to the purification of its imagination, to order and selection in the flow of its tasks and ideas. As yet the great man is still invisible in the greatest thing which claims worship, invisible like a distant star; his triumph over power continues to be without eyes, hence also without song and poets. As yet the order of greatness has not been settled for the sum total of human history.
549
The “flight from self”—Those sufferers from intellectual spasms who are impatient and gloomy towards themselves—as Byron or Alfred de Musset—and in all their actions resemble runaway horses, may, who derive from their own works nothing but a short delight and a burping passion which almost burst their blood-vessels, and after that a wintry solitude and sorrow—how are they to bear up against themselves? They long to be thoroughly saturated with a feeling of being “beside themselves”; if, possessed by such a longing, we happen to be Christians, we strive after fusion in God, after ‘‘becoming all one” with Him; if we are like Shakespeare we long for oneness with pictures of the most passionate life; if like Byron, we desire for great actions because these detach us from ourselves even more than thoughts, feelings and works. Should then the desire of achieving great actions really be the flight from our own selves ?—thus Pascal would ask us. And, indeed, the proposition might be proved with regard to the most notable instances which are known of the
