Napoleon lived wholly in a great idea, but he was unable to take conscious hold of it. After utterly disavowing all ideals and denying them any reality, he zealously strove to realise them. His clear, incorruptible intellect could not, however, tolerate such a perpetual conflict within; and there is much value in the thoughts which he was compelled, as it were, to utter, and which are expressed very peculiarly and with much charm.
He considered the idea as a thing of the mind, that had, it is true, no reality, but still, on passing away, left a residuum—a caput mortuum—to which some reality could not be altogether refused. We may think this a very perverse and material notion; but when he entertained his friends with the neverending consequences of his life and actions, in full belief and confidence in them, he expressed himself quite differently. Then, indeed, he was ready to admit that life produces life; that a fruitful act has effects to all time. He took pleasure in confessing that he had given a great impulse, a new direction, to the course of the world's affairs.
It always remains a very remarkable fact that men whose whole personality is almost all idea, are so extremely shy of all phantasy. In this case was Hamann, who could not bear the mention of "things of another world." He took occasion to express himself on this point in a certain paragraph, which he wrote in fourteen different ways; and still, apparently, he was never quite satisfied with it.
Two of these attempts have been preserved to us; a third we have ourselves attempted, which we are induced to print here by the preceding observations.
Man is placed as a real being in the midst of a real world, and endowed with such organs that he can perceive and produce the real and also the possible.
All healthy men have the conviction of their own existence and of an existence around them. However, even the brain contains a hollow spot, that is to say, a place in which no object is mirrored; just as in the eye itself there is a little spot that does not see. If a man pays particular attention to this spot and is absorbed in it, he falls into a state of mental sickness, has presentiments of "things of another world," which are, in reality, no things at all; possessing neither form nor limit, but alarming him like dark, empty tracts of night, and pursuing him as something more than phantoms, if he does not tear himself free from them.