what he will without 
 offense. There is something Attic and aerial in them; 
 they mingle grave and gay, fiction and truth, with a light 
 grace of touch such as neither La Fontaine nor Alcibiades 
 would have been ashamed of. Socratic badinage like this 
 presupposes a free and equal mind, victorious over physical 
 ill and inward discontents. Such delicate playfulness is 
 the exclusive herita fe ^ of those rare natures iu whom sub- 
 dety is the disguise of superiority, and taste its revelation. 
 What balance of faculties and cultivation it requires! 
 What personal distinction it shows: F^rhaps only a 
 valetudinarian would have been capable of this morbidezza 
 of touch, this marriage of virile thought and feminine 
 caprice. If there is excess anywhere, it lies perhaps in a 
 certain effeminacy of sentiment. Doudan can put up 
 with nothing but what is perfect nothing but what is 
 absolutely harmonious; all that is rough, harsh, powerful, 
 brutal, and unexpected, throws him into convulsions. 
 Audacity boldness of all kinds repels him. This 
 Athenian of the Komaii time is a true disciple of Epicurus 
 in all matters of sight, hearing, and intelligence a crum- 
 pled rose-leaf disturbs him. 
 
 " Une ombre, un souffle, un rien, tout lui donnait la fievre." 
 
 What all this softness wants is strength, creative and 
 muscular force. His range is not as wide as I thought it 
 at first. The classical world and the Kenaissance that 
 is to say, the horizon of La Fontaine is his horizon. He 
 is out of his element in the German or Slav literatures. 
 He knows nothing of Asia. Humanity for him is not 
 much larger than France, and he has never made a bible 
 of Nature. In music and painting he is more or less ex- 
 clusive. In philosophy he stops at Kant. To sum up: 
 he is a man of exquisite and ingenious taste, but he is not 
 a first-rate critic, still less a poet, philosopher, or artist. 
 He was an admirable talker, a delightful letter writer, 
 who might have became an author had he chosen to con-
 
 A MIKL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 centrate himself. I must wait for the second volume in 
 order to review and correct this preliminary impression. 
 
 Midday. I have now gone once more through the 
 whole volume, lingering over the Attic charm of it, and 
 meditating on the originality and distinction of the man's 
 organization. Doudan was a keen penetrating psycholo- 
 gist, a diviner of aptitudes, a trainer of minds, a man of 
 infinite taste and talent, capable of every nuance and of 
 every delicacy ; but his defect was a want of persevering 
 'energy of thought, a lack of patience in execution. 
 Timidity, unworldliness, indolence, indifference, confined 
 him to the role of the literary counsellor and made him 
 judge of the field in which he ou ght rather to have fought. 
 But do I mean to blame him? no indeed! In the first 
 place, it would be to fire on my allies; in the second, very 
 likely he chose the better part. 
 
 Was it not Goethe who remarked that in the neighbor- 
 hood of all famous men we find men who never achieve 
 fame, and yet were esteemed by those who did, as their 
 equals or superiors? Descartes, I think, said the same 
 thing. Fame will not run after the men who are afraid 
 ,)f her. She makes mock of those trembling and respect- 
 ful lovers who deserve but cannot force her favors. The 
 public is won by the bold, imperious talents by the enter- 
 prising and the skillful. It does not believe in modesty, 
 which it regards as a device of impotence. The golden 
 book contains but a section of the true geniuses; it names 
 those only who have taken glory by storm. 
 
 November 15, 1876. I have been reading "L'Avenir 
 Eeligieux des Peuples Civilises," by Emile de Laveleye. 
 The theory of this writer is that the gospel, in its pure 
 form, is capable of providing the religion of the future, 
 and that the abolition of all religious principle, which is 
 what the socialism of the present moment demands, is as. 
 much to be feared as Catholic superstition. The Protestant 
 method, according to him, is the means of transition 
 whereby sacerdotal Christianity passes into the pure religion 
 of the gospel. Laveleye does not think that civilization
 
 500 A MIEUS JO URNAL. 
 
 can last without the belief in God and in another life. 
 Perhaps he forgets that Japan and China prove the con- 
 trary. But it is enough to determine him against atheism 
 if it can be shown that a general atheism would bring 
 about a lowering of the moral average. After all, how- 
 ever, this is nothing but a religion of utilitarianism. A 
 belief is not true because it is useful. And it is truth 
 alone scientific, established, proved, and rational truth 
 which is capable of satisfying nowadays the awakened 
 minds of all classes. We may still say perhaps, "faith 
 governs the world " but the faith of the present is no 
 longer in revelation or in the priest it is in reason and in 
 science. Is there a science of goodness and happiness? 
 that is the question. Do justice and goodness depend 
 upon any particular religion? How are men to be made 
 free, honest, just, and good? there is the point. 
 
 On my way through the book I perceived many new 
 applications of my law of irony. Every epoch has two con- 
 tradictory aspirations which are logically antagonistic and 
 practically associated. Thus the philosophic materialism 
 of the last century was the champion of liberty. And at 
 the present moment we find Darwinians in love with 
 equality, while Darwinism itself is based on the right of 
 the stronger. Absurdity is interwoven with life: real 
 beings are animated contradictions, absurdities brought 
 into action. Harmony with self woulet- mean peace, 
 repose, and perhaps immobility By far the greater num- 
 ber of human beings can only conceive action,* or practice 
 it, under the form of war a war of competition at home, 
 a bloody war of nations abroad, and finally war with self. 
 So that life is a perpetual combat; it wills that which it 
 wills not, and wills not that it wills. Hence what I call 
 the law of irony that is to say, the refutation of the self 
 by itself, the concrete realization of the absurd. 
 
 Is such a result inevitable? I think not. Struggle is 
 the caricature of harmony, and harmony, which is the 
 association, of contraries, is also a principle of movement. 
 War is a brutal and fierce means of pacification; it mean*
 
 A MIKL S JO URNAL. 301 
 
 the suppression of resistance by the destruction or enslave- 
 ment of the conquered. Mutual respect would be a better 
 way out of difficulties. Conflict is the result of the selfish- 
 ness which will acknowledge no other limit than that of 
 external force. The laws of animality govern almost the 
 whole of history. The history of man is essentially 
 zoological; it becomes human late in the day, and then 
 only in the beautiful souls, the souls alive to justice, good- 
 ness, enthusiasm, and devotion. The angel shows itself 
 rarely and with difficulty through the highly-organized 
 brute. The divine aureole plays only with a dim and 
 fugitive light around the brows of the world's governing 
 race. 
 
 The Christian nations offer many illustrations of the law 
 of irony. They profess the citizenship of heaven, the 
 exclusive worship of eternal good; and never has the 
 hungry pursuit of perishable joys, the love of this world, 
 or the thirst for conquest, been stronger or more active 
 than among these nations. Their official motto is exactly 
 the reverse of their real aspiration. Under a false flag 
 they play the smuggler with a droll ease of conscience. 
 Is the fraud a conscious one? No it is but an application 
 of the law of irony. The deception is so common a one 
 that the delinquent becomes unconscious of it. Every 
 nation gives itself the lie in the course of its daily life, 
 and not one feels the ridicule of its position. A man must 
 be a Japanese to .perceive the burlesque contradictions of 
 the Christian civilization. He must be a native of the 
 moon to understand the stupidity of man and his state of 
 constant delusion. The philosopher himself falls under 
 the law of irony, for after having mentally stripped him- 
 self of all prejudice having, that is to say, wholly laid 
 aside his own personality, he finds himself slipping back 
 perforce into the rags he had taken off, obliged to eat and 
 drink, to be hungry, cold, thirsty, and to behave like all 
 other mortals, after having for a moment behaved like no 
 other. This is the point where the comic poets are lying 
 in wait for him ; the animal needs revenge themselves for
 
 302 A KIEL'S JO URN A L, 
 
 his flight into the Empyrean, and mock him by their cry: 
 Thou art dust, thou art nothing, thou art man! 
 
 November 26, 1876. I have just finished a novel of 
 Cherbuliez, "Le fiance de Mademoiselle de St. Maur." It 
 is a jeweled mosaic of precious stones, sparkling with a 
 thousand lights. But the heart gets little from it. The 
 Mephistophelian type of novel leaves one sad. This subtle, 
 refined world is strangely near to corruption; these artificial 
 : women have an air of the Lower Empire. There is not a 
 character who is not witty, and neither is there one who 
 has not bartered conscience for cleverness. The elegance 
 of the whole is but a mask of immorality. These stories 
 of feeling in which there is no feeling make a strange and 
 painful impression upon me. 
 
 December 4, 1876. I have been thinking a great deal of 
 Victor Cherbuliez. Perhaps his novels make up the 
 most disputable part of his work they are so much wanting 
 in simplicity, feeling, reality. And yet what knowledge, 
 style, wit, and subtlety how much thought everywhere, 
 and what mastery of language! He astonishes one; 1 
 cannot but admire him. 
 
 Cherbuliez 's mind is of immense range, clear-sighted, 
 keen, full of resource; he is an Alexandrian exquisite, 
 substituting for the feeling which makes men earnest the 
 irony which leaves them free. Pascal would say of him 
 " He has never risen from the order of thought to the order 
 of charity." But we must not be ungrateful. A Lucian 
 is not worth an Augustine, but still he is Lucian. Those 
 who enfranchise the mind render service to man as well as 
 those who persuade the heart. After the leaders come the 
 liberators, and the negative and critical minds have their 
 1 place and function beside the men of affirmation, the con- 
 vinced and inspired souls. The positive element in Victor 
 Cherbuliez's work is beauty, not goodness, not moral or 
 religious life. ^Esthetically he is serious ; what he respects 
 is style. And therefore he has found his vocation ; for he 
 is first and foremost a writer a consummate, exquisite, 
 and model writer. He does not win our love, but he 
 claims our homage.
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 303 
 
 In every union there is a mystery a certain invisible 
 bond which must not be disturbed. This vital bond in the 
 filial relation is respect ; in friendship, esteem ; in marriage, 
 confidence; in the collective life, patriotism; in the reli- 
 gious life, faith. Such points are best left untouched by 
 speech, for to touch them is almost to profane them. 
 
 Men of genius supply the substance of history, while the 
 mass of men are but the critical filter, the limiting, slack- 
 ening, passive force needed for the modification of the 
 ideas supplied by genius. Stupidity is dynamically the 
 necessary balance of intellect. To make an atmosphere 
 which human life can breathe, oxygen must be combined 
 with a great deal with three-fourths of azote. And so, 
 to make history, there must be a great deal of resistance to 
 conquer and of weight to drag. 
 
 January 5, 1877. This morning I am altogether miser- 
 able, half-stifled by bronchitis walking a difficulty the 
 brain weak this last the worst misery of all, for thought 
 is my only weapon against my other ills. Eapid deteriora- 
 tion of all the bodily powers, a dull continuous waste of 
 vital organs, brain decay: this is the trial laid upon me, a 
 trial that no one suspects ! Men pity you for growing old 
 outwardly; but what does that matter? nothing, so long 
 as the faculties are intact. This boon of mental sound- 
 ness to the last has been granted to so many students that 
 I hoped for it a little. Alas, must I sacrifice that too? 
 Sacrifice is almost easy when we believe it laid upon us, 
 asked of us, rather, by a fatherly God and a watchful 
 Providence; but I know nothing of this religious joy. 
 The mutilation of the self which is going on in me lowers 
 and lessens me without doing good to anybody. Supposing 
 I became blind, who would be the gainer? Only one 
 motive remains to me that of manly resignation to the 
 inevitable the wish to set an example to others the stoic 
 view of morals pure and simple. 
 
 This moral education of the individual soul is it then 
 wasted? When our planet, has accomplished the cycle of
 
 304 A MIEU8 JO URNAL. 
 
 its destinies, of what use will it have been to any one or 
 anything in the universe? Well, it will have sounded its 
 note in the symphony of creation. And for us, individual 
 atoms, seeing monads, we appropriate a momentary con- 
 sciousness of the whole and the unchangeable, and then we 
 disappear. Is not this enough? No, it is not enough, 
 for if there is not progress, increase, profit, there is nothing 
 but a mere chemical play and balance of combinations. 
 Brahma, after having created, draws his creation back into 
 the gulf. If we are a laboratory of the universal mind, 
 may that mind at least profit and grow by us ! If we 
 realize the supreme will, may God have the joy of it! If 
 the trustful humility of the soul rejoices him more than 
 the greatness of intellect, let us enter into his plan, his in- 
 tention. This, in theological language, is to live to the 
 glory of God. Keligion consists in the filial acceptation 
 of the divine will whatever it be, provided we see it dis- 
 tinctly. Well, can we doubt that decay, sickness, death, 
 are in the programme of our existence? Is not destiny the 
 inevitable? And is not destiny the anonymous title of 
 him or of that which the religions call God? To descend 
 without murmuring the stream of destiny, to pass without 
 revolt through loss after loss, and diminution after diminu- 
 tion, with no other limit than zero before us this is what 
 is demanded of us. Involution is as natural as evolution. 
 We sink gradually back into the darkness, just as we issued 
 gradually from it. The play of faculties and organs, the 
 grandiose apparatus of life, is put back bit by bit into the 
 box. We begin by instinct; at the end comes a clearness 
 of vision which we must learn to bear with and to employ 
 without murmuring upon our own failure and decay. A 
 musical theme once exhausted, finds its due refuge and 
 repose in silence. 
 
 February 6, 1877. I spent the evening with the , 
 
 and we talked of the anarchy of ideas, of the general want 
 of culture, of what it is which keeps the world going, and 
 of the assured march of science in the midst of universal 
 passion and superstition.
 
 AMIEL'S JO URN A L. 305 
 
 What is rarest in the world is fair-mindedness, method, 
 the critical view, the sense of proportion, the capacity for 
 distinguishing. The common state of human thought is 
 one of confusion, incoherence, and presumption, and the 
 common state of human hearts is a state of passion, in 
 which equity, impartiality, and openness to impressions 
 are unattainable. Men's wills are always in advance of 
 their intelligence, their desires ahead of their will, and 
 accident the source of their desires; so that they express 
 merely fortuitous opinions which are not worth the trouble 
 of taking seriously, and which have no other account to 
 give of themselves than this childish one : I am, because I 
 am. The art of finding truth is very little practiced ; it 
 scarcely exists, because there is no personal humility, nor 
 even any love of truth among us. We are covetous 
 enough of such knowledge as may furnish weapons to our 
 hand or tongue, as may serve our vanity or gratify our 
 craving for power; but self-knowledge, the criticism of our 
 own appetites and prejudices, is unwelcome and disagree- 
 able to us. 
 
 Man is a willful and covetous animal, who makes use of 
 his intellect to satisfy his inclinations, but who cares, 
 nothing for truth, who rebels against personal disci- 
 pline, who hates disinterested thought and the idea of 
 self -education. Wisdom offends him, because it rouses in 
 him disturbance and confusion, and because he will not see 
 himself as he is. 
 
 The great majority of men are but tangled skeins, im- 
 perfect keyboards, so many specimens of restless or stag- 
 nant chaos and what makes their situation almost hope- 
 less is the fact that they take pleasure in it. There is no 
 curing a sick man who believes himself in health. 
 
 April 5, 1877. I have been thinking over the pleasant 
 evening of yesterday, an experience in which the sweets of 
 friendship, the charm of mutual understanding, aesthetic 
 pleasure, and a general sense of comfort, were happily 
 combined and intermingled. There was not a crease in the 
 rose-leaf. Why? Because "all that is pure, all that is
 
 306 AMI KU 8 JOURNAL. 
 
 honest, all that is excellent, all that is lovely and of good 
 report," was there gathered together. "The incorrup- 
 tibility of a gentle and quiet spirit," innocent mirth, faith- 
 fulness <:o duty, fine taste and sympathetic imagination, 
 form an attractive and wholesome milieu in which the soul 
 may rest. 
 
 The party which celebrated the last day of vacation 
 gave much pleasure, and not to me only. Is not making 
 others happy the best happiness? To illuminate for an 
 instant the depths of a deep soul, to cheer those who bear 
 by sympathy the burdens of so many sorrow-laden hearts 
 and suffering lives, is to me a blessing and a precious privi- 
 lege. There is a sort of religious joy in helping to renew 
 the strength and courage of noble minds. We are sur- 
 prised to find ourselves the possessors of a power of which 
 we are not worthy, and we long to exercise it purely and 
 seriously. 
 
 I feel most strongly that man, in all that he does or can 
 do which is beautiful, great, or good is but the organ 
 and the vehicle of something or some one higher than 
 himself. This feeling is religion. The religious man 
 takes part with a tremor of sacred joy in these phenomena 
 of which he is the intermediary out not the source, of 
 which he is the scene, but noc ^he author, or rather, the 
 poet. He lends them voice, <md will, and help, but he is 
 respectfully careful to efface himself, that he may alter as 
 little as possible tne Mgher work of the genius who is 
 making a momentary use of him. A pure emotion deprives 
 him of personality and annihilates the self in him. Self 
 oiust perforce disappear when it is the Holy Spirit who 
 ipeaks, when it is God who acts. This is the mood in 1 ' 
 which the prophet hears the call, the young mother feels 
 the movement of the child within, the preacher watches 
 the tears of his audience. So long as we are conscious of 
 self we are limited, selfish, held in bondage; when we are 
 in harmony with the universal order, when we vibrate in 
 unison with God, self disappears. Thus, in a perfectly 
 harmonious choir, the individual cannot hear himself
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 307 
 
 anless he makes a false note. The religious state is one of 
 deep enthusiasm, of moved contemplation, of tranquil 
 ecstasy. But how rare a state it is for us poor creatures 
 harassed by duty, by necessity, by the wicked world, by 
 sin, by illness! It is the state which produces inward 
 happiness; but alas! the foundation of existence, the com- 
 mon texture of our days, is made up of action, effort 
 struggle, and therefore dissonance. Perpetual conflict, 
 interrupted by short and threatened truces there is a true 
 picture of our human condition. 
 
 Let us hail, then, as an echo from heaven, as the fore- 
 taste of a more blessed economy, these brief moments of 
 perfect harmony, these halts between two storms. Peace 
 is not in itself a dream, but we know it only as the result 
 of a momentary equilibrium an accident. "Happy are 
 the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of 
 God." 
 
 April 26, 1877. I have been turning over again the 
 "Paris" of Victor Hugo (1867). For ten years event after 
 event has given the lie to the prophet, but the confidence 
 of the prophet in his own imaginings is not therefore a whit 
 diminished. Humility and common sense are only fit for 
 Lilliputians. Victor Hugo superbly ignores everything 
 that he has not foreseen. He does not see that pride is a. 
 limitation of the mind, and that a pride without limita- 
 tions is a littleness of soul. If he could but learn to com- 
 pare himself with other men, and France with other nations, 
 he would see things more truly, and would not fall into 
 these mad exaggerations, these extravagant judgments. 
 But proportion and fairness will never be among the 
 strings at his command. He is vowed to the Titanic; his 
 gold is always mixed with lead, his insight with childish- 
 ness, his reason with madness. He cannot be simple; the 
 only light he has to give blinds you like that of a fire. He 
 astonishes a reader and provokes him, he moves him and 
 annoys him. There is always some falsity of note in him, 
 which accounts for the malaise he so constantly excites in 
 me. The great poet in him cannot shake off the charlatan.
 
 308 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 A few shafts of Voltairean irony would have shriveled the 
 inflation of his genius and made it stronger by making it 
 saner. It is a public misfortune that the most powerful 
 poet of a nation should not have better understood his r61e, 
 and that, unlike those Hebrew prophets who scourged 
 because they loved, he should devote himself proudly and 
 systematically to the flattery of his countrymen. France 
 is the world; Paris is France; Hugo is Paris; peoples, 
 bow down! 
 
 May 2, 1877. Which nation is best worth belonging to? 
 There is not one in which the good is not counterbalanced 
 by evil. Each is a caricature of man, a proof that no one 
 among them deserves to crush the others, and that all 
 have something to learn from all. I am alternately struck 
 with the qualities and with the defects of each, which is 
 perhaps lucky for a critic. I am conscious of no prefer- 
 ence for the defects of north or south, of west or east ; and 
 I should find a difficulty in stating my own predilections. 
 Indeed I myself am wholly indifferent in the matter, for 
 to me the question is not one of liking or of blaming, but 
 of understanding. My point of view is philosophical that 
 is to say, impartial and impersonal. The only type which 
 pleases me is perfection man, in short, the ideal man. 
 As for the national man, I bear with and study him, but I 
 have no admiration for him. I can only admire the fine 
 specimens of the race, the great men, the geniuses, the 
 lofty characters and noble souls, and specimens of these 
 are to be found in all the ethnographical divisions. The 
 " country of my choice " (to quote Madame de Stael) is 
 with the chosen souls. I feel no greater inclination 
 toward the French, the Germans, the Swiss, the English, 
 the Poles, the Italians, than toward the Brazilians or the 
 Chinese. The illusions of patriotism, of Chauvinist, 
 family, or professional feeling, do not exist for me My 
 tendency, on the contrary, is to feel with increased force 
 the lacunae, deformities, and imperfections of the group to 
 which I belong. My inclination is to see things as they 
 are, abstracting mv own individuality, and suppressing all
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 309 
 
 personal will and desire; so that I feel antipathy, not 
 toward this or that, but toward error, prejudice, stupidity, 
 exclusiveness, exaggeration. I love only justice and fair- 
 ness. Anger and annoyance are with me merely superficial ; 
 the fundamental tendency is toward impartial ty and detach- 
 ment. Inward liberty and aspiration toward the true 
 these are what I care for and take pleasure in. 
 
 June 4, 1877. I have just heard the "Romeo and 
 Juliet " of Hector Berlioz. The work is entitled "Dramatic 
 symphony for orchestra, with choruses." The execution 
 was extremely good. The work is interesting, careful, 
 curious, and suggestive, but it leaves one cold. When I 
 come to reason out my impression I explain it in this way. 
 To subordinate man to things to annex the human voice, 
 as a mere supplement, to the orchestra is false in idea. 
 To make simple narrative out of dramatic material, is a. 
 derogation, a piece of levity. A Romeo and Juliet in 
 which there is no Romeo and no Juliet is an absurdity. 
 To substitute the inferior, the obscure, the vague, for the- 
 higher and the clear, is a challenge to common sense. It 
 is a violation of that natural hierarchy of things which is 
 never violated with impunity. The musician has put 
 together a series of symphonic pictures, without any inner 
 connection, a string of riddles, to which a prose text alone 
 supplies meaning and unity. The only intelligible voice- 
 which is allowed to appear in the work is that of Friar 
 Laurence: his sermon could not be expressed in chords, 
 and is therefore plainly sung. But the moral of a play is 
 not the play, and the play itself has been elbowed out by 
 recitative. 
 
 The musician of the present day, not being able to give 
 us what is beautiful, torments himself to give us what is 
 new. False originality, false grandeur, false genius! This 
 labored art is wholly antipathetic to me. Science simulat- 
 ing genius is but a form of quackery. 
 
 Berlioz as a critic is cleverness itself; as a musician he- 
 is learned, inventive, and ingenious, but he is trying to 
 achieve the greater when he cannot compass the lesser.
 
 SI AMIEL'S JO URNAL. 
 
 Thirty years ago, at Berlin, the same impression was left 
 upon me by his "Infancy of Christ," which I heard him 
 conduct himself. His art seems to me neither fruitful nor 
 wholesome; there is no true and solid beauty in it. 
 
 I ought to say, however, that the audience, which was 
 u fairly full one, seemed very well satisfied. 
 
 July 17, 1877. Yesterday I went through my La Fon- 
 taine, and noticed the omissions in him. He has neither 
 butterfly nor rose. He utilizes neither the crane, nor the 
 quail, nor the dromedary, nor the lizard. There is not a 
 single echo of chivalry in him. For him, the history of 
 France dates from Louis XIV. His geography only 
 ranges, in reality, over a few square miles, and touches 
 neither the Rhine nor the Loire, neither the mountains nor 
 the sea. He never invents his subjects, but indolently 
 takes them ready-made from elsewhere. But with all this 
 what an adorable writer, what a painter, what an observer, 
 what a humorist, what a story-teller! I am never tired 
 of reading him, though I know half his fables by heart. 
 In the matter of vocabulary, turns, tones, phrases, idioms, 
 his style is perhaps the richest of the great period, for it 
 combines, in the most skillful way, archaism and classic 
 finish, the Gallic and the French elements. Variety, 
 satire, finesse, feeling, movement, terseness, suavity, grace, 
 gayety, at times even nobleness, gravity, grandeur every- 
 thing is to be found in him. And then the happiness of 
 the epithets, the piquancy of the sayings, the felicity of 
 his rapid sketches and unforeseen audacities, and the unfor- 
 gettable sharpness of phrase ! His defects are eclipsed by 
 his immense variety of different aptitudes. 
 
 One has only to compare his " Woodcutter and Death " 
 with that of Boileau in order to estimate the enormous 
 difference between the artist and the critic who found fault 
 with his work. La Fontaine gives you a picture of the 
 poor peasant under the monarchy; Boileau shows you 
 nothing but a man perspiring under a heavy load. The 
 first is a historical witness, the second a mere academic 
 rhymer. From La Fontaine it is possible to reconstruct
 
 AM1KUS JOURNAL. 311 
 
 the whole society of his epoch, and the old Champenois 
 with his beasts remains the only Homer France has ever 
 possessed. He has as many portraits of men and women 
 as La Bruyere, and Moliere is not more humorous. 
 
