e happiness from my
chimeras than they from their realities.

The wild spot of the forest [selected by Rousseau for his solitary walks
and meditations] could not long remain a desert to my imagination. I
soon peopled it with beings after my own heart, and, dismissing opinion,
prejudice, and all factitious passions, I brought to these sanctuaries
of nature men worthy of inhabiting them. I formed with these a charming
society, of which I did not feel myself unworthy. I made a golden age
according to my fancy, and, filling up these bright days with all the
scenes of my life that had left the tenderest recollections, and with
all that my heart still longed for, I affected myself to tears over the
true pleasures of humanity--pleasure so delicious, so pure, and yet so
far from men! Oh, if in these moments any ideas of Paris, of the age,
and of my little author vanity, disturbed my reveries, with what
contempt I drove them instantly away, to give myself up entirely to the
exquisite sentiments with which my soul was filled. Yet, in the midst of
all this, I confess the nothingness of my chimeras would sometimes
appear, and sadden me in a moment.

3. Prayer as a Form of Isolation[97]

He who prays begins his prayer with some idea of God, generally one that
he has received from instruction or from current traditions. He commonly
retires to a quiet place, or to a place having mental associations of
religious cast, in order to "shut out the world." This beginning of
concentration is followed by closing the eyes, which excludes a mass of
irrelevant impressions. The body bows, kneels, or assumes some other
posture that requires little muscular tension and that may favor
extensive relaxation. Memory now provides the language of prayer or of
hallowed scripture, or makes vivid some earlier experiences of one's
own. The worshiper represents to himself his needs, or the interests
(some of them happy ones) that seem most important, and he brings them
into relation to God by thinking how God regards them. The
presupposition of the whole procedure is that God's way of looking at
the matters in question is the true and important one. Around God, then,
the interests of the individual are now freshly organized. Certain ones
that looked large before the prayer began, now look small because of
their relation to the organizing idea upon which attention has focused.
On the other hand, interests that express this organizing idea gain
emotional q