ght rather than of
action finds much to perplex, to weary, and to sadden. So it was with
the Swiss professor. He was always in the sanctum sanctorum of his
spirit, striving to attain the truth; with Hamlet-like irresolution he
poised in mind before the antinomies of the universe, alert to see
around a subject, having the modern thinker's inability to be partisan.
This way of thought is obviously unhealthy, or at least has in it
something of the morbid. It implies the undue introspection which is
well-nigh the disease of this century. There is in it the failure to
lose one's life in objective incident and action, that one may find it
again in regained balance of mind and bodily health. Amiel had the
defect of his quality; but he is clearly to be separated from those
shallow or exaggerated specimens of subjectivity illustrated by
present-day women diarists, like Bashkirtseff and Kovalevsky. The Swiss
poet-thinker had a vigor of thought and a broad culture; his aim was
high, his desire pure, and his meditations were often touched with
imaginative beauty. Again and again he flashes light into the darkest
penetralia of the human soul. At times, too, there is in him a mystic
fervor worthy of St. Augustine. If his dominant tone is melancholy, he
is not to be called a pessimist. He believed in the Good at the central
core of things. Hence is he a fascinating personality, a stimulative
force. And these outpourings of an acute intellect, and a nature
sensitive to the Ideal, are conveyed in a diction full of literary
feeling and flavor. Subtlety, depth, tenderness, poetry, succeed each
other; nor are the crisp, compressed sayings, the happy _mots_ of the
epigrammatist, entirely lacking. And pervading all is an impression of
character.

Like Pascal, Amiel was a thinker interested above all in the soul of
man. He was a psychologist, seeking to know the secret of the Whence,
the Why, and the Whither. Like Joubert, whose journal resembled his own
in its posthumous publication, his reflections will live by their
weight, their quality, their beauty of form. Nor are these earlier
writers of "Pensees" likely to have a more permanent place among the
seed-sowers of thought. Amiel himself declared that "the pensee-writer
is to the philosopher what the dilettante is to the artist. He plays
with thought, and makes it produce a crowd of pretty things of detail;
but he is more anxious about truths than truth, and what is essential in
thought, i