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Part II.
Part II.
Letter VII.
Can this effect of harmony be attained by the state? That is not
possible, for the state, as at present constituted, has given occasion to
evil, and the state as conceived in the idea, instead of being able to
establish this more perfect humanity, ought to be based upon it. Thus the
researches in which I have indulged would have brought me back to the same
point from which they had called me off for a time. The present age, far from
offering us this form of humanity, which we have acknowledged as a necessary
condition of an improvement of the state, shows us rather the diametrically
opposite form. If therefore the principles I have laid down are correct, and
if experience confirms the picture I have traced of the present time, it would
be necessary to qualify as unseasonable every attempt to effect a similar
change in the state, and all hope as chimerical that would be based on such an
attempt, until the division of the inner man ceases, and nature has been
sufficiently developed to become herself the instrument of this great change
and secure the reality of the political creation of reason.
In the physical creation, nature shows us the road that we have to follow
in the moral creation. Only when the struggle of elementary forces has ceased
in inferior organisations, nature rises to the noble form of the physical man.
In like manner, the conflict of the elements of the moral man and that of
blind instincts must have ceased, and a coarse antagonism in himself, before
the attempt can be hazarded. On the other hand, the independence of man`s
character must be secured, and his submission to despotic forms must have
given place to a suitable liberty, before the variety in his constitution can
be made subordinate to the unity of the ideal. When the man of nature still
makes such an anarchical abuse of his will, his liberty ought hardly to be
disclosed to him. And when the man fashioned by culture makes so little use of
his freedom, his free will ought not to be taken from him. The concession of
liberal principles becomes a treason to social order when it is associated
with a force still in fermentation, and increases the already exuberant energy
of its nature. Again, the law of conformity under one level becomes tyranny to
the individual when it is allied to a weakness already holding sway and to
natural obstacles, and when it comes to extinguish the last spark of
spontaneity and of originality.
The tone of the age must therefore rise from its profound moral
degradation; on the one hand it must emancipate itself from the blind service
of nature, and on the other it must revert to its simplicity, its truth, and
its fruitful sap; a sufficient task for more than a century. However, I admit
readily, more than one special effort may meet with success, but no
improvement of the whole will result from it, and contradictions in action
will be a continual protest against the unity of maxims. It will be quite
possible, then, that in remote corners of the world humanity may be honoured
in the person of the negro, while in Europe it may be degraded in the person
of the thinker. The old principles will remain, but they will adopt the dress
of the age, and philosophy will lend its name to an oppression that was
formerly authorised by the Church. In one place, alarmed at the liberty which
in its opening efforts always shows itself an enemy, it will cast itself into
the arms of a convenient servitude. In another place, reduced to despair by a
pedantic tutelage, it will be driven into the savage license of the state of
nature. Usurpation will invoke the weakness of human nature, and insurrection
will invoke its dignity, till at length the great sovereign of all human
things, blind force, shall come in and decide, like a vulgar pugilist, this
pretended contest of principles.
Letter VIII.
Must philosophy therefore retire from this field, disappointed in its
hopes? Whilst in all other directions the dominion of forms is extended, must
this the most precious of all gifts be abandoned to a formless chance? Must
the contest of blind forces last eternally in the political world, and is
social law never to triumph over a hating egotism?
Not in the least. It is true that reason herself will never attempt
directly a struggle with this brutal force which resists her arms, and she
will be as far as the son of Saturn in the `Iliad` from descending into the
dismal field of battle, to fight them in person. But she chooses the most
deserving among the combatants, clothes him with divine arms as Jupiter gave
them to his son-in-law, and by her triumphing force she finally decides
the victory.
Reason has done all that she could in finding the law and promulgating
it; it is for the energy of the will and the ardour of feeling to carry it
out. To issue victoriously from her contest with force, truth herself must
first become a force, and turn one of the instincts of man into her champion
in the empire of phaenomena. For instincts are the only motive forces in the
material world. If hitherto truth has so little manifested her victorious
power, this has not depended on the understanding, which could not have
unveiled it, but on the heart which remained closed to it, and on instinct
which did not act with it.
