in literature, with Amiel at all events, it
meant the fastidiousness which [33] is incompatible with any but the
very best sort of production.

And as that abstract condition of Maia, to the kind and quantity of
concrete literary production we hold to have been originally possible
for him; so was the religion he actually attained, to what might have
been the development of his profoundly religious spirit, had he been
able to see that the old-fashioned Christianity is itself but the
proper historic development of the true "essence" of the New Testament.
There, again, is the constitutional shrinking, through a kind of
metaphysical prejudice, from the concrete--that fear of the actual--in
this case, of the Church of history; to which the admissions, which
form so large a part of these volumes, naturally lead. Assenting, on
probable evidence, to so many of the judgments of the religious sense,
he failed to see the equally probable evidence there is for the
beliefs, the peculiar direction of men's hopes, which complete those
judgments harmoniously, and bring them into connection with the facts,
the venerable institutions of the past--with the lives of the saints.
By failure, as we think, of that historic sense, of [34] which he could
speak so well, he got no further in this direction than the glacial
condition of rationalistic Geneva. "Philosophy," he says, "can never
replace religion." Only, one cannot see why it might not replace a
religion such as his: a religion, after all, much like Seneca's.

"I miss something," he himself confesses, "common worship, a positive
religion, shared with other people. Ah! when will the Church to which
I belong in heart rise into being?" To many at least of those who can
detect the ideal through the disturbing circumstances which belong to
all actual institutions in the world, it was already there. Pascal,
from considerations to which Amiel was no stranger, came to the large
hopes of the Catholic Church; Amiel stopped short at a faith almost
hopeless; and by stopping short just there he really failed, as we
think, of intellectual consistency, and missed that appeasing influence
which his nature demanded as the condition of its full activity, as a
force, an intellectual force, in the world--in the special business of
his life. "Welcome the unforeseen," he says again, by way of a counsel
of perfection in the matter of culture, "but give to [35] your life
unity, and bring the unforesee