The age of great men is going.... By continual leveling and division of labor society will become everything and man nothing.... A plateau with fewer and fewer undulations, without contrasts and without oppositions--such will be the aspect of human society. The statistician will register a growing progress, and the moralist a gradual decline: on the one hand, a progress of things; on the other, a decline of souls. The useful will take the place of the beautiful, industry of art, political economy of religion, and arithmetic of poetry. He writes to himself a sort of "spiritual letter" that might almost have been Fenelon's (the date is 1852, he was therefore now thirty-one years old): We receive everything, both life and happiness; but the _manner_ in which we receive, this is what is still ours. Let us, then, receive trustfully without shame or anxiety. Let us humbly accept from God even our own nature, and treat it charitably, firmly, intelligently. Not that we are called upon to accept the evil and the disease in us, but let us accept ourselves in spite of the evil and the disease. The first following "thought" is a deep intuition: There are two states or conditions of pride. The first is one of self-approval, the second one of self-contempt. Pride is seen probably at its purest in the last. To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius. Chateaubriand posed all his life as the wearied Colossus, smiling pitifully upon a pigmy world, and contemptuously affecting to desire nothing from it, though at the same time wishing it to be believed that he could if he pleased possess himself of every thing by mere force of genius. We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves. To grow old is more difficult than to die, because to renounce a good once and for all costs less than to renew the sacrifice day by day and in detail. From entries fourteen years apart in date, we bring together, abridging them, two expressions of Amiel about Victor Hugo: His ideal is the extraordinary, the gigantic, the overwhelming, the incommensurable. His most characteristic words are immense, colossal, enormous, huge, monstrous. He finds a way of making even child-nature extravagant and bizarre. The only thing which seems impossible to him is to be natural.