The ‘Journal’ of Amiel is symptomatic of his time,—­perhaps one reason why it met with so sympathetic a response.  It mirrors the intellectual doubtings, the spiritual yearnings and despairs of a strenuous and pure soul in a rationalistic atmosphere.  In the day of scientific test and of skepticism, of the readjustment of conventions and the overthrow of sacrosanct traditions, one whose life is that of thought rather than of action finds much to perplex, to weary, and to sadden.  So it was with the Swiss professor.  He was always in the sanctum sanctorum of his spirit, striving to attain the truth; with Hamlet-like irresolution he poised in mind before the antinomies of the universe, alert to see around a subject, having the modern thinker’s inability to be partisan.  This way of thought is obviously unhealthy, or at least has in it something of the morbid.  It implies the undue introspection which is well-nigh the disease of this century.  There is in it the failure to lose one’s life in objective incident and action, that one may find it again in regained balance of mind and bodily health.  Amiel had the defect of his quality; but he is clearly to be separated from those shallow or exaggerated specimens of subjectivity illustrated by present-day women diarists, like Bashkirtseff and Kovalevsky.  The Swiss poet-thinker had a vigor of thought and a broad culture; his aim was high, his desire pure, and his meditations were often touched with imaginative beauty.  Again and again he flashes light into the darkest penetralia of the human soul.  At times, too, there is in him a mystic fervor worthy of St. Augustine.  If his dominant tone is melancholy, he is not to be called a pessimist.  He believed in the Good at the central core of things.  Hence is he a fascinating personality, a stimulative force.  And these outpourings of an acute intellect, and a nature sensitive to the Ideal, are conveyed in a diction full of literary feeling and flavor.  Subtlety, depth, tenderness, poetry, succeed each other; nor are the crisp, compressed sayings, the happy mots of the epigrammatist, entirely lacking.  And pervading all is an impression of character.

Like Pascal, Amiel was a thinker interested above all in the soul of man.  He was a psychologist, seeking to know the secret of the Whence, the Why, and the Whither.  Like Joubert, whose journal resembled his own in its posthumous publication, his reflections will live by their weight, their quality, their beauty of form.  Nor are these earlier writers of “Pensees” likely to have a more permanent place among the seed-sowers of thought.  Amiel himself declared that “the pensee-writer is to the philosopher what the dilettante is to the artist.  He plays with thought, and makes it produce a crowd of pretty things of detail; but he is more anxious about truths than truth, and what is essential in thought, its sequence, its unity, escapes him....  In a word, the pensee-writer deals with what is superficial and fragmentary.”  While these words show the fine critical sense of the man, they do an injustice to his own work.  Fragmentary it is, but neither superficial nor petty.  One recognizes in reading his wonderfully suggestive pages that here is a rare personality, indeed,—­albeit “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”