 His weak side is his epicureanism, with its tinge of gross- 
 ness. This, no doubt, was what made Lamartine dislike 
 him. - The religious note is absent from his lyre; there is 
 nothing in him which shows any contact with Christianity, 
 ,any knowledge of the sublimer tragedies of the soul. Kind 
 'nature is his goddess, Horace his prophet, and Montaigne 
 his gospel. In other words, his horizon is that of the 
 Renaissance. This pagan island in the full Catholic 
 stream is very curious; the paganism of it is so perfectly 
 sincere and naive. But indeed, Reblais, Moliere, Saint 
 Evremond, are much more pagan than Voltaire. It is as 
 though, for the genuine Frenchman, Christianity was a 
 mere pose or costume something which has nothing to do 
 with the heart, with the real man, or his deeper nature. 
 This division of things is common in Italy too.- It is the 
 natural effect of political religions: the priest becomes 
 separated from the layman, the believer from the man, 
 worship from sincerity. 
 
 July 18, 1877. I have just come across a character in a 
 novel with a passion for synonyms, and I said to myself: 
 Take care that is your weakness too. In your search 
 for close and delicate expression, you run through the 
 whole gamut of synonyms,and your pen works too often in 
 series of three. Beware! Avoid mannerisms and tricks; 
 they are signs of weakness. Subject and occasion only 
 must govern the use of words. Procedure by single epithet 
 gives strength; the doubling of a word gives clearness* 
 because it supplies the two extremities of the series; the 
 trebling of it gives completeness by suggesting at once the 
 beginning, middle, and end of the idea; while a quadruple 
 phrase may enrich by force of enumeration. 
 
 Indecision being my principal defect, I am fond of a 
 plurality of phrases which are but so many successive 
 approximations and corrections. I am especially fond of
 
 315> AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 them in this journal, where I write as it comes. In serious 
 composition two is, on the whole, my category. But it 
 would be well to practice one's self in the use of the single 
 word of the shaft delivered promptly and once for all. 
 I should have indeed to cure myself of hesitation first. 
 I see too many ways of saying things; a more decided 
 mind hits on the right way at once. Singleness of phrase 
 implies courage, self-confidence, clear-sightedness. To 
 attain it there must be no doubting, and I am always 
 doubting. And yet 
 
 " Quiconque est loup agisse en loup; 
 C'est le plus certain de beaucoup." 
 
 I wonder whether I should gain anything by the attempt 
 to assume a character which is not mine. My wavering 
 manner, born of doubt and scruple, has at least the ad- 
 vantage of rendering all the different shades of my thought, 
 and of being sincere. If it were to become terse, affirma- 
 tive, resolute, would it not be a mere imitation? 
 
 A private journal, which is but a vehicle for meditation 
 and reverie, beats about the bush as it pleases without 
 being bound to make for any definite end. Conversation 
 with self is a gradual process of thought-clearing. Hence 
 all these synonyms, these waverings, these repetitions and 
 returns upon one's self. Affirmation may be brief; inquiry 
 takes time; and the line which thought follows is neces- 
 sarily an irregular one. 
 
 I am conscious indeed that at bottom there is but one 
 right expression; * but in order to find it I wish to make 
 my choice among all that are like it; and my mind 
 instinctively goes through a series of verbal modulations in 
 
 * Compare La Bruyere: 
 
 " Entre toutes les differentes expressions qui peuvent rendre une 
 seule de nos pensees il n'y en a qu'une qui soit la bonne; on ne la 
 rencontre pas toujours en parlant ou en ecrivant: il est vray nean- 
 moins qu'elle existe, que tout ce qui ne 1'est point est foible, 
 et ne satisfait point un homme d'esprit qui veut se faire 
 entendre."
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 31$ 
 
 search of thac shade which may most accurately render the 
 idea. Or sometimes it is the idea itself which has to be 
 turned over and over, that I may know it and apprehend 
 it better. I think, pen in hand; it is like the disentan- 
 glement, the winding-off of a skein. Evidently the corre- 
 sponding form of style cannot' have the qualities which 
 belong to thought which is already sure of itself, and only 
 seeks to communicate itself to others. The function of 
 the private journal is one of observation, experiment, 
 analysis, contemplation; that of the essay or article is to 
 provoke reflection ; that of the book is to demonstrate. 
 
 July 21, 1877. A superb night a starry sky Jupiter 
 and Phoebe holding converse before my windows. Grandiose 
 effects of light and shade over the courtyard. A sonata rose 
 from the black gulf of shadow like a repentant prayer 
 wafted from purgatory. The picturesque was lost in poetry, 
 and admiration in feeling. 
 
 July 30, 1877. . . makes a very true remark about 
 Eenan, a propos of the volume of "Les Evangiles." He 
 brings out the contradiction between the literary taste of 
 the artist, which is delicate, individual, and true, and the 
 opinions of the critic, which are borrowed, old-fashioned 
 and wavering. This hesitancy of choice between the 
 beautiful and the true, between poetry and prose, between 
 art and learning, is, in fact, characteristic. Renan has a 
 keen love for science, but he has a still keener love for 
 good writing, and, if necessary, he will sacrifice the exact 
 phrase to the beautiful phrase. Science is his material 
 rather than his object; his object is style . A fine passage 
 is ten times more precious in his eyes than the discovery of 
 a fact or the rectification of a date. And on this point I 
 am very much with him, for a beautiful piece of writing 
 is beautiful by virtue of a kind of truth which is truer 
 than any mere record of authentic foots. Eousseau also 
 thought the same. A chronicler may be able to correct 
 Tacitus, but Tacitus survives all the chroniclers. I know 
 well that the aesthetic temptation is the French tempta- 
 tion; I have often bewailed it, and yetj if I desired any-
 
 314 AMIKL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 thing, it would be to be a writer, a great writer. To 
 leave a monument behind, aere perennius, an imper- 
 ishable work which might stir the thoughts, the feelings, 
 the dreams of men, generation after generation this is the 
 only glory which I could wish for, if I were not weaned 
 even from this wish also. -A book would be my ambition, 
 if ambition were not vanity and vanity of vanities. 
 
 August 11, 1877. The growing triumph of Darwinism 
 that is to say of materialism, or of force threatens the 
 conception of justice. But justice will have its turn. 
 The higher human law cannot be the offspring of animality. 
 Justice is the right to the maximum of individual independ- 
 ence compatible with the same liberty for others; in other 
 words, it is respect for man, for the immature, the small, 
 the feeble ; it is the guarantee of those human collectivities, 
 associations, states, nationalities those voluntary or invol- 
 untary unions the object of which is to increase the sun? 
 of happiness, and to satisfy the aspiration of the indi- 
 vidual. That some should make use of others for their 
 own purposes is an injury to justice. The right of the 
 stronger is not a right, but a simple fact, which obtains 
 only so long as there is neither protest nor resistance. It 
 is like cold, darkness, weight, which tyrannize over man 
 until he has invented artificial warmth, artificial light, 
 and machinery. Human industry is throughout an eman- 
 cipation from brute nature, and the advances made by 
 justice are in the same way a series of rebuffs inflicted 
 upon the tyranny of the stronger. As the medical art 
 consists in the conquest of disease, so goodness consists in 
 the conquest of the blind ferocities and untamed appetites 
 of the human animal. I see the same law throughout 
 increasing emancipation of the individual, a continuous 
 ascent of being toward life, happiness, justice, and wisdom. 
 Greed and gluttony are the starting-point, intelligence and 
 generosity the goal. 
 
 August 21, 1877. (Batlis of Ems). In the salon there 
 has been a performance in chorus of " Lorelei " and other 
 popular airs. What in our country is only done for wor-
 
 AMIKL'8 JOURNAL. 315 
 
 ship is done also in Germany for poetry and music. Voices 
 blend together; art shares the privilege of religion. It is a 
 trait which is neither French nor English, nor, I think, 
 Italian. The spirit of artistic devotion, of impersonal 
 combination, of common, harmonious, disinterested action, 
 is specially German; it makes a welcome balance to cer- 
 tain clumsy and prosaic elements in the race. 
 
 Later. Perhaps the craving for independence of thought 
 the tendency to go back to first principles is really 
 proper to the Germanic mind only. The Slavs and the 
 Latins are governed rather by the collective wisdom of the 
 community, by tradition, usage, prejudice, fashion; or, if 
 they break through these, they are like slaves in revolt, 
 without any real living apprehension of the law inherent 
 in things the true law, which is neither written, nor 
 arbitrary, nor imposed. The German wishes to get at 
 nature; the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Kussian, stop 
 at conventions. The root of the problem is in the ques- 
 tion of the relations between God and the world. Imma- 
 nence or transcendence that, step by step, decides the 
 meaning of everything else. If the mind is radically exter- 
 nal to things, it is not called upon to conform to them. 
 If the mind is destitute of native truth, it must get its 
 truth from outside, by revelations. And so you get 
 thought despising nature, and in bondage to the church 
 so you have the Latin world ! 
 
 November 6, 1877. (Geneva). We talk of love many 
 years before we know anything about it, and we think we 
 know it because we talk of it, or because we repeat what 
 other people say of it, or what books tell us about it. So 
 that there are ignorances of different degrees, and degrees 
 of knowledge which are quite deceptive. One of the 
 worst plagues of society is this thoughtless inexhaustible 
 verbosity, this careless use of words, this pretense of 
 knowing a thing because we talk about it these counter- 
 feits of belief, thought, love, or earnestness, which all the 
 while are mere babble. The worst of it is, that as self-love 
 is behind the babble, these ignorances of society are in
 
 316 AMIEL'8 JOURNAL. 
 
 general ferociously affirmative ; chatter mistakes itself f 01 
 opinion, prejudice poses as principle. Parrots behave as 
 though they were thinking beings; imitations give them- 
 selves out as originals; and politeness demands the accept- 
 ance of the convention. It is very wearisome. 
 
 Language is the vehicle of this confusion, the instru- 
 ment of this unconsicous fraud, and all evils of the kind 
 are enormously increased by universal education, by the 
 periodical press, and by all the other processes of vulgariza- 
 tion in use at the present time. Every one deals in paper 
 money; few have ever handled gold. We live on symbols, 
 and even, on the symbols of symbols; we have never 
 grasped or verified things for ourselves; we judge every- 
 thing, and we know nothing. 
 
 How seldom we meet with originality, individuality, 
 sincerity, nowadays! with men who are worth the trouble 
 of listening to! The true self in the majority is lost in the 
 borrowed self. How few are anything else than a bundle 
 of inclinations anything more than animals whose lan- 
 guage and whose gait alone recall to us the highest rank 
 m nature ! 
 
 The immense majority of our species are candidates for 
 humanity, and nothing more. Virtually we are men ; we 
 might be, we ought to be, men ; but practically we do not 
 succeed in realizing the type of our race. Semblances and 
 counterfeits of men fill up the habitable earth, people the 
 islands and the continents, the country and the town. If 
 we wish to respect men we must forget what they are, and 
 think of the ideal which they carry hidden within them, 
 of the just man and the noble, the man of intelligence and 
 goodness, inspiration and creative force, who is loyal and 
 true, faithful and trustworthy, of the higher man, in 
 short, and that divine thing we call a soul. The only men 
 who deserve the name are 'the heroes, the geniuses, the 
 saints, the harmonious, puissant, and perfect samples of 
 the race. 
 
 Very few individuals deserve to be listened to, but all 
 deserve that our curiosity with regard to them should be a
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 317 
 
 pitiful curiosity that the insight AVG bring to bear on them 
 should be charged with humility. Are we not all ship- 
 wrecked, diseased, condemned to death? Let each work 
 out his own salvation, and blame no one but himself; so 
 the lot of all will be bettered. Whatever impatience we 
 may feel toward our neighbor, and whatever indignation 
 our race may rouse in us, we are chained one to another, 
 and, companions in labor and misfortune, have everything 
 to lose by mutual recrimination and reproach. Let us be 
 silent as to each other's weakness, helpful, tolerant, nay, 
 tender toward each other! Or, if we cannot feel tender- 
 ness, may we at least feel pity ! May we put away from us 
 the satire which scourges and the anger which brands; the 
 oil and wine of the good Samaritan are of more avail. We 
 may make the ideal a reason for contempt; but it is more 
 beautiful to make it a reason for tenderness. 
 
 December 9, 1877. The modern haunters of Parnassus* 
 carve urns of agate and of onyx, but inside the urns what 
 is there? ashes. Their work lacks feeling, seriousness, 
 sincerity, and pathos in a word, soul and moral life. I 
 cannot bring myself to sympathize with such a way of 
 understanding poetry. The talent shown is astonishing, 
 but stuff and matter are wanting. It is an effort of the 
 imagination to stand alone a substitute for everything 
 else. We find metaphors, rhymes, music, color, but not 
 man, not humanity. Poetry of this factitious kind may 
 beguile one at twenty, but what can one make of it at 
 fifty? It reminds me of Pergamos, of Alexandria, of all 
 the epochs of decadence when beauty of form hid poverty 
 of thought and exhaustion of feeling. I strongly share 
 the repugnance which this poetical school arouses in simple 
 people. It is as though it only cared to please the world- 
 
 * Amiel's expression is Les Parnassieus, an old name revived, 
 which nowadays describes the younger school of French poetry 
 represented by such names as Theophile Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, 
 Theodore de Bauville, and Baudelaire. The modern use of the 
 word dates from the publication of " La Parnasse Contemporain " 
 (Lemerre, 1866).
 
 318 A MIEL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 worn, the ovei -subtle, the corrupted, while it ignores all 
 normal healthy life, virtuous habits, pure affections, steady 
 labor, honesty, and duty. It is an affectation, and because 
 it is an affectation the school is struck with sterility. 
 The reader desires in the poet something better than a 
 juggler in rhyme, or a conjurer in verse; he looks to find 
 in him a painter of life, a being who thinks, loves, and has 
 a conscience, who feels passion and repentance. 
 
 Composition is a process of combination, in which 
 thought puts together complementary truths, and talent 
 fuses into harmony the most contrary qualities of style. 
 
 So that there is no composition without effort, without 
 pain even, as in all bringing forth. The reward is the 
 giving birth to something living something, that is to 
 say, which, by a kind of magic, makes a living unity out 
 of such opposed attributes as orderliness and spontaneity, 
 thought and imagination, solidity and charm. 
 
 The true critic strives for a clear vision of things as they 
 are for justice and fairness; his effort is to get free from 
 himself, so that he may in no way disfigure that which he 
 wishes to understand or reproduce. His superiority to 
 the common herd lies in this effort, even when its success 
 is only partial. He distrusts his own senses, he sifts his 
 own impressions, by returning upon them from different 
 sides and at different times, by comparing, moderating, 
 shading, distinguishing, and so endeavoring to approach 
 more and more nearly to the formula which represents the 
 maximum of truth. 
 
 Is it not the sad natures who are most tolerant of gayety? 
 They know that gayety means impulse and vigor, that 
 generally speaking it is disguised kindliness, and that if it 
 were a mere affair of temperament and mood, still it is a 
 blessing. 
 
 The art which is grand and yet simple is that which pre- 
 supposes the greatest elevation both in artist and in public.
 
 AMIEDS JOURNA.^. 319 
 
 How much folly is compatible with ultimate wisdom and 
 prudence? It is difficult to say. The cleverest folk are 
 those who discover soonest how to utilize their neighbor's 
 experience, and so get rid in good time of their natural 
 presumption. 
 
 We must try to grasp the spirit of things, to see cor- i 
 rectly, to speak to the point, to give practicable advice, to 
 act on the spot, to arrive at the proper moment, to stop in 
 time. Tact, measure, occasion all these deserve our 
 cultivation and respect. 
 
 April 22, 1878. Letter from my cousin Julia. These 
 kind old relations find it very difficult to understand a 
 man's life, especially a student's life. The hermits of 
 reverie are scared by the busy world, and feel themselves 
 out of place in action. But after all, we do not change at 
 seventy, and a good, pious old lady, half-blind and living 
 in a village, can no longer extend her point of view, nor 
 form any idea of existences which have no relation with 
 her own. 
 
 What is the link by which these souls, shut in and 
 encompassed as they are by the details of daily life, lay 
 hold on the ideal? The link of religious aspiration. Faith 
 is the plank which saves them. They know the 
 meaning of the higher life; their soul is athirst for 
 heaven. Their opinions are defective, but their moral 
 experience is great; their intellect is full of darkness 
 but their souls is full of light. We scarcely know how to 
 talk to them about the things of earth, but they are ripe 
 and mature in the things of the heart. If they cannot 
 understand us, it is for us to make advances to them, to 
 speak their language, to enter into their range of ideas, 
 their modes of feeling. We must approach them on their 
 noble side, and, that we may show them the more respect, 
 induce them to open to us the casket of their most 
 treasured thoughts. There is always some grain of gold at 
 the bottom of every honorable old age. Let it be our busi 
 ness to give it an opportunity of showing itself to affection- 
 ate eyes.
 
 320 A MIEL'S JO URNAL. 
 
 May 10, 1878. I have just come back from a solitary 
 walk. I heard nightingales, saw white lilac and orchard 
 trees in bloom. My heart is full of impressions showered 
 upon it by the chaffinches, the golden orioles, the grass- 
 hoppers, the hawthorns, and the primroses. A dull, gray, 
 fleecy sky brooded with a certain melancholy over the nuptial 
 
 ' splendors of vegetation. Many painful memories stirred 
 afresh in me; at Pre PEv6que, at Jargonnant, at "Viller- 
 euse, a score of phantoms phantoms of youth rose with 
 sad eyes to greet me. The walls had changed, and roads 
 which were once shady and dreamy I found now waste and 
 treeless. But at the first trills of the nightingale a flood 
 of tender feeling filled my heart. I felt myself soothed, 
 grateful, melted; a mood of serenity and contemplation 
 took possession of me. A certain little path, a very king- 
 dom of green, with fountain, thickets, gentle ups and 
 downs, and an abundance of singing-birds, delighted me, 
 and did me inexpressible good. Its peaceful remoteness 
 brought back the bloom of feeling. I had need of it. 
 
 May 19, 1878. Criticism is above all a gift, an intui- 
 tion, a matter of tact and flair; it cannot be taught or 
 demonstrated it is an art. Critical genius means an apti- 
 tude for discerning truth under appearances or in disguises 
 which conceal it; for discovering it in spite of the errors of 
 testimony, the frauds of tradition, the dust of time, the 
 loss or alteration of texts. It is the sagacity of the hunter 
 whom nothing deceives for long, and whom no ruse can 
 throw off the trail. It is the talent of the Juge d'lnstruc- 
 
 ' tion, who knows how to interrogate circumstances, and to 
 extract an unknown secret from a thousand falsehoods. 
 The true critic can understand everything, but he will be 
 the dupe of nothing, and to no convention will he sacrifice 
 his duty, which is to find out and proclaim truth. Com- 
 petent learning, general cultivation, absolute probity, 
 accuracy of general view, human sympathy and technical 
 capacity how many things are necessary to the critic, 
 without reckoning grace, delicacy, savoir vivre, and the 
 gift of happy phrase-making !
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 321 
 
 July 26, 1878. Every morning I wake up with the same 
 sense of vain struggle against a mountain tide which js 
 about to overwhelm me. I shall die by suffocation, and 
 the suffocation has begun; the progress it has already 
 made stimulates it to go on. 
 
 How can one make any plans when every day brings 
 with it some fresh misery? I cannot even decide on a line 
 of action in a situation so full of confusion and uncertainty 
 in which I look forward to the worst, while yet all is 
 doubtful. Have I still a few years before me or only a 
 few months? Will death be slow or will it come upon me 
 as a sudden catastrophe? How am I to bear the days as 
 they come? how am I to fill them? How am I to die with 
 calmness and dignity? I know not. Everything I do for 
 the first time I do badly; but here everything is new; 
 there can be no help from experience; the end must be a 
 chance! How mortifying for one who has set so great a 
 price upon independence to depend upon a thousand 
 unforeseen contingencies ! He knows not how he will act 
 or what he will become; he would fain speak of these 
 things with a friend of good sense and good counsel but 
 who? He dares not alarm the affections which are most 
 his own, and he is almost sure that any others would try 
 to distract his attention, and would refuse to see the posi- 
 tion as it is. 
 
 And while I wait (wait for what? certainty?) the weeks 
 flow by like water, and strength wastes away like a smok- 
 ing candle. . . . 
 
 Is one free to let one's self drift into death without resist- 
 ance? Is self-preservation a duty? Do we owe it to those 
 who love us to prolom; this desperate struggle to its utmost 
 limit? I think so, but it is one fetter the more. For we 
 must then feign a hope which we do not feel, and hide the 
 absolute discouragement of which the heart is really full. 
 Well, why not? Those who succumb are bound in gener- 
 osity not to cool the ardor of those who are still battling, 
 still enjoying. 
 
 Two parallel roads lead to the same result; meditation
 
 322 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 paralyzes me, physiology condemns me. My soul is dying, 
 my body is dying. In every direction the end is closing 
 upon me. My own melancholy anticipates and endorses 
 the medical judgment which says, " Your journey is done." 
 The two verdicts point to the same result that I have no 
 longer a future. And yet there is a side of me which 
 says. "Absurd!" which is incredulous, and inclined to 
 regard it all as a bad dream. In vain the reason asserts it; 
 the mind's inward assent is still refused. Another contra- 
 diction 1 
 
 I have not the strength to hope, and I have not tha 
 strength to submit. I believe no longer, and I believe 
 still. I feel that I am dying, and yet I cannot realize that 
 I am dying. Is it madness already? No, it is human 
 nature taken in the act; it is life itself which is a contra- 
 diction, for life means an incessant death and a daily resur- 
 rection; it affirms and it denies, it destroys and constructs, 
 it gathers and scatters, it humbles and exalts at the same 
 time. To live is to die partially to feel one's self in the 
 heart of a whirlwind of opposing forces to be an enigma. 
 
 If the invisible type molded by these two contradictory 
 currents if this form which presides over all my changes 
 of being has itself general and original value, what does 
 it matter whether it carries on the game a few months or 
 years longer, or not? It has done what it had to do, it 
 h*.s represented a certain unique combination, one particu- 
 lar expression of the race. These types are shadows 
 manes. Century after century employs itself in fashioning 
 them. Glory fame is the proof that one type has 
 seemed to the other types newer, rarer, and more beautiful 
 than the rest. The common types are souls too, only they 
 have no interest except for the Creator, and for a small 
 number of individuals. 
 
 To feel one's own fragility is well, but to be indifferent 
 to it is better. To take the measure of one's own misery 
 is profitable, but to understand its raison d'etre is still 
 more profitable. To mourn for one's self is a last sign of 
 vanity; we ought only to regret that which has real value,
 
 AMI KL'S JOURNAL. 323 
 
 and to regret one's self, is to furnish involuntary evidence 
 that one had attached importance to one's self. At the 
 same time it is a proof of ignorance of our true worth and 
 function. It is not necessary to live, but it is necessary to 
 preserve one's type unharmed, to remain faithful to one's 
 idea, to protect one's monad against alteration and degra 
 dation. 
 
 November 7, 1878. To-day we have been talking of 
 realism in painting, and, in connection with it, of that poet- 
 ical and artistic illusion which does not aim at being con- 
 founded with reality itself. Eealism wishes to entrap sen- 
 sation ; the object of true art is only to charm the imagina- 
 tion, not to deceive the eye. When we see a good portrait 
 we say, "It is alive!" in other words, our imagination 
 lends it life. On the other hand, a wax figure produces a 
 sort of terror in us; its frozen life-likeness makes a death- 
 like impression on us, and we say, "It is a ghost! " In the 
 one case we see what is lacking, and demand it; in the other 
 we see what is given us, and we give on our side. Art, 
 then, addresses itself to the imagination; everything that 
 appeals to sensation only is below art, almost outside art. 
 A work of art ought to set the poetical faculty in us to 
 work, it ought to stir us to imagine, to complete our per- 
 ception of a thing. And we can only do this when the 
 artist leads the way. Mere copyist's painting, realistic 
 reproduction, pure imitation, leave us cold because their 
 author is a machine, a mirror, an iodized plate, and not 
 a soul. 
 
 Art lives by appearances, but these appearances are 
 spiritual visions, fixed dreams. Poetry represents to us 
 nature become con-substantial with the soul, because in it 
 nature is only a reminiscence touched with emotion, an 
 image vibrating with our own life, a form without weight 
 in short, a mode of the soul. The poetry which is most 
 real and objective is the expression of a soul which throws 
 itself into things, and forgets itself in their presence more 
 readily than others; but still, it is the expression of the 
 soul, and hence what we call style. Style may be only col-
 
 3-24 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 lective, hieratic, national, so long as the artist is still the 
 interpreter of the community; it tends to become personal 
 in proportion as society makes room for individuality and 
 favors its expansion. 
 
 There is a way of killing truth hy truths, tinder the 
 pretense that we want to study it more in detail we pul- 
 verize the statue it is an absurdity of which our pedantry 
 is constantly guilty. Those who can only see the fragments 
 of a thing are to me esprits faux, just as much as those 
 who disfigure the fragments. The good critic ought to be 
 master of the three capacities, the three modes of seeing 
 men and things he should be able simultaneously to see 
 them as they are, as they might be, and as they ought 
 to be. 
 
