What is best among things and most perfect among beings
slips through these categories. The man who is perfectly well is neither
sanguineous--[to use the old medical term]--nor bilious nor nervous. A
normal republic contains opposing parties and points of view, but it
contains them, as it were, in a state of chemical combination. All the
colors are contained in a ray of light, while red alone does not contain
a sixth part of the perfect ray.
July 8, 1880.--It is thirty years since I read Waagen's book on
"Museums," which my friend ---- is now reading. It was in 1842 that I
was wild for pictures; in 1845 that I was studying Krause's philosophy;
in 1850 that I became professor of aesthetics. ---- may be the same age
as I am; it is none the less true that when a particular stage has
become to me a matter of history, he is just arriving at it. This
impression of distance and remoteness is a strange one. I begin to
realize that my memory is a great catacomb, and that below my actual
standing-ground there is layer after layer of historical ashes.
Is the life of mind something like that of great trees of immemorial
growth? Is the living layer of consciousness super-imposed upon hundreds
of dead layers? _Dead?_ No doubt this is too much to say, but still,
when memory is slack the past becomes almost as though it had never
been.
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