The story of the “Journal Intime” is a story to make us think, to make us anxious; but at the same time, in the case of a nature like Amiel’s, there is so much high poetry thrown off from the long process of conflict, the power of vision and of reproduction which the intellect gains at the expense of the rest of the personality is in many respects so real and so splendid, and produces results so stirring often to the heart and imagination of the listener, that in the end we put down the record not so much with a throb of pity as with an impulse of gratitude. The individual error and suffering is almost forgotten; all that we can realize is the enrichment of human feeling, the quickened sense of spiritual reality bequeathed to us by the baffled and solitary thinker whose _via dolorosa_ is before us. The manner in which this intellectual idiosyncrasy we have been describing gradually affected Amiel’s life supplies abundant proof of its actuality and sincerity. It is a pitiful story. Amiel might have been saved from despair by love and marriage, by paternity, by strenuous and successful literary production; and this mental habit of his--this tyranny of ideal conceptions, helped by the natural accompaniment of such a tyranny, a critical sense of abnormal acuteness--stood between him and everything healing and restoring. “I am afraid of an imperfect, a faulty synthesis, and I linger in the provisional, from timidity and from loyalty.” “As soon as a thing attracts me I turn away from it; or rather, I cannot either be content with the second-best, or discover anything which satisfies my aspiration. The real disgusts me, and I cannot find the ideal.” And so one thing after another is put away. Family life attracted him perpetually. “I cannot escape,” he writes, “from the ideal of it. A companion, of my life, of my work, of my thoughts, of my hopes; within a common worship--toward the world outside kindness and beneficence; education to undertake; the thousand and one moral relations which develop round the first--all these ideas intoxicate me sometimes.” But in vain. “Reality, the present, the irreparable, the necessary, repel and even terrify me. I have too much imagination, conscience, and penetration and not enough character. _The life of thought alone seems to me to have enough elasticity and immensity, to be free enough from the irreparable; practical life makes me afraid._ I am distrustful of myself and of happiness because I know myself. The ideal poisons for me all imperfect possession. And I abhor useless regrets and repentance.”