Did you deduce your own being? Even that is less absurd than the conceit of deducing the Divine being? Never would you have had the notion, had you not had the idea--rather, had not the idea worked in you like the memory of a name which we cannot recollect and yet feel that we have and which reveals its existence in the mind only by a restless anticipation and proves its _a priori_ actuality by the almost explosive instantaneity with which it is welcomed and recognised on its re-emersion out of the cloud, or its re-ascent from the horizon of consciousness.
I should like to know whether or how far the delight I feel, and have always felt, in adages or aphorisms of universal or very extensive application is a general or common feeling with men, or a peculiarity of my own mind. I cannot describe how much pleasure I have derived from "Extremes meet," for instance, or "Treat everything according to its nature," and, the last, "Be"! In the last I bring all inward rectitude to its test, in the former all outward morality to its rule, and in the first all problematic results to their solution, and reduce apparent contraries to correspondent opposites. How many hostile tenets has it enabled me to contemplate as fragments of truth, false only by negation and mutual exclusion?
I have myself too often of late used the phrase "rational self-love" the same as "enlightened self-love." O no more of this! What have love, reason or light to do with _self_, except as the dark and evil spirit which it is given to them to overcome! _Soul-love_, if you please. O there is more stuff of thought in our simple and pious fore-elders' adjuration, "Take pity of your poor soul!" than in all the volumes of Paley, Rochefoucauld, and Helvetius!
N.B.--The injurious manner in which men of genius are treated, not only as authors, but even when they are in social company. _A_ is believed to be, or talked of as, a man of unusual talent. People are anxious to meet him. If he says little or nothing, they wonder at the report, never considering whether they themselves were fit either to excite, or if self-excited to receive and comprehend him. But with the simplicity of genius he attributes more to them than they have, and they put questions that cannot be answered but by a return to first principles, and then they complain of him as not conversing, but lecturing. "He is quite intolerable," "Might as well be hearing a sermon." In short, in answer to some objection, _A_ replies, "Sir, this rests on the distinction between an _idea_ and an _image_, and, likewise, its difference from a perfect _conception_." "Pray, sir, explain." Because he does not and cannot [state the case as concisely as if he had been appealed to about a hand at] whist, 'tis "Lord! how long he talks," and they never ask themselves, Did this man force himself into your company? Was he not dragged into it? What is the practical result? That the man of genius should live as much as possible with beings that simply love him, from relationship or old association, or with those that have the same feelings with himself; but in all other company he will do well to cease to be the man of genius, and make up his mind to appear dull or commonplace as a companion, to be the most silent except upon the most trivial subjects of any in the company, to turn off questions with a joke or a pun as not suiting a wine-table, and to trust only to his writings.