 Modern culture is a delicate electuary made up of varied 
 savors and subtle colors, which can be more easily felt 
 than measured or defined. Its very superiority consists in 
 the complexity, the association of contraries, the skillful 
 combination it implies. The man of to-day, fashioned by 
 the historical and geographical influences of twenty coun- 
 tries and of thirty centuries, trained and modified by all 
 the sciences and all the arts, the supple recipient of all 
 literatures, is an entirely new product. He finds affinities, 
 relationships, analogies everywhere, but at the same time 
 he condenses and sums up what is elsewhere scattered. He 
 is like the smile of La Gioconda, which seems to reveal a 
 soul to the spectator only to leave him the more certainly 
 tinder a final impression of mystery, so many different 
 things are expressed in it at once. 
 
 To understand things we must have been once in them 
 and then have come out of them; so that first there must 
 be captivity and then deliverance, illusion followed by 
 disillusion, enthusiasm by disappointment. He who is still 
 under the spell, and he who has never felt the spell, are 
 equally incompetent. We only know well what we have
 
 A MTKL'S JO URNAL. 325 
 
 first believed, then judged. To understand we must be 
 free, yet not have been always free. The same truth holds, 
 whether it is a question of love, of art, of religion, or of 
 patriotism. Sympathy is a first condition of criticism; 
 reason and justice presuppose, at their origin, emotion. 
 
 What is an intelligent man? A man who enters with 
 case and completeness into the spirit of things and the 
 intention of persons, and who arrives at an end by the 
 shortest route. Lucidity and suppleness of thought, 
 critical delicacy and inventive resource, these are his 
 attributes. 
 
 Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into 
 flour springs and germinates no more. 
 
 January 3, 1879. Letter from . This kind friend 
 
 of mine has no pity. ... I have been trying to quiet 
 his over-delicate susceptibilities. . . It is difficult to 
 write perfectly easy letters when one finds them studied 
 with a magnifying glass, and treated like monumental 
 inscriptions, in which each character has been deliberately 
 engraved with a view to an eternity of life. Such dispro- 
 portion between the word and its commentary, between 
 the playfulness of the writer and the analytical temper of 
 the reader, is not favorable to ease of style. One dares not 
 be one's natural self with these serious folk who attach 
 importance to everything; it is difficult to write open- 
 heartedly if one must weigh every phrase and every word. 
 
 Esprit means taking things in the sense which they are 
 meant to have, entering into the tone of other people, being 
 able to place one's self on the required level; esprit is that 
 just and accurate sense which divines,appreciates,and weighs 
 quickly, lightly, and well. The mind must have its play, 
 the Muse is winged the Greeks knew it, and Socrates. 
 
 January 13, 1879. It is impossible for me to remember 
 what letters I wrote yesterday, A single night digs a gulf 
 between the self of yesterday and the self of to-day. My
 
 326 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 life is without unity of action, because my actions them- 
 selves are escaping from the control of memory. My men- 
 tal power, occupied in gaining possession of itself under 
 the form of consciousness, seems to be letting go its hold 
 on all that generally peoples the understanding, as the 
 glacier throws off the stones and fragments fallen into its 
 crevasses, that it may remain pure crystal. The philosophic 
 mind is loth to overweight itself with too many material 
 facts or trivial memories. Thought clings only to thought 
 that is to say, to itself, to the psychological process. 
 The mind's only ambition is for an enriched experience. 
 It finds its pleasure in studying the play of its own facul- 
 ties, and the study passes easily into an aptitude and habit. 
 Keflection becomes nothing more than an apparatus for 
 the registration of the impressions, emotions, and ideas 
 which pass across the mind. The whole moulting process 
 is carried on so energetically that the mind is not only 
 unclothed, but stripped of itself, and, so to speak, 
 de-substantiated. The wheel turns so quickly that it 
 melts around the mathematical axis, which alone remainc 
 cold because it is impalpable, and has no thickness. All 
 this is natural enough, but very dangerous. 
 
 So long as one is numbered among the living so long, 
 that is to say, as one is still plunged in the world of men, 
 a sharer of their interests, conflicts, vanities, passions, and 
 duties, one is bound to deny one's self this subtle state of 
 consciousness ; one must consent to be a separate individual, 
 having one's special name, position, age, and sphere of 
 activity. In spite of all the temptations of impersonality, 
 one must resume the position of a being imprisoned within 
 certain limits of time and space, an individual with special 
 surroundings, friends, enemies, profession, country, bound 
 to house and feed himself, to make up his accounts and 
 look afcer his affairs; in short, one must behave like all 
 tne world. There are days when all these details seem to 
 me a dream when I wonder at the desk under my hand, 
 at my body itself when I ask myself if there is a street 
 before my house, and if all this geographical and topo-
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 327 
 
 graphical phantasmagoria is indeed real. Time and space 
 become then mere specks; I become a sharer in a purely 
 spiritual existence ; I see myself sub specie ceternitatis. 
 
 Is not mind simply that which enables us to merge 
 finite reality in the infinite possibility around it? Or, to 
 put it differently, is not mind the universal virtuality, the 
 universe latent? If so, its zero would be the germ of the 
 infinite, which is expressed mathematically by the double 
 zero (00). 
 
 Deduction: that the mind may experience the infinite 
 in itself; that in the human individual there arises some- 
 times the divine spark which reveals to him the existence 
 of the original, fundamental, principal Being, within 
 which all is contained like a series within its generating 
 formula. The universe is but a radiation of mind; and 
 the radiations of the Divine mind are for us more than 
 appearances; they have a reality parallel to our own. The 
 radiations of our mind are imperfect reflections from the 
 great show of fireworks set in motion by Brahma, and 
 great art is great only because of its conformities with the 
 Divine order with that which is. 
 
 Ideal conceptions are the mind's anticipation of such an 
 order. The mind is capable of them because it is mind, 
 and, as such, perceives the Eternal. The real, on the 
 contrary, is fragmentary and passing. Law alone is eternal. 
 The ideal is then the imperishable hope of something better 
 the mind's involuntary protest against the present, the 
 leaven of the future working in it. It is the supernatural 
 in us, or rather the super-animal, and the ground of human 
 progress. He who has no ideal contents himself with what 
 is; he has no quarrel with facts, which for him are identi- 
 cal with the just, the good, and the beautiful. 
 
 But why is the divine radiation imperfect? Because it 
 is still going on. Our planet, for example, is in the mid- 
 course of its experience. Its flora and fauna are still chang- 
 ing. The evolution of humanity is nearer its origin than 
 its close. The complete spiritualization of the animal 
 element in nature seems to be singularly difficult, and it is
 
 328 AMIKL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 the task of our species. Its performance is hindered b^ 
 error, evil, selfishness, and death, without counting telluric 
 catastrophes. The edifice of a common happiness, a com- 
 mon science of morality and justice, is sketched, but only 
 sketched. A thousand retarding and perturbing causes 
 hinder this giant's task, in which nations, races, and con- 
 tinents take part. At the present moment humanity is 
 not yet constituted as a physical unity, and its general 
 ducation is not yet begun. All our attempts at order as 
 yet have been local crystallizations. Now, indeed, the 
 different possibilities are beginning to combine (union of 
 posts and telegraphs, universal exhibitions, voyages round 
 the globes, international congresses, etc.). Science and 
 common interest are binding together the great fractions 
 of humanity, which religion and language have kept 
 apart. A year in which there has been talk of a network 
 of African railways, running from the coast to the center 
 and bringing the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the 
 Indian Ocean into communication with each other such 
 a year is enough to mark a new epoch. The fantastic 
 has become the conceivable, the possible tends to become 
 the real; the earth becomes the garden of man. Man's 
 chief problem is how to make the cohabitation of the 
 individuals of his species possible; how, that is to say, to 
 secure for each successive epoch the law, the order, the 
 equilibrium which befits it. Division of labor allows him 
 to explore in every direction at once; industry, science, 
 art, law, education, morals, religion, politics, and economi- 
 3al relations all are in process of birth. 
 
 Thus everything may be brought back to zero by the 
 mind, but it is a fruitful zero a zero which contains the 
 universe and, in particular, humanity. The mind has no 
 more difficulty in tracking the real within the innumerable 
 than in apprehending infinite possibility. 00 may issue 
 from 0, or may return to it. 
 
 January 19, 1879. Charity goodness places a volun- 
 tary curb on acuteness of perception; \t screens and 
 softens the rays of a too vivid insight; it refuses to see too
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 329 
 
 clearly the ugliness and misery of the great intellectual 
 hospital around it. True goodness is loth to recognize 
 any privilege in itself; it prefers to be humble and chari- 
 table; it tries not to see what stares it in the face that is 
 to say, the imperfections, infirmities, and errors of human- 
 kind ; its pity puts on airs of approval and encouragement. 
 It triumphs over its own repulsions that it may help and 
 raise. 
 
 It has often been remarked that Vinet praised weak 
 things. If so, it was not from any failure in his own 
 critical sense; it was from charity. "Quench not the 
 smoking flax," to which I add, "Never give unnecessary 
 pain. The cricket is not the nightingale; why tell him 
 so? Throw yourself into the mind of the cricket the 
 process is newer and more ingenious; and it is what 
 charity commands. 
 
 Intellect is aristocratic, charity is democratic. In a 
 democracy the general equality of pretensions, combined 
 with the inequality of merits, creates considerable practical 
 difficulty; some get out of it by making their prudence a 
 muzzle on their frankness; others, by using kindness as a 
 corrective of perspicacity. On the whole, kindness is 
 safer than reserve; it inflicts no wound, and kills nothing. 
 
 Charity is generous; it runs a risk willingly, and 'in 
 spite of a hundred successive experiences, it thinks no evil 
 at the hundred-and-first. We cannot be at the same time 
 kind and wary, nor can we serve two masters love and 
 selfishness. We must be knowingly rash, that we may not 
 be like the clever ones of the world, who never forget their 
 own interests. We must be able to submit to being 
 deceived; it is the sacrifice which interest and self-love 
 owe to conscience. The claims of the soul must be satis- 
 fied first if we are to be the children of God. 
 
 Was it not Bossuet who said, " It is only the great souls 
 who know all the grandeur there is in charity?" 
 
 January 21, 1879. At first religion holds the place of 
 science and philosophy ; afterward she has to learn to con/ 
 fine herself to her own domain which is in the inmr
 
 330 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 depths of conscience, in the secret recesses of the 
 where life communes with the Divine will and the universal 
 order. Piety is the daily renewing of the ideal, the steady- 
 ing of our inner being, agitated, troubled, and embittered 
 by the common accidents of existence. Prayer is the 
 spiritual balm, the precious cordial which restores to us 
 peace and courage. It reminds us of pardon and of duty. 
 It says to us, "Thou art loved love; thou hast received 
 give; thou must die labor while thou canst; overcome 
 anger by kindness; overcome evil with good. What does 
 the blindness of opinion matter, or misunderstanding, or 
 ingratitude? Thou art neither bound to follow the com- 
 mon example nor to succeed. Fais ce que dois, advienne 
 que pourra. Thou hast a witness in thy conscience; and 
 thy conscience is God speaking to thee! " 
 
 March 3, 1879. The sensible politician is governed by 
 consideration.! of social utility, the public good, the greatest 
 attainable good ; the political windbag starts from the idea 
 of the rights of the individual abstract rights, of which 
 the extent is affirmed, not demonstrated, for the political 
 right of the individual is precisely what is in question. 
 The revolutionary school always forgets that right apart 
 from duty is a compass with one leg. The notion of right 
 inflates the individual fills him with thoughts of self and 
 of what others owe him, while it ignores the other side of 
 \che question, and extinguishes his capacity for devoting 
 himself to a common cause. The state becomes a shop 
 with self-interest for a principle or rather an arena, in 
 which every combatant fights for his own hand only. In 
 either case self is the motive power. 
 
 Church and state ought to provide two opposite careers 
 for the individual; in the state he should be called on to 
 give proof of merit that is to say, he should earn his 
 rights by services rendered; in the church his task should 
 be to do good while suppressing his own merits, by a volun- 
 tary act of humility. 
 
 Extreme individualism dissipates the moral substance of 
 the individual. It leads him to subordinate everything to
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 331 
 
 himself, and to think the world, society, the state, made 
 for him. I am chilled by its lack of gratitude, of the 
 spirit of deference, of the instinct of solidarity. It is an 
 ideal without beauty and without grandeur. 
 
 But, as a consolation, the modern ze?,l for equality 
 makes a counterpoise for Darwinism, just as one wolf holds 
 another wolf in check. Neither, indeed, acknowledges 
 the claim of duty. The fanatic for equality affirms his 
 right not to be eaten by his neighbor; the Darwinian 
 states the fact that the big devour the little, and adds so 
 much the better. Neither the one nor the other has a word 
 to say of love, of eternity, of kindness, of piety, of volun- 
 tary submission, of self-surrender. 
 
 All forces and all principles are brought into action at 
 once in this world. The result is, on the whole, good. 
 But the struggle itself is hateful because it dislocates truth 
 and shows us nothing but error pitted against error, party 
 against party ; that is to say, mere halves and fragments of 
 being monsters against monsters. A nature in love with 
 beauty cannot reconcile itself to the sight; it longs for 
 harmony, for something else than perpetual dissonance. 
 The common condition of human society must indeed be 
 accepted; tumult, hatred, fraud, crime, the ferocity of 
 self-interest, the tenacity of prejudice, are perennial; but 
 the philosopher sighs over it; his heart is not in it; his 
 ambition is to see human history from a height; his ear is 
 set to catch the music of the eternal spheres. 
 
 March 15, 1879. I have been turrjng over "Les his- 
 tories de mon Parrain " by Stahl, and a few chapters of 
 " Nos Fils et nos Filles " by Legouve. These writers 
 press wit, grace, gayety, and charm into the service of 
 goodness; their desire is to show that virtue is not so dull 
 nor common sense so tiresome as people believe. They 
 are persuasive moralists, captivating story-tellers; they 
 rouse the appetite for good. This pretty manner of theirs, 
 however, has its dangers. A moral wrapped up in sugar 
 goes down certainly, but it may be feared that it only goes 
 down because of its sugar. The Sybarites of to-day will
 
 332 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 toierate a sermon which is delicate enough to flatter theii 
 literary sensuality; but it is their taste which is charmed, 
 not their conscience which is awakened; their principle 
 of conduct escapes untouched. 
 
 Amusement, instruction, morals, are distinct genres. 
 They may no doubt be mingled and combined, but if we 
 wish to obtain direct and simple effects, we shall do best 
 to keep them apart. The well-disposed child, besides, 
 does not like mixtures which have something of artifice 
 and deception in them. Duty claims obedience; study 
 requires application; for amusement, nothing is wanted 
 but good temper. To convert obedience and application 
 into means of amusement is to weaken the will and the 
 intelligence. These efforts to make virtue the fashion 
 are praiseworthy enough, but if they do honor to the 
 writers, on the other hand they prove the moral anaemia 
 of society. When the digestion is unspoiled, so much per- 
 suading is not necessary to give it a taste for bread. 
 
 May 22, 1879. (Ascension Day). Wonderful and delicious 
 weather. Soft, caressing sunlight the air a limpid blue 
 twitterings of birds; even the distant voices of the city 
 have something young and springlike in them. It is indeed 
 a new birth. The ascension of the Saviour of men is sym- 
 bolized by this expansion, this heavenward yearning of 
 nature. ... I feel myself born again; all the win- 
 dows of the soul are clear. Forms, lines, tints, reflections, 
 sounds, contrasts, and harmonies, the general play and 
 interchange of things it is all enchanting! The atmos- 
 phere is steeped in joy. May is in full beauty. 
 
 In my courtyard the ivy is green again, the chestnut 
 tree is full of leaf, the Persian lilac beside the little foun- 
 tain is flushed with red, and just about to flower; through 
 the wide openings to the right and left of the old College 
 of Calvin I see the Saleve above the trees of St. Antoine, 
 the Voiron above the hill of Cologny; while the three 
 flights of steps which, from landing to landing, lead 
 between two high walls from the Rue Verdaine to the 
 terrace of the Tranohees, recall to one's imagination some 
 old city of the south, a glimpse o Perugia or of Malaga.
 
 AMIEUS JOURNAL. 333 
 
 All the bells are ringing. It is the hour of worship. A 
 historical and religious impression mingles with the pictur- 
 esque, the musical, the poetical impressions of the scene. 
 All the peoples of Christendom all the churches scattered 
 over the globe are celebrating at this moment the glory 
 of the Crucified. 
 
 And what are those many nations doing who have other 
 prophets, and honor the Divinity in other ways? the 
 Jews, the Mussulmans, the Buddhists, the Vishnuists, the 
 Guebers? They have other sacred days, other rites, other 
 solemnities, other beliefs. But all have some religion, 
 some ideal end for life all aim at raising man above the 
 sorrows and smallnesses of the present, and of the indi- 
 vidual existence. All have faith in something greater 
 than themselves, all pray, all bow, all adore; all see beyond 
 nature, Spirit, and beyond evil, Good. All bear witness 
 to the Invisible. Here we have the link which binds all 
 peoples together. All men are equally creatures of sorrow 
 and desire, of hope and fear. All long to recover some- 
 lost harmony with the great order of things, and to feel 
 themselves approved and blessed by the Author of the uni- 
 verse. All know what suffering is, and yearn for happi- 
 ness. All know what sin is, and feel the need of pardon. 
 
 Christianity reduced to its original simplicity is the 
 reconciliation of the sinner with God, by means of the cer- 
 tainty that God loves in spite of everything, and that he 
 chastises because he loves. Christianity furnished a new 
 motive and a new strength for the achievement of moral 
 perfection. It made holiness attractive by giving to it the 
 air of filial gratitude. 
 
 June 28, 1879. Last lecture of the term and of the 
 academic year. I finished the exposition of modern 
 philosophy, and wound up my course with the precision I 
 wished. The circle has returned upon itself. In order 
 to do this I have divided my hour into minutes, calculated 
 my material, and counted every stitch and point. This, 
 However, is but a very small part of the professorial science. 
 It is a more difficult matter to divide one's whole material
 
 334 AMIKL'8 JO URN A L. 
 
 into a given number of lectures, to determine the right 
 proportions of the different parts, and the normal 3peed of 
 delivery to be attained. The ordinary lecturer may achieve 
 a series of complete seances the unity being the seance. 
 But a scientific course ought to aim at something more 
 &t a general unity of subject and of exposition. 
 
 Has this concise, substantial, closely-reasoned kind of 
 work been useful to my class? I cannot tell. Have my 
 students liked me this year? I am not sure, but I hope 
 BO. It seems to me they have. Only, if I have pleased 
 them, it cannot have been in any case more than a succe* 
 d'estime; I have never aimed at any oratorical success. 
 My only object is to light up for them a complicated and 
 difficult subject. I respect myself too much, and I respect 
 my class too much, to attempt rhetoric. My role is to 
 help them to understand. Scientific lecturing ought to 
 be, above all things, clear, instructive, well put together, 
 and convincing. A lecturer has nothing to do with pay- 
 ing court to the scholars, or with showing off the master; 
 his business is one of serious study and impersonal exposi- 
 tion. To yield anything on this point would seem to me 
 a piece of mean utilitarianism. I hate everything that 
 savors of cajoling and coaxing. All such ways are mere 
 attempts to throw dust in men's eyes, mere forms of 
 coquetry and stratagem. A professor is the priest of his 
 subject; he should do the honors of it gravely and with 
 dignity. 
 
 September 9, 1879. "Non-being is perfect. Being, im- 
 perfect : " this horrible sophism becomes beautiful only in 
 the Platonic system, because there Non-being is replaced 
 by the Idea, which is, and which is divine. 
 
 The ideal, the chimerical, the vacant, should not be 
 ^llowed to claim so great a superiority to the Real, which, 
 on its side, has the incomparable advantage of existing. 
 The Ideal kills enjoyment and content by disparaging the 
 present and actual. It is the voice which says No, like 
 Mephistopheles. No, you have not succeeded; no, your 
 work is "ot good; no, you are not happy; no, you shall
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 335 
 
 not find rest all that you see and all that you do is 
 insufficient, insignificant, overdone, badly done, imper- 
 fect. The thirst for the ideal is like the goad of Siva, which 
 only quickens life to hasten death. Incurable longing 
 that it is, it lies at the root both of individual suffering 
 and of the progress of the race. It destroys happiness in ' 
 the name of dignity. 
 
 The only positive good is order, the return therefore to 
 order and to a state of equilibrium. Thought without 
 action is an evil, and so is action without thought. The 
 ideal is a poison unless it be fused with the real, and the 
 real becomes corrupt without the perfume of the ideal. 
 Nothing is good singly wichout its complement and its 
 contrary. Self-examination is dangerous if it encroaches 
 upon self-devotion ; reverie is hurtful when it stupefies the 
 will ; gentleness is an evil when it lessens strength ; con- 
 templation is fatal when it destroys character. "Too 
 much" and "too little " sin equally against wisdom. Ex- 
 cess is one evil, apathy another. Duty may be defined as 
 energy tempered by moderation; happiness, as inclination 
 calmed and tempered by self-control. 
 
 Just as life is only lent us for a few years, but is not in- 
 herent in us, so the good which is in us is not our own. 
 It is not difficult to think of one's self in this detached 
 spirit. It only needs a little self-knowledge, a little intui- 
 tive preception of the ideal, a little religion. There is even 
 much sweetness in this conception that we are nothing of 
 ourselves, and that yet it is granted to us to summon each 
 other to life, joy, poetry and holiness. 
 
 Another application of the law of irony: Zeno, a fatalist 
 by theory, makes his disciples heroes; Epicurus, the up- 
 holder of liberty, makes his disciples languid and effemin- 
 ate. The ideal pursued is the decisive point; the stoical 
 ideal is duty, whereas the Epicureans make an ideal out of 
 an interest. Two tendencies, two systems of morals, two 
 worlds. In the same way the Jansenists, and before them 
 the great reformers, are for predestination, the Jesuits for 
 free-will and yet the first founded liberty, the second
 
 B36 AMI BUS JOURNAL 
 
 slavery of conscience. What matters then is not th 
 theoretical principle ; it is the secret tendency, the aspira- 
 tion, the aim, which is the essential thing. 
 
 At every epoch there lies, beyond the domain of what 
 man knows, the domain of the unknown, in which faith 
 has its dwelling. Faith has no proofs, but only itself, to 
 offer. It is born spontaneously in certain commanding 
 souls; it spreads its empire among the rest by imitation 
 and contagion. A great faith is but a great hope which 
 becomes certitude as we move farther and farther from the 
 founder of it; time and distance strengthen it, until at 
 last the passion for knowledge seizes upon it, questions, and 
 examines it. Then all which had once made its strengtli 
 becomes its weakness; the impossibility of verification, ex- 
 altation of feeling, distance. 
 
 At what age is our view clearest, our eye truest? Surelv 
 
 j * 
 
 in old age, before the infirmities come which weaken or 
 embitter. The ancients were right. The old man who is 
 ,at once sympathetic and disinterested, necessarily develops 
 the spirit of contemplation, and it is given to the spirit of 
 contemplation to see things most truly, because it alone 
 perceives them in their relative and proportional value. 
 
 January 2, 1880. A sense of rest, of deep quiet even. 
 Silence within and without. A quietly-burning fire. A 
 sense of comfort. The portrait of my mother seems to 
 smile upon me. I am not dazed or stupid, but only happy 
 in this peaceful morning. Whatever may be the charm of 
 emotion, I do not know whether it equals the sweetness of 
 those hours of silent meditation, in which we have a 
 glimpse and foretaste of the contemplative joys of paradise. 
 Desire and fear, sadness and care, are done away. Exist- 
 ence is reduced to the simplest form, the most ethereal 
 mode of being, that is, to pure self-consciousness. It is a 
 state of harmony, without tension and without disturb- 
 ance, the dominical state of the soul, perhaps the state 
 which awaits it beyond the grave. It is happiness as the
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 337 
 
 orientals understand it, the happiness of the anchorite, Avho 
 neither struggles nor wishes any more, but simply adores 
 and enjoys. It is difficult to find words in which to ex- 
 press this moral situation, for our languages can only 
 render the particular and localized vibrations of life; they 
 are incapable of expressing this motionless concentration, 
 this divine quietude, this state of the resting ocean, which 
 reflects the sky, and is master of its own profundities. 
 Things are then re-absorbed into their principles ; memories 
 are swallowed up in memory; the soul is only soul, and ia 
 no longer conscious of itself in its individuality and sepa- 
 rateness. It is something which feels the universal life, a 
 sensible atom of the Divine, of God. It no longer appro- 
 priates anything to itself, it is conscious of no void. Only 
 the Yogis and Soufis perhaps have known in its profund- 
 ity this humble and yet voluptuous state, which combines 
 the joys of being and of non-being, which is neither reflec- 
 tion nor will, which is above both the moral existence and 
 the intellectual existence, which is the return to unity, to 
 the pleroma, the vision of Plotinus and of Proclus 
 Nirvana in its most attractive form. 
 
