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 Muetter_,' 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 speculative, decrits dans
une 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 experiences 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 importance--dwarfed reflections of ideal truths for which
neither language nor institutions provide any adequate expression! 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.
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