Whence, in fact, proceeds this general sway of prejudices, this might of
the understanding in the midst of the light disseminated by philosophy and
experience? The age is enlightened, that is to say, that knowledge, obtained
and vulgarised, suffices to set right at least our practical principles. The
spirit of free inquiry has dissipated the erroneous opinions which long barred
the access to truth, and has undermined the ground on which fanaticism and
deception had erected their throne. Reason has purified itself from the
illusions of the senses and from a mendacious sophistry, and philosophy
herself raises her voice and exhorts us to return to the bosom of nature, to
which she had first made us unfaithful. Whence then is it that we remain still
barbarians?
There must be something in the spirit of man - as it is not in the
objects themselves - which prevents us from receiving the truth,
notwithstanding the brilliant light she diffuses, and from accepting her,
whatever may be her strength for producing conviction. This something was
perceived and expressed by an ancient sage in this very significant maxim:
sapere aude.^1
[Footnote 1: Dare to be wise.]
Dare to be wise! A spirited courage is required to triumph over the
impediments that the indolence of nature as well as the cowardice of the heart
oppose to our instruction. It was not without reason that the ancient Mythos
made Minerva issue fully armed from the head of Jupiter, for it is with
warfare that this instruction commences. From its very outset it has to
sustain a hard fight against the senses, which do not like to be roused from
their easy slumber. The greater part of men are much too exhausted and
enervated by their struggle with want to be able to engage in a new and severe
contest with error. Satisfied if they themselves can escape from the hard
labour of thought, they willingly abandon to others the guardianship of their
thoughts. And if it happens that nobler necessities agitate their soul, they
cling with a greedy faith to the formulas that the state and the church hold
in reserve for such cases. If these unhappy men deserve our compassion, those
others deserve our just contempt, who, though set free from those necessities
by more fortunate circumstances, yet willingly bend to their yoke. These
latter persons prefer this twilight of obscure ideas, where the feelings have
more intensity, and the imagination can at will create convenient chimeras, to
the rays of truth which put to flight the pleasant illusions of their dreams.
They have founded the whole structure of their happiness on these very
illusions, which ought to be combated and dissipated by the light of
knowledge, and they would think they were paying too dearly for a truth which
begins by robbing them of all that has value in their sight. It would be
necessary that they should be already sages to love wisdom: a truth that was
felt at once by him to whom philosophy owes its name.^2
[Footnote 2: The Greek word means, as is known, love of wisdom.]
It is therefore not going far enough to say that the light of the
understanding only deserves respect when it reacts on the character; to a
certain extent it is from the character that this light proceeds; for the road
that terminates in the head must pass through the heart. Accordingly, the most
pressing need of the present time is to educate the sensibility, because it is
the means, not only to render efficacious in practice the improvement of
ideas, but to call this improvement into existence.
Letter IX.
But perhaps there is a vicious circle in our previous reasoning?
Theoretical culture must it seems bring along with it practical culture, and
yet the latter must be the condition of the former. All improvement in the
political sphere must proceed from the ennobling of the character. But,
subject to the influence of a social constitution still barbarous, how can
character become ennobled? It would then be necessary to seek for this end an
instrument that the state does not furnish, and to open sources that would
have preserved themselves pure in the midst of political corruption.
I have now reached the point to which all the considerations tended that
have engaged me up to the present time. This instrument is the art of the
beautiful; these sources are open to us in its immortal models.
