"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 seems to me to have enough elasticity and
immensity, to be free enough from the irreparable; 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. 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 whole," 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 _Schematismus_. 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.
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