neglect any means towards that end.  I, who never deceive myself, confess openly that I want Aniela to sacrifice for me her husband, but I do not want to corrupt her or to soil her purity.  Let nobody tell me that this is a sophism, and that the one includes the other.  The tormenting devil that is always within me raising difficulties says:  “You create new theories; the way of faithlessness is the way of corruption.”  How these conflicting thoughts tear me to pieces!  I reply to the familiar spirit:  “I might doubt opposite theories quite as much; I contrive what I can in defence of my love,—­it is my natural law.”  And there is a greater law still, the law of love.  Some feelings are mean and commonplace, others lofty and full of nobility.  A woman that follows the call of lofty feeling does not lose the nobility of her soul.  Such a great, exceptional love I try to awake in Aniela, and therefore I may say conscientiously that I do not want to corrupt her.

Besides, these inward arguments do not lead to anything.  Even if I had not the slightest doubt that I am doing wrong, if I were unable to give any conclusive answer to the tormenting spirit, I would not cease loving; and always following where a greater power leads me, I should go according to my feeling, and not according to abstract reasoning.

But the true misfortune of those analytic and hyper-analytic modern people is that, though not believing in the result of their analysis, they have the invincible habit of inquiring into everything that goes on within themselves.  It is the same with me.  For some time I have been questioning myself how it is possible that a man absorbed by a great feeling should be able to be so watchful, so calculating about ways and means, and to account for everything as if somebody else did it for him.  I could reply to it in this way:  The man of the period reserves above everything part of himself to observe the other part.  Besides, the whole activity of a mind full of forethought, of reflections apparently cool, stands eventually in proportion to the temperature of the feeling.  The hotter this grows, the more cool reason is forced into service.  I repeat, it is a mistake to represent love with bandaged eyes.  Love does not suppress reason, as it does not suppress the breathing, or the beating of the heart,—­it only subjugates it.  Reason thereupon becomes the first adviser, the implement of war,—­in other words, it plays the part of an Agrippa to a Caesar Augustus.  It is holding all the forces in readiness, leads them into war, gains victories, and places the monarch on the triumphal car; it erects finally,—­not a Pantheon, like the historical Agrippa,—­but a Monotheon, where it serves its only divinity.  In the microcosm called man, the part reason plays is a still greater one than that of chief commander,—­for it reflects into infinite parts the consciousness of everything and of self,—­as a collection of properly arranged mirrors reflect a given object infinitely.