So far from saying that his heart and intelligence belonged to two
persons, we might have been quite sure, knowing his heart, that his
intelligence must be exactly what he describes its process to have been.
The slow-burning ecstasy in which he knew himself at his height and was
most conscious of fulness of life, was incompatible with the rapid and
deliberate generation of ideas. The same soft passivity, the same
receptiveness, which made his emotions like the surface of a lake under
sky and breeze, entered also into the working of his intellectual
faculties. But it happens that in this region, in the attainment of
knowledge, truth, and definite thoughts, even receptiveness implies a
distinct and active energy, and hence the very quality of temperament
which left him free and eager for sensuous impressions, seemed to muffle
his intelligence in a certain opaque and resisting medium, of the
indefinable kind that interposes between will and action in a dream. His
rational part was fatally protected by a non-conducting envelope of
sentiment; this intercepted clear ideas on their passage, and even cut
off the direct and true impress of those objects and their relations,
which are the material of clear ideas. He was no doubt right in his
avowal that objects generally made less impression on him than the
recollection of them; that he could see nothing of what was before his
eyes, and had only his intelligence in cases where memories were
concerned; and that of what was said or done in his presence, he felt
and penetrated nothing.[91] In other words, this is to say that his
material of thought was not fact but image. When he plunged into
reflection, he did not deal with the objects of reflection at first hand
and in themselves, but only with the reminiscences of objects, which he
had never approached in a spirit of deliberate and systematic
observation, and with those reminiscences, moreover, suffused and
saturated by the impalpable but most potent essences of a fermenting