And if only a few withdraw, the world can spare them. Enough of
that.
Only let us not talk of this ideal of impersonal, universal being in
individual consciousness as an unverified dream. Our sense and
impatience of limitations are the guarantees that they are not final and
insuperable. Whence is this power of standing outside myself, of
recognizing the worthlessness of the pseudo--judgments, of the
prejudices with their lurid colouring of passion, of the temporal
interests, of the ephemeral appetites, of all the sensibilities of
egoism, to which I nevertheless surrender myself so that they indeed
seem myself? Through and above this troubled atmosphere I see a being,
pure, passionless, rightly measuring the proportions and relations of
things, for whom there is, properly speaking, no present, with its
phantasms, falsities, and half-truths; who has nothing personal in the
sense of being opposed to the whole of related personalities: who sees
the truth rather than struggles logically towards it, and truth of which
I can at present form no conception; whose activities are unimpeded by
intellectual doubt, un-perverted by moral depravity, and who is
indifferent to results, because he has not to guide his conduct by
calculation of them, or by any estimate of their value.
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