Art, like science, is emancipated from all that is positive, and all that
is humanly conventional; both are completely independent of the arbitrary will
of men. The political legislator may place their empire under an interdict,
but he cannot reign there. He can proscribe the friend of truth, but truth
subsists; he can degrade the artist, but he cannot change art. No doubt,
nothing is more common than to see science and art bend before the spirit of
the age, and creative taste receive its law from critical taste. When the
character becomes stiff and hardens itself, we see science severely keeping
her limits, and art subject to the harsh restraint of rules; when the
character is relaxed and softened, science endeavours to please and art to
rejoice. For whole ages philosophers as well as artists show themselves
occupied in letting down truth and beauty to the depths of vulgar humanity.
They themselves are swallowed up in it; but, thanks to their essential vigour
and indestructible life, the true and the beautiful make a victorious fight,
and issue triumphant from the abyss.
No doubt the artist is the child of his time, but unhappy for him if he
is its disciple or even its favourite. Let a beneficent deity carry off in
good time the suckling from the breast of its mother, let it nourish him on
the milk of a better age, and suffer him to grow up and arrive at virility
under the distant sky of Greece. When he has attained manhood, let him come
back, presenting a face strange to his own age; let him come, not to delight
it with his apparition, but rather to purify it, terrible as the son of
Agamemnon. He will, indeed, receive his matter from the present time, but he
will borrow the form from a nobler time and even beyond all time, from the
essential, absolute, immutable unity. There, issuing from the pure ether of
its heavenly nature, flows the source of all beauty, which was never tainted
by the corruption of generations or of ages, which roll along far beneath it
in dark eddies. Its matter may be dishonoured as well as ennobled by fancy,
but the ever chaste form escapes from the caprices of imagination. The Roman
had already bent his knee for long years to the divinity of the emperors, and
yet the statues of the gods stood erect; the temples retained their sanctity
for the eye long after the gods had become a theme for mockery, and the noble
architecture of the palaces that shielded the infamies of Nero and of Commodus
were a protest against them. Humanity has lost its dignity, but art has saved
it, and preserves it in marbles full of meaning; truth continues to live in
illusion, and the copy will serve to reestablish the model. If the nobility of
art has survived the nobility of nature, it also goes before it like an
inspiring genius, forming and awakening minds. Before truth causes her
triumphant light to penetrate into the depth of the heart, poetry intercepts
her rays, and the summits of humanity shine in a bright light, while a dark
and humid night still hangs over the vatleys.
But how will the artist avoid the corruption of his time which encloses
him on all hands? Let him raise his eyes to his own dignity, and to law; let
him not lower them to necessity and fortune. Equally exempt from a vain
activity which would imprint its trace on the fugitive moment, and from the
dreams of an impatient enthusiasm which applies the measure of the absolute to
the paltry productions of time, let the artist abandon the real to the
understanding, for that is its proper field. But let the artist endeavour to
give birth to the ideal by the union of the possible and of the necessary. Let
him stamp illusion and truth with the effigy of this ideal; let him apply it
to the play of his imagination and his most serious actions, in short, to all
sensuous and spiritual forms; then let him quietly launch his work into
infinite time.
But the minds set on fire by this ideal have not all received an equal
share of calm from the creative genius - that great and patient temper which
is required to impress the ideal on the dumb marble, or to spread it over a
page of cold, sober letters, and then entrust it to the faithful hands of
time. This divined instinct, and creative force, much too ardent to follow
this peaceful walk, often throws itself immediately on the present, on active
life, and strives to transform the shapeless matter of the moral world. The
misfortune of his brothers, of the whole species, appeals loudly to the heart
of the man of feeling; their abasement appeals still louder; enthusiasm is
inflamed, and in souls endowed with energy the burning desire aspires
impatiently to action and facts. But has this innovator examined himself to
see if these disorders of the moral world wound his reason, or if they do not
rather wound his self-love? If he does not determine this point at once, he
will find it from the impulsiveness with which he pursues a prompt and
definite end. A pure, moral motive has for its end the absolute; time does not
exist for it, and the future becomes the present to it directly, by a
necessary development, it has to issue from the present. To a reason having no
limits the direction towards an end becomes confounded with the accomplishment
of this end, and to enter on a course is to have finished it.
