Such a doctor is possible, but the greater number of them lack the
higher and inner life, they know nothing of the transcendent
laboratories of nature; they seem to me superficial, profane, strangers
to divine things, destitute of intuition and sympathy. The model doctor
should be at once a genius, a saint, a man of God.
September 11, 1873. (_Amsterdam_).--The doctor has just gone. He says I
have fever about me, and does not think that I can start for another
three days without imprudence. I dare not write to my Genevese friends
and tell them that I am coming back from the sea in a radically worse
state of strength and throat than when I went there, and that I have
only wasted my time, my trouble, my money, and my hopes....
This contradictory double fact--on the one side an eager hopefulness
springing up afresh after all disappointments, and on the other an
experience almost invariably unfavorable--can be explained like all
illusions by the whim of nature, which either wills us to be deceived or
wills us to act as if we were so.
Skepticism is the wiser course, but in delivering us from error it tends
to paralyze life. Maturity of mind consists in taking part in the
prescribed game as seriously as though one believed in it. Good-humored
compliance, tempered by a smile, is, on the whole, the best line to
take; one lends one's self to an optical illusion, and the voluntary
concession has an air of liberty.
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