Nothing is so melancholy and wearisome as this journal of
Maine de Biran. This unchanging monotony of perpetual reflection has an
enervating and depressing effect upon one. Here, then, is the life of a
distinguished man seen in its most intimate aspects! It is one long
repetition, in which the only change is an almost imperceptible
displacement of center in the writer's manner of viewing himself. This
thinker takes thirty years to move from the Epicurean quietude to the
quietism of Fenelon, and this only speculatively, for his practical life
remains the same, and all his anthropological discovery consists in
returning to the theory of the three lives, lower, human, and higher,
which is in Pascal and in Aristotle. And this is what they call a
philosopher in France! Beside the great philosophers, how poor and
narrow seems such an intellectual life! It is the journey of an ant,
bounded by the limits of a field; of a mole, who spends his days in the
construction of a mole-hill. How narrow and stifling the swallow who
flies across the whole Old World, and whose sphere of life embraces
Africa and Europe, would find the circle with which the mole and the ant
are content! This volume of Biran produces in me a sort of asphyxia; as
I assimilate it, it seems to paralyze me; I am chained to it by some
spell of secret sympathy.
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