I must not desire to
know anything beyond it. I must stand fast in this one centre, and
take root in it. All my scheming and striving, and all my faculty,
must be directed to that. My whole existence must inweave itself with
it.
* * * * *
I raise myself to this viewpoint, and am a new creature. My whole
relation to the existing world is changed. The threads by which my
mind was heretofore bound to this world, and by whose mysterious
traction it followed all the movements of this world, are forever
severed, and I stand free--myself, my own world, peaceful and unmoved.
No longer with the heart, with the eye alone, I seize the objects
about me, and, through the eye alone, am connected with them. And this
eye itself, made clearer by freedom, looks through error and deformity
to the true and the beautiful; as, on the unmoved surface of the
water, forms mirror themselves pure and with a softened light.
My mind is forever closed against embarrassment and confusion, against
doubt and anxiety; my heart is forever closed against sorrow, and
remorse, and desire. There is but one thing that I care to know: What
I must do; and this I know, infallibly, always. Concerning all besides
I know nothing, and I know that I know nothing; and I root myself fast
in this my ignorance, and forbear to conjecture, to opine, to quarrel
with myself concerning that of which I know nothing.
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