[Sidenote: "CAST NOT YOUR PEARLS BEFORE SWINE"]
[Sidenote: Oct. 11, Syracuse, Lecky's, midnight]
O young man, who hast seen, felt and known the truth, to whom reality is a phantom and virtue and mind the sole actual and permanent being, do not degrade the truth in thee by disputing. Avoid it! do not by any persuasion be tempted to it! Surely not by vanity or the weakness of the pleasure of communicating thy thoughts and awaking sympathy, but not even by the always mixed hope of producing conviction. This is not the mode, this is not the time, not the place. [Truth will be better served] by modestly and most truly saying, "Your arguments are all consequent, if the foundation be admitted. I do not admit the foundation. But this will be a business for moments of thought, for a Sabbath-day of your existence. Then, perhaps, a voice from within will say to you, better, because [in a manner] more adapted to you, all I can say. But if I felt this to _be_ that day or that moment, a sacred sympathy would at once compel and inspire me to the task of uttering the very truth. Till then I am right willing to bear the character of a mystic, a visionary, or self-important juggler, who nods his head and says, 'I could if I would.' But I cannot, I _may_ not, bear the reproach of profaning the truth which is my life in moments when all passions heterogeneous to it are eclipsing it to the exclusion of its dimmest ray. I might lose my tranquillity, and in acquiring the _passion_ of proselytism lose the _sense_ of conviction. I might become _positive_! Now I am _certain_! I might have the heat and fermentation, now I have the warmth of life."
[Sidenote: THE YEARNING OF THE FINITE FOR THE INFINITE: Oct. 13, 1804, Saturday, Syracuse]
Each man having a spark (to use the old metaphor) of the Divinity, yet a whole fire-grate of humanity--each, therefore, will legislate for the whole, and spite of the _De gustibus non est disputandum_, even in trifles--and, till corrected by experience, at least, in this endless struggle of presumption, really occasioned by the ever-working spark of the Universal, in the disappointments and baffled attempts of each, all are disposed to [admit] the _jus extrinsecum_ of Spinoza, and recognise that reason as the highest which may not be understood as the best, but of which the concrete possession is felt to be the strongest. Then come society, habit, education, misery, intrigue, oppression, then _revolution_, and the circle begins anew. Each man will universalise his notions, and, yet, each is variously finite. To _reconcile_, therefore, is truly the work of the inspired! This is the true _Atonement_--that is, to reconcile the struggles of the infinitely various finite with the _permanent_.
