isolated and petty self, by a kind of practical lie in things; although
through every incident of its hypothetic existence it had protested
that its proper function was to die. Surely! those transient affections
marred the freedom, the truth, the beatific calm, of the absolute
selfishness, which could not, if it would, pass beyond the
circumference of itself; to which, at times, with a fantastic sense of
wellbeing, he was capable of a sort of fanatical devotion. And those,
as he conceived, were his moments of genuine theoretic insight, in
which, under the abstract "perpetual light," he died to self; while the
intellect, after all, had attained a freedom of its own through the
vigorous act which assured him that, as nature was but a thought of
his, so himself also was but the passing thought of God.

No! rather a puzzle only, an anomaly, upon that one, white, unruffled
consciousness! His first principle once recognised, all the rest, the
whole array of propositions down to the heartless practical conclusion,
must follow of themselves. Detachment: to hasten hence: to fold up
one's whole self, as a vesture put aside: to anticipate, by such
individual force as he could find in him, the slow disintegration by
which nature herself is levelling the eternal hills:--here would be the
secret of peace, of such dignity and truth as there could be in a world
which after all was essentially an illusion. For Sebastian at least,
the world and the individual alike had been divested of all effective
purpose. The most vivid of finite objects, the dramatic episodes of
Dutch history, the brilliant personalities which had found their parts
to play in them, that golden art, surrounding us with an ideal world,
beyond which the real world is discernible indeed, but etherealised by
the medium through which it comes to one: all this, for most men so
powerful a link to existence, only set him on the thought of
escape--means of escape--into a formless and nameless infinite world,
quite evenly grey. The very emphasis of those objects, their
importunity to the eye, the ear, the finite intelligence, was but the
measure of their distance from what really is. One's personal presence,
the presence, such as it is, of the 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
co