I see God is the
same eye by which He sees me."

Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive world
while at the same time detaching us from it.

February 20th, 1851.--I have almost finished these two volumes of
[Joubert's] 'Pensees' and the greater part of the 'Correspondance.' This
last has especially charmed me; it is remarkable for grace, delicacy,
atticism, and precision. The chapters on metaphysics and philosophy are
the most insignificant. All that has to do with large views, with the
whole of things, is very little at Joubert's command: he has no
philosophy of history, no speculative intuition. He is the thinker of
detail, and his proper field is psychology and matters of taste. In this
sphere of the subtleties and delicacies of imagination and feeling,
within the circle of personal affections and preoccupations, of social
and educational interests, he abounds in ingenuity and sagacity, in fine
criticisms, in exquisite touches. It is like a bee going from flower to
flower, a teasing, plundering, wayward zephyr, an aeolian harp, a ray of
furtive light stealing through the leaves. Taken as a whole, there is
something impalpable and immaterial about him, which I will not venture
to call effeminate, but which is scarcely manly. He wants bone and body:
timid, dreamy, and clairvoyant, he hovers far above reality. He is
rather a soul, a breath, than a man. It is the mind of a woman in the
character of a child, so that we feel for him less admiration than
tenderness and gratitude.

November 10th, 1852.--How much have we not to learn from the Greeks,
those immortal ancestors of ours! And how much better they solved their
problem than we have solved ours! Their ideal man is not ours; but they
understood infinitely better than we, how to reverence, cultivate, and
ennoble the man whom they knew. In a thousand respects we are still
barbarians beside them, as Beranger said to me with a sigh in 1843:
barbarians in education, in eloquence, in public life, in poetry, in
matters of art, etc. We must have millions of men in order to produce a
few elect spirits: a thousand was enough in Greece. If the measure of a
civilization is to be the number of perfected men that it produces, we
are still far from this model people. The slaves are no longer below us,
but they are among us. Barbarism is no longer at our frontiers: it lives
side by side with us. We carry within us much greater things than they,
but we ours