 It is clear that the western nations in general, and 
 especially the Americans, know very little of this state of 
 feeling. For them life is devouring and incessant activity. 
 They are eager for gold, for power, for dominion; their 
 aim is to crush men and to enslave nature. They show an 
 obstinate interest in means, and have not a thought for 
 the end. They confound being with individual being, and 
 the expansion of the self with happiness that is to say, 
 they do not live by the soul ; they ignore the unchangeable 
 and the eternal; they live at the periphery of their being, 
 because they are unable to penetrate to its axis. They are 
 excited, ardent, positive, because they are superficial. 
 Why so much effort, noise, struggle, and greed? it is all 
 a mere stunning and deafening of the self. When death 
 comes they recognize that it is so why not then admit it 
 sooner? Activity is only beautiful when it is holy that 
 is to say, when it is snent in the service of that which 
 passeth not awav
 
 338 ^ MIEVR JO URN A L. 
 
 February 6, 1880. A feeling article by Edmond Scherei 
 on the death of Bersot, the director of the " Ecole Nor- 
 male," a philosopher who bore like a stoic a terrible 
 disease, and who labored to the last without a complaint. 
 . . I have just read the four orations delivered over 
 his grave. They have brought the tears to my eyes. In 
 the last days of this brave man everything was manly, 
 noble, moral, and spiritual. Each of the speakers paid 
 homage to the character, the devotion, the constancy, and 
 the intellectual elevation of the dead. " Let us learn from 
 him how to live and how to die." The whole funeral cere- 
 mony had an antique dignity. 
 
 February 7, 1880. Hoar-frost and fog, but the general 
 aspect is bright and fairylike, and has nothing in common 
 with the gloom in Paris and London, of which the news- 
 papers tell us. 
 
 This silvery landscape has a dreamy grace, a fanciful 
 charm, which are unknown both to the countries of the sun 
 and to those of coal-smoke. The trees seem to belong to 
 another creation, in which white has taken the place of 
 green. As one gazes at these alleys, these clumps, these 
 groves and arcades, these lace-like garlands and festoons, 
 one feels no wish for anything else ; their beauty is original 
 and self-sufficing, all the more because the ground pow- 
 dered with snow, the sky dimmed with mist, and the 
 smooth soft distances, combine to form a general scale of 
 color, and a harmonious whole, which charms the eye. No 
 harshness anywhere all is velvet. My enchantment 
 beguiled me out both before and after dinner. The im- 
 pression is that of a fete, and the subdued tints are, or seem' 
 to be, a mere coquetry of winter which has set itself to 
 paint something without sunshine, and yet to charm the 
 spectator. 
 
 February 9, 1880. Life rushes on so much the worse 
 for the weak and the stragglers. As soon as a man's tendo 
 Achillis gives way he finds himself trampled under foot 
 by the young, the eager, the voracious. " Vae victis, 
 vae debilibus!" yells the crowd, which in its turn is storm-
 
 A MIEL'S JO URNAL. 339 
 
 ing the goods of this world. Every man is always in some 
 other man's way, since, however small he may make him- 
 self, he still occupies some space, and however little he may 
 envy or possess, he is still sure to be envied and his goods 
 coveted by some one else. Mean world! peopled by a 
 mean race! To console ourselves we must think of the 
 exceptions of the noble and generous souls. There are 
 such. What do the rest matter! The traveler crossing 
 the desert feels himself surrounded by creatures thirsting 
 for his blood; by day vultures fly about his head; by night 
 scorpions creep into his tent, jackals prowl around his 
 camp-fire, mosquitoes prick and torture him with their 
 greedy sting; everywhere menace, enmity, ferocity. But 
 far beyond the horizon, and the barren sands peopled by 
 these hostile hordes, the wayfarer pictures to himself a few 
 loved faces aud kind looks, a few true hearts which follow 
 him in their dreams and smiles. When all is said, indeed, 
 we defend ourselves a greater or lesser number of years, 
 but we are always conquered and devoured in the end; 
 there is no escaping the grave and its worm. Destruction 
 is our destiny, and oblivion our portion. ... i 
 
 How near is the great gulf! My skiff is thin as a nut- 
 shell, or even more fragile still. Let the leak but widen a 
 little and all is over for the navigator. A mere nothing 
 separates me from idiocy, from madness, from death. The 
 slightest breach is enough to endanger all this frail, ingeni- 
 ous edifice, which calls itself my being and my life. 
 
 Not even the dragonfly symbol is enough to express its 
 frailty; the soap-bubble is the best poetical translation of, 
 all this illusory magnificence, this fugutive apparition of 
 the tiny self, which is we, and we it. 
 
 . . . A miserable night enough. Awakened three 
 or four times by my bronchitis. Sadness restlessness. 
 One of these winter nights, possibly, suffocation will come. 
 I realize that it would be well to keep myself ready, to put 
 everything in order. ... To begin with, let me wipe 
 out all personal grievances and bitternesses; forgive all, 
 judge no one; in enmity and ill-will, see only misunder-
 
 340 A MIEL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 standing. "As much as lieth in you, be at peace with all 
 men." On the bed of death the soul should have no eyes 
 but for eternal things. All the littlenesses of life disappear. 
 The fight is over. There should be nothing left now but 
 emembrance of past blessings adoration of the ways of 
 God. Our natural instinct leads us back to Christian 
 humility and pity. <; Father, forgive us our trespasses, as 
 we forgive them who trespass against us." 
 
 Prepare thyself as though the coming Easter were thy 
 last, for thy days henceforward shall be few and evil. 
 
 February 11, 1880. Victor de Laprade* has elevation, 
 grandeur, nobility, and harmony. What is it, then, that 
 he lacks? Ease, and perhaps hurnor. Hence the monoto- 
 nous solemnity, the excess of emphasis, the over-intensity, 
 the inspired air, the statue-like gait, which annoy one in 
 him. His is a muse which never lays aside the cothurnus, 
 and a royalty which never puts off its crown, even in sleep. 
 The total absence in him of playfulness, simplicity, 
 familiarity, is a great defect. De Laprade is to the ancients 
 as the French tragedy is to that of Euripides, or as the wig 
 of Louis XIV. to the locks of Apollo. His majestic airs 
 are wearisome and factitious. If there is not exactly affec- 
 tation in them, there is at least a kind of theatrical and 
 sacerdotal posing, a sort of professional attitudinizing. 
 Truth is not as fine as this, but it is more living, more 
 pathetic, more varied. Marble images are cold. Was it 
 not Musset who said, " If De Laprade is a poet, then I am 
 not one?" 
 
 February 27, 1880. I have finished translating twelve 
 or fourteen little poems by Petofi. They have a strange 
 kind of savor. There is something of the Steppe, of the 
 East, of Mazeppa, of madness, in these songs, which seem 
 
 * Victor de Laprade, born 1812, first a disciple and imitator of 
 Edgar Quinet. then the friend of Lamartine, Lamennais, George 
 Sand, Victor Hugo; admitted to the Academy in 1857 in succession 
 to Alfred de Musset. He wrote " Parf urns de Madeleine," 3839; 
 " Odes et Poemes," 1843; " Poemes Evangeliques," 1852: " Idylles 
 Heroiques," 1858, etc- etc
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 341 
 
 to go to the beat of a riding-whip. What force and pas- 
 sion, what savage brilliancy, what wild and grandiose 
 images, there are in them ! One feels that the Magyar is a 
 kind of Centaur, and that he is only Christian and Euro- 
 pean by accident. The Hun in him tends toward the 
 Arab. 
 
 March 20, 1880. I have been reading "La Banniere 
 Bleue " a history of the world at the time of Genghis 
 Khan, under the form of memoirs. It is a Turk, Oui'gour, 
 who tells the story. He shows us civilization from the 
 wrong side, or the other side, and the Asiatic nomads 
 appear as the scavengers of its corruptions. 
 
 Genghis proclaimed himself the scourge of God, and he 
 did in fact realize the vastest empire known to history, 
 stretching from the Blue Sea to the Baltic, and from the 
 vast plains of Siberia to the banks of the sacred Ganges. 
 The most solid empires of the ancient world were over- 
 thrown by the tramp of his horsemen and the shafts of his 
 archers. From the tumult into which he threw the 
 western continent there issued certain vast results: the 
 fall of the Byzantine empire, involving the Renaissance, 
 the voyages of discovery in Asia, undertaken from both 
 sides of the globe that is to say, Gama and Columbus; 
 the formation of the Turkish empire; and the preparation 
 of the Russian empire. This tremendous hurricane, 
 starting from the high Asiatic tablelands, felled the decay- 
 ing oaks and worm-eaten buildings of the whole ancient 
 world. The descent of the yellow, flat-nosed Mongols upon 
 Europe is a historical cyclone which devastated and puri- 
 fied our thirteenth century, and broke, at the two ends of 
 the known world, through two great Chinese walls that 
 which protected the ancient empire of the Center, and 
 that which made a barrier of ignorance and superstition 
 round the little world of Christendom. Attila, Genghis, 
 Tamerlane, ought to range in the memory of men with 
 Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon. They roused whole 
 peoples into action, and stirred the depths of human life, 
 they powerfulJv affected ethnography, they let loose rivera
 
 342 AMIRL' 8 JOURNAL. 
 
 of blood, and renewed the face of things. The Quakers 
 will not see that there is a law of tempests in history as in 
 nature. The revilers of war are like the revilers of thun- 
 der, storms, and volcanoes; they know not what they do. 
 Civilization tends to corrupt men, as large towns tend to 
 vitiate the air. , 
 
 "Nos patimur longse pacis mala." 
 
 Catastrophes bring about a violent restoration of equili- 
 brium ; they put the world brutally to rights. Evil chas- 
 tises itself, and the tendency to ruin in human things sup- 
 plies the place of the regulator who has not yet been dis- 
 covered. No civilization can bear more than a certain 
 proportion of abuses, injustice, corruption, shame, and 
 crime. When this proportion has been reached, the 
 boiler bursts, the palace falls, the scaffolding breaks down ; 
 institutions, cities, states, empires, sink into ruin. The 
 evil contained in an organism is a virus which preys upon 
 it, and if it is not eliminated ends by destroying it. And 
 as nothing is perfect, nothing can escape death. 
 
 May 19, 1880. Inadaptibility, due either to mysticism 
 or stiffness, delicacy or disdain, is the misfortune or at all 
 events the characteristic of my life. I have not been able 
 to fit myself to anything, to content myself with anything. 
 I have never had the quantum of illusion necessary for risk- 
 ing the irreparable. I have made use of the ideal itself to 
 keep me from any kind of bondage. It was thus with 
 marriage: only perfection would have satisfied me; and, 
 on the other hand, I was not worthy of perfection. 
 So that, finding no satisfaction in things, I 
 tried to extirpate desire, by which things enslave us. 
 Independence has been my refuge; detachment my strong- 
 hold. I have lived the impersonal life in the world, yet 
 not in it, thinking much, desiring nothing. It is a state 
 of mind which corresponds with what in women is called a 
 broken heart; and it is in fact like it, since the character- 
 istic common to both is despair. When one knows that one 
 will never possess what one could have loved, and that one
 
 AM1KUS JOURNAL. 343 
 
 can be content with nothing less, one has, so to speak, 
 left the world, one has cut the golden hair, parted with 
 all that makes human life that is to say, illusion the 
 incessant effort toward an apparently attainable end. 
 
 May 31, 1880. Let us not be over-ingenious. There is 
 no help to be got out of subtleties. Besides, one must 
 live. It is best and simplest not to quarrel with any illu- 
 ,sion, and to accept the inevitable good-temperedly. Plunged 
 as we are in human existence, we must take it as it comes, 
 not too bitterly, nor too tragically, without horror and 
 without sarcasm, without misplaced petulance or a too 
 exacting expectation ; cheerfulness, serenity, and patience, 
 these are best let us aim at these. Our business is to 
 treat life as the grandfather treats his granddaughter, or 
 the grandmother her grandson; to enter into the pretenses 
 of childhood and the fictions of youth, even when we our- 
 selves have long passed beyond them. It is probable that 
 God himself looks kindly upon the illusions of the human 
 race, so long as they are innocent. There is nothing evil 
 but sin that is, egotism and revolt. And as for error, 
 man changes his errors frequently, but error of some sort 
 is always with him. Travel as one may, one is always 
 somewhere, and one's mind rests on some point of truth, 
 as one's feet rest upon some point of the globe. 
 
 Society alone represents a more or less complete unity. 
 The individual must content himself with being a stone 
 in the building, a wheel in the immense machine, E word 
 in the poem. He is a part of the family, of the state, of 
 humanity, of all the special frgaments formed by human 
 interests, beliefs, aspirations, and labors. The loftiest 
 souls are those who are conscious of the universal sym- 
 phony, and who give their full and willing collaboration to 
 this vast and complicated concert Avhich we call civilization. 
 
 In principle .the mind is capable of suppressing all the 
 limits which it discovers in itself, limits of language, 
 nationality, religion, race, or epoch. But it must be ad- 
 mitted that the more the mind spiritualizes and generalizes 
 itself, the less hold it has on other minds, which no
 
 344 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 longer understand it or know what to do with it. Influ 
 ence belongs to men of action, and for purposes of actiou 
 nothing is more useful than narrowness of thought com- 
 bined with energy of will. 
 
 The forms of dreamland are gigantic, those of action are 
 small and dwarfed. To the minds imprisoiied in things, 
 belong success, fame, profit; a great deal no doubt; but 
 they know nothing of the pleasures of liberty or the joy 
 of penetrating the infinite. However, I do not mean to 
 put one class before another; for every man is happy 
 according to his nature. History is made by combatants 
 and specialists ; only it is perhaps not a bad thing that in 
 the midst of the devouring activities of the western world, 
 there should be a few Brahmanizing souls. 
 
 . . . This soliloquy means what? That reverie 
 turns upon itself as dreams do; that impressions added 
 together do not always produce a fair judgment; that a 
 private journal is like a good king, and permits repetitions, 
 outpourings, complaint. . . . These unseen effusions 
 are the conversation of thought with itself the arpeggios 
 involuntary but not unconscious, of that ^Eolian harp we 
 bear within us. Its vibrations compose no piece, exhaust 
 no theme, achieve no melody, carry out no programme, 
 but they express the innermost life of man. 
 
 June 1, 1880. Stendhal's "La Chartreuse de Parme." 
 A remarkable book. It is even typical, the first of a 
 class. Stendhal opens the series of naturalist novels, 
 which suppress the intervention of the moral sense, and 
 scoff at the claim of free-will. Individuals are irrespon- 
 sible; they are governed by their passions, and the play of 
 human passions is the observer's joy, the artist's material. 
 Stendhal is a novelist after Taine's heart, a faithful 
 painter who is neither touched nor angry, and whom every- 
 thing amuses the knave and the adventuress as well as 
 honest men and women, but who has neither faith, nor 
 preference, nor ideal. In him literature is subordinated to 
 natural history, to science. It no longer forms part of the 
 humanities, it no longer gives man the honor of a separate
 
 AMIEUS JOURNAL. 345 
 
 rank. It classes him with the ant, the beaver, and the 
 monkey. And this moral indifference to morality leads 
 direct to immorality. 
 
 The vice of the whole school is cynicism, contempt for 
 man, whom they degrade to the level of the brute; it is 
 the worship of strength, disregard of the soul, a want of 
 generosity, of reverence, of nobility, which shows itself in 
 spite of all protestations to the contrary ; in a word, it is 
 inhumanity. No man can be a naturalist with impunity : 
 he will be coarse even with the most refined culture. A 
 free mind is a great thing no doubt, but loftiness of heart, 
 belief in goodness, capacity for enthusiasm and devotion, 
 the thirst after perfection and holiness, are greater things 
 still. 
 
 June 7, 1880. I am reading Madame Necker de 
 Saussure* again. "L'Education progressive" is an ad- 
 mirable book. What moderation and fairness of view, 
 what reasonableness and dignity of manner ! Everything 
 in it is of high quality observation, thought, and style. 
 The reconciliation of science with the ideal, of philosophy 
 with religion, of psychology with morals, which the book 
 attempts, is sound and beneficent. It is a fine book a 
 classic and Geneva maybe proud of a piece of work which 
 shows such high cultivation and so much solid wisdom. 
 Here we have the true Grenevese literature, the central 
 tradition of the country. 
 
 Later. I have finished the third volume of Madame 
 Necker. The elevation and delicacy, the sense and serious- 
 ness, the beauty and perfection of the whole are astonish- 
 
 * Madame Necker de Saussure was the daughter of the famous 
 geologist, De Saussure; she married a nephew of Jacques Necker, 
 and was therefore cousin by marriage of Madame de Stael. She is 
 often supposed to be the original of Madame de Cerlebe in " Del- 
 phine," and the Notice sur le Caractere et les Merits de Mdme. de 
 Stael, prefixed to the authoritative edition of Madame de StaeTs 
 collected works, is by her. Philanthropy and education were her 
 two main interests, but she had also a very large amount of general 
 literary cultivation, as was proved by her translation of Schlegel'a 
 " Lectures on Dramatic Literature."
 
 346 A MIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 ing. A few harshnesses or inaccuracies of language do no; 
 matter. I feel for the author a respect mingled with 
 emotion. How rare it is to find a book in which every- 
 thing is sincere and everything is true! 
 
 June 26, 1880. Democracy exists; it is mere loss of 
 time to dwell upon its absurdities and defects. Every 
 regime has its weaknesses, and this regime is a lesser evil 
 than others. On things its effect is unfavorable, but on 
 the other hand men profit by it, for it develops the indi- 
 vidual by obliging every one to take interest in a multitude 
 of questions. It makes bad work, but it produces citizens. 
 This is its excuse, and a more than tolerable one; in the 
 eyes of the philanthropist, indeed, it is a serious title to 
 respect, for, after all, social institutions are made for man, 
 and not vice versd. 
 
 June 27, 1880. I paid a visit to my friends , and we 
 
 resumed the conversation of yesterday. We talked of the 
 ills which threaten democracy and which are derived from 
 the legal fiction at the root of it. Surely the remedy 
 consists in insisting everywhere upon the truth which 
 democracy systematically forgets, and which is its proper 
 makeweight on the inequalities of talent, of virtue, and 
 merit, and on the respect due to age, to capacity, to serv- 
 vices rendered. Juvenile arrogance and jealous ingratitude 
 must be resisted all the more strenuously because social 
 forms are in their favor; and when the institutions of a 
 country lay stress only on the rights of the individual, it is 
 the business of the citizen to lay all the more stress on 
 duty. There must be a constant effort to correct the pre- 
 vailing tendency of things. All this, it is true, is nothing 
 but palliative, but in human society one cannot hope for 
 more. 
 
 Later. Alfred de Vigny is a sympathetic writer, 
 with a meditative turn of thought, a strong and supple 
 talent. He possesses elevation, independence, seriousness, 
 originality, boldness and grace ; he has something of every- 
 thing. He paints, describes, and judges well; he thinks, 
 and has the courage of his opinions. His defect lies in au
 
 AMIUL'S JOURNAL. 347 
 
 excess of -self-respect, jji a British pride and reserve which 
 give him a horror of familiarity and a terror of letting him- 
 self go. This tendency has naturally injured his popularity 
 as a writer with a public whom he holds at arm's length 
 as one might a troublesome crowd. The French race has 
 never cared much about the inviolability of personal con- 
 science ; it does not like stoics shut up in their own dignity 
 as in a tower, and recognizing no master but God, duty or 
 faith. Such strictness annoys and irritates it; it is merely 
 piqued and made impatient by anything solemn. It repu- 
 diated Protestantism for this very reason, and in all crises 
 it has crushed those who have not yielded to the passionate 
 current of opinion. 
 
 July 1, 1880. (Three o' 'clock). The temperature is 
 oppressive; I ought to be looking over my notes, and think- 
 ing of to-morrow's examinations. Inward distaste 
 emptiness discontent. Is it trouble of conscience, or sor- 
 row of heart? or the soul preying upon itself? or merely .a 
 sense of strength decaying and time running to waste? Is 
 sadness or regret or fear at the root of it? I do not 
 know; but this dull sense of misery has danger in it; it 
 leads to rash efforts and mad decisions. Oh, for escape 
 from self, for something to stifle the importunate voice of 
 want and yearning! Discontent is the father of tempta- 
 tion. How can we gorge the invisible serpent hidden at 
 the bottom of our well gorge it so that it may sleep? 
 
 At the heart of all this rage and vain rebellion there lies 
 what? Aspiration, yearning! We are athirst for the 
 infinite for love for I know not what. It is the instinct 
 of hapmness, which, like some wild animal, is restless for 
 its prey. It is God calling God avenging himself. 
 
 July 4, 1880. (Sunday, half -past eight in the morning}. 
 The sun has come out after heavy rain. May one take 
 it as an omen on this solemn day? The great voice of 
 Clemence has just been sounding in our ears. The bell's 
 deep vibrations went to my heart. For a quarter of an hour 
 the pathetic appeal went on u Geneva, Geneva, remember! 
 I am called Clemence I am the voice of church and of
 
 348 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 country. People of Geneva, serve. God and be at peace 
 together."* 
 
 Seven o^clock in the evening. CUmence has been ringing 
 again, during the last half -hour of the scrutin. Now that 
 she has stopped, the silence has a terrible seriousness, like 
 that which weighs upon a crowd when it is waiting for the 
 return of the judge and the delivery of the death sentence. 
 The fate of the Genevese church and country is now in 
 the voting box. 
 
 Eleven o'clock in the evening. Victory along the whole 
 line. The Ayes have carried little more than two-sevenths 
 
 of the vote. At my friend 's house I found them all 
 
 full of excitement, gratitude, and joy. 
 
 July o, 1880. There are some words which have still a 
 magical virtue with the mass of the people: those of State, 
 Republic, Country, Nation, Flag, and even, I think, 
 Church. Our skeptical and mocking culture knows 
 nothing of the emotion, the exaltation, the delirium, which 
 these words awaken in simple people. The biases of the 
 world have no idea how the popular mind vibrates to these 
 appeals, by which they themselves are untouched. It is 
 their punishment; it is also their infirmity. Their temper 
 is satirical and separatist; they live in isolation and 
 sterility. 
 
 I feel again what I felt at the time of the Rousseau cen- 
 tenary ; my feeling and imagination are chilled and repelled 
 by those Pharisaical people who think themselves too good 
 to associate with the crowd. 
 
 At the same time, I suffer from an inward contradiction, 
 from a two-fold, instinctive repugnance an aesthetic 
 repugnance toward vulgarity of every kind, a moral repug- 
 nance toward barrenness and coldness of heart. 
 
 So that personally I am only attracted by the individuals 
 of cultivation and eminence, while on the other hand 
 
 *A law to bring about separation between Church and State, 
 adopted by the Great Council, was on this day submitted to the vote 
 or the Genevese people. It was rejected by a large majority (9,30tf 
 against 4,044). [S.]
 
 AM1EUS JO URNAL 349 
 
 nothing is sweeter to me than to feel myself vibrating in 
 sympathy with the national spirit, with the feeling of the 
 masses. I only care for the two extremes, and it is this 
 which separates me from each of them. 
 
 Our everyday life, split up as it is into clashing parties 
 and opposed opinions, and harassed by perpetual disorder 
 and discussion, is painful and almost hateful to me. A 
 thousand things irritate and provoke me. But perhaps it 
 would be the same elsewhere. Very likely it is the inevi- 
 table way of the world which displeases me the sight of 
 what succeeds, of what men approve or blame, of what 
 they excuse or accuse. I need to admire, to feel myself in 
 sympathy and in harmony with my neighbor, with the 
 march of things, and the tendencies of those around me, 
 and almost always I have had to give up the hope of it. I 
 take refuge in retreat, to avoid discord. But solitude is 
 only a pis-aller. 
 
 July 6, 1880. Magnificent weather. The college prize- 
 day.* Toward evening I went with our three ladies to 
 the plain of Plainpalais. There was an immense crowd, 
 and I was struck with the bright look of the faces. The 
 festival wound up with the traditional fireworks, under a 
 calm and starry sky. Here we have the republic indeed, 
 I thought as I came in. For a whole week this people has 
 been out-of-doors, camping, like the Athenians on the 
 Agora. Since Wednesday lectures and public meetings 
 have followed one another without intermission ; at home 
 there are pamphlets and the newspapers to be read; while 
 speech-making goes on at the clubs. On Sunday, plebiscite; 
 Monday, public procession, service at St. Pierre, speeches 
 on the Molard, festival for the adults. Tuesday, the col- 
 lege f6te-day. Wednesday, the fte-day of the primary 
 schools. 
 
 Geneva is a caldron always at boiling-point, a furnace 
 of which the fires are never extinguish 3d. Vulcan had 
 more than one forge, and Geneva is certainly one of those 
 
 * The prize-giving at the College of Geneva is made the occasion 
 of a national festival.
 
 350 -A- MIKV8 JO URN A L. 
 
 world-anvils on which the greatest number of projects 
 have been hammered out. When one thinks that the 
 martyrs of all causes Lave been at work here, the mystery 
 is explained a little; but the truest explanation is that 
 Geneva republican, protestant, democratic, learned, and 
 enterprising Geneva has for centuries depended on her- 
 self alone for the solution of her own difficulties. Since 
 the Reformation she has been always on the alert, march- 
 1 ing with a lantern in her left hand and a sword in her 
 right. It pleases me to see that she has not yet become a 
 mere copy of anything, and that she is still capable of 
 deciding for herself. Those who say to her, " Do as they 
 do at New York, at Paris, at Rome, at Berlin," are still in 
 the minority. The doctrinaires who would split her up 
 and destroy her unity waste their breath upon her. She 
 divines the snare laid for her and turns away. I like this 
 proof of vitality. Only that which is original has a suffi- 
 cient reason for existence. A country in which the word 
 of command comes from elsewhere is nothing more than 
 a province. This is what our Jacobins and our Ultramon- 
 tanes never will recognize. Neither of them understand 
 the meaning of self-government, and neither of them have 
 any idea of the dignity of a historical state and an inde- 
 pendent people. 
 
