In this also consists
self-deliverance, self-enfranchisement, self-conquest. All that comes
from outside is a question to which we owe an answer--a pressure to be
met by counter-pressure, if we are to remain free and living agents. The
development of our unconscious nature follows the astronomical laws of
Ptolemy; everything in it is change--cycle, epi-cycle, and
metamorphosis.
Every man then possesses in himself the analogies and rudiments of all
things, of all beings, and of all forms of life. He who knows how to
divine the small beginnings, the germs and symptoms of things, can
retrace in himself the universal mechanism, and divine by intuition the
series which he himself will not finish, such as vegetable and animal
existences, human passions and crises, the diseases of the soul and
those of the body. The mind which is subtle and powerful may penetrate
all these potentialities, and make every point flash out the world which
it contains. This is to be conscious of and to possess the general life,
this is to enter into the divine sanctuary of contemplation.
September 12, 1861.--In me an intellect which would fain forget itself
in things, is contradicted by a heart which yearns to live in human
beings. The uniting link of the two contradictions is the tendency
toward self-abandonment, toward ceasing to will and exist for one's
self, toward laying down one's own personality, and losing
--dissolving--one's self in love and contemplation.
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