"
This abolition of nature by natural science is logical, and it was, in
fact, Schelling's starting-point. From the standpoint of physiology,
nature is but a necessary illusion, a constitutional hallucination. We
only escape from this bewitchment by the moral activity of the _ego_,
which feels itself a cause and a free cause, and which by its
responsibility breaks the spell and issues from the enchanted circle of
Maia.
Maia! Is she indeed the true goddess? Hindoo wisdom long ago regarded
the world as the dream of Brahma. Must we hold with Fichte that it is
the individual dream of each individual _ego_? Every fool would then be
a cosmogonic poet producing the firework of the universe under the dome
of the infinite. But why then give ourselves such gratuitous trouble to
learn? In our dreams, at least, nightmare excepted, we endow ourselves
with complete ubiquity, liberty and omniscience. Are we then less
ingenious and inventive awake than asleep?
January 25, 1868.--It is when the outer man begins to decay that it
becomes vitally important to us to believe in immortality, and to feel
with the apostle that the inner man is renewed from day to day. But for
those who doubt it and have no hope of it? For them the remainder of
life can only be the compulsory dismemberment of their small empire, the
gradual dismantling of their being by inexorable destiny.
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