hat it is buried in the depths of my
subconsciousness; but from these depths it animates my life; and if the
whole of my spirit, the total content of my soul, were to awake to full
consciousness, all these dimly perceived and forgotten fugitive
impressions would come to life again, including even those which I had
never been aware of. I carry within me everything that has passed before
me, and I perpetuate it with myself, and it may be that it all goes into
my germs, and that all my ancestors live undiminished in me and will
continue so to live, united with me, in my descendants. And perhaps I,
the whole I, with all this universe of mine, enter into each one of my
actions, or, at all events, that which is essential in me enters into
them--that which makes me myself, my individual essence.

And how is this individual essence in each several thing--that which
makes it itself and not another--revealed to us save as beauty? What is
the beauty of anything but its eternal essence, that which unites its
past with its future, that element of it that rests and abides in the
womb of eternity? or, rather, what is it but the revelation of its
divinity?

And this beauty, which is the root of eternity, is revealed to us by
love; it is the supreme revelation of the love of God and the token of
our ultimate victory over time. It is love that reveals to us the
eternal in us and in our neighbours.

Is it the beautiful, the eternal, in things, that awakens and kindles
our love for them, or is it our love for things that reveals to us the
beautiful, the eternal, in them? Is not beauty perhaps a creation of
love, in the same way and in the same sense that the sensible world is a
creation of the instinct of preservation and the supersensible world of
that of perpetuation? Is not beauty, and together with beauty eternity,
a creation of love? "Though our outward man perish," says the Apostle,
"yet the inward man is renewed day by day" (2 Cor. iv. 16). The man of
passing appearances perishes and passes away with them; the man of
reality remains and grows. "For our light affliction, which is but for a
moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory"
(ver. 17). Our suffering causes us anguish, and this anguish, bursting
because of its own fullness, seems to us consolation. "While we look not
at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for
the things which are seen are temporal; but the things whic