with natural truth, which certain minds would not fail to heed;
discerning also, if they were really loyal to themselves, its practical
conclusion.--The one alone is: and all things beside are but its
passing affections, which have no necessary or proper right to be.

As but such "accidents" or "affections," indeed, there might have been
found, within the circumference of that one infinite creative thinker,
some scope for the joy and love of the creature. There have been
dispositions in which that abstract theorem has only induced a renewed
value for the finite interests around and within us. Centre of heat and
light, truly nothing has seemed to lie beyond the touch of its
perpetual summer. It has allied itself to the poetical or artistic
sympathy, which feels challenged to acquaint itself with and explore
the various forms of finite existence all the more intimately, just
because of that sense of one lively spirit circulating through all
things--a tiny particle of the one soul, in the sunbeam, or the leaf.
Sebastian van Storck, on the contrary, was determined, perhaps by some
inherited satiety or fatigue in his nature, to the opposite issue of
the practical dilemma. For him, that one abstract being was as the
pallid Arctic sun, disclosing itself over the dead level of a glacial,
a barren and absolutely lonely sea. The lively purpose of life had been
frozen out of it. What he must admire, and love if he could, was
"equilibrium," the void, the tabula rasa, into which, through all those
apparent energies of man and nature, that in truth are but forces of
disintegration, the world was really settling. And, himself a mere
circumstance in a fatalistic series, to which the clay of the potter
was no sufficient parallel, he could not expect to be "loved in
return." At first, indeed, he had a kind of delight in his thoughts--in
the eager pressure forward, to whatsoever conclusion, of a rigid
intellectual gymnastic, which was like the making of Euclid. Only,
little by little, under the freezing influence of such propositions,
the theoretic energy itself, and with it his old eagerness for truth,
the care to track it from proposition to proposition, was chilled out
of him. In fact, the conclusion was there already, and might have been
foreseen, in the premises. By a singular perversity, it seemed to him
that every one of those passing "affections"--he too, alas! at
times--was for ever trying to be, to assert ITSELF, to maintain its