"I miss something," he himself confesses, "common worship, a positive
religion, shared with other people. Ah! when will the Church to
which I belong in heart rise into being?" To many at least of those
who can detect the ideal through the disturbing circumstances which
belong to all actual institutions in the world, it was already there.
Pascal, from considerations to which Amiel was no stranger, came to
the large hopes of the Catholic Church; Amiel stopped short at a
faith almost hopeless; and by stopping short just there he really
failed, as we think, of intellectual consistency, and missed that
appeasing influence which his nature demanded as the condition of its
full activity, as a force, an intellectual force, in the world--in
the special business of his life. "Welcome the unforeseen," he says
again, by way of a counsel of perfection in the matter of culture,
"but give to [35] your life unity, and bring the unforeseen within
the lines of your plan." Bring, we should add, the Great Possibility
at least within the lines of your plan--your plan of action or
production; of morality; especially of your conceptions of religion.
And still, Amiel too, be it remembered (we are not afraid to repeat
it), has said some things in Pascal's vein not unworthy of Pascal.

And so we get only the Journal. Watching in it, in the way we have
suggested, the contention of those two men, those two minds in him,
and observing how the one might have ascertained and corrected the
shortcomings of the other, we certainly understand, and can
sympathize with Amiel's despondency in the retrospect of a life which
seemed to have been but imperfectly occupied. But, then, how
excellent a literary product, after all, the Journal is. And already
we have found that it improves also on second reading. A book of
"thoughts" should be a book that may be fairly dipped into, and yield
good quotable sayings. Here are some of its random offerings: