[104] The volume was, indeed, a kind of treatise to be:--a hard,
systematic, well-concatenated train of thought, still implicated in
the circumstances of a journal. Freed from the accidents of that
particular literary form with its unavoidable details of place and
occasion, the theoretic strain would have been found mathematically
continuous. The already so weary Sebastian might perhaps never have
taken in hand, or succeeded in, this detachment of his thoughts;
every one of which, beginning with himself, as the peculiar and
intimate apprehension of this or that particular day and hour, seemed
still to protest against such disturbance, as if reluctant to part
from those accidental associations of the personal history which had
prompted it, and so become a purely intellectual abstraction.
The series began with Sebastian's boyish enthusiasm for a strange,
fine saying of Doctor Baruch de Spinosa, concerning the Divine Love:-
-That whoso loveth God truly must not expect to be loved by him in
return. In mere reaction against an actual surrounding of which
every circumstance tended to make him a finished egotist, that bold
assertion defined for him the ideal of an intellectual
disinterestedness, of a domain of unimpassioned mind, with the desire
to put one's subjective side out of the way, and let pure reason
speak.
And what pure reason affirmed in the first place, as the "beginning
of wisdom," was that [105] the world is but a thought, or a series of
thoughts: that it exists, therefore, solely in mind.
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