The dread of the first is
the paradise of the second.
One thing only is necessary--the committal of the soul to God. Look that
thou thyself art in order, and leave to God the task of unraveling the
skein of the world and of destiny. What do annihilation or immortality
matter? What is to be, will be. And what will be, will be for the best.
Faith in good--perhaps the individual wants nothing more for his passage
through life. Only he must have taken sides with Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle, and Zeno, against materialism, against the religion of
accident and pessimism. Perhaps also he must make up his mind against
the Buddhist nihilism, because a man's system of conduct is
diametrically opposite according as he labors to increase his life or to
lessen it, according as he aims at cultivating his faculties or at
systematically deadening them.
To employ one's individual efforts for the increase of good in the
world--this modest ideal is enough for us. To help forward the victory
of good has been the common aim of saints and sages. _Socii Dei sumus_
was the word of Seneca, who had it from Cleanthus.
April 30, 1869.--I have just finished Vacherot's [Footnote: Etienne
Vacherot, a French philosophical writer, who owed his first successes
in life to the friendship of Cousin, and was later brought very much
into notice by his controversy with the Abbe Gratry, by the prosecution
brought against him in consequence of his book, "La Democratie" (1859),
and by his rejection at the hands of the Academy of Moral and Political
Sciences in 1865, for the same kind of reasons which had brought about
the exclusion of Littre in the preceding year.
Pages:
358
359
360
361
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373
374
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382