Amiel possessed the power of clear logical thought to a high degree, but he limited its expression largely to the introspective musings of the diary. Aside from his daily life, which was narrow but normal and conventional, it is to Amiel's deepest interests and admirations as revealed by his diary that one must look for light upon his emotional make-up. The things with which he occupied himself were extremely few: introspective literature, philosophy and religion, and contemplation of God and the hereafter. The diary covers the years of his life from twenty-seven to sixty, the entire fruitful span of most men's lives. During all of this time his interests showed little or no variation. Nowhere throughout the record do we find any evidence of interest in the developments which were shaping the course of the world's history. Still less do we find any indication of a desire or a conscience to participate in such history. Amiel evidently felt no urge to be an actor in the drama. He was not even a critic or an interested on-looker. Rather did he prefer to withdraw to a sheltered distance and forget the reverberations of the struggle in contemplation of abstractions.
He lived in an era in which the world was revolutionised. The most deforming institution which civilisation has ever tolerated, slavery, was razed and dismantled; yet he never said a word about it. He was a witness of one of the greatest transformations that has ever been wrought, the making of things by machinery rather than by hand; and he never commented on it. His life was contemporaneous with the beginning of discovery in science, such as the origin of species and the general evolutionary doctrine associated with Darwin's name; and it seems only to have excited his scorn.
“The growing triumph of Darwinism—that is to say of materialism, or of force—threatens the conception of justice. But justice will have its turn. The higher human law cannot be the offspring of animality. Justice is the right to the maximum of individual independence compatible with the same liberty for others;—in other words, it is respect for man, for the immature, the small, the feeble; it is the guarantee of those human collectivities, associations, states, nationalities—those voluntary or involuntary unions—the object of which is to increase the sum of happiness, and to satisfy the aspiration of the individual. That some should make use of others for their own purposes is an injury to justice. The right of the stronger is not a right, but a simple fact, which obtains only so long as there is neither protest nor resistance. It is like cold, darkness, weight, which tyrannise over man until he has invented artificial warmth, artificial light, and machinery. Human industry is throughout an emancipation from brute nature, and the advances made by justice are in the same way a series of rebuffs inflicted upon the tyranny of the stronger. As the medical art consists in the conquest of disease, so goodness consists in the conquest of the blind ferocities and untamed appetites of the human animal. I see the same law throughout:—increasing emancipation of the individual, a continuous ascent of being towards life, happiness, justice, and wisdom. Greed and gluttony are the starting-point, intelligence and generosity the goal.”
Nor is there anything in the “Journal Intime” to indicate that he had ever heard of Pasteur, or Morton, or Simpson, who laid the foundation of a diseaseless world and a painless world. His diary is a record of his own thoughts, to be sure, but one's thoughts are engendered, in a measure at least, by what is going on in the world. An inhabitant of any other world whose knowledge of this could be obtained only from Amiel's book, would be left with an abysmal ignorance of the subject. He would learn something of the German philosophers and of French littérateurs and of Amiel's ideas of God and of infinity.
Schopenhauer says that
“It is not by the unification of the intellect and the will that man attains to higher truth, but by their dissociation. When the intellect casts off the yoke of the will it rises above the illusion of finite life and attains a vision of transcendent truth. When one can contemplate without will, beyond, when he can dissolve the life instinct in pure thought, then he possesses the field of higher truth, then he is on the avenue that leads to Nirvana.”
Higher truth is possible only through the annihilation of the will, and if this annihilation is done after taking thought, that is after planning to do it and determining to do it, the price that one has to pay, or the penalty that is exacted, is an incapacity or diminished capacity for practical life. Amiel was a real mystic, not by choice, perhaps, but by birth. He was proud of it in his youth and early maturity; he questioned it in his late maturity; and regretted it in his senescence. When he was fifty years old he wrote,
“The man who gives himself to contemplation looks on at rather than directs his life, is a spectator rather than an actor, seeks rather to understand than to achieve. Is this mode of existence illegitimate, immoral? Is one bound to act? Is such detachment an idiosyncrasy to be respected or a sin to be fought against? I have always hesitated on this point, and I have wasted years in futile self-reproach and useless fits of activity. My western conscience, penetrated as it is with Christian morality, has always persecuted my Oriental quietism and Buddhist tendencies. I have not dared to approve myself, I have not known how to correct myself.... Having early caught a glimpse of the absolute, I have never had the indiscreet effrontery of individualism. What right have I to make a merit of a defect? I have never been able to see any necessity for imposing myself upon others, nor for succeeding. I have seen nothing clearly except my own deficiencies and the superiority of others.... With varied aptitudes and a fair intelligence, I had no dominant tendency, no imperious faculty, so that while by virtue of capacity I felt myself free, yet when free I could not discover what was best. Equilibrium produced indecision and indecision has rendered all my faculties barren.”
If Amiel had been a real Christian, that is, if he had taken his orientation and orders from Christ, he would have had no doubt whether such a mode of existence was illegitimate and immoral or not. He could have found specific instruction telling him he was bound to act. He was a nominal Christian, but a de facto Buddhist.
Next to the output of a man's activity as shown by his work, his selection of recreational outlets for his emotional life is illuminating. What were Amiel's amusements? So far as the diary shows, day dreaming, poetising, fancy, and a contemplation of nature furnished the only outlets for his more organised emotional nature. For play in any form he apparently felt no need.