 Our small nationalities are ruined by the hollow cosmo- 
 politan formulae which have an equally disastrous effect 
 upon art and letters. The modern isms are so many acids 
 which dissolve everything living and concrete. No one 
 achieves a masterpiece, nor even a decent piece of work, by 
 the help of realism, liberalism, or romanticism. Separa- 
 tism has even less virtue than any of the other isms, for it 
 is the abstraction of a negation, the shadow of a shadow. 
 The various isms of the present are not fruitful principles: 
 they are hardly even explanatory formulae. They are 
 rather names of disease, for they express some element in 
 excess, some dangerous and abusive exaggeration. Exam- 
 ples: empiricism, idealism, radicalism. What is best 
 among things and most perfect among beings slips through
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 35L 
 
 these categories. The man who is perfectly well is neither 
 sanguineous [to use the old medical term] nor bilious 
 nor nervous. A normal republic contains opposing parties 
 and points of view, but it contains them, as it were, in a 
 state of chemical combination. All the colors are con- 
 tained in a ray of light, while red alone does not contain a 
 sixth part of the perfect ray. 
 
 July 8, 1880. It is thirty years since I read Waagen's 
 
 book on "Museums," which my friend is now reading. 
 
 It was in 1842 that I was wild for pictures; in 1845 that 
 I was studying Krause's philosophy ; in 1850 that I became 
 
 professor of aesthetics. may be the same age as I am; 
 
 it is none the less true that when a particular stage has 
 become to me a matter of history, he is just arriving at it. 
 This impression of distance and remoteness is a strange 
 one. I begin to realize that my memory is a great cata 
 comb, and that below my actual standing-ground there is 
 layer after layer of historical ashes. 
 
 Is the life of mind something like that of great trees of 
 immemorial growth? Is the living layer of consciousness 
 super-imposed upon hundreds of dead layers? Dead? No 
 doubt this is too much to say, but still, when memory is 
 slack the past becomes almost as though it had never been. 
 To remember that we did know once is not a sign of 
 possession but a sign of loss; it is like the number of an 
 engraving which is no longer on its nail, the title of a vol- 
 ume no longer to be found on its shelf. My mind is the 
 empty frame of a thousand vanished images. Sharpened 
 by incessant training, it is all culture, but it has retained 
 hardly anything in its meshes. It is without matter, and 
 is only form. It no longer has knowledge; it has become 
 method. It is etherealized, algebraicized. Life has treated 
 it as death treats other minds; it has already prepared it 
 for a further metamorphosis. Since the age of sixteen on- 
 ward I have been able to look at things with the eyes of a 
 blind man recently operated upon that is to say, I have 
 been able to suppress in myself the results of the long edu- 
 cation of sight, and to abolish distances; and now I find
 
 352 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 myself regarding existence as though from beyond the 
 tomb, from another world; all is strange to me; I am, aa 
 it were, outside my own body and individuality; I am 
 depersonalized, detached, cut adrift. Is this madness? 
 No. Madness means the impossibility of recovering one's 
 normal balance after the mind has thus played truant 
 among alien forms of being, and followed Dante to invisible 
 worlds. Madness means incapacity for self-judgment and 
 self-control. Whereas it seems to me that my mental 
 transformations are but philosophical experiences. I am 
 tied to none. I am but making psychological investiga- 
 tions. At the same time I do not hide from myself that 
 such experiences weaken the hold cf common sense, be- 
 cause they act as solvents of all personal interests and preju- 
 dices. I can only defend myself against them by return- 
 ing to the common life of men, and by bracing and 
 fortifying the will. 
 
 July 14, 1880. What is the book which, of all Genev^se 
 literature, I would soonest have written? Perhaps that 
 of Madame Necker de Saussure, or Madame de Stae'Ps 
 "L'Allemagne." To a Genevese, moral philosophy is still 
 the most congenial and remunerative of studies. Intellec- 
 tual seriousness is what suits us least ill. History, politics, 
 economical science, education, practical philosophy ^these 
 are our subjects. We have everything to lose in the 
 attempt to make ourselves mere Frenchified copies of the 
 Parisians : by so doing we are merely carrying water to the 
 Seine. Independent criticism is perhaps easier at Geneva 
 than at Paris, and Geneva ought to remain faithful to 
 her own special line, which, as compared with that of 
 France, is one of greater freedom from the tyranny of 
 taste and fashion on the one hand, and the tyranny of 
 ruling opinion on the other of Catholicism or Jacobinism. 
 Geneva should be to La Grande Nation what Diogenes 
 was to Alexander; her role is to represent the independ- 
 ent thought and the free speech which is not dazzled by 
 prestige, and does not blink the truth. It is true that the 
 role is an ungrateful one, that it lends itself to sarcasm and 
 misrepresentation but W matter?
 
 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 353 
 
 July 28, 1880. This afternoon I have had a walk in the 
 sunshine, and have just come back rejoicing in a renewed 
 -communion with nature. The waters of the Rhone and 
 the Arve, the murmur of the river, the austerity of its 
 banks, the brilliancy of the foliage, the play of the leaves, 
 the splendor of the July sunlight, the rich fertility of the 
 fields, the lucidity of the distant mountains, the whiteness 
 of the glaciers under the azure serenity of the sky, the 
 sparkle and foam of the mingling rivers, the leafy masses 
 of the La Batie woods all and everything delighted me. 
 It seemed to me as though the years of strength had come 
 back to me. I was overwhelmed with sensations. I was 
 surprised and grateful. The universal life carried me on 
 its breast; the summer's caress went to my heart. Once 
 more my eyes beheld the vast horizons, the soaring peaks, 
 the blue lakes, the winding valleys, and all the free outlets 
 of old days. And yet there was no painful sense of long- 
 ing. The scene left upon me an indefinable impression, 
 which was neither hope, nor desire, nor regret, but rather 
 a sense of emotion, of passionate impulse, mingled with 
 admiration and anxiety. I am conscious at once of joy 
 and of want; beyond what I possess I see the impossible 
 and the unattainable; I guagemyown wealth and poverty; 
 in a word, I am and I am not my inner state is one of 
 contradiction, because it is one of transition. The ambiguity 
 of it is characteristic of human nature, which is ambig- 
 uous, because it is flesh becoming spirit, space changing 
 into thought, the Finite looking dimly out upon the 
 Infinite, intelligence working its way through love and 
 pain. 
 
 Man is the sensoriiim commune of nature, the point at 
 which all values are interchanged. Mind is the plastic 
 medium, the principle, and the result of all; at once 
 material and laboratory, product and formula, sensation, 
 expression, and law; that which is, that which does, that 
 which knows. All is not mind, but mind is in all, and 
 contains all. It is the consciousness of being that is, 
 Being raised to the second power. If the universe sub-
 
 35 4 AMIEL'S JO URNAL. 
 
 sists, it is because the Eternal mind loves to perceive its 
 own content, in all its wealth and expansion especially 
 in its stages of preparation. Not that God is an egotist. 
 He allows myriads upon myriads of suns to disport them- 
 selves in his shadow; he grants life and consciousness to 
 innumerable multitudes of creatures who thus participate 
 in being and in nature; and all these animated monads 
 multiply, so to speak, his divinity. 
 
 August 4, 1880. I have read a few numbers of the 
 FeuiUe Cent rale de Zoftngen.* It is one of those perpet- 
 ual new beginnings of youth which thinks it is producing 
 something fresh when it is only repeating the old 
 
 Nature is governed by continuity the continuity of 
 repetition; it is like an oft-told tale, or the recurring 
 burden of a song. The rose-trees are never tired of rose- 
 bearing, the birds of nest-building, young hearts of loving, 
 or young voices of singing the thoughts and feelings 
 which have served their predecessors a hundred thousand 
 times before. Profound monotony in universal movement 
 there is the simplest formula furnished by the spectacle 
 of the world. All circles are alike, and every existence 
 tends to trace its circle. 
 
 How, then, is fastidium to be avoided? By shutting 
 our eyes to the general uniformity, by laying stress upon, 
 the small differences which exist, and then by learning to 
 enjoy repetition. What to the intellect is old and worn- 
 out is perennially young and fresh to the heart; curiosity 
 is insatiable, but love is never tired. The natural preserva- 
 tive against satiety, too, is work. What we do may weary 
 others, but the personal effort is at least useful to its 
 author. Where every one works, the general life is sure 
 to possess charm and savor, even though it repeat forever 
 the same song, the same aspirations, the same prejudices, 
 and the same sighs. "To every man his turn," is the 
 motto of mortal beings. If what they do is old, they 
 
 *The journal of a students' society, drawn from the different 
 cantons of Switzerland, which meets every year in the little town of 
 Zofingen
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 355 
 
 themselves are new; when they imitate, they think they 
 are inventing. They have received, and they transmit. 
 E sempre bene! 
 
 August 24, 1880. As years go on I love the beautiful 
 more than the sublime, the smooth more than the rough, 
 the calm nobility of Plato more than the fierce holiness of 
 the world's Jeremiahs. The vehement barbarian is to me 
 the inferior of the mild and playful Socrates. My taste is 
 for the well-balanced soul and the well-trained heart for 
 a liberty which is not harsh and insolent, like that of the 
 newly enfranchised slave, but lovable. The temperament 
 which charms me is that in which one virtue leads natur- 
 ally to another. All exclusive and sharply-marked qualities 
 are but so many signs of imperfection. 
 
 August 29, 1880. To-day I am conscious of improve- 
 ment. I am taking advantage of it to go back to my 
 neglected work and my interrupted habits; but in a Aveek 
 I have grown several months older that is easy to see. 
 The affection of those around me makes them pretend not 
 to see it; but the looking-glass tells the truth. The fact 
 does not take away from the pleasure of convalescence; 
 but still one hears in it the shuttle of destiny, and death 
 seems to be nearing rapidly, in spite of the halts and truces 
 which are granted one. The most beautiful existence, it 
 seems to me, would be that of a river which should get 
 through all its rapids and waterfalls not far from its rising, 
 and should then in its widening course form a succession 
 of rich valleys, and in each of them a lake equally but 
 diversely beautiful, to end, after the plains of age were 
 past, in the ocean where all that is weary and heavy-laden 
 comes to seek for rest. How few there are of these full, 
 fruitful, gentle lives! What is the use of wishing for or 
 regretting them? It is wiser and harder to see in one's 
 own lot the best one could have had, and to say to one's 
 self that after all the cleverest tailor cannot make us a 
 coat to fit us more closely than our skin. 
 
 " Le vrai nom du bonheur est le contentement."
 
 356 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 . . . The essential thing for every one is to accept 
 his destiny. Fate has deceived you ; you have sometimes 
 grumbled at your lot; well, no more mutual reproaches; 
 go to sleep in peace. 
 
 August 30, 1880. (Tivo o'clock). Rumblings of a grave 
 and distant thunder. The sky is gray but rainless; the 
 sharp little cries of the birds show agitation and fear ; one 
 might imagine it the prelude to a symphony or a catas- 
 trophe. 
 
 " Quel eclair te traverse, 6 mon coeur soucieux?" 
 
 Strange all the business of the immediate neighborhood 
 is going on; there is even more movement than usual; 
 and yet all these noises are, as it were, held suspended in 
 the silence in a soft, positive silence, which they cannot 
 disguise silence akin to that which, in every town, on 
 one day of the week, replaces the vague murmur of the 
 laboring hive. Such silence at such an hour is extra- 
 ordinary. There is something expectant, contemplative, 
 almost anxious in it. Are there days on which " the little 
 breath " of Job produces more effect than tempest? on 
 which a dull rumbling on the distant horizon is enough to 
 suspend the concert of voices, like the roaring of a desert 
 lion at the fall of night? 
 
 September 9, 1880. It seems to me that with the 
 decline of my active force I am becoming more purely 
 spirit; everything is growing transparent to me. I see 
 the types, the foundation of beings, the sense of things. 
 
 All personal events, all particular experiences, are to me 
 texts for meditation, facts to be generalized into laws, 
 realities to be reduced to ideas. Life is only a document 
 to be interpreted, matter to be spiritualized. Such is the 
 life of the thinker. Every day he strips himself more and 
 more of personality. If he consents to act and to feel, it is 
 that he may the better understand ; if he wills, it is that 
 he may know what will is. Although it is sweet to him to 
 be loved, and he knows nothing else so sweet, yet there 
 also he seems to himself to be the occasion of the phenom-
 
 A MIEVS JO URNAL. 357 
 
 enon rather than its end. He contemplates the spectacle 
 of love, and love for him remains a spectacle. He does 
 not even believe his body his own ; he feels the vital whirl- 
 wind passing through him lent to him, as it were, for a 
 moment, in order that he may perceive the cosmic vibra- 
 tions. He is a mere thinking subject ; he retains only the 
 form of things; he attributes to himself the material 
 possession of nothing whatsoever; he asks nothing from 
 life but wisdom. This temper of mind makes him incom- 
 prehensible to all that loves enjoyment, dominion, posses- 
 sion. He is fluid as a phantom that we see but cannot 
 grasp ; he resembles a man, as the manes of Achilles or 
 the shade of Creusa resembled the living. Without having 
 died, I am a ghost. Other men are dreams to me, and I 
 am a dream to them. 
 
 Later. Consciousness in me takes no account of the 
 category of time, and therefore all those partitions which 
 tend to make of life a palace with a thousand rooms, do 
 not exist in my case ; I am still in the primitive unicellular 
 state. I possess myself only as Monad and as Ego, and I 
 feel my faculties themselves reabsorbed into the substance 
 which they have individualized. All the endowment of 
 animality is, so to speak, repudiated; all the product of 
 study and of cultivation is in the same way annulled; the 
 whole crystallization is redissolved into fluid; the whole 
 rainbow is withdrawn within the dewdrop; consequences 
 return to the principle, effects to the cause, the bird to 
 the egg, the organism to its germ. 
 
 This psychological reinvolution is an anticipation of death ; 
 it represents the life beyond the grave, the return to 
 scheol, the soul fading into the world of ghosts, or descend- 
 ing into the region of Die Mutter; it implies the simplifi- 
 cation of the individual who, allowing all the accidents of 
 personality to evaporate, exists henceforward only in the 
 indivisible state, the state of point, of potentiality, of preg- 
 nant nothingness. Is not this the true definition of mind? 
 is not mind, dissociated from space and time, just this? 
 Its development, past or future, is contained in it just as
 
 358 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 a curve is contained in its algebraical formula. This 
 nothing is an all. This punctum without dimensions is a 
 punctum saliens. What is the acorn but the oak which 
 has lost its branches, its leaves, its trunk, and its roots 
 that is to say, all its apparatus, its forms, its particularities 
 but which is still present in concentration, in essence,, 
 in a force which contains the possibility of complete 
 revival? 
 
 This impoverishment, then, is only superficially a loss, a 
 reduction. To be reduced to those elements in one which 
 are eternal, is indeed to die but not to be annihilated : it i& 
 simply to become virtual again. 
 
 October 9, 1880. (Clarens). A walk. Deep feeling and 
 admiration. Nature was so beautiful, so caressing, so 
 poetical, so maternal. The sunlight, the leaves, the sky, 
 the bells, all said to me " Be of good strength and cour- 
 age, poor bruised one. This is nature's kindly season; 
 here is forgetfulness, calm, and rest. Faults and troubles, 
 anxieties and regrets, cares and wrongs, are but one and 
 the same burden. We make no distinctions; we comfort 
 all sorrows, we bring peace, and with us is consolation. 
 Salvation to the weary, salvation to the afflicted, salvation 
 to the sick, to sinners, to all that suffer in heart, in con- 
 science, and in body. We are the fountain of blessing; 
 drink and live! God maketh his sun to rise upon the just 
 and upon the unjust. There is nothing grudging in his 
 munificence; he does not weigh his gifts like a money- 
 changer, or number them like a cashier. Come there is 
 enough for all !" 
 
 October 29, 1880. (Geneva). The ideal which a man pro- 
 fesses may itself be only a matter of appearance a device 
 for misleading his neighbor, or deluding himself. The 
 individual is always ready to claim for himself the merits 
 of the badge under which he fights; whereas, generally 
 speaking, it is the contrary which happens. The nobler 
 the badge, the less estimable is the wearer of it. Such at 
 least is the presumption. It is extremely dangerous to 
 pride one's self on any moral or religious specialty what-
 
 AMIEVS JOURNAL. 359 
 
 ever. Tell me what you pique yourself upon, and I wili 
 tell you what you are not. 
 
 But how are we to know what an individual is? First 
 of all by his acts ; but by something else too something 
 which is only perceived by intuition. Soul judges soul by 
 elective affinity, reaching through and beyond both words 
 and silence, looks and actions. 
 
 The criterion is subjective, I allow, and liable to error; 
 but in the first place there is no safer one, and in the next, 
 the accuracy of the judgment 'is in proportion to the moral 
 culture of the judge. Courage is an authority on courage, 
 goodness on goodness, nobleness on nobleness, loyalty on 
 uprightness. We only truly know what we have, or what 
 we have lost and regret, as, for example, childish inno- 
 cence, virginal purity, or stainless honor. The truest and 
 best judge, then, is Infinite Goodness, and next to it, the 
 regenerated sinner or the saint, the man tried by experi- 
 ence or the sage. Naturally, the touchstone in us becomes 
 finer and truer the better we are. 
 
 November 3, 1880. What impression has the story I 
 have just read made upon me? A mixed one. The imag- 
 ination gets no pleasure out of it, although the intellect is 
 amused. Why? Because the author's mood is one of 
 incessant irony and persiflage. The Voltairean tradition 
 has been his guide a great deal of wit and satire, very 
 little feeling, no simplicity. It is a combination of qualities 
 which serves eminently well for satire, for journalism, and 
 for paper warfare of all kinds, but which is much less suita- 
 ble to the novel or short story, for cleverness is not poetry, 
 ani the novel is still within the domain of poetry, although 
 on the frontier. The vague discomfort aroused in one by 
 these epigrammatic productions is due probably to a confu- 
 sion of kinds. Ambiguity of style keeps one in a perpetual 
 state of tension and self-defense; we ought not to be left 
 in doubt whether the speaker is jesting or serious, mocking 
 or tender. Moreover, banter is not humor, and never 
 will be. I think, indeed, that the professional wit finds a 
 difficulty in being genuinely comic, for want of depth and
 
 360 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 disinterested feeling. To laugh at things and people ia 
 not really a joy ; it is at best but a cold pleasure. Buffoon- 
 ery is wholesomer, because it is a little more kindly. The 
 reason why continuous sarcasm repels us is that it lacks 
 two things humanity and seriousness. Sarcasm implies 
 pride, since it means putting one's self above others and 
 levity, because conscience is allowed no voice in controlling 
 it. In short, we read satirical books, but we only love and 
 cling to the books in which there is heart. 
 
 November 22, 1880. Ho'w is ill-nature to be met and 
 overcome? First, by humility: -when a man knows his 
 own weaknesses, why should he be angry with others for 
 pointing them out? No doubt it is not very amiable of 
 them to do so, but still, truth is on their side. Secondly, 
 by reflection: after all we are what we are, and if we have 
 been thinking too much of ourselves, it is only an opinion 
 to be modified; the incivility of our neighbor leaves us 
 what we were before. Above all, by pardon : there is only 
 one way of not hating those who do us wrong, and that is 
 by doing them good; anger is best conquered by kindness. 
 Such a victory over feeling may not indeed affect those 
 who have wronged us, but it is a valuable piece of self-dis- 
 cipline. It is vulgar to be angry on one's own account; 
 we ought only to be angry for great causes. Besides, the 
 poisoned dart can only be extracted from the wound by the 
 balm of a silent and thoughtful charity. Why do we let 
 human malignity embitter us? why should ingratitude, 
 jealousy perfidy even enrage us? There is no end to 
 recriminations, complaints, or reprisals. The simplest 
 plan is to blot everything out. Anger, rancor, bitterness, 
 trouble the soul. Everyman is a dispenser of justice; but 
 there is one wrong that he is not bound to punish that 
 of which he himself is the victim. Such a wrong is to be 
 healed, not avenged. Fire purifies all. 
 
 " Mon ame est comme un feu qui devore et parfume 
 Ce qu'on jette pour le ternir." 
 
 December 27, 1880. In an article I have just read,
 
 A MTEL'8 JO URNAL. 361 
 
 Biedermann reproaches Strauss with being too negative, 
 and with having broken with Christianity. The object 
 to be pursued, according to him, should be the freeing of 
 religion from the mythological element, and the substitu- 
 tion of another point of view for the antiquated dualism of 
 orthodoxy this other point of view to be the victory over 
 the world, produced by the sense of divine sonship. 
 
 It is true that another question arises: has not a religion 
 which has separated itself from special miracle, from local 
 interventions of the supernatural, and from mystery, lost 
 its savor and its efficacy? For the sake of satisfying a 
 thinking and instructed public, is it wise to sacrifice the 
 influence of religion over the multitude? Answer. A 
 pious fiction is still a fiction. Truth has the highest 
 claim. It is for the world to accommodate itself to truth, 
 and not vice versa. Copernicus upset the astronomy of 
 the Middle Ages so much the worse for it! The Eternal 
 Gospel revolutionizes modern churches what matter! 
 When symbols become transparent, they have no further 
 binding force. We see in them a poem, an allegory, a 
 metaphor; but we believe in them no longer. 
 
 Yes, but still a certain esotericism is inevitable, since 
 critical, scientific, and philosophical culture is only attain- 
 able by a minority. The new faith must have its symbols 
 too. At present the effect it produces on pious souls is a 
 more or less profane one ; it has a disrespectful, incredu- 
 lous, frivolous look, and it seems to free a man from tradi- 
 tional dogma at the cost of seriousness of conscience. 
 How are sensitiveness of feeling, the sense of sin, the desire 
 for pardon, the thirst for holiness, to be preserved among 
 us, when the errors which have served them so long for 
 support and food have been eliminated? Is not illusion 
 indispensable? is it not the divine process of education? 
 
 Perhaps the best way is to draw a deep distinction 
 between opinion and belief, and between belief and science. 
 The mind which discerns these different degrees may 
 aHow itself imagination and faith, and still remain within 
 the lines of progress.
 
 362 AMIKL'8 JOURNAL. 
 
 December 28, 1880. There are two modes of classing 
 the people we know: the first is utilitarian it starts from 
 ourselves, divides our friends from our enemies, and dis- 
 tinguishes those who are antipathetic to us, those who are 
 indifferent, those who can serve or harm us; the second is 
 disinterested it classes men according to their intrinsic 
 value, their own qualities and defects, apart from the feel- 
 ings which they have for us, or we for them. 
 
 My tendency is to the second kind of classification. I 
 appreciate men less by the special affection which they 
 show to me than by their personal excellence, and I cannot 
 confuse gratitude with esteem. It is a happy thing for us 
 when the two feelings can be combined; and nothing is 
 more painful than to owe gratitude where yet we can feel 
 neither respect nor confidence. 
 
 I am not very willing to believe in the permanence of 
 accidental states. The generosity of a miser, the good 
 nature of an egotist, the gentleness of a passionate tem- 
 perament, the tenderness of a barren nature, the piety of a 
 dull heart, the humility of an excitable self-love, interest 
 me as phenomena nay, even touch me if I am the object 
 of them, but they inspire me with very little confidence. 
 I foresee the end of them too clearly. Every exception 
 tends to disappear and to return to the rule. All privilege 
 is temporary, and besides, I am less flattered than anxious 
 when I find myself the object of a privilege. 
 
 A man's primitive character may be covered over by 
 alluvial deposits of culture and acquisition none the less 
 is it sure to come to the surface when years have worn 
 away all that is accessory and adventitious. I admit indeed 
 the possibility of great moral crises which sometimes 
 revolutionize the soul, but I dare not reckon on them. It 
 is a possibility not a probability. In choosing one's 
 friends we must choose those whose qiialities are inborn, 
 and their virtues virtues of temperament. To lay the foun- 
 dations of friendship on borrowed or added virtues is to build 
 on an artificial soil; we run too many risks by it. 
 
 Exceptions are snares, and we ought above all to distrust
 
 AMIKL'S JO URN A L. 
 
 .hem when they charm our vanity. To catch and fix a 
 fickle heart is a task which tempts all women ; and a man 
 finds something intoxicating in the tears of tenderness and 
 joy which he alone has had the power to draw from a 
 proud woman. But attractions of this kind are deceptive. 
 Affinity of nature founded on worship of the same ideal, 
 and perfect in proportion to perfectness of soul, is the only 
 affinity which is worth anything. True love is that which 
 ennobles the personality, fortifies the heart, and sanctifies 
 the existence. And the being we love must not be myster- 
 ious and sphinx-like, but clear and limpid as a diamond ; 
 so that admiration and attachment may grow with knowl- 
 edge. 
 
 Jealousy is a terrible thing. It resembles love, only it is 
 precisely love's contrary. Instead of wishing for the wel- 
 fare of the object loved, it desires the dependence of that 
 object upon itself, and its own triumph. Love is the for- 
 getfulness of self; jealousy is the most passionate form of 
 egotism, the glorification of a despotic, exacting, and vain 
 ego, which can neither forget nor subordinate itself. The 
 contrast is perfect. 
 
