PKEFACE BY THE AUTHOR v 



my way of -seeing, but because those reflections were 

 then made for the first time, with absolute spontaneous- 

 ness, and without the slightest system or premeditation. 

 The reader will thus be able to see how general ideas 

 naturally emerge from deep and close contemplation of 

 a group of various details, how forcible their unsought 

 impression is ; in other words, how surely thought, fol- 

 lowing orderly and regular evolution, without studied 

 intention as without dogmatic aim, arrives at the loftiest 

 philosophic certainties. 



The thinker who freely seeks for truth, continuously 

 changes his position in his aspirations toward mind and 

 the ideal. He deserts the regions of phenomena and 

 concrete things, to rise to those of the absolute and 

 eternal. The farther he withdraws from the former, 

 which had at first absorbed all his attention, the more 

 strikingly does the perspective in which he viewed 

 them alter. At last, he discerns nothing else in them 

 but spectres without substance, and delusive phantoms. 

 And in the degree and extent of his drawing near to 

 the eternal and the absolute, reality comes more surely 

 within his ken, and he gains a more vivid feeling and a 

 keener conception of it. He measures the distance he 

 has traversed, and values the worth of his own contem- 

 plations by the fullness of lucid clearness which enlight- 

 ens his faint view of the first principles of things, and 

 by the depth of humble reverence with which he bows 

 before the mysterious Power which created all ! 



CONCARNEAU (FlNISTERRE), May, 1873. 



