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 pandemonium, the
artist, an Olympus, the elect soul, a paradise, 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
nature, 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.
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