he most incisive things and
persons around us, could only lessen by so much, that which really is.
To restore tabula rasa, then, by a continual effort at self-effacement!
Actually proud at times of his curious, well-reasoned nihilism, he
[111] could but regard what is called the business of life as no better
than a trifling and wearisome delay. Bent on making sacrifice of the
rich existence possible for him, as he would readily have sacrificed
that of other people, to the bare and formal logic of the answer to a
query (never proposed at all to entirely healthy minds) regarding the
remote conditions and tendencies of that existence, he did not reflect
that if others had inquired as curiously as himself the world could
never have come so far at all--that the fact of its having come so far
was itself a weighty exception to his hypothesis. His odd devotion,
soaring or sinking into fanaticism, into a kind of religious mania,
with what was really a vehement assertion of his individual will, he
had formulated duty as the principle to hinder as little as possible
what he called the restoration of equilibrium, the restoration of the
primary consciousness to itself--its relief from that uneasy, tetchy,
unworthy dream of a world, made so ill, or dreamt so weakly--to forget,
to be forgotten.

And at length this dark fanaticism, losing the support of his pride in
the mere novelty of a reasoning so hard and dry, turned round upon him,
as our fanaticism will, in black melancholy. The theoretic or
imaginative desire to urge Time's creeping footsteps, was felt now as
the physical fatigue which leaves the book or the letter unfinished, or
finishes eagerly out of hand, for mere finishing's sake, unimportant
business.

[112] Strange! that the presence to the mind of a metaphysical
abstraction should have had this power over one so fortunately endowed
for the reception of the sensible world. It could hardly have been so
with him but for the concurrence of physical causes with the influences
proper to a mere thought. The moralist, indeed, might have noted that
a meaner kind of pride, the morbid fear of vulgarity, lent secret
strength to the intellectual prejudice, which realised duty as the
renunciation of all finite objects, the fastidious refusal to be or do
any limited thing. But besides this it was legible in his own
admissions from time to time, that the body, following, as it does with
powerful temperaments, the lead of mind an