 Austerity in women is sometimes the accompaniment of 
 a rare power of loving. And when it is so their attach- 
 ment is strong as death ; their fidelity as resisting as the- 
 diamond; they are hungry for devotion and athirst for 
 sacrifice. Their love is a piety, their tenderness a religion,, 
 and they triple the energy of love by giving to it the sanc- 
 tity of duty. 
 
 To the spectator over fifty, the world certainly presents 
 a good deal that is new, but a great deal more which is 
 only the old furbished up mere plagiarism and modifica- 
 tion, rather than amelioration. Almost everything is a 
 copy of a copy, a reflection of a reflection, and the perfect 
 being is as rare now as he ever was. Let us not complain 
 of it: it is the reason why the world lasts. Humanity 
 improves but slowly; that is why history goes on.
 
 364 AM1EU8 JOURNAL. 
 
 Is not progress the goad of Siva? It excites the torch 
 to burn itself away; it hastens the approach of death. 
 Societies which change rapidly only reach their final catas- 
 trophe the sooner. Children who are too precocious never 
 reach maturity. Progress should be the aroma of life, not 
 its substance. 
 
 Man is a passion which brings a will into play, which 
 works an intelligence and thus the organs which seem to 
 be in the service of intelligence, are in reality only the 
 agents of passion. For all the commoner sorts of being, 
 determinism is true: inward liberty exists only as an ex- 
 ception and as the result of self-conquest. And even he 
 who has tasted liberty is only free intermittently and by 
 moments. True liberty, then, is not a continuous state ; 
 it is not an indefeasible and invariable quality. We are 
 free only so far as we are not dupes of ourselves, our pre- 
 texts, our instincts, our temperament. We are freed by 
 energy and the critical spirit that is to say, by detach- 
 ment of soul, by self-government. So that we are enslaved, 
 but susceptible of freedom ; we are bound, but capable of 
 shaking off our bonds. The soul is caged, but it has 
 power to flutter within its cage. 
 
 Material results are but the tardy sign of invisible activi- 
 ties. The bullet has started long before the noise of the 
 report has reached us. The decisive events of the world 
 take place in the intellect. 
 
 Sorrow is the most tremendous of all realities in the sen- 
 sible world, but the transfiguration of sorrow after the 
 manner of Christ is a more beautiful solution of the prob- 
 lem than the extirpation of sorrow, after the method of 
 Cakyamouni. 
 
 Life should be a giving birth to the soul, the develop- 
 ment of a higher mode of reality. The animal must be 
 humanized: flesh must be made spirit; physiological activ-
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 365 
 
 ity must be transmuted into intellect and conscience, into 
 reason, justice, and generosity, as the torch is transmuted 
 into life and warmth. The blind, greedy, selfish nature 
 of man must put on beauty and nobleness. This heavenly 
 alchemy is what justifies our presence on the earth : it is 
 our mission and our glory. 
 
 To renounce happiness and think only 01 duty, to put 
 conscience in the place of feeling this voluntary martyr- 
 dom has its nobility. The natural man in us flinches, but 
 the better self submits. To hope for justice in the woild 
 is a sign of sickly sensibility; we must be able to do with- 
 out it. True manliness consists in such independence. 
 Let the world think what it will of us, it is its own affair. 
 If it will not give us the place which is lawfully ours until 
 after our death, or perhaps not at all, it is but acting 
 within its right. It is our business to behave as though 
 our country were grateful, as though the world were equi- 
 table, as though opinion were clear-sighted, as though life 
 were just, as though men were good. 
 
 Death itself may become matter of consent, and there- 
 fore a moral act. The animal expires; man surrenders his 
 soul to the author of the soul. 
 
 [With the year 1881, beginning with the month of 
 January, we enter upon the last period of Amiel's illness. 
 Although he continued to attend to his professional duties, 
 and never spoke of his forebodings, he felt himself mortally 
 ill, as we shall see by the following extracts from the 
 Journal. Amiel wrote up to the end, doing little else, 
 however, toward the last than record the progress of his 
 disease, and the proofs of interest and kindliness which he 
 received. After weeks of suffering and pain a state of ex- 
 treme weakness gradually gained upon him. His last lines 
 are dated the 29th of April; it was on the llth of May 
 that he succumbed, without a struggle, to the complicated 
 disease from which he suffered. S. J 
 
 January 5, 1881. I think I fear shame more than death.
 
 366 AMIEL'8 JO URN A L. 
 
 Tacitus said: Omnia serviliter pro dominations. My ten- 
 dency is just the contrary. Even when it is voluntary, 
 dependence is a burden to me. I should blush to find my- 
 self determined by interest, submitting to constraint, or 
 becoming the slave of any will whatever. To me vanity is 
 slavery, self-love degrading, and utilitarianism meanness. 
 I detest the ambition which makes you the liege man of 
 something or some one I desire to be simply my own 
 master. 
 
 If I had health I should be the freest man I know. 
 Although perhaps a little hardness of heart would be desir- 
 able to make me still more independent. 
 
 Let me exaggerate nothing. My liberty is only negative. 
 Nobody has any hold over me, but many things have be- 
 come impossible to me, and if I were so foolish as to wish 
 for them, the limits of my liberty would soon become 
 apparent. Therefoie I take care not to wish for them, and 
 not to let my thoughts dwell on them. I only desire what 
 I am able for, and in this way I run my head against no 
 wall, I cease even to be conscious of the boundaries which 
 enclose me. I take care to wish for rather less than is in 
 my power, that I may not even be reminded of the ob- 
 stacles in my way. Renunciation is the safeguard of dig- 
 nity. Let us strip ourselves if we would not be stripped. 
 He who has freely given up his life may look death in the 
 face: what more can it take away from him? Do away 
 with desire and practice charity there you have the whole 
 method of Buddha, the whole secret of the great Deliver- 
 ance. . . . 
 
 It is snowing, and my chest is troublesome. So that I 
 depend on nature and on God. But I do not depend on 
 human caprice; this is the point to be insisted on. It is 
 true that my chemist may make a blunder and poison me, 
 my banker may reduce me to pauperism, just as an earth- 
 quake may destroy my house without hope of redress. 
 Absolute independence, therefore, is a pure chimera. 
 But I do possess relative independence that of the stoic 
 who withdraws into the fortress of his will, and shuts the 
 gates behind him. .
 
 AMIKL'8 JOURNAL. 36? 
 
 " Jurons, excepte Dieu, de n'avoir point de maitre." 
 
 Th> oath of old Geneva remains my motto still. 
 
 January 10, 1881. To let one's self be troubled by the 
 ill-will, the ingratitude, the indifference, of others, is a 
 weakness to which I am very much inclined. It is painful 
 to me to be misunderstood, ill-judged. I am wanting in 
 manly hardihood, and the heart in me is more vulnerable 
 than it ought to be. It seems to me, however, that I have 
 grown tougher in this respect than I used to be. The 
 malignity of the world troubles me less than it did. Is it 
 the result of philosophy, or an effect of age, or simply 
 caused by the many proofs of respect and attachment that 
 I have received? These proofs were just what were want- 
 ing to inspire me with some self-respect. Otherwise I 
 should have so easily believed in my own nullity and in the 
 insignificance of all my efforts. Success is necessary for 
 the timid, praise is a moral stimulus, and admiration a 
 strengthening elixir. We think we know ourselves, but 
 as long as we are ignorant of our comparative value, our 
 place in the social assessment, we do not know ourselves 
 well enough. If we are to act with effect, we must count 
 for something with our fellow-men ; we must feel ourselves 
 possessed of some weight and credit with them, so that 
 our effort may be rightly proportioned to the resistance 
 which has to be overcome. As long as we despise opinion 
 we are without a standard by which to measure ourselves; 
 we do not know our relative power. I have despised 
 opinion too much, while yet I have been too sensitive to in- 
 justice. These two faults have cost me dear. I longed 
 for kindness, -sympathy, and equity, but my pride forbade 
 me to ask for them, or to employ any address or calcula- 
 tion to obtain them. . . . I do not think I have been 
 wrong altogether, for all through I have been in harmony 
 with my best self, but my want of adaptibility has worn 
 me out, to no purpose. Now, indeed, I am at peace 
 within, but my career is over, my strength is running out, 
 and my life is near its end. 
 
 " II n'est plus temps pour rien execute pour mourn."
 
 368 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 This is why I can look at it all historically. 
 
 January 23, 1881. A tolerable night, but this morning 
 the cough has been frightful. Beautiful weather, the 
 windows ablaze with sunshine. With my feet on the fen- 
 der I have just finished the newspaper. 
 
 At this moment I feel well, and it seems strange to me 
 that my doom should be so near. Life has no sense of 
 kinship with death. This is why, no doubt, a sort of 
 mechanical instinctive hope is forever springing up afresh 
 in us, troubling our reason, and casting doubt on the ver- 
 dict of science. All life is tenacious and persistent. It is 
 like the parrot in the fable, who, at the very moment 
 when its neck is being wrung, still repeats with its last 
 breath : 
 
 " Cela, cela, ne sera rien." 
 
 The intellect puts the matter at its worst, but the animal 
 protests. It will not believe in the evil till it comes. 
 Ought one to regret it? Probab.y not. It is nature's will 
 that life should defend itself against death ; hope is only 
 the love of life ; it is an organic impulse which religion has 
 taken under its protection. Who knows? God may save 
 us, may work a miracle. Besides, are we ever sure that 
 there is no remedy? Uncertainty is the refuge of hope. 
 We reckon the doubtful among the chances in our favor. 
 Mortal frailty clings to every support. How be angry with 
 it for so doing? Even with all possible aids it hardly evei 
 escapes desolation and distress. The supreme solution is, 
 and always will be, to see in necessity the fatherly will of 
 God, and so to submit ourselves and bear our cross bravely, 
 as an offering to the Arbiter of human destiny. The sol- 
 dier does not dispute the order given him : he obeys aiid 
 dies without murmuring. If he waited to understand the 
 use of his sacrifice, where would his submission be? 
 
 It occurred to me this morning how little we know of 
 each other's physical troubles ; even those nearest and dear- 
 est to us know nothing of our conversations with the King 
 of Terrors. There arp thoughts which brook no confidant;
 
 ' AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 3G9 
 
 there are griefs which cannot be shared. Consideration for 
 others even bids us conceal them. We dream alone, we 
 suffer alone, we die alone, we inhabit the last resting-place 
 alone. But there is nothing to prevent us from opening 
 our solitude to God. And so what was an austere mono- 
 logue becomes dialogue, reluctance becomes docility, 
 renunciation passes into peace, and the sense of painful 
 defeat is lost in the sense of recovered liberty. 
 
 " Vouloir se que Dieu veut est la seule science 
 Qui nous met en repos." 
 
 None of us can escape the play of contrary impulse; but as 
 soon as the soul has once recognized the order of things, 
 and submitted itself thereto, then all is well. 
 
 " Comme un sage mourant puissions nous dire en paix: 
 
 J'ai trop longtemps erre, cherche; je me trompais: 
 
 Tout est bien, mon Dieu m'enveloppe." 
 
 January 28, 1881. A terrible night. For three or four 
 hours I struggled against suffocation and looked death in 
 the face. ... It is clear that what awaits me is 
 suffocation asphyxia. I shall die by choking. 
 
 I should not have chosen such a death; but when there 
 is no option, one must simply resign one's self, and at 
 once. . . . Spinoza expired in the presence of the doc- 
 tor whom he had sent for. I must familiarize myself with 
 the idea of dying unexpectedly, some fine night, strangled 
 by laryngitis. The last sigh of a patriarch surrounded by 
 his kneeling family is more beautiful: my fate indeed lacks 
 beauty, grandeur, poetry; but stoicism consists in renun- 
 ciation. Abstine et sustine. 
 
 I must remember besides that I have faithful friends; it 
 is better not to torment them. The last journey is only 
 made more painful by scenes and lamentations: one word 
 is worth all others "Thy will, not mine, be done!'* 
 Leibnitz was accompanied to the grave by his servant only. 
 The loneliness of the deathbed and the tomb is not an 
 evil. The great mystery cannot be shared. The dialogue 
 between the soul and the King of Terrors needs no wit-
 
 370 AMI KU 8 JOURNAL. 
 
 nesses. It is the living who cling to the thought of last 
 greetings And, after all, no one knows exactly what is 
 reserved for him. What will be will be. We have but to 
 say, "Amen." 
 
 February 4, 1881. It is a strange sensation that of lay- 
 ing one's self down to rest with the thought that perhaps 
 one will never see the morrow. Yesterday I felt it 
 strongly, and yet here I am. Humility is made easy by 
 the sense of excessive frailty, but it cuts away all ambition. 
 
 " Quittez le long espoir et les vastes pensees." 
 
 A long piece of work seems absurd one lives but from 
 day to day. 
 
 When a man can no longer look forward in imagination 
 to five years, a year, a month, of free activity when he 
 is reduced to counting the hours, and to seeing in the com- 
 ing night the threat of an unknown fate it is plain that 
 he must give up art, science, and politics, and that he must 
 be content to hold converse with himself, the one possi- 
 bility which is his till the end. Inward soliloquy is the 
 only resource of the condemned man whose execution is 
 delayed. He withdraws upon the fastnesses of conscience. 
 His spiritual force no longer radiates outwardly ; it is con- 
 sumed in self-study. Action is cut off only contempla- 
 tion remains. He still writes to those who have claims 
 upon him, but he bids farewell to the public, and retreats 
 into himself. Like the hare, he comes back to die in his 
 form, and this form is his consciousness, his intellect 
 the journal, too, which has been the companion of his 
 inner life. As long as he can hold a pen, as long as he has 
 a moment of solitude, this echo of himself still claims his' 
 meditation, still represents to him his converse with his 
 God. 
 
 In all this, however, there is nothing akin to self-exami- 
 nation: it is not an act of contrition, or a cry for help. It 
 is simply an Amen of submission " My child, give me thy 
 heart!" 
 
 Renunciation and acquiescence are less difficult to me
 
 A Ml EL'S JO URNAL. 371 
 
 than to others, for I desire nothing. I could only wish not 
 to suffer, but Jesus on Gethesemane allowed himself to 
 make the same prayer; let us add to it the words that he 
 did: "Nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done," 
 and wait. 
 
 . . . For many years past the immanent God has 
 been more real to me than the transcendent God, and the 
 religion of Jacob has been more alien to me than that of 
 Kant, or even Spinoza. The whole Semitic dramaturgy 
 has come to seem to me a work of the imagination. The 
 apostolic documents have changed in value and meaning 
 to my eyes. Belief and truth have become distinct to me 
 with a growing distinctness. Religious psychology has 
 become a simple phenomenon, and has lost its fixed and 
 absolute value. The apologetics of Pascal, of Leibnitz, of 
 Secretan, are to me no more convincing than those of the 
 Middle Ages, for they presuppose what is really in ques- 
 tion a revealed doctrine, a definite and unchangeable 
 Christianity. It seems to me that what remains to me 
 from all my studies is a new phenomenology of mind, 
 an intuition of universal metamorphosis. All particular 
 convictions, all definite principles, all clear-cut formulas 
 and fixed ideas, are but prejudices, useful in practice, but 
 still narrownesses of the mind. The absolute in detail is 
 absurd and contradictory. All political, religious, aesthetic, 
 or literary parties are protuberances, misgrowths of 
 thought. Every special belief represents a stiffening and 
 thickening of thought; a stiffening, however, which .is 
 necessary in its time and place. Our monad, in its think- 
 ing capacity, overleaps the boundaries of time and space 
 and of its own historical surroundings; but in its individual 
 capacity, and for purposes of action, it adapts itself to cur- 
 rent illusions, and puts before itself a definite end. It is 
 lawful to be man, but it is needful also to be a man, to be 
 an individual. Our role is thus a double one. Only, the 
 philosopher is specially authorized to develop the first role, 
 which the vast majority of humankind neglects. 
 
 February 7, 1881. Beautiful sunshine to-day. But I
 
 372 AMIEU 8 JOURNAL. 
 
 have scarcely spring enough left in me to notice it. Ad- 
 miration, joy, presuppose a little relief from pain. Whereas 
 my neck is tired with the weight of my head, and my heart 
 is wearied with the weight of life; this is not the aesthetic 
 state. 
 
 I have been thinking over different things which I 
 might, have written. But generally speaking we let what 
 is most original and best in us be wasted. We reserve 
 ourselves for a future which never comes. Omnis moriar. 
 
 February 14, 1881. Supposing that my weeks are num- 
 bered, what duties still remain to me to fulfill, that I may 
 leave all in order? I must give every one his due; justice, 
 prudence, kindness must be satisfied; the last memories 
 must be sweet ones. Try to forget nothing useful, nor 
 anybody who has a claim upon thee! 
 
 February 15, 1881. I have, very reluctantly, given up 
 my lecture at the university, and sent for my doctor. On 
 
 my chimney-piece are the flowers which has sent me. 
 
 Letters from London, Paris, Lausanne, Neuchdtel . . . 
 They seem to me like wreaths thrown into a grave. 
 
 Mentally I say farewell to all the distant friends whom i 
 shall never see again. 
 
 February 18, 1881. Misty weather. A fairly good 
 night. Still, the emaciation goes on. That is to say, the 
 vulture allows me some respite, but he still hovers over his 
 prey. The possibility of resuming my official work seems 
 like a dream to me. 
 
 Although just now the sense of ghostly remoteness from 
 life which I so often have is absent, I feel myself a prisoner 
 for good, a hopeless invalid. This vague intermediate 
 state, which is neither death nor life, has its sweetness, 
 because if it implies renunciation, still it allows of thought. 
 It is a reverie without pain, peaceful and meditative. Sur- 
 rounded with affection and with books, I float down the 
 stream of time, as once I glided over the Dutch canals, 
 smoothly and noiselessly. It is as though I were once 
 more on board the Treckschute. Scarcely can one hear 
 even the soft ripple of the water furrowed by the baige, or
 
 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 373 
 
 the hoof of the towing horse trotting along the sandy path. 
 A journey under these conditions has something fantastic 
 in it. One is not sure whether one still exists, still 
 belongs to earth. It is like the manes, the shadows, flitting 
 through the twilight of the ina/iia regna. Existence has 
 become fluid. From the standpoint of complete personal 
 renunication I watch the passage of my impressions, my 
 dreams, thoughts, and memories. . . . It is a mood 
 of fixed contemplation akin to that which we attribute to 
 the seraphim. It takes no interest in the individual self, 
 but only in the specimen monad, the sample of the general 
 history of mind. Everything is in everything, and the 
 consciousness examines what it has before it. Nothing is 
 either great or small. The mind adopts all modes, and 
 everything is acceptable to it. In this state its relations 
 with the body, with the outer world, and with other indi- 
 viduals, fade out of sight. Selbst-bewusstsein becomes 
 once more impersonal Bewusstsein, and before personality 
 can be reacquired, pain, duty, and will must be brought 
 into action. 
 
 Are these oscillations between the personal and the im- 
 personal, between pantheism and theism, between Spinoza 
 and Leibnitz, to be regretted? No, for it is the one state 
 which makes us conscious of the other. And as man is 
 capable of ranging the two domains, why should he muti- 
 late himself? 
 
 February 22, 1881. The march of mind finds its typical 
 expression in astronomy no pause, but no hurry; orbits, 
 cycles, energy, but at the same time harmony; movement 
 and yet order; everything has its own weight and its rela- 
 tive weight, receives and gives forth light. Cannot this 
 cosmic and divine become oars? Is the war of all against 
 all, the preying of man upon man, a higher type of 
 balanced action? I shrink form believing it. Some 
 theorists imagine that the phase of selfish brutality is the 
 last phase of all. They must be wrong. Justice will 
 prevail, and justice is not selfishness. Independence of 
 intellect, combined with goodness of heart, will be the 
 agents of a result, which will be the compromise required.
 
 374 -A MIEL'S JO URNAL. 
 
 March 1, 1881. I have just been glancing over the 
 affairs of the world in the newspaper. What a Babel it is ! 
 But it is very pleasant to be able to make the tour of the 
 planet and review the human race in an hour. It gives 
 one a sense of ubiquity. A newspaper in the twentieth 
 century will be composed of eight or ten daily bulletins \ 
 political, religious, scientific, literary, artistic, commercial, 
 meteorological, military, economical, social, legal, and 
 financial; and will be divided into two parts only Urbs 
 and Orbis. The need of totalizing, of simplifying, will 
 bring about the general use of such graphic methods as 
 permit of series and comparisons. We shall end by feeling 
 the pulse of the race and the globe as easily as that of a 
 sick man, and we shall count the palpitations of the uni- 
 versal life, just as we shall hear the grass growing, or the 
 .sunspots clashing, and catch the first stirrings of volcanic 
 disturbances. Activity will become consciousness; the 
 earth will see herself. Then will be the time for her to 
 blush for her disorders, her hideousness, her misery, her 
 crime and to throw herself at last with energy and per- 
 severance into the pursuit of justice. When humanity has 
 -cut its wisdom-teeth, then perhaps it will have the grace 
 to reform itself, and the will to attempt a systematic 
 reduction of the share of the evil in the world. The 
 Weltgeist will pass from the state of instinct to the moral 
 state. War, hatred, selfishness, fraud, the right of the 
 .stronger, will be held to be old-world barbarisms, mere 
 diseases of growth. The pretenses of modern civilization 
 will be replaced by real virtues. Men will be brothers, 
 peoples will be friends, races will sympathize one with 
 another, and mankind will draw from love a principle of 
 emulation, of invention, and of zeal, as powerful as any 
 furnished by the vulgar stimulant of interest. This 
 millennium will it ever be? It is at least an act of piety 
 to believe in it. 
 
 March 14, 1881. I have finished Merimee's letters to 
 Panizzi. Merimee died of the disease which torments me 
 "Je tousse, et je'touffe." Bronchitis and asthma, 

 
 AMIEL'^ JOURNAL. 375 
 
 whence defective assimilation, and finally exhaustion. He, 
 too, tried arsenic, wintering at Cannes, compressed air. 
 All was useless. Suffocation and inanition carried off the 
 author of "Colomba." Hie tua res agitur. The gray, 
 heavy sky is of the same color as my thoughts. And yet 
 the irrevocable has its own sweetness and serenity. The 
 fluctuations of illusion, the uncertainties of desire, the 
 leaps and bounds of hope, give place to tranquil resigna- 
 tion. One feels as though one were already beyond the 
 grave. It is this very week, too, I remember, that my 
 corner of ground in the Oasis is to be bought. Everything 
 draws toward the end. Festinat ad eventum. 
 
 March 15, 1881. The "Journal" is full of details of the 
 horrible affair at Petersburg. How clear it is that such 
 catastrophes as this, in which the innocent suffer, are the 
 product of a long accumulation of iniquities. Historical 
 justice is, generally speaking, tardy so tardy that it be- 
 comes unjust. The Providential theory is really based OD 
 human solidarity. Louis XVI. pays for Louis XV. , Alex- 
 ander II. for Nicholas. We expiate the sins of our fathers, 
 and our grandchildren will be punished for ours. A double 
 injustice! cries the individual. And he is right it the 
 individualist principle is true. But is it true? That is 
 the point. It seems as though the individual part of 
 each man's destiny were but one section of that des- 
 tiny. Morally we are responsible for what we> Ourselves 
 have willed, but socially, our happiness and unhappiness 
 depend on causes outside our will. Keligion answers 
 "Mystery, obscurity, submission, faith. Do your duty; 
 leave the rest to God." 
 
 March 16, 1881. A wretched night. A melancholy 
 morning. . . . The two stand-bys of the doctor, 
 digitalis and bromide, seem to have lost their power over 
 me. Wearily and painfully I watch the tedious progress of 
 my own decay. What efforts to keep one's self from 
 dying! I am worn out with the struggle. 
 
 Useless and incessant struggle is a humiliation to one's 
 manhood. The lion finds the gnat the most intolerable of
 
 376 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 
 
 his foes. The natural man feels the same. But tne 
 spiritual man must learn the lesson of gentleness and long- 
 suffering. The inevitable is the will of God. We might 
 have preferred something else, but it is our business to 
 accept the lot assigned us. ... One thing only is 
 necessary 
 
 " Garde en mon cceur la foi dans ta volontfi sainte, 
 Et de moi fais, 6 Dieu, tout ce que tu voudras." 
 
 Later. One of my students has just brought me a sym- 
 pathetic message from my class. My sister sends me a pot 
 
 of azaleas, rich in flowers and buds; sends roses and 
 
 violets: every one spoils me, which proves that I am ill. 
 
 March 19, 1881. Distaste discouragement. My heart 
 is growing cold. And yet what affectionate care, what 
 tenderness, surrounds me! . . . But without health, 
 what can one do with all the rest? What is the good of it 
 all to me? What was the good of Job's trials? They 
 ripened his patience ; they exercised his submission. 
 
 Come, let me forget myself, let me shake off this melan- 
 choly, this weariness. Let me think, not of all that is lost, 
 but of all that I might still lose. I will reckon up my 
 privileges ; I will try to be worthy of my blessings. 
 
 March 21, 1881. This invalid life is too Epicurean. 
 For five or six weeks now I have done nothing else but 
 wait, nurse myself, and amuse myself, and how weary one 
 gets of it ! What I want is work. It is work which gives 
 flavor to life. Mere existence without object and without 
 effort is a poor thing. Idleness leads to languor, and 
 languor to disgust. Besides, here is the spring again, the 
 season of vague desires, of dull discomforts, of dim aspira- 
 tions, of sighs without a cause. We dream wide-awake. 
 We search darkly for we know not what; invoking the 
 while something which has ho name, unless it be happiness 
 or death. 
 
