Existence has become fluid. From the standpoint of complete
personal renunciation I watch the passage of my impressions, my dreams,
thoughts, and memories.... It is a mood of fixed contemplation akin to
that which we attribute to the seraphim. It takes no interest in the
individual self, but only in the specimen monad, the sample of the
general history of mind. Everything is in everything, and the
consciousness examines what it has before it. Nothing is either great or
small. The mind adopts all modes, and everything is acceptable to it. In
this state its relations with the body, with the outer world, and with
other individuals, fade out of sight. _Selbst-bewusstsein_ becomes once
more impersonal _Bewusstsein_, and before personality can be reacquired,
pain, duty, and will must be brought into action.
Are these oscillations between the personal and the impersonal, between
pantheism and theism, between Spinoza and Leibnitz, to be regretted? No,
for it is the one state which makes us conscious of the other. And as
man is capable of ranging the two domains, why should he mutilate
himself?
February 22, 1881.--The march of mind finds its typical expression in
astronomy--no pause, but no hurry; orbits, cycles, energy, but at the
same time harmony; movement and yet order; everything has its own weight
and its relative weight, receives and gives forth light.
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