Two things nearly incompatible, he writes in an important passage, are united in me without my being able to think how; an extremely ardent temperament, lively and impetuous passions, along with ideas that are very slow in coming to birth, very embarrassed, and which never arise until after the event.  “One would say that my heart and my intelligence do not belong to the same individual....  I feel all, and see nothing; I am carried away, but I am stupid....  This slowness of thinking, united with such vivacity of feeling, possesses me not only in conversation, but when I am alone and working.  My ideas arrange themselves in my head with incredible difficulty; they circulate there in a dull way and ferment until they agitate me, fill me with heat, and give me palpitations; in the midst of this stir I see nothing clearly, I could not write a single word.  Insensibly the violent emotion grows still, the chaos is disentangled, everything falls into its place, but very slowly and after long and confused agitation."[90]

So far from saying that his heart and intelligence belonged to two persons, we might have been quite sure, knowing his heart, that his intelligence must be exactly what he describes its process to have been.  The slow-burning ecstasy in which he knew himself at his height and was most conscious of fulness of life, was incompatible with the rapid and deliberate generation of ideas.  The same soft passivity, the same receptiveness, which made his emotions like the surface of a lake under sky and breeze, entered also into the working of his intellectual faculties.  But it happens that in this region, in the attainment of knowledge, truth, and definite thoughts, even receptiveness implies a distinct and active energy, and hence the very quality of temperament which left him free and eager for sensuous impressions, seemed to muffle his intelligence in a certain opaque and resisting medium, of the indefinable kind that interposes between will and action in a dream.  His rational part was fatally protected by a non-conducting envelope of sentiment; this intercepted clear ideas on their passage, and even cut off the direct and true impress of those objects and their relations, which are the material of clear ideas.  He was no doubt right in his avowal that objects generally made less impression on him than the recollection of them; that he could see nothing of what was before his eyes, and had only his intelligence in cases where memories were concerned; and that of what was said or done in his presence, he felt and penetrated nothing.[91] In other words, this is to say that his material of thought was not fact but image.  When he plunged into reflection, he did not deal with the objects of reflection at first hand and in themselves, but only with the reminiscences of objects, which he had never approached in a spirit of deliberate and systematic observation, and with those reminiscences, moreover, suffused and saturated by the impalpable but most