The Breviary of Aesthetic 67
of repose from movement, so full of anxiety; withdrawn
henceforward from the ocean and standing upon the shore,
to turn back and contemplate the tossing billows. But I have
already had occasion to state of what this repose consists : an
effectual negation of reality, beneath the appearance of ele-
vation and sublimation; and it is certainly attained, but is
called death; the death of the individual, not of reality,
which does not die, and is not afflicted by its own motion,
but enjoys it. Others dream of a spiritual form, in which the
circle is dissolved, a form which should be Thought of
thought, unity of the Theoretical and of the Practical, Love,
God, or whatever other name it may bear; they fail to per-
ceive that this thought, this unity, this Love, this God, al-
ready exists in and for the circle, and that they are uselessly
repeating a search already completed, or are repeating
metaphorically what has already been discovered, in the
myth of another world, where the very drama of the only
world should be repeated.
I have hitherto outlined this drama, as it truly is, ideal and
extratemporal, employing such terms as first and second,
solely with a view to