If, then, a young friend of the true and of the beautiful were to ask me
how, notwithstanding the resistance of the times, he can satisfy the noble
longing of his heart, I should reply: Direct the world on which you act
towards that which is good, and the measured and peaceful course of time will
bring about the results. You have given it this direction if by your teaching
you raise its thoughts towards the necessary and the eternal; if, by your acts
or your creations, you make the necessary and the eternal the object of your
leanings. The structure of error and of all that is arbitrary must fall, and
it has already fallen, as soon as you are sure that it is tottering. But it is
important that it should not only totter in the external but also in the
internal man. Cherish triumphant truth in the modest sanctuary of your heart;
give it an incarnate form through beauty, that it may not only be the
understanding that does homage to it, but that feeling may lovingly grasp its
appearance. And that you may not by any chance take from external reality the
model which you yourself ought to furnish, do not venture into its dangerous
society before you are assured in your own heart that you have a good escort
furnished by ideal nature. Live with your age, but be not its creation; labour
for your contemporaries, but do for them what they need, and not what they
praise. Without having shared their faults, share their punishment with a
noble resignation, and bend under the yoke which they find is as painful to
dispense with as to bear. By the constancy with which you will despise their
good fortune, you will prove to them that it is not through cowardice that you
submit to their sufferings. See them in thought such as they ought to be when
you must act upon them; but see them as they are when you are tempted to act
for them. Seek to owe their suffrage to their dignity; but to make them happy
keep an account of their unworthiness; thus, on the one hand, the nobleness of
your heart will kindle theirs, and, on the other, your end will not be reduced
to nothingness by their unworthiness. The gravity of your principles will keep
them off from you, but in play they will still endure them. Their taste is
purer than their heart, and it is by their taste you must lay hold of this
suspicious fugitive. In vain will you combat their maxims, in vain will you
condemn their actions; but you can try your moulding hand on their leisure.
Drive away caprice, frivolity, and coarseness, from their pleasures, and you
will banish them imperceptibly from their acts, and length from their
feelings. Everywhere that you meet them, surround them with great, noble, and
ingenious forms; multiply around them the symbols of perfection, till
appearance triumphs over reality, and art over nature.
Letter X.
Convinced by my preceding letters, you agree with me on this point, that
man can depart from his destination by two opposite roads, that our epoch is
actually moving on these two false roads, and that it has become the prey, in
one case, of coarseness, and elsewhere of exhaustion and depravity. It is the
beautiful that must bring it back from this twofold departure. But how can the
cultivation of the fine arts remedy, at the same time, these opposite defects,
and unite in itself two contradictory qualities? Can it bind nature in the
savage, and set it free in the barbarian? Can it at once tighten a spring and
loose it, and if it cannot produce this double effect, how will it be
reasonable to expect from it so important a result as the education of man?
It may be urged that it is almost a proverbial adage that the feeling
developed by the beautiful refines manners, and any new proof offered on the
subject would appear superfluous. Men base this maxim on daily experience,
which shows us almost always clearness of intellect, delicacy of feeling,
liberality and even dignity of conduct associated with a cultivated taste,
while an uncultivated taste is almost always accompanied by the opposite
qualities. With considerable assurance, the most civilised nation of antiquity
is cited as an evidence of this, the Greeks, among whom the perception of the
beautiful attained its highest development; and, as a contrast, it is usual to
point to nations in a partial savage state, and partly barbarous, who expiate
their insensibility to the beautiful by a coarse or, at all events, a hard
austere character; Nevertheless, some thinkers are tempted occasionally to
deny either the fact itself or to dispute the legitimacy of the consequences
that are derived from it. They do not entertain so unfavourable an opinion of
that savage coarseness which is made a reproach in the case of certain
nations; nor do they form so advantageous an opinion of the refinement so
highly lauded in the case of cultivated nations. Even as far back as in
antiquity there were men who by no means regarded the culture of the liberal
arts as a benefit, and who were consequently led to forbid the entrance of
their republic to imagination.
