I see the types, the foundation of beings, the sense
of things.
All personal events, all particular experiences, are to me texts for
meditation, facts to be generalized into laws, realities to be reduced
to ideas. Life is only a document to be interpreted, matter to be
spiritualized. Such is the life of the thinker. Every day he strips
himself more and more of personality. If he consents to act and to feel,
it is that he may the better understand; if he wills, it is that he may
know what will is. Although it is sweet to him to be loved, and he knows
nothing else so sweet, yet there also he seems to himself to be the
occasion of the phenomenon rather than its end. He contemplates the
spectacle of love, and love for him remains a spectacle. He does not
even believe his body his own; he feels the vital whirlwind passing
through him--lent to him, as it were, for a moment, in order that he may
perceive the cosmic vibrations. He is a mere thinking subject; he
retains only the form of things; he attributes to himself the material
possession of nothing whatsoever; he asks nothing from life but wisdom.
This temper of mind makes him incomprehensible to all that loves
enjoyment, dominion, possession. He is fluid as a phantom that we see
but cannot grasp; he resembles a man, as the _manes_ of Achilles or the
shade of Creusa resembled the living.
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