January 7, 1866.--Our life is but a soap-bubble hanging from a reed; it is formed, expands to its full size, clothes itself with the loveliest colors of the prism, and even escapes at moments from the law of gravitation; but soon the black speck appears in it, and the globe of emerald and gold vanishes into space, leaving behind it nothing but a simple drop of turbid water. All the poets have made this comparison, it is so striking and so true. To appear, to shine, to disappear; to be born, to suffer, and to die; is it not the whole sum of life, for a butterfly, for a nation, for a star? Time is but the measure of the difficulty of a conception. Pure thought has scarcely any need of time, since it perceives the two ends of an idea almost at the same moment. The thought of a planet can only be worked out by nature with labor and effort, but supreme intelligence sums up the whole in an instant. Time is then the successive dispersion of being, just as speech is the successive analysis of an intuition or of an act of will. In itself it is relative and negative, and disappears within the absolute being. God is outside time because he thinks all thought at once; Nature is within time, because she is only speech--the discursive unfolding of each thought contained within the infinite thought. But nature exhausts herself in this impossible task, for the analysis of the infinite is a contradiction. With limitless duration, boundless space, and number without end, Nature does at least what she can to translate into visible form the wealth of the creative formula. By the vastness of the abysses into which she penetrates, in the effort--the unsuccessful effort--to house and contain the eternal thought, we may measure the greatness of the divine mind. For as soon as this mind goes out of itself and seeks to explain itself, the effort at utterance heaps universe upon universe, during myriads of centuries, and still it is not expressed, and the great harangue must go on for ever and ever. The East prefers immobility as the form of the Infinite: the West, movement. It is because the West is infected by the passion for details, and sets proud store by individual worth. Like a child upon whom a hundred thousand francs have been bestowed, he thinks she is multiplying her fortune by counting it out in pieces of twenty sous, or five centimes. Her passion for progress is in great part the product of an infatuation, which consists in forgetting the goal to be aimed at, and absorbing herself in the pride and delight of each tiny step, one after the other. Child that she is, she is even capable of confounding change with improvement--beginning over again, with growth in perfectness.