I do not speak of those who calumniate art, because they have never been
favoured by it. These persons only appreciate a possession by the trouble it
takes to acquire it, and by the profit it brings; and how could they properly
appreciate the silent labour of taste in the exterior and interior man? How
evident it is that the accidental disadvantages attending liberal culture
would make them lose sight of its essential advantages! The man deficient in
form despises the grace of diction as a means of corruption, courtesy in the
social relations as dissimulation, delicacy and generosity in conduct as an
affected exaggeration. He cannot forgive the favourite of the Graces for
having enlivened all assemblies as a man of the world, of having directed all
men to his views like a statesman, and of giving his impress to the whole
century as a writer; while he, the victim of labour, can only obtain, with all
his learning, the least attention or overcome the least difficulty. As he
cannot learn from his fortunate rival the secret of pleasing, the only course
open to him is to deplore the corruption of human nature, which adores rather
the appearance than the reality.
But there are also opinions deserving respect, that pronounce themselves
adverse to the effects of the beautiful, and find formidable arms in
experience, with which to wage war against it. "We are free to admit" - such
is their language - "that the charms of the beautiful can further honourable
ends in pure hands; but it is not repugnant to its nature to produce, in
impure hands, a directly contrary effect, and to employ in the service of
injustice and error the power that throws the soul of man into chains. It is
exactly because taste only attends to the form and never to the substance; it
ends by placing the soul on the dangerous incline, leading it to neglect all
reality and to sacrifice truth and morality to an attractive envelope. All the
real difference of things vanishes, and it is only the appearance that
determines their value! How many men of talent" - thus these arguers proceed -
"have been turned aside from all effort by the seductive power of the
beautiful, or have been led away from all serious exercise of their activity,
or have been induced to use it very feebly? How many weak minds have been
impelled to quarrel with the organisation of society, simply because it has
pleased the imagination of poets to present the image of a world constituted
differently, where no propriety chains down opinion and no artifice holds
nature in thraldom? What a dangerous logic of the passions they have learned
since the poets have painted them in their pictures in the most brilliant
colours and since, in the contest with law and duty, they have commonly
remained masters of the battlefield. What has society gained by the relations
of society, formerly under the sway of truth, being now subject to the laws of
the beautiful, or by the external impression deciding the estimation in which
merit is to be held? We admit that all virtues whose appearance produces an
agreeable effect are now seen to flourish, and those which, in society, give a
value to the man who possesses them. But, as a compensation, all kinds of
excesses are seen to prevail, and all vices are in vogue that can be
reconciled with a graceful exterior." It is certainly a matter entitled to
reflection that, at almost all the periods of history when art flourished and
taste held sway, humanity is found in a state of decline; nor can a single
instance be cited of the union of a large diffusion of aesthetic culture with
political liberty and social virtue, of fine manners associated with good
morals, and of politeness fraternising with truth and loyalty of character and
life.
As long as Athens and Sparta preserved their independence, and as long as
their institutions were based on respect for the laws, taste did not reach its
maturity, art remained in its infancy, and beauty was far from exercising her
empire over minds. No doubt, poetry had already taken a sublime flight, but it
was on the wings of genius, and we know that genius borders very closely on
savage coarseness, that it is a light which shines readily in the midst of
darkness, and which therefore often argues against rather than in favour of
the taste of the time. When the golden age of art appears under Pericles and
Alexander, and the sway of taste becomes more general, strength and liberty
have abandoned Greece; eloquence corrupts the truth, wisdom offends it on the
lips of Socrates, and virtue in the life of Phocion. It is well known that the
Romans had to exhaust their energies in civil wars, and, corrupted by oriental
luxury, to bow their heads under the yoke of a fortunate despot, before
Grecian art triumphed over the stiffness of their character. The same was the
case with the Arabs: civilisation only dawned upon them when the vigour of
their military spirit became softened under the sceptre of the Abbassides. Art
did not appear in modern Italy till the glorious Lombard League was dissolved,
Florence submitting to the Medici, and all those brave cities gave up the
spirit of independence for an inglorious resignation. It is almost superfluous
to call to mind the example of modern nations, with whom refinement has
increased in direct proportion to the decline of their liberties. Wherever we
direct our eyes in past times, we see taste and freedom mutually avoiding each
other. Everywhere we see that the beautiful only founds its sway on the ruins
of heroic virtues.
