My third maxim was ever to endeavour to conquer myself rather than fortune, and to change my own desires rather than the order of the universe. In short, to grow familiar with the doctrine that ’tis but over our own thoughts we hold complete and absolute sway. Thus, if after all our efforts we fail in matters external to us, it behoofs us to acknowledge that those things wherein we fail belong, for us at least, to the domain of the impossible.
Here was a doctrine as uncompromising with regard to individual desires as Jansenism itself.
Oh, those treacherous twists in every creed and every adventure which were always suddenly bringing her shivering to the edge of the world of reality, face to face with its weary outstretched horizons, its cruelly clear outlines, and its three-dimensional, vivid, ruthless population. Well, even Descartes was aware that it was not a pleasant place, for did he not say in the Six Meditations:—
But the Reason is that my Mind loves to wander, and suffers not itself to be bounded within the strict limits of Truth.
But were these limits fixed for ever: were we absolutely powerless to widen them?
A few lines down the page she came on the famous wax metaphor:—
Let us choose for example this piece of Beeswax: it was lately taken from the comb; it has not yet lost all the taste of the honey; it retains something of the smell of the flowers from whence ’twas gathered, its colour, shape, and bigness are manifest; ’tis hard, ’tis cold, ’tis easily felt, and if you will knock it with your finger, ’twill make a noise. In fine, it hath all things requisite to the most perfect notion of a Body.
But behold whilst I am speaking, ’tis put to the fire, its taste is purged away, the smell is vanished, the colour is changed, the shape is altered, its bulk is increased, it becomes soft, ’tis hot, it can scarce be felt, and now (though you can strike it) it makes no noise. Does it yet continue the same wax? Surely it does: this all confess, no one denies it, no one doubts it. What therefore was there in it that was so evidently known? Surely none of those things which I perceive by my senses; for what I smelt, tasted, have seen, felt, or heard, are all vanished, and yet the wax remains. Perhaps ’twas this only that I now think on, to wit, that the wax itself was not that taste of honey, that smell of flowers, that whiteness, that shape, or that sound, but it was a body which a while before appeared to me so and so modified, but now otherwise.
She was illuminated by a sudden idea—startling yet comforting. In itself her bugbear, the world of reality, was an innocuous body without form, sound, or colour. Once before she had felt it as it really is—cold and nil—when at the Fête-Dieu the bell at the most solemn moment of the Mass had rung her into ‘a world of non-bulk and non-colour.’