PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR. Vv 
“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 (FINISTERRE), May, 1878. 
