438
Men and things.—Why does man not see the things? He is in the way himself: he obscures the things.
439
Characteristics of happiness.—Two things are common to all sensations of happiness: a profusion of feelings and wantonness, so that, like unto the fishes, we feel surrounded by our element and float therein. True Christians will know what Christian exuberance means.
440
Never resign.—To renounce the world without knowing it, after the fashion of the nun—results in a fruitless, perhaps melancholy solitude, This is entirely unlike the solitude of the thinker’s life contemplative: when he chooses it, he has not the least intention of renouncing ; he would, on the contrary, deem it a renunciation, a melancholy destruction of his own self, were he obliged to continue in the rita practica: he foregoes the latter, because he knows it, because he knows himself. So he jumps into his water, so he gains his cheerfulness.
441
Why the immediate object grows ever mere distant to us.—The more we think of all that was and will be, the paler will grow that which is actually happening. When we live with the dead and die their deaths, what
