Let us begin as Orientals, and end as Westerns, for
these are the two halves of wisdom.
December 11, 1872.--A deep and dreamless sleep and now I wake up to the
gray, lowering, rainy sky, which has kept us company for so long. The
air is mild, the general outlook depressing. I think that it is partly
the fault of my windows, which are not very clean, and contribute by
their dimness to this gloomy aspect of the outer world. Rain and smoke
have besmeared them.
Between us and things how many screens there are! Mood, health, the
tissues of the eye, the window-panes of our cell, mist, smoke, rain,
dust, and light itself--and all infinitely variable! Heraclitus said:
"No man bathes twice in the same river." I feel inclined to say; No one
sees the same landscape twice over, for a window is one kaleidoscope,
and the spectator another.
What is madness? Illusion, raised to the second power. A sound mind
establishes regular relations, a _modus vivendi_, between things, men,
and itself, and it is under the delusion that it has got hold of stable
truth and eternal fact. Madness does not even see what sanity sees,
deceiving itself all the while by the belief that it sees better than
sanity. The sane mind or common sense confounds the fact of experience
with necessary fact, and assumes in good faith that what is, is the
measure of what may be; while madness cannot perceive any difference
between what is and what it imagines--it confounds its dreams with
reality.
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