 March 28, 1881. I cannot work; I find it difficult to 
 exist. One may be glad to let one's friends spoil one for a 
 few months ; it is an experience which is good for us all ;
 
 AM1EDS JOURNAL. 377 
 
 but afterward? How much better to make room for the 
 living, the active, the productive. 
 
 " Tircis, voici le temps de prendre sa retraite." 
 Is it that I care so much to go on living? I think not. 
 It is health that 1 long for freedom from suffering. 
 
 And this desire being vam, I can find no savor in any- 
 thing else. Satiety. Lassitude. Eenunciation. Abdica- 
 tion. "In your patience possess ye your souls." 
 
 April 10, 1881. (Sunday}. Visit to . She read over 
 
 to me letters of 1844 to 1845 letters of mine. So much 
 promise to end in so meager a result! What creatures we 
 are ! I shall end like the Khine, lost among the sands, and 
 the hour is close by when my thread of water will have 
 disappeared. 
 
 Afterward I had a little walk in the sunset. There was 
 an effect of scattered rays and stormy clouds; a green haze 
 envelops all the trees 
 
 " Et tout renait, et deja 1'aubepine 
 A vu 1'abeille accourir a ses fleurs," 
 
 but to me it all seems strange already. 
 
 Later. What dupes we are of our own desires! . . . 
 Destiny has two ways of crushing us by refusing our 
 wishes and by fulfilling them. But he who only wills what 
 God wills escapes both catastrophes. "All things work 
 together for his good." 
 
 April 14, 1881. Frightful night; the fourteenth 
 Cunning, in which I have been consumed by sleepless- 
 ness. . . . 
 
 April 15, 1881. To-morrow is Good Friday, the festival 
 of pain. I know what it is to spend days of anguish and 
 nights of agony. Let me bear my cross humbly. . . . 
 I have no more future. My duty is to satisfy the claims 
 of the present, and to Jeave everything in order. Let me 
 try to end well, seeing that to undertake and even to con- 
 tinue, are closed to me. 
 
 April 19, 1881. A terrible sense of oppression. My 
 flesh and my heart fail me. 
 
 "Que vivre eat difficile, 6 mon cceur fatigue!"
 
 INDEX. 
 
 About's satire and irony, 170. 
 
 Absolute, Amiel's craving for the, 55; conception of the, '275, 294. 
 
 Absolutism, 218. 
 
 Accident, philosophy of 67, 68; and Providence, 174. 
 
 Ackermann, poems of Madame, 274. 
 
 Acorn and Oak, 358. 
 
 Action, Amiel's cross, 102; ^concrete thought, 5; how to recover cour- 
 age for; 40, requisites, for, 344. 
 
 Activity of the Western Nations, unholy, 337. 
 
 Adoration and consolation essential in religion, 101. 
 
 Advice, giving, 245. 
 
 ./Eschylus' and "Prometheus Eumenides," 256. 
 
 Affected poets, 317. 
 
 Affirmation and examination, 249. 
 
 Age, loss of respect for, 130; the servitude of, 191. 
 
 Alcibiades, 298. 
 
 Algebra v. life, 232. 
 
 All or nothing, 275. 
 
 Alps, the, 55, 164 221. 
 
 Ambition, Amiel's horror of, 106, 293; moral, 211. 
 
 Americans, the, 337. 
 
 Amusement and instruction, 332. 
 
 Analysis, extreme, 104; kills spontaneity, 324; of self, Amiel's, 158, 
 woman's dislike of, 173. 
 
 Analytic minds, 166. 
 
 Anger, conquest of, 360. 
 
 Animality, the laws of, 300. 
 
 Animals, treatment of, 156. 
 
 Annihilation of Buddha, 194. 
 
 Anonymous souls, 199. 
 
 Ant v. swallow, 80. 
 
 A priori speculations, 249. 
 
 Arcadia, an expedition into, 281. 
 
 Aristotle, 294. 
 
 Art, decadence of, 180; grand and simple, 318; and imagination, 323, 
 reveals Nature, 104. 
 
 Ascension Day. 332. 
 
 " Atala " and " Rene," Chateaubriand's, 83, 84. 
 
 Atheism, effects of, 300. 
 
 Atomism, philosophy of, 131. 
 
 Attila, 341. 
 
 Augustine and Lucian contrasted, 302. 
 
 Authority v. liberty, 199. 
 
 Autumn, melancholy of, 278; of life, 183; two-fold, 127.
 
 380 INDEX 
 
 Azote, woman the social, 256. 
 
 Babble, ignorant, 315. 
 Bach's prelude, 50. 
 Bacon on religion, 144. 
 Babnsen's pessimism, 244. 
 Balzac, 232. 
 
 Banniere, Bleue, la, 341. 
 Banter not humor, 359. 
 Barbarism, possible triumph of, 132. 
 Basle, 225. 
 
 Bayle and Saint Simon, 205. 
 
 Beauty, female, 171; v. goodness, 302; and pathos, 86, 87; and ugli- 
 ness, 244; universal in Paradise, 132. 
 Beauty =the spiritual ization of matter, 133. 
 Beethoven and Mozart contrasted, 50. 
 Being consciousness of, 353, and non-being, 334. 
 Beranger, 207. 
 Berkeley, 27. 
 
 Berlioz, " Romeo and Juliet," 309. 
 Bevmsstsein, 373. 
 Biedermann on Strauss, 361. 
 Biran's Journal, 78, 79. 
 Birds in bad weather, 158. 
 Bismarck, 174. 
 Biases of the world, 348. 
 Boileau and Fontaine contrasted, 310. 
 Book, function of the, 313. 
 Bossuet on charity, 329. 
 
 Bourse, movements of the (the beat of the common heart), 151. 
 Brahma, 226, his dream, 167. 
 Brahmanic aspirations, 287. 
 Brahtnanizing souls, 344. 
 Brain decay, Amiel's, 303. 
 Buddha, 223, method of, 366. 
 Buddhism, 194, 208, 274. 
 Buddhist tendency of Amiel, 155. 
 Buisson, 199. 
 
 Caesarism the counterpoise of equality, 131. 
 
 Cartesian dualism, 248 
 
 Catholic superstition, 259 
 
 Catholicism, 53, essence of, 122; and revolution, 217. 
 
 Cauteries Athenienes, Cherbuliez, 100. 
 
 Cellerier on St. James, 31. 
 
 Chance and Providence, 174. 
 
 Change not improvement, 143; persistence in, 229; rules the world, 
 
 Changeable character, Amiel's 159, 172. 
 
 Character, how to judge, 359; temperament, and individuality, 204; 
 
 and will, Amiel's lack of, 102. 
 Charity, democratic character of, 328. 
 Charm, 243.
 
 INDEX. 381 
 
 Chateaubriand, 83, 139; and Rousseau, 83. 
 
 Oherbuliez, 178; Mephistophelean novel, 302; on chivalry, etc., 99, 
 
 125. 
 
 Cherry trees and lilacs, 2. 
 Childhood, Amiel's second, 125; blessings of, 169; first conversations 
 
 of, 31; revived impressions of, 273. 
 Children, 86. 
 
 Chivalry, Cherbuliez on, 99. 
 Christendom and Ascension Day, 332. 
 
 Christian nations, aspiration of, 299; preaching, confusions of, 270. 
 Christianity a vast ocean, 188; different aspects of, 188; essence of, 47. 
 
 from a human point of view, 184; historical aspects of, 247; 
 
 liberal, 197; of dignity instead of humility, 98; and reconciliation, 
 
 334; v. religion, 153; task of, 4, 5, 42; true, 122. 
 Church and State, proper aims of, 329; separation, rejected by the 
 
 Qenevese people, 348. 
 Churches (the) and Jesus, 178. 
 Churchyard, reflections in a, 276. 
 " Cid " and "Rodogune," artificiality of, 112. 
 Circumstances, force of, 290; influence of, 131. 
 Civilization, corrupting tendency of, 342; confounded with the inner 
 
 life, 53; in the light of religion, 209. 
 Claparede, Edouard, 166. 
 Classification of men, twofold, 362. 
 Cleanthus, 195. 
 Cleons, modern, 122. 
 Clever folk defined, 319. 
 Cleverness, negative character of, 170. 
 Cohabitation of individuals, man's chief problem, 328. 
 Cohesion essential to society, 157. 
 Comic poets, role of the, 302. 
 
 Common sense, 44; v. the ideal, 71; rebellion against, 274. 
 Common sense worship, 26. 
 Commune of Paris, 238. 
 Compliance, good-humored, 266. 
 
 Composition, Amiel's laborious, 287; the process of, 318. 
 Compound character of Amiel, 201. 
 Condorcet's theory, 52. 
 Conflict, man's perpetual, 307. 
 Conscience, 255; abdication of the, 217; appeal of, 10, 12; v. clever- 
 
 ness, 301; corruption of the, 136; and faith, 60; and history, 21; 
 
 individualized by, 145; v. reality, 212; v. taste, 331; the voice of 
 
 God, 330. 
 
 Consciousness compared to a book, 273. 
 
 "Consideration," definition of, 284; unsought by Amiel, 285. 
 Constant, Benjamin, 284. 
 
 Contemplation, Amiel's milieu, 173; contrasted with action, 173; pas- 
 sionate temperament incapable of, 166. 
 Contentment, 356; apostolic, 181; and submission, 279. 
 Contradictory aspirations, 300. 
 Contraries, marriage of, 290. 
 Coppee, Francois, 290. 
 Coquerel, 199.
 
 382 INDEX. 
 
 " Corinne," 80. 
 
 Corneille's heroes, rSles not men, 113 
 
 Courage, Amiel's want of, 261. 
 
 Creation, the act of, 289 
 
 Credulity, freedom from, 157. 
 
 Creed, Amiel's want of a, 268. 
 
 Critic, the, 44; the conscientious, 86; the true, 200, 207, 319, 320, 
 323. 
 
 Critical faculty, abuse of the, 65; lucidity, 250. 
 
 Criticism a gift, 320; indifferent, 110. 
 
 Cross, apotheosis of the, 214, 215; (one's) made heavier by repul- 
 sion, 7. 
 
 Crowd (the) and the individual, 145; instinct and passion of the, 272. 
 
 Crowd worship, 129. 
 
 Crucifixion, the, 214. 
 
 Culture, modern, 324. 
 
 Cynic, egotism of the, 228. 
 
 Dante, 47; in hell, 138. 
 
 Darwinism, 314; counterpoised by equality, 331; inconsistencies 
 of, 300. 
 
 Dead and living, the, 276; want of respect for the, 100. 
 
 Death, 58; Amiel's anticipation of, 369, 370, 371; anticipation of, 321, 
 322; certainty of, 95; death of, 214; speculations respecting, 273. 
 
 De Candolle, 180. 
 
 Democracy unfavorable to high art, 166; evil results of, 179; fickle- 
 ness of, 237; fiction of, 130, 237; results of, 346; weakness of, 
 227 
 
 Democratic era, 18, 129, 130. 
 
 Demos, stupidity of, 237. 
 
 Dependence and liberty, 152. 
 
 Depersonalization, Amiel's, 352. 
 
 Descartes on fame, 299. 
 
 Desert, the traveler of the, 339. 
 
 Desolation and daylight, 258. 
 
 Despair, resignation of, 280. 
 
 Despotic government and intellectual anarchy, 157. 
 
 Despotism, 152; and materialism, 35; of Russia, 69. 
 
 Detritus of past eras, 262. 
 
 Diderot, 177. 
 
 "Die unto sin," 90. 
 
 Discontentment, 86. 
 
 Discouragement, Amiel's sin, 102. 
 
 Discremen ingeniorum, 48. 
 
 Disraeli's " Lothair," 216. 
 
 Distilled history, 295. 
 
 Divine, glimpses of the, 60; and human union, 187; will, acceptation 
 of the, 305. 
 
 Divinity, multiplication of, 354. 
 
 Doctor, the model, 266. 
 
 Doctors, causes of their mistakes, 265. 
 
 Dollar, the almighty, 214. 
 
 Double, a characteristic of perfection, 127.
 
 INDEX. 383 
 
 Double-faced life, 13. 
 
 Doubt, 89; and atheism, 187; and obedience, 158k 
 
 Doudan's Lettres et Melanges, 297, 299 
 
 Dragonfly symbol, 341. 
 
 Dream-aspect of life, 126. 
 
 Dreaming, 87. 
 
 Dreamland and action, 344. 
 
 Dreams, 186; helpfulness of, 101. 
 
 Duped, fear of being, 187. 
 
 Dupes, mental, 291. 
 
 Dutchman, twofold aspect of the, 264. 
 
 Duty, 4, 13, 76, 89, 228, 355; double power of, 5; ignored by both 
 equality and Darwinism, 331; negative, 230; and pleasure. 286; 
 power of the idea of, 108; the human pole-star, 169; the sign of 
 nobility, 152, the viaticum of life, 192; and trial, 148; v. the in- 
 dividual, 374. 
 
 Dying, words and looks of the, 185, 186. 
 
 East and West contrasted, 143. 
 
 Ecclesiastical struggles, worthlessness of, 153. 
 
 Education and development, 229, 230. 
 
 Effect, the misfortune of Victor Hugo, 114. 
 
 Effort of modern morality, 230. 
 
 Ego, Claparede's view of the, 166. 
 
 Egotism, 18, 22. 
 
 Eighteenth century criticism, 270. 
 
 Emerson's ideal, 22, 27. 
 
 English children, 251; homes, attractiveness of, 250. 
 
 Englishmen, twofold character of, 150. 
 
 Enthusiasm, cultivation of, 121; two forms of, 258. 
 
 Enthusiastic women, 258. 
 
 Epicureanism, intellectual, 108. 
 
 Epicurism, 208. 
 
 Epicurus, 335. 
 
 Epigrammatic productions, 359. 
 
 Equality a bad principle, 122, 131; doctrines, 236; of functions, 
 
 American, 213; results of, 17, 18, 179, 328; the counterpoise of 
 
 Darwinism. 331. 
 Equilibrium of forces, 68. 
 " Errare, humanum est," 343. 
 Error, emancipation from, 250. 
 Errors, moral and psychological, 270. 
 E sempre bene, 355. 
 Esoteric beauty, 242. 
 Esprit defined, 325. 
 Essay, function of the, 313. 
 Etrangeres, Armel's, 291 
 Evil, problem of, 193; transfiguration of, 55; ignored by Pelletan, 
 
 52; by V. Hugo, 114. 
 Examination v. affirmation, 249. 
 Example, a good, 236; importance of, 32. 
 Existence, submission to the laws of, 267. 
 Experience, individual and collective, 269.
 
 384 INDEX 
 
 Extempore preachers, 268. 
 Extremes, reconciliation of, 252. 
 
 Fair mindedness, rarity of, 305. 
 
 Fairy tales, their truth, 27. 
 
 Fau ce que dois, admenne que pourra, 330. 
 
 Faith defined, 246, has no proofs, 336; narrow v. enlightened, 247; 
 of the present, the, 299, and science, 216; and truth, 246. 
 
 False flag of Christendom, 301, originality, 310, shame, Amiel's, 
 261. 
 
 Fame, achievement of, 299. 
 
 Family life, value of, 251. 
 
 Fanatics, Indian, 189 
 
 Fastidwm, how to avoid, 354. 
 
 " Faust," 89. 
 
 Feeling . irony, 301; precedes will, 50, respect for, 28. 
 
 Feeling, suppression of, 228, 234, the bread of angels, 135, and 
 thought. 258. 
 
 Feminine nature, infirmity of the, 259. 
 
 Festinat ad eoentum, 375. 
 
 Feuerbach, 15 
 
 Feudle Centrale de Zofingen, 354. 
 
 Fiat justitia, pereat mundus, 212. 
 
 Fichte, 21, 167. 
 
 Finite, and infinite, 276. 
 
 Plunene, 30 
 
 Flattery of the multitude, 271. 
 
 Fog, poetry of, I4b. 
 
 Fontaine's defects and beauties, 810. 
 
 Fontanes, 199 
 
 Fools, behavior toward, 58. 
 
 Force, external, 300 
 
 Forces, opposing, 68 
 
 Fragmentary contemplation, 324. 
 
 France, Christianity in, 311, fundamental error of, 259, v. Geneva, 
 352, and Germany, 234, philosophic superficiality of, 53, the 
 center of the world, 165. 
 
 Francis of Ass'si, 156 
 
 Frankness and self-knowledge, women deficient in, 186. 
 
 Freethinkers, puerility of the, 217. 
 
 Freethought, republic of, 270. 
 
 French Academy, eloquence of the, 283, drama, an oratorical tourna- 
 ment, 113, and German literature contrasted, 177, ignorance of 
 liberty, 221, literary method, 221; love of aesthetics, 313; mind, 
 106,280, philosophy, 81, poets, modern, 317, symbolical authority 
 of the, 221, republicanism, 224, vivacity of the, 113. 
 
 Friends, choice of, 362 
 
 Future state, mystery of the 161, 201. 
 
 Gayety and sadness, 318. 
 
 Galiani, 177. 
 
 Gallery, playing to the, 281, 285.
 
 INDEX. 385 
 
 Galley-slaves, modern, 230. 
 
 Geneva, appeal to, 348; characteristics of, 349; v. France, 352; oath of 
 old, 367. 
 
 Genevese Liberalism, 82. 
 
 Genghis Khan, 341. 
 
 Genius and talent, 75; writers of, 206. 
 
 Gentleman defined, 148, 149; the Shibboleth of England, 148. 
 
 German and French literature contrasted, 178; novels, 233; society, 
 vulgarity of, 233; thinkers, their repugnance to public life, 39. 
 
 Germanic mind, tendency of the, 315. 
 
 Germans, artistic devotion of the, 315; the masters of the philosophy 
 of life, 68. 
 
 Germany and France, 234. 
 
 Germs of good and bad in every heart, 129. 
 
 Gethsemane, 371. 
 
 Ghost, Amiel a living, 357. 
 
 Gifts considered acquisitions, 32. 
 
 Gioberti on the French mind, 280. 
 
 Qioconda, la, 290, 324. 
 
 Glory of God, 304. 
 
 Glow-worm, 34. 
 
 God, communion with, 1; conquest of, 55, 66; harmony with, 163, 
 181; life in, 123. 
 
 "God and my right," 148, 251; and Nature contrasted, 141; recogni- 
 tion of, 217; submission to, 147, 280, 368, 369, 375, 377; will 
 of, 277. 
 
 God's love and chastisement, 333; omnipresence, 291; perfection, 229. 
 
 Goethe, 26; contrasted with Rousseau, 140; on fame, 299; on self- 
 obscurity, 1C5. 
 
 Goethe's want of soul, 239; complex nature, 239. 
 
 " Good news," of Christianity, 187. 
 
 "Good society," 232. 
 
 Good, sum of, perhaps always the same, 180; victory of, 137, 193, 
 194. 
 
 Goodness and beauty, 301,302; character of, 328, 329; conquests of, 
 314; philosophy of, 274; truest judge, 359. 
 
 Gospel, Amiel's belief in the, 268; blessings of the, 178, 179; th 
 Eternal, 188; why successful, 240, 241. 
 
 Great men, 141, 142; and small things, 291. 
 
 Greeks, changes in character of the, 140; lessons from the, 41. 
 
 Grief, luxury of, 245; results of, 59, 60. 
 
 Griefs which cannot be shared, 368. 
 
 Growing old, 355. 
 
 Habere non haberi, 49. 
 
 Habit, Amiel a creature of, 140. 
 
 Habits, life a tissue of, 7. 
 
 Happiness, Amiel's thirst for, 257 ; contagious, 208 ; cumulative, 56 ; 
 denned, 335, dreams about, 72, enjoyment of, 33, 34; impossible, 
 145, 146; pursuit of, 192; the best, 306; universal yearning for, 
 333. 
 
 Harmony 211; blessings of, 230, 231; longing for, 831. 
 
 Hartmann, 244; his " Philosophy cf the Unconscious," 206.
 
 386 INDEX. 
 
 Havet's " Origines du Christianisme," 270. 
 
 Head and Heart, 14. 
 
 Healing power of life, 110. 
 
 Health, frailty of, 95, loss of, 278; and happiness, 280; and the outer 
 
 world, 235 
 Heart and intellect, 320, 355; the mainspring of life, 132 149; 
 
 yearnings of the, 146. 
 Heartless books, 360. 
 Heavenly moments, 241 
 Hegel, 124, 270, 294; and Leibnitz, 236. 
 Heim, Charles, 155, 185. 
 Heine and Lamennais contrasted, 200 
 Heraclitus, saying of, 254. 
 Herder's " Lichtstrahlen," 205. 
 Hermits and the world, 319. 
 Heroism, 5. 
 
 Hindoo genius, the, 286. 
 Hirn's three principles, 198, 199. 
 
 Historical justice, tardiness of, 375, law of tempests, 342. 
 History and conscience, 21; three views of, 190, varied views of, 174. 
 Holiness v. liberty, 173, requisites for, 265. 
 
 Hope and duty, 168; influence of, 219, and melancholy, 269; not for- 
 bidden, 276, 
 
 flora est benefaciendi, 282. 
 Horace, 311. 
 Hugo, Victor, a Gallicized Spaniard, 116; Lis exaggerations, 307; his 
 
 " Contemplations," 108; his literary and Titanic power, 116, 117; 
 
 his " Miserables," 114; " Paris," 307. 
 Human and Divine union, 188, life, the three modes of (action, 
 
 thought, speech), 123, personality ignored, 78; solidarity, 152. 
 Humanism and religion, 14, 15, of Cherbuliez, 124. 
 Humanity, a higher standard of, 151; benefactors and masters of, 
 
 209, candidates for, 310; ideal of, 18; slow development of, 300, 
 
 326, 363, toughness of, 238. 
 Humboldt, 239 
 
 Humility precedes repentance, 66; (true), = contentment, 59. 
 Humorist, the true. 170. 
 Hyacinthe, Pere. 258. 
 Hypocrisy and deception, 112. 
 
 Ideal conceptions, 327. 
 
 Ideal, diminution of the, 198; malady of the, 71; v. material, 129; v. 
 
 real, 27, 35, 36, 133; thirst for the, 335. 
 Ideals, hypocritical, 358. 
 Ideas, anarchy of, 304: formation of, 290. 
 Ill-health, Amiel's, 279, 293. 
 Ill-nature, conquest of, 360. 
 Illness, summonses of, 95. 
 Illusion, benefit of, 220. 
 Illusions, human, 175, 192, 342. 
 Illustrious men, disappearance of, 10. 
 Imagination v. character, 11; enfranchised, 253; influence of, 205; of 
 
 Rousseau, 139.
 
 INDEX. 387 
 
 Immortality, belief in, 168; consolations of, 267; and annihilation, 
 91. 
 
 Impersonality, 206; temptations of, 326. 
 
 Indecision, 76; Amiel's, 311. 
 
 Independence, Amiel's. 366; twofold aspect, of, 210. 
 
 Independent thought of Geneva, 352. 
 
 Indifference of cultivated classes, 228. 
 
 Indignation, incapacity for, 245. 
 
 Individual and society, 343; (the) B. duty, 346. 
 
 Individualism an absurdity, 177; epoch of, 151; and equality, 17; 
 evils of, 330. 
 
 Individuality=character and temperament, 205, rarity of, 316. 
 
 Inevitable, Amiel's resignation to the, 303; acceptance of the, 343; 
 the, 296. 
 
 Infallibility of judgment rare, 207. 
 
 Infinite, communion with the, 27, 28; penetration of the, 344; thirst 
 for the, 347. 
 
 Infinites, infinity of, 229. 
 
 Influence of men of action, 343. 
 
 Injustice, Amiel too sensitive to, 367. 
 
 Inner life essential, 144. 
 
 Instinct precedes feeling, 50. 
 
 Institutions, capacity of, 226. 
 
 Instruction and amusement, 332. 
 
 Insubordination, increase of, 130. 
 
 Intellect, aristocratic character of the, 329; and heart, 319, 355; re- 
 ligion of, 14; and stupidity, 303. 
 
 Intellectualism, 255. 
 
 Interests, want of, 165. 
 
 International influences, 234. 
 
 Internationale, the, 237. 
 
 Introspection, 235. 
 
 In-tuition, 359. 
 
 Invalid, individuality of every, 265, 266. 
 
 Invisible, the universal witness to the, 333. 
 
 Involution, 304. 
 
 Irony, law of, 301. 
 
 Irreparable, thought of the, 162, 191. 
 
 Isms, the modern, 350. 
 
 Italy, Christianity in, 311. 
 
 Jansenists v. Jesuits, 335. 
 Jesuits v. Jansenists, 335. 
 Jesus and the churches, 181; and Socrates, 14; comprehension of, 4, 
 
 5; faith of, 187. 
 
 Job's murmurings, 376; trials, 66. 
 
 " Jocelyn " and " Paul et Virginie," tenderness and purity of, 109. 
 "John Halifax, Gentleman," 148. 
 Joubert, 7; Doudan's resemblance to, 297. 
 Journal, Amiel's estimate of his, 295; function of the private, 24, 
 
 312, 313. 
 
 Joy expressed by tears, 138. 
 Judaism of nineteenth century, 4.
 
