false intellectual conscience. "I have always avoided what attracted
me, and turned my back upon the point where secretly I desired to
be"; and, of course, that is not the way to a free and generous
productivity, in literature, or in anything else; though in
literature, with Amiel at all events, it meant the fastidiousness
which [33] is incompatible with any but the very best sort of
production.

And as that abstract condition of Maia, to the kind and quantity of
concrete literary production we hold to have been originally possible
for him; so was the religion he actually attained, to what might have
been the development of his profoundly religious spirit, had he been
able to see that the old-fashioned Christianity is itself but the
proper historic development of the true "essence" of the New
Testament. There, again, is the constitutional shrinking, through a
kind of metaphysical prejudice, from the concrete--that fear of the
actual--in this case, of the Church of history; to which the
admissions, which form so large a part of these volumes, naturally
lead. Assenting, on probable evidence, to so many of the judgments
of the religious sense, he failed to see the equally probable
evidence there is for the beliefs, the peculiar direction of men's
hopes, which complete those judgments harmoniously, and bring them
into connection with the facts, the venerable institutions of the
past--with the lives of the saints. By failure, as we think, of that
historic sense, of [34] which he could speak so well, he got no
further in this direction than the glacial condition of rationalistic
Geneva. "Philosophy," he says, "can never replace religion." Only,
one cannot see why it might not replace a religion such as his: a
religion, after all, much like Seneca's.