Lives such as hers prove something.... The kingdom of God belongs not to the most enlightened but to the best; and the best man is the most unselfish man. Humble, constant, voluntary self-sacrifice—this is what constitutes the true dignity of man.... Society rests upon conscience and not upon science. Civilization is, first and foremost, a moral thing.
He first passes judgment on Goethe, and then afterward checks himself:
He [Goethe] has so little soul. His way of understanding love, religion, duty, and patriotism has something mean and repulsive in it. There is no ardor, no generosity, in him. A secret barrenness, an ill-concealed egotism, makes itself felt through all the wealth and flexibility of his talent.
One must never be too hasty in judging these complex natures. Completely lacking as he is in the sense of obligation and of sin, Goethe nevertheless finds his way to seriousness through dignity. Greek sculpture has been his school of virtue.
Under date 1874, Amiel asks a question and answers it. He had before said, “My creed has melted away”:
Is there a particular Providence directing all the circumstances of our life, and therefore imposing all our trials upon us for educational ends? Is this heroic faith compatible with our actual knowledge of the laws of nature? Scarcely. But what this faith makes objective we may hold as subjective truth.... What he [the moral being] cannot change he calls the will of God, and to will what God wills brings him peace.
A melancholy fall from his earlier state! A whole sky between such conscious false motions toward self-deceiving and the victory which overcomes the world, even our faith. Amiel had now definitely lost his health.
Toward the end, occurs this striking and illuminating word about one of the worst of human passions:
Jealousy is a terrible thing. It resembles love, only it is precisely love’s contrary. Instead of wishing for the welfare of the object loved, it desires the dependence of that object upon itself, and its own triumph. Love is the forgetfulness of self; jealousy is the most passionate form of egotism, the glorification of a despotic, exacting, and vain ego, which can neither forget nor subordinate itself. The contrast is perfect.