sion, the
theoretic strain would have been found mathematically continuous. The
already so weary Sebastian might perhaps never have taken in hand, or
succeeded in, this detachment of his thoughts; every one of which,
beginning with himself as the peculiar and intimate apprehension of
this or that particular day and hour, seemed still to protest against
such disturbance, as if reluctant to part from those accidental
associations of the personal history which had prompted it, and so
become a purely intellectual abstraction.

The series began with Sebastian's boyish enthusiasm for a strange, fine
saying of Doctor Baruch de Spinosa, concerning the Divine Love:--That
whoso loveth God truly must not expect to be loved by him in return. In
mere reaction against an actual surrounding of which every circumstance
tended to make him a finished egotist, that bold assertion defined for
him the ideal of an intellectual disinterestedness, of a domain of
unimpassioned mind, with the desire to put one's subjective side out of
the way, and let pure reason speak.

And what pure reason affirmed in the first place, as the "beginning of
wisdom," was that the world is but a thought, or a series of thoughts:
that it exists, therefore, solely in mind. It showed him, as he fixed
the mental eye with more and more of self-absorption on the phenomena
of his intellectual existence, a picture or vision of the universe as
actually the product, so far as he really knew it, of his own lonely
thinking power--of himself, there, thinking: as being zero without him:
and as possessing a perfectly homogeneous unity in that fact. "Things
that have nothing in common with each other," said the axiomatic
reason, "cannot be understood or explained by means of each other." But
to pure reason things discovered themselves as being, in their essence,
thoughts:--all things, even the most opposite things, mere
transmutations, of a single power, the power of thought. All was but
conscious mind. Therefore, all the more exclusively, he must minister
to mind, to the intellectual power, submitting himself to the sole
direction of that, whithersoever it might lead him. Everything must be
referred to, and, as it were, changed into the terms of that, if its
essential value was to be ascertained. "Joy," he said, anticipating
Spinosa--that, for the attainment of which men are ready to surrender
all beside--"is but the name of a passion in which the mind passes to a
greater perf