 388 INDEX: 
 
 Judgment, impersonality of, 76; of character, 359; self-interested, 
 228; and understanding, 241. 
 
 Justice defined, 814; forgetfulness of, 228; v. love, 212; will ulti- 
 mately prevail, 373. 
 
 Kant's radicate Bose, 209. 
 
 Kindness and wariness incompatible, 329; the principle of tact, 20. 
 
 Krause's religious serenity, 25. 
 
 Laboremus, 206. 
 
 Laborious lives, 227. 
 
 Labor question unsolved, 42. 
 
 La Bruyere, 311. 
 
 La Fontaine, 298. 
 
 Lamartine, 207; his "Preludes," 282; his dislike of Fontaine, 310. 
 311. 
 
 Lamennais, 139; contrasted with Heine, 200. 
 
 Laprade, Victor de, affectation of, 340. 
 
 Last words and looks of the dying, 185, 186. 
 
 Latent genius, 89. 
 
 Latin world, the, 248, 815. 
 
 Laveleye's " L'Avenir Religieux," 299. 
 
 Law, eternity of, 327. 
 
 Lectures, Amiel's, 333. 
 
 Legal fictions and institutions, 199. 
 
 Legouve's NosJUs et nosJUles, 331. 
 
 Leibnitz, 194; v. Hegel, 236; and Spinoza, 373. 
 
 Lessing's principle, 57. 
 
 Letter and spirit, 34. 
 
 Letters, studied, 325. 
 
 Leveler, the modern, 122. 
 
 Leveling down, 181. 
 
 Liberalism, political, 200. 
 
 Liberty and religion, 217; and revolution, 224; diminished by de- 
 mocracy, 131; in God, 47; possible suppression of, 218; the true 
 friends of, 218; true, 364; v. authority, 200; v. holiness,. 173. 
 
 Life, aim of, 58; a calvary, 89; a dream, 167; a perpetual combat, 
 300; brevity of, 125, 142, 145, 162. 191, 223, 225, 293; definition 
 of, 295; different aspects of, 191; drama, a monologue, 75; frail- 
 ity of, 339; matter to be spiritualized, 356; melancholy aspect of, 
 119; ocean of, 50; proper treatment of , 343; the Divine, 35; the 
 true, 365; tenacity of, 368; . logic, 262, 263. 
 
 Light and beauty, 117; without warmth, 14. 
 
 Link of humanity, the, 333. 
 
 Literary ambition, Amiel's, 313; career, Amiel's impediments to a, 
 52; " gentlemen," 282. 
 
 Literature and science, 233. 
 
 Little things, influence of, 174. 
 
 Logic v. life, 262, 263. 
 
 "Lorelei," 314. 
 
 Lotze, 177. 
 
 Lovable, Amiel's taste for the, 355. 
 
 Love, 24, 77; a young girl's, 279; and contemplation, 102; and
 
 INDEX. 
 
 knowledge, 14; and holiness, power of, 198; eminently religious, 
 119, 161; tendency to postpone, 186; V. justice, 114, 212; woman's 
 supreme authority, 212. 
 
 Lucian and Augustine contrasted, 302. 
 
 Luck, good, 174. 
 
 Luther on humanity, 237. 
 
 Madness denned, 254, 352. 
 
 Maia, 225, 253, 255. 
 
 Malignity of the world, 367. 
 
 Man and woman contrasted, 213. 
 
 " Man " in essence and principle, 287; the true, 35. 
 
 Mannerisms, 311, 312. 
 
 Manou on Woman, 196. 
 
 Many, the, and the few, 152. 
 
 Marcus Aurelius, aim of. 121. 
 
 Martyrdom, nobility of, 365. 
 
 Martyrs, 190. 
 
 Masses, frivolity of the, 143; impetuosity of the, 272; the, and dem- 
 agogues, 237, 238. 
 
 Material results, 364. 
 
 Materialism, 18, 35, 314. 
 
 Mathematical and historical intelligence, 48; 0. sensuous minds, 68. 
 
 May, caprices of, 196. 
 
 Mediocrity, era of, 17; the result of equality, 180. 
 
 Meditation, joys of silent, 336. 
 
 Melancholy, Amiel's tendency to, 158, 162, 182, 222, 225, 231, 232, 
 276, 285, 286; and hope, 269; below the surface, 58; universality 
 of, 129. 
 
 Memories, painful, 320. 
 
 Memory a catacomb, Amiel's, 351; deficient, 65. 
 
 Men and things, Amiel's relation to, 106. 
 
 Mephistopheles, weakness of, 228. 
 
 Merimee's letters to Panizzi, 374. 
 
 Method in religion, secondary, 154. 
 
 Michelet, 53. 
 
 Milieu, a w-holesome, 306. 
 
 Millennium, the, 374. 
 
 Mind and soul, 292; and the infinite, 326; described, 353, 357 ; forms 
 and metamorphoses of (the one subject of study), 2; not phenome- 
 nal, 292; science of, 274; the march of, 373. 
 
 Minds, abstract and concrete, 48; well governed, 166. 
 
 Minors in perpetuity, 218. 
 
 Miracles, 248. 
 
 " Miserables," Victor Hugo's, 114. 
 
 Misspent time, 283. 
 
 Mist and sunshine, 148. 
 
 Misunderstandings, 3, 159. 
 
 Modern man, character of the, 143. 
 
 "Modern spirit," the, 239. 
 
 Modesty, 44. 
 
 " Moi," the central consciousness, 29k 
 
 Moliere, 311; on reasoning, 231.
 
 390 INDEX. 
 
 Monad, the human, 261. 
 
 Monads, conscious, 296. 
 
 Mongol invasion, 341. 
 
 Monod, Adolphe, 18. 
 
 Montaigne, 311. 
 
 Montesquieu, 260; saying of, 271. 
 
 Moonlight reflections, 268. 
 
 Moralists, sugar, 331. 
 
 Moral law, reconciliation of faith and science by the, 268; philosophy 
 
 of Geneva, 352; v. natural, 212; . physical science, 274. 
 Morals, physchology and system of, 46. 
 Morning and evening conditions, 45. 
 Mortification, 215. 
 
 Mozart and Beethoven contrasted, 61. 
 " Much ado about nothing," 292. 
 Mulock, Miss, 148. 
 Multitude, flattery of the, 271. 
 
 Music, Wagner's, depersonalized, 77, 78; effects of, 211. 
 Musician, the modern, 809. 
 Musset on De Laprade, 340. 
 Mystery of Providence, 174. 
 Mysticism, so-called, 56. 
 
 Napoleon, 174. 
 
 National competitions, 181; types, 151; preferences unknown to 
 Amiel, 308. 
 
 Nationalities, ancient and modern, 54; imply prejudice, 111; Quinet's 
 studies of, 97. 
 
 Nationality and the State, 76. 
 
 Nations, destinies of ( JSschylus), 256. 
 
 Natural man, the, 209; . moral, 212 
 
 Naturalist thinkers (q>v6iHoi), 274. 
 
 Nature, Auiiel's enjoyment, of, 163, 178, 183, 192, 221, 241, 278, 281, 
 282, 313, 320, 332, 338, 353, 358; enjoyment of, 3, 15, 26, 27, 28, 
 29, 37. 42, 57, 58. 80, 104, 105, 106. 127, 135; continuity of, 354; 
 v. conventions, 315; and God contrasted, 142; the kindly voice of, 
 358; the law of, 212; without man, 78; worship of, 240. 
 
 Narille, Ernest. 80; on " The Eternal Life," 91, 93. 
 
 Neckar, the river, 103. 
 
 Necker de Saussure, Madame, 345, 352. 
 
 Negative minds, danger of, 111. 
 
 Neo-Hegelians, 13. 
 
 New birth, the, 90. 
 
 Nicole and Pascal, 205. 
 
 Nihilism, Russian, 237. 
 
 Nirvana, 337. 
 
 Nobility, true, 149. 
 
 Nobility and vulgarity, 129. 
 
 Normal, the, to be chosen, 269. 
 
 North, poetry of the, 43. 
 
 Nostalgia of happiness, 87. 
 
 Nothing is lost, 123. 
 
 Nothingness. 220; man's, 224,225; realization of, 72, 78.
 
 INDEX. 391 
 
 Obedience the chief mark of religion, 279. 
 
 Obernmnn, 208. 
 
 Oblivion man's portion, 389. 
 
 Obscure self, the, 74, 75. 
 
 Obstinacy, 93. 
 
 Odyssey, the divine, 35. 
 
 Old age, 319; our views clearest in, 336. 
 
 Old, the art of growing, 279. 
 
 Olivier's " Chansons du Soir," 231. 
 
 Opinion, 23; and belief, 361; too much despised by Amiel, 367. 
 
 Optimism and pessimism, 193, 267. 
 
 Orators, 258, 259. 
 
 Order, 94; attempts at, 328; harmony with universal, 306; and law, 
 
 224; the only positive good, 335. 
 Oriental element, benefit of the, 143; happiness, 336. 
 Originality, modern lack of, 316; ridicule the result of, 272. 
 Origins all secret, 389. 
 Outside and inside, 15, 35, 57, 281. 
 Overrating, result of, 245. 
 Oxygen and azote, human, 303. 
 
 Pain, 63, 67; and comfort, 19. 
 
 Pantheism, 148; of Krause, 248. 
 
 Pantheistic disinterestedness, 286. 
 
 Paradise, echoes of, 211. 
 
 Paradox, 140. 
 
 Paris, the French townsman's axis, 165. 
 
 Pascal, 302; and Nicole, 205; on development, 130. 
 
 Passion and reason, 226. 
 
 Passionless man, the, 76. 
 
 Passions, life of the, 62; conquest of the, 104. 
 
 Past, poetry of the, 145. Reminiscences of the, 133, 134; the inter- 
 preter of the present, 260; woman, the priestess of the, 256. 
 
 Patuos and beauty, 86. 
 
 Patience, the test of virtue, 147. 
 
 Peace, 307; true, 163; two-fold aspect of, 265. 
 
 Pedantic books, 177. 
 
 Pelletan's " Profession de fo'," 52. 
 
 Pensee writers, 9. 
 
 " Penseroso," Amiel's, 183. 
 
 People, emotion of the, 349. 
 
 Perfection as an end, 154; attainment of, 294; of God, 229; search 
 for, 65. 
 
 Persiflage, 359. 
 
 Pessimism, 244; and optimism, 193, 267; Amiel's tendency to, 162; 
 helplessness of, 206. 
 
 Petofi's poems, 340. 
 
 Pharisaical people, 348. 
 
 Philistinism, increase of, 180. 
 
 Philosopher, ambition of the, 331. 
 
 Philosophy defined, 249, 250; and religion, 216. 
 
 Physical v. moral science, 274.
 
 392 
 
 Piety defined, 330; and religion contrasted, 120. 
 
 Pity, exhibition of, 317; and contempt, 176. 
 
 Plaid, the chivalrous, 134. 
 
 Plato v. Saint Paul, 236. 
 
 Plato's " Dialogues," 51. 
 
 Playthings of the world, 152. 
 
 Pleasure and duty, 286. 
 
 Plotinus and Proclus, vision of, 337. 
 
 Plutolatry, 214. 
 
 Poet and philosopher contrasted, 47. 
 
 Poetry flayed by science, 232; of childhood and mature age, 99; tlia 
 expression of a soul, 323. 
 
 Points, straining after, 289. 
 
 Political liberty of England, 157; windbags, 330. 
 
 Politician, aim of thelionest, 271. 
 
 Popular harangues, 258. 
 
 Portraits and wax figures contrasted, 823. 
 
 Poverty a crime in England, 149. 
 
 Practical life, Amiel unsuited for, 202. 
 
 Prayer, blessings of, 330. 
 
 Prejudice essential to nationalities, 111; better than doubt, 111. 
 
 Prestige, French worship of, 234. 
 
 Pride and discouragement, 7; moral and religious, 358; two condi- 
 tions of, 57. 
 
 Priesthood, domination of the, 218. 
 
 "Prince Vitale," Cherbuliez, 123, 124. 
 
 Principiis obsta, 210. 
 
 Privilege only temporary, 362. 
 
 Professor, obligations of a, 285. 
 
 Professorial lectures, 333. 
 
 Progress, absolute and relative, 269; results of, 363, 364; Victor 
 Hugo's religion of, 114. 
 
 Protestant v. Catholic countries, 217. 
 
 Protestantism defined, 153; advance guard of, 199; historical, 199. 
 
 Protestants, liberal, 199. 
 
 Proudhon, 139; his axiom, 245. 
 
 Providence, 277. 
 
 Province defined, 350. 
 
 Psychological study, Amiel's aptitude tor, xJOtf. 
 
 Psychologist, the, 235. 
 
 Psychology, applied, 293, 294. 
 
 Punctum saliens, 358. 
 
 Punishment softened by faith, 66. 
 
 Quantitative and qualitative, 53. 
 
 Quinet, 53. 
 
 Quintilian, saying of, 259. 
 
 Rabelais, 311. 
 Racine, 112, 115. 
 Radical jugglery, 271. 
 Rain, the country in, 242. 
 Rationalism, 98.
 
 INDEX. 393 
 
 Ready-made ideas, 57. 
 
 Real and ideal, 133, 334. 
 
 Realism in painting, 323; suppression of, 233. 
 
 Reality and appearance, 281; character with no sense of, 165. 
 
 Reason and passion, 226. 
 
 Reconciliation and Christianity, 333. 
 
 Redeemed, motive power of the, 187. 
 
 Regenerate man, 211. 
 
 Reinvolution, psychological, 357. 
 
 Religion and liberty, 217; and philosophy, 196, 200, 216; and piety 
 
 contrasted, 129; indestructible, 158; life in God, 195; phases of, 
 
 329, 330; refreshing power of, 144; and Utilitarianism, 900; 
 
 without mysticism, 100. 
 
 Religions, multitude of, 176; effect of political, 311. 
 Religious man, the (an intermediary), 306; views, Amiel's, 371. 
 Reminiscences, vague, 118. 
 Renaissance, the, Fontaine's horizon, 811. 
 Renan, 178; his object, style, 313. 
 Renan's " Les Evangiles," 313; " Vie de Jesus," 240; "St. Paul," 
 
 201. 
 
 " Rene" and " Atala," Chateaubriand's, 83, 84. 
 Renunciation, benefit of, 366. 
 Repentance and sanctifi cation too exclusively preached, 101; simple, 
 
 215. 
 
 Republic, the normal, 351. 
 Repugnance, Amiel's twofold, 348. 
 Resignation, manly, 29. 
 Responsibility, 12; dread of, 39. 
 Restlessness, Amiel's, 70, 72. 
 Reveries, 28, 30. 
 Reville, 199. 
 Revolt instinctive, 209. 
 
 Revolution and Catholicism, 217; 0. liberty, 224. 
 Ridicule, fear of. 272. 
 
 Right apart from duty, a compass with one leg, 330. 
 Rights' abstract, 330. 
 River, a beautiful life compared to a, 355. 
 Roads, high and cross, 269. 
 Role, our twofold, 371. 
 Romance peoples, the, 68. 
 
 Rosenkrantz's " History of Poetry," 67; on Hegel's logic, 105. 
 Rousseau and Chateaubriand, 83, 84; an ancestor in all things, 140; 
 
 his letter to Archbishop Beaumont, 139; his regard for style, 
 
 313; on savage life, 290. 
 Ruge's " Die Academic," 13, 15. 
 Russian national character, 68, 69. 
 
 Sacerdotal dogmatism, 99. 
 
 Sadness and gayety, 318. 
 
 St. Evremond, 311; James' Epistle, 31; John's Gospel, 4; Martin's 
 
 summer, 42; Paul and St. John, 18; Paul and Plato, 236; Simon 
 
 and Bayle, 205. 
 Sainte-Beuve, 178, 206, 284, 297.
 
 394 INDEX. 
 
 Saintly alchemy, 187. 
 
 Sanctification implies martyrdom, 88. 
 
 Sarcasm, repulsiveness of, 360. 
 
 Satan, possible conversion of, 137; the father of lies, 136; his 
 territory, 99. 
 
 Satiety, preservative against, 354. 
 
 Satirist, the, 170. 
 
 Savoir vivre, 234. 
 
 Skepticism and intellectual independence, 157. 
 
 Schelling, 167. 
 
 Schellingian speculation, 185. 
 
 Scherer, 26, 155, 178, 207, 224. 
 
 Scheveningen, 260. 
 
 Schiller on superiority and perfection, 99. 
 
 Schleiermacher, 99, 239; his "Monologues," 21. 
 
 Scholasticism, 249. 
 
 Schopenhauer, 194, 203, 204, 208; his pessimism, 267. 
 
 Science and faith, 216, 246, 267; and literature, 232; and religion, 
 274; and wisdom, 132; march of, 304; weakness of, 27. 
 
 Sea, the, 262; conversation of the, 166. 
 
 Secretan's philosophy, 184. 
 
 Secrets, hidden^ 59. 
 
 Seed-sowing, 31. 
 
 Self-abandonment, 102; annihilation of, 306; approval and self- 
 contempt, 57, conquest, 88 ; contempt, excessive, 230 ; con- 
 versation with, 312; criticism, 104; distrust. Amiel's, 62, 65, 
 98, 155; education, hatred of, 305; gloriiication, 81; govern- 
 ment misunderstood, 350; ignorance, cause of, 159: interest 
 v. truth, 189; love, 58, 63; preservation a duty, 322; re- 
 newal, 239; renunciation, 2. 64, 72, 182; rule the essence of 
 gentlemanliness, 149; sacrifice, 227, 277. 
 
 Selfishness and individual rights, 330. 
 
 Seneca, 195. 
 
 Sensation, nature of, 166. 
 
 Sensorium commune of nature. 353. 
 
 Separation of modern society, 228. 
 
 Separatism, 350. 
 
 Septimius Severus, motto of, 206. 
 
 Sex, the virtue of, 213. 
 
 Shadow and substance, 280. 
 
 Shakespeare, 112. 
 
 Siefert's, Louise, "Lea StoTques," 252. 
 
 Silence and repose, 166; effect of, 26, 27; of nature, 356. 
 
 Sin, definition of, 210; frivolous idea of, 256; pardon of, 187; 
 the cardinal question, 14. 
 
 Singing, rustic, 81 
 
 Sismondi, 82. 
 
 Sivaism, 244. 
 
 Slavery, 42. 
 
 Sleep. 49. 
 
 Soap-bubble symbol, 339. 
 
 Social charity and harsh justice, llo. 
 
 Socialism, international, 236.
 
 INDEX. 395 
 
 Society, 233; and the individual, 305 
 
 t^ocii Deisumus (Seneca), 195. 
 
 Socrates and Jesus, 14. 
 
 Solitariness of life, 72. 
 
 Solitary life, AmiePs, 86. 
 
 Solitude, human, 368. 
 
 Soul, abyss of the, 229; and mind, 292. 
 
 Soul, dominical state of the, 336; ghosts of the, 118; history of a 
 
 295; three powers of the (counsel, judgment, and action), 64. 
 Soul's wants ignored by the Church, 100. 
 
 Southern Europe, statesmen of, 218; theater, masks of the, 112. 
 Sparrenhorn, ascent of the, 222. 
 Speech, mystery of, 31. 
 Spinoza, 62; and Leibnitz, 373. 
 Spirit, voice of the Holy, 306. 
 Spiritual existence, 327. 
 Spontaneity, the question of, 236. 
 Stael, Madame, de, 284, 287; on nationalities, 308; her " L'Alle- 
 
 magne," 352. 
 
 Stahl's " Les histoires de mon Parrain," 331. 
 State, the model, 234; true foundations of a, 227. 
 Statistical progress and moral decline, 17. 
 Stendhal, 232. 
 
 Stoicism, 274; and suicide. 168. 
 Stoics, the, 62. 
 Strauss, 361. 
 
 Struggle of opposing forces, 331. 
 Stupidity and intellect, 303. 
 Style, Kenan's main object, 313. 
 Sub-Alpine history, 54. 
 
 Subjectivity and objectivity, 19,41, 42, 79, 106; of experience, 166. 
 Submission, 129; not defeat, 153. 
 Subtleties not helpful, 343. 
 Subtlety and taste, 297. 
 Success, 174. 
 Suffering, way of, 230; produces depth, 208; triumph of, 214; resuh 
 
 of, 277. 
 
 Suffering, universality of, 333. 
 Sunshine and mist contrasted, 148. 
 Supernatural, the, 153, 247. 
 Swiss critics, 81; ungracefulness of the, 179. 
 Sybarites, modern, 331. 
 Symbols, decay of, 361. 
 Sympathy, 15, and criticism, 325, moral, 243; of Amiel, 155; with 
 
 our fellows, 177. 
 
 Symphonic pictures, Berlioz's, 309 
 Synonyms, passion for, 311. 
 Systems defined, 141. 
 
 Tacitus v. the chroniclers, 313. 
 Tact, measure, and occasion, 319. 
 Taine on the Ancient Regime, 289. 
 Taine's " English Literature," 232
 
 396 INDEX 
 
 Talent and genius, 76; triumphs of, 140. 
 Tamerlane, 841. 
 
 Taste ignored in German aesthetics, 233; v. conscience, 381. 
 Teaching, successful, 230; the art of, 129. 
 Tears and joy, 215; origin of, 138. 
 Temperament, character, and individuality, 204. 
 Temptation our natural state, 210. 
 Temptations, etc., never ending, 147. 
 Tenderness toward our neighbors, 317. 
 Thales, hylozoism of, 289. 
 Theism, Christian, 153. 
 Theory and practice, 19, 70. 
 Thought and feeling, 259, a kind of opium, 77. 
 Time, flight of, 109, 191. 
 
 Timidity, Amiel's, 203, 288; and pride, Amiel's, 102. 
 Tocqueville, 16, on obedience, 158. 
 " To every man his turn," 354. 
 Too late, 135. 
 
 Toppfer, 30; his tourist class, 165. 
 Totality, Amiel's tendency to, 203. 
 Tradition v. force, 131. 
 Trial and duty, 148. 
 Trials, 67. 
 
 True love defined, 367. 
 
 Truth and error, 43; and faith, 246, 247; common fear of, 189; identi- 
 fication with, 56; rarely sought for, 305; the test of religion, 299. 
 Truthfulness, 59. 
 Truths, philosophic, 290 
 Turin, 54. 
 Twentieth century, newspaper of the, 374. 
 
 Ugliness and beauty, 248; disappearance of, 132. 
 
 Unsconscious nature of life, 101, 110. 
 
 Understanding and judgment, 241; the art of, 151; things, requisite* 
 
 for, 324. 
 
 Unexpected, the, 65. 
 Unfinished, the, 141. 
 Unions, a mystery in all, 303. 
 
 Unity of action, Amiel's want of, 325, 326; of everything, 61. 
 Universal suffrage, 272. 
 Universe, different relations of the, 46. 
 Unknown, domain of the, 336. 
 Unselfishness implies love, 176. 
 Usefulness, Anuel's doubts as to his, 285, 286. 
 Utilitarian materialism, 18. 
 
 Vacherot's " La Religion," 195. 
 
 Vae victis, 338 
 
 Vanity, the last sign of, 323. 
 
 Vesta and Beelzebub, 13. 
 
 Via dolorosa, 90. 
 
 Vinet, 40; his praise of weak things, 320 
 
 Virtue a sine qua non, 227.
 
 ItfDEX, 397 
 
 Visionaries, good and bad, 46. 
 
 Voltaire, 177, 311. 
 
 Voltarianism, 270. 
 
 Vnlgarization, causes of modern, 315. 
 
 Vulgarity and nobility, 129. 
 
 Wagner, 77. 
 
 Want, sense of, 71. 
 
 War, 300; uses of, 365. 
 
 War rumors, lessons of, 341. 
 
 Wariness and kindness incompatible, 329. 
 
 Wasted life, 135. 
 
 Watchwords of the people, 348. 
 
 " We" always right, 272. 
 
 Weak, charity toward the, 328, 339. 
 
 Weather, caprices of the, 122. 
 
 Weber, Dr. Ueorge, 104. 
 
 Weltgeist, the, 374. 
 
 Weltmude, the, 162. 
 
 West and East contrasted, 143. 
 
 Whole, sense of the, 106. 
 
 Whole-natured men, disappearance of, 230. 
 
 " Whom the gods love die young," 147. 
 
 Wickedness, fascination of, 136. 
 
 Will, England the country of, 150; feebleness of the, 61; proceeded 
 
 by feeling and instinct, 50; the, 79. 
 Winter in Switzerland, 338. 
 Wisdom, 121; the heritage of the few, 226. 
 Wisdom's two halves, 254. 
 Wit, Doudan's, 297. 
 Woman a "monstre incomprehensible," 186, 187; and man contrasted, 
 
 212. 
 
 Woman's faithful heart, 119; family influence, 256. 
 Women, austere, 363; emancipation of, 196; Manou's views of, 196f 
 
 never orators, 253, 258. 
 Women's love, 173. 
 Words, careless use of, 315. 
 Work the flavor of life, 376. 
 World, meanness of the, 339 
 Worship, humanity needs a, 178. 
 Worth, 94; individual, 154. 
 Writing, the art, 288. 
 
 Young, secret of remaining, 121. 
 
 Youth and manhood, 29; renewal of, 193; revival of, 239. 
 
 Youthful impressions, 57; presumptions, 269- 
 
 Zeno, 22, 335. 
 
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