According to religion man must seek the
satisfaction that the finite fails to give by looking not without but
within; and to look within he must in the literal sense of the word
undergo conversion. A path will then be found to open up before him, a
path of which he cannot see the end. He merely knows that to advance
on this path is to increase in peace, poise, centrality; though beyond
any calm he can attain is always a deeper centre of calm. The goal
is at an infinite remove. This is the truth that St. Augustine puts
theologically when he exclaims: “For thou hast made us for thyself
and our heart is restless until it findeth peace in thee.”[176] One
should insist that this question of the two infinites is not abstract
and metaphysical but bears on what is most concrete and immediate
in experience. If the inner and human infinite cannot be formulated
intellectually, it can be known practically in its effect on life and
conduct. Goethe says of Werther that he “treated his heart like a sick
child; its every wish was granted it.” “My restless heart asked me
for something else,” says Rousseau. “René,” says Chateaubriand, “was
enchanted, tormented and, as it were, possessed by the demon of his
heart.” Mr. Galsworthy speaks in a similar vein of “the aching for the
wild, the passionate, the new, that never quite dies in a man’s heart.”
But is there not deep down in the human breast another heart that is
felt as a power of control over this romantic heart and can keep within
due bounds “its aching for the wild, the passionate, the new.” This is
the heart, it would seem, to which a man must hearken if he is not for
a “little honey of romance” to abandon his “ancient wisdom and austere
control.”