Amiel's Journal

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 excessive detachment of the individual from all received prejudices 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 Renaissance, 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 à 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.

Doubt is the accomplice of tyranny. “If a people will not believe it must obey,” said Tocqueville. All liberty implies dependence, and has its conditions; this is what negative 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 versâ. 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 observation. All is gray from the Salève 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 waiting? 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 imperfectly, 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 surrounding 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 lacking in proportion and breadth; it is one-sided, and wants a center; it has, as it were, been painted from too near.

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 perpetually 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 pleasure 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 metamorphoses, 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 converted into simultaneousness, plurality into unity, and all the changing phenomena must be traced back to their essence. There are ten men in me, according to time, place, surrounding, and occasion; and in their restless diversity I am forever escaping myself. Therefore, whatever I may reveal of my past, of my Journal, or of myself, 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 polarization; fluid, virtual, and therefore latent—latent even in manifestation, and absent even in presentation. I am a 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 Mütter,” [Footnote: “Die Mütter”—an allusion to a strange and enigmatical, but very effective conception in “Faust” (Part II. Act I. Scene v.) Die Mütter are the prototypes, the abstract forms, the generative ideas, of things. “Sie sehn dich nicht, denn Schemen sehn sie nur.” Goethe borrowed the term from a passage of Plutarch’s, but he has made the idea half Platonic, half legendary. Amiel, however, seems rather to have in his mind Faust’s speech in Scene vii. than the speech of Mephistopheles in Scene v:

  “In eurem Namen, Mütter, die ihr thront  Im Gränzenlosen, ewig einsam wohnt,  Und doch gesellig! Euer haupt umschweben  Des Lebens Bilder, regsam, ohne Leben.”]

where sleeps that which neither lives nor dies, that which has neither movement, nor change, nor extension, nor form, and which lasts when all else passes away.

  “Dans l’éternel azur de l’insondable espace  S’enveloppe de paix notre globe agitée:  Homme, enveloppe ainsi tes jours, rêve qui passe,  Du calme firmament de ton éternité.”

(H. P. AMIEL, Penseroso.)

Geneva, January 11, 1867.

  “Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, Labuntar anni....”

I hear the drops of my life falling distinctly one by 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 religions 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 einmal war, in allem Glanz und Schein,  Es regt sich dort; denn es will ewig sein.  Und ihr vertheilt es, allgewaltige Mächte,  Zum Zelt des Tages, zum Gewölb’ der Nächte.

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—(Seven A. 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 glistering 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, ô jeunes filles,  Cueillir des bleuets dans les blés!”

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 Weltmüde, 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 sacrifice, his gentleness should be taken to mean privation patiently borne rather than resignation. In a word, he submits to an existence in which he feels no joy, and he cannot hide from himself that all the alleviations with 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 himself 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 responsibility, 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 willingly 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 waverings, are they not temptations of the soul?

September 6, 1867, Weissenstein. [Footnote: Weissenstein is a high point in the Jura, above Soleure.] (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 Tödi 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 Spannörter, the Titlis, then the Bernese colossi from the Wetterhorn to the Diablerets, then the 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 composition 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 mountains 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 interests, 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 townswoman to the core, and feels herself out of place in this great nature, which probably 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 amusingly drawn by Töpffer. Character: naïve conceit. Country: 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 center point of the world, and leads Frenchmen to neglect geography and languages. The ordinary French townsman 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’armée. 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 individualities.

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.

What a pity I must leave this place now that everything is so bright!

The calm sea says more to the thoughtful soul than the same sea in storm and tumult. But we need the understanding of eternal things and the sentiment of the infinite to be able to feel this. The divine state par excellence is that of silence and repose, because all speech and all action are in themselves limited and fugitive. Napoleon with his arms crossed over his breast is more expressive than the furious Hercules beating the air with his athlete’s fists. People of passionate temperament never understand this. They are only sensitive to the energy of succession; they know nothing of the energy of condensation. They can only be impressed by acts and effects, by noise and effort. They have no instinct of contemplation, no sense of the pure cause, the fixed source of all movement, the principle of all effects, the 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 philosophical meeting at the house of Edouard Claparède. [Footnote: Edouard Claparède, a Genevese naturalist, born 1832, died 1871.] The question on the order of the day was the nature of sensation. Claparède pronounced for the absolute subjectivity of all experience—in other words, for pure idealism—which is amusing, from a naturalist. According to him the ego alone exists, and the universe is but a projection of the ego, a phantasmagoria which we ourselves create without suspecting it, believing all the time that we are lookers-on. It is our noümenon which objectifies itself as phenomenon. The ego, according to him, is a radiating force which, modified without knowing what it is that modifies it, imagines it, by virtue of the principle of causality—that is to say, produces the great illusion of the objective world in order so to explain itself. Our waking life, therefore, is but a more connected dream. The self is an unknown which gives birth to an infinite number of unknowns, by a fatality of its nature. Science is summed up in the consciousness that nothing exists but consciousness. 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 l’ombre d’un esprit  Qui traçait l’ombre d’um système  Avec l’ombre de l’ombre même.”

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 responsibility breaks the spell and issues from the enchanted circle of Maïa.

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

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 horizontal 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 conscience, 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 annihilation. 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 earthliness. These eighty thousand daily births, of which statistics tell us, represent as it were an effusion of innocence and freshness, struggling not only against the death of the 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 accumulation 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.