Man is not a product of the world of the senses; and the end of his existence can never be attained in that world.  His destination lies beyond time and space and all that pertains to the senses.  He must know what he is and what he is to make himself.  As his destination is sublime, so his thought must be able to lift itself above all the bounds of the senses.  This must be his calling.  Where his being is indigenous, there his thought must be indigenous also; and the most truly human view, that which alone befits him, that in which his whole power of thought is represented, is the view by which he lifts himself above those limits, by which all that is of the senses is changed for him into pure nothing, a mere reflection in mortal eyes of the alone enduring, non-sensuous.

Many have been elevated to this view without scientific thought, simply by their great heart and their pure moral instinct; because they lived especially with the heart, and in the sentiments.  They denied, by their conduct, the efficacy and reality of the world of the senses; and in the shaping of their purposes and measures, they esteemed as nothing that concerning which they had not yet learned by thinking that it is nothing, even to thought.  They who could say, “our citizenship is in heaven; we have here no permanent place, but seek one to come;” they whose first principle was, to die to the world and to be born anew, and, even here, to enter into another life—­they, truly, placed not the slightest value upon all the objects of sense, and were, to use the language of the School, practical transcendental Idealists.

Others who, in addition to the sensuous activity which is native to us all, have, by their thought, confirmed themselves in the sensuous, become implicated, and, as it were, grown together with it; they can raise themselves permanently and perfectly above the sensuous only by continuing and carrying out their thought.  Otherwise, with the purest moral intentions, they will still be drawn down again by their understanding, and their whole being will remain a continued and insoluble contradiction.  For such, that philosophy, which I now first entirely understand, is the power by which Psyche first strips off her chrysalis, unfolds the wings on which she then hovers above herself, and casts one glance on the slough she has dropped, thenceforth to live and work in higher spheres.

Blessed be the hour in which I resolved to meditate on myself and my destination!  All my questions are solved.  I know what I can know, and I am without anxiety concerning that which I cannot know.  I am satisfied.  There is perfect harmony and clearness in my spirit, and a new and more glorious existence for that spirit begins.