The dream that is told becomes absurd; the ecstasy in which one retains complete control of one’s mind, in which one endeavours to take stock of the confused emotions one experiences, vanishes before us and leaves behind no more than a fatigue, a certain subjective obscurity, like a winter twilight, which precipitates a frost upon the window-panes that intercepts the last rays of the sun. My most beautiful verses will never be written, the poet says: “Of my work, the better part lies buried in myself.”[72] That is an illusion by which dream seems always superior to reality; an illusion of the same sort as that which makes us attach so much value to certain hours of religious exaltation. The truth is that the poet’s best verses are those which he has written with his own hand, his best thought is that which has possessed vitality enough to find its formula and its music; the whole of him lies in his poetry. And we also, we are in our actions, in our words, in the glance of an eye or the accent of a word, in a gesture, in the palm of a hand open in charity. To exist is to act, and a thought which is incapable of expression is an abortion which has never really been alive and has never merited to live. In the same way the true God is also the one who can be domesticated in one’s own heart, who does not fly the face of reflective consciousness, who does not show himself in dreams alone, whom one does not invoke as a phantom or a demon. Our ideal ought not to be some passing and fantastic apparition, but a positive creation of our spirit; we must be able to contemplate it without destroying it, to feed our eyes upon it as upon a reality. For the rest this ideal of goodness and of perfection, persisting as it does in the face of inner scrutiny, has no need of an objective existence in some sort material, to produce its proper effect upon the spirit. The profoundest love subsists for those who have been, as well as for those who are, and reaches out into the future as well as into the present. Nay, it even in a manner outstretches the measure of existence and develops a power of divining and loving the ideal that shall some day be. Maternal love is a model now as always for all moral beings, in that it does not await the birth of its object before making the first steps in its service. Long before the child is born the mother forms an image of it in her fancy, and loves it and gives herself to it in advance. [69] _Report of MM. Bourru and Burot au Congrès scientifique de Grenoble_, August 18, 1885.