And yet this strength of character, which is commonly sacrificed to
establish aesthetic culture, is the most powerful spring of all that is great
and excellent man, and no other advantage, however great, can make up for it.
Accordingly, if we only keep to the experiments hitherto made, as to the
influence of the beautiful, we cannot certainly be much encouraged in
developing feelings so dangerous to the real culture of man. At the risk of
being hard and coarse, it will seem preferable to dispense with this
dissolving force of the beautiful, rather than see human nature a prey to its
enervating influence, notwithstanding all its refining advantages. However,
experience is perhaps not the proper tribunal at which to decide such a
question; before giving so much weight to its testimony, it would be well to
inquire if the beauty we have been discussing is the power that is condemned
by the previous examples. And the beauty we are discussing seems to assume an
idea of the beautiful derived from a source different from experience, for it
is this higher notion of the beautiful which has to decide if what is called
beauty by experience is entitled to the name.
This pure and rational idea of the beautiful - supposing it can be placed
in evidence - cannot be taken from any real and special case, and must, on the
contrary, direct and give sanction to our judgment in each special case. It
must therefore be sought for by a process of abstraction, and it ought to be
deduced from the simple possibility of a nature both sensuous and rational; in
short, beauty ought to present itself as a necessary condition of humanity. It
is therefore essential that we should rise to the pure idea of humanity, and
as experience shows us nothing but individuals, in particular cases, and never
humanity at large, we must endeavour to find in their individual and variable
mode of being the absolute and the permanent, and to grasp the necessary
conditions of their existence, suppressing all accidental limits. No doubt
this transcendental procedure will remove us for some time from the familiar
circle of phaenomena and the living presence of objects, to keep us on the
unproductive ground of abstract ideas; but we are engaged in the search after
a principle of knowledge solid enough not to be shaken by anything, and the
man who does not dare to rise above reality will never conquer this truth.
Letter XI.
If abstraction rises to as great an elevation as possible, it arrives at
two primary ideas, before which it is obliged to stop and to recognise its
limits. It distinguishes in man something that continues, and something that
changes incessantly. That which continues it names his person; that which
changes his position, his condition.
The person and the condition, I and my determinations, which we represent
as one and the same thing in the necessary being, are eternally distinct in
the finite being. Notwithstanding all continuance in the person, the condition
changes; in spite of all change of condition, the person remains. We pass from
rest to activity, from emotion to indifference, from assent to contradiction,
but we are always we ourselves, and what immediately springs from ourselves
remains. It is only in the absolute subject that all his determinations
continue with his personality. All that Divinity is, it is because it is so;
consequently it is eternally what it is, because it is eternal.
As the person and the condition are distinct in man, because he is a
finite being, the condition cannot be founded on the person, nor the person on
the condition. Admitting the second case, the person would have to change; and
in the former case, the condition would have to continue. Thus in either
supposition either the personality or the quality of a finite being would
necessarily cease. It is not because we think, feel, and will, that we are; it
is not because we are that we think, feel, and will. We are because we are. We
feel, think, and will, because there is out of us something that is not
ourselves.
