Our
whole being, irritated and overstrung by the nervous excitement of the
day, arrives in the evening at the culminating point of its human
vitality; the same being, tranquilized 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, cannot be complete so
long as the physiology of our planet is itself incomplete--that science
to which we give nowadays 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.
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