All the world was before me and every day was a holiday, so it did not seem important to which one of the world’s wildernesses I first should wander.
Beauty beyond thought everywhere, beneath, above, made and being made forever. I gazed and gazed and longed and admired until the dusty sheep and packs were far out of sight, made hurried notes and a sketch, though there was no need of either, for the colors and lines and expression of this di[Pg 15]vine landscape-countenance are so burned into mind and heart they surely can never grow dim.
At this point I can no longer evade a direct answer to the question, how one becomes what one is.
Then the intensity of the search for the Kingdom of God commenced gradually to pass over into sober economic virtue; the religious roots died out slowly, giving way to utilitarian worldliness. Then, the isolated economic man takes the place of the lonely spiritual search for the Kingdom of heaven of Bunyan's pilgrim, hurrying through the market-place of Vanity. p.176
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius.Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
This absolute determinability of our mind by abstractions is one of the cardinal facts in our human constitution.
Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.
Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations. Translated by J. N. Findlay. 2 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
