Amiel's Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric AmielAmiel, Henri Frédéric
Philosophy
Amiel's Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Amiel, Henri Frédéric
Amiel, Henri Frédéric, 1821-1881 -- Diaries; Authors, Swiss -- 19th century -- Diairies
The soul is essentially active, and the activity of which we are
conscious is but a part of our activity, and voluntary activity is but
a part of our conscious activity. Here we have the basis of a whole
psychology and system of morals. Man reproducing the world, surrounding
himself with a nature which is the objective rendering of his spiritual
nature, rewarding and punishing himself; the universe identical with
the divine nature, and the nature of the perfect spirit only becoming
understood according to the measure of our perfection; intuition the
recompense of inward purity; science as the result of goodness; in
short, a new phenomenology more complete and more moral, in which the
total soul of things becomes spirit. This shall perhaps be my subject
for my summer lectures. How much is contained in it! the whole domain
of inner education, all that is mysterious in our life, the relation of
nature to spirit, of God and all other beings to man, the repetition
in miniature of the cosmogony, mythology, theology, and history of the
universe, the evolution of mind, in a word the problem of problems
into which I have often plunged but from which finite things, details,
minutiae, have turned me back a thousand times. I return to the brink of
the great abyss with the clear perception that here lies the problem
of science, that to sound it is a duty, that God hides Himself only
in light and love, that He calls upon us to become spirits, to possess
ourselves and to possess Him in the measure of our strength and that it
is our incredulity, our spiritual cowardice, which is our infirmity and
weakness.
Dante, gazing into the three worlds with their divers heavens, saw under
the form of an image what I would fain seize under a purer form. But he
was a poet, and I shall only be a philosopher. The poet makes himself
understood by human generations and by the crowd; the philosopher
addresses himself only to a few rare minds. The day has broken.
It brings with it dispersion of thought in action. I feel myself
de-magnetized, pure clairvoyance gives place to study, and the ethereal
depth of the heaven of contemplation vanishes before the glitter of
finite things. Is it to be regretted? No. But it proves that the hours
most apt for philosophical thought are those which precede the dawn.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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