Whatever else had disturbed
his mind and diverted him from his course, nothing had weaned him from
this obsession. He still interlarded all his conversation with quotations
from brilliant poseurs like Chateaubriand and Rochefoucauld, and from
missionaries of thought like Hume and Hegel.
His real joy, however, was in withdrawing for what might be called a
seance of meditation from the world's business. Some men make celebration
in wine, sport and adventure; but Jean Jacques made it in flooding his
mind with streams of human thought which often tried to run uphill, which
were frequently choked with weeds, but still were like the pool of Siloam
to his vain mind. They bathed that vain mind in the illusion that it
could see into the secret springs of experience.
So, on as bright a day as ever the New World offered, Jean Jacques sat
reciting to himself a spectacular bit of logic from one of his idols,
wedged between a piece of Aristotle quartz and Plato marble. The sound of
it was good in his ears. He mouthed it as greedily and happily as though
he was not sitting on the edge of a volcano instead of the moss-grown
limestone on a hill above his own manor.
"The course of events in the life of a man, whatever their gravity or
levity, are only to be valued and measured by the value and measure of
his own soul. Thus, what in its own intrinsic origin and material should
in all outer reason be a tragedy, does not of itself shake the
foundations or make a fissure in the superstructure.
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