112.
“Sense can support herself handsomely in most countries on some eighteenpence a day, but for phantasy, planets and solar systems will not suffice.” And thence do you infer the superiority of sense over phantasy? Shallow reasoning! God who made the soul of man of sufficient capacity to embrace whole worlds and systems of worlds, gave us thereby a foretaste of our immortality.
113.
“Faith in the hereafter is as necessary for the intellectual as the moral character, and to the man of letters as well as to the Christian, the present forms but the slightest portion of his existence.”—Southey.
Goethe did not think so. “Genutzt dem Augenblick,” “Use the present,” was his favourite maxim; and always this notion of sacrificing or slighting the present seems to me a great mistake. It ought to be the most important part of our existence, as it is the only part of it over which we have power. It is in the present only that we absolve the past and lay the foundation for the future.
114.
“Je allseitigen, je individueller,” is a beautiful significant phrase, quite untranslateable, used, I think, by Rahel (Madame Varnhagen). It means that the more the mind can multiply on every side its capacities of thinking and feeling, the more individual, the more original, that mind becomes.