O Plato! O Pythagoras!
ages ago you heard these harmonies--surprised these moments of inward
ecstacy--knew these divine transports! If music thus carries us to
heaven, it is because music is harmony, harmony is perfection,
perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven. This world of quarrels
and bitterness, of selfishness, ugliness, and misery, makes us long
involuntarily for the eternal peace, for the adoration which has no
limits, and the love which has no end. It is not so much the infinite as
the beautiful that we yearn for. It is not being, or the limits of
being, which weigh upon us; it is evil, in us and without us. It is not
all necessary to be great, so long as we are in harmony with the order
of the universe. Moral ambition has no pride; it only desires to fill
its place, and make its note duly heard in the universal concert of the
God of love.
March 30, 1870.--Certainly, nature is unjust and shameless, without
probity, and without faith. Her only alternatives are gratuitous favor
or mad aversion, and her only way of redressing an injustice is to
commit another. The happiness of the few is expiated by the misery of
the greater number. It is useless to accuse a blind force.
The human conscience, however, revolts against this law of nature, and
to satisfy its own instinct of justice it has imagined two hypotheses,
out of which it has made for itself a religion--the idea of an
individual providence, and the hypothesis of another life.
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