"--(_Journal des
Debats_, September 30, 1884).
One is reminded of Mr. Morley's criticism of Emerson. Emerson, he points
out, has almost nothing to say of death, and "little to say of that
horrid burden and impediment on the soul which the churches call sin,
and which, by whatever name we call it, is a very real catastrophe in
the moral nature of man--the courses of nature, and the prodigious
injustices of mail in society affect him with neither horror nor awe. He
will see no monster if he can help it."
Here, then, we have the eternal difference between the two orders of
temperament--the men whose overflowing energy forbids them to realize
the ever-recurring defeat of the human spirit at the hands of
circumstance, like Renan and Emerson, and the men for whom "horror and
awe" are interwoven with experience, like Amiel.] Or rather I am wrong:
temptation is our natural state, but sin is not necessary. Sin consists
in the voluntary confusion of the independence which is good with the
independence which is bad; it is caused by the half-indulgence granted
to a first sophism. We shut our eyes to the beginnings of evil because
they are small, and in this weakness is contained the germ of our
defeat. _Principiis obsta_--this maxim dutifully followed would preserve
us from almost all our catastrophes.
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