Eleven o’clock.--Preludes, scales, piano-exercises going on under my feet. In the garden children’s voices. I have just finished Rosenkrantz on “Hegel’s Logic,” and have run through a few articles in the Reviews.... The limitation of the French mind consists in the insufficiency of its spiritual alphabet, which does not allow it to translate the Greek, German, or Spanish mind without changing the accent. The hospitality of French manners is not completed by a real hospitality of thought.... My nature is just the opposite. I am individual in the presence of men, objective in the presence of things. I attach myself to the object, and absorb myself in it; I detach myself from subjects [_i.e._. persons], and hold myself on my guard against them. I feel myself different from the mass of men, and akin to the great whole of nature. My way of asserting myself is in cherishing this sense of sympathetic unity with life, which I yearn to understand, and in repudiating the tyranny of commonplace. All that is imitative and artificial inspires me with a secret repulsion, while the smallest true and spontaneous existence (plant, animal, child) draws and attracts me. I feel myself in community of spirit with the Goethes, the Hegels, the Schleiermachers, the Leibnitzes, opposed as they are among themselves; while the French mathematicians, philosophers, or rhetoricians, in spite of their high qualities, leave me cold, because there is in them no sense of the whole, the sum of things [Footnote: The following passage from Sainte-Beuve may be taken as a kind of answer by anticipation to this accusation, which Amiel brings more than once in the course of the Journal: “Toute nation livrée à elle-même et à son propre génie se fait une critique littéraire qui y est conforme. La France en son beau temps a eu la sienne, qui ne ressemble ni à celle de l’Allemagne ni à celle de ses autres voisins--un peu plus superficielle, dira-t-on--je ne le crois pas: mais plus vive, moins chargée d’erudition, moins théorique et systématique, plus confiante au sentiment immédiat du goût. _Un peu de chaque chose et rien de l’ensemble, à la Française_: telle était la devise de Montaigne et telle est aussi la devise de la critique française. Nous ne sommes pas _synthétiques_, comme diraient les Allemands; le mot même n’est pas française. L’imagination de détail nous suffit. Montaigne, La Fontaine Madame de Sévigné, sont volontiers nos livres de chevet.”