ain of thought, still implicated in the
circumstances of a journal. Freed from the accidents of that
particular literary form with its unavoidable details of place and
occasion, 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 [105] 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