Consequently the person must have its principle of existence in itself
because the permanent cannot be derived from the changeable, and thus we
should be at once in possession of the idea of the absolute being, founded on
itself; that is to say, of the idea of freedom. The condition must have a
foundation, and as it is not through the person, and is not therefore
absolute, it must be a sequence and a result; and thus, in the second place,
we should have arrived at the condition of every dependent being, of
everything in the process of becoming something else: that is, of the idea of
time. "Time is the necessary condition of all processes, of becoming
(werden);" this is an identical proposition, for it says nothing but this:
"That something may follow, there must be a succession."
The person which manifests itself in the eternally continuing Ego, or I
myself, and only in him, cannot become something or begin in time, because it
is much rather time that must begin with him, because the permanent must serve
as basis to the changeable. That change may take place, something must change;
this something cannot therefore be the change itself. When we say the flower
opens and fades, we make of this flower a permanent being in the midst of this
transformation; we lend it, in some sort, a personality, in which these two
conditions are manifested. It cannot be objected that man is born, and becomes
something; for man is not only a person simply, but he is a person finding
himself in a determinate condition. Now our determinate state of condition
springs up in time, and it is thus that man, as a phaenomenon or appearance,
must have a beginning, though in him pure intelligence is eternal. Without
time, that is, without a becoming, he would not be a determinate being; his
personality would exist virtually, no doubt, but not in action. It is not by
the succession of its perceptions that the immutable Ego or person manifests
himself to himself.
Thus, therefore, the matter of activity, or reality, that the supreme
intelligence draws from its own being, must be received by man; and he does,
in fact, receive it, through the medium of perception, as something which is
outside him in space, and which changes in him in time. This matter which
changes in him is always accompanied by the Ego, the personality, that never
changes; and the rule prescribed for man by his rational nature is to remain
immutably himself in the midst of change, to refer all perceptions to
experience, that is, to the unity of knowledge, and to make of each of its
manifestations of its modes in time the law of all time. The matter only
exists in as far as it changes; he, his personality, only exists in as far as
he does not change. Consequently, represented in his perfection, man would be
the permanent unity, which remains always the same, among the waves of change.
Now, although an infinite being, a divinity could not become (or be
subject to time), still a tendency ought to be named divine which has for its
infinite end the most characteristic attribute of the divinity; the absolute
manifestation of power - the reality of all the possible - and the absolute
unity of the manifestation (the necessity of all reality). It cannot be
disputed that man bears within himself, in his personality, a predisposition
for divinity. The way to divinity - if the word "way" can be applied to what
never leads to its end - is open to him in every direction.
Considered in itself and independently of all sensuous matter, his
personality is nothing but the pure virtuality of a possible infinite
manifestation, and so long as there is neither intuition nor feeling, it is
nothing more than a form, an empty power. Considered in itself, and
independently of all spontaneous activity of the mind, sensuousness can only
make a material man; without it, it is a pure form; but it cannot in any way
establish a union between matter and it. So long as he only feels, wishes, and
acts under the influence of desire, he is nothing more than the world, if by
this word we point out only the formless contents of time. Without doubt, it
is only his sensuousness that makes his strength pass into efficacious acts,
but it is his personality alone that makes this activity his own. Thus, that
he may not only be a world, he must give form to matter, and in order not to
be a mere form, he must give reality to the virtuality that he bears in him.
He gives matter to form by creating time, and by opposing the immutable to
change, the diversity of the world to the eternal unity of the Ego. He gives a
form to matter by again suppressing time, by maintaining permanence in change,
and by placing the diversity of the world under the unity of the Ego.
Now from this source issue for man two opposite exigencies, the two
fundamental laws of sensuous-rational nature. The first has for its object
absolute reality; it must make a world of what is only form, manifest all that
in it is only a force. The second law has for its object absolute formality;
it must destroy in him all that is only world, and carry out harmony in all
changes. In other terms, he must manifest all that is internal, and give form
to all that is external. Considered in its most lofty accomplishment, this
twofold labour brings us back to the idea of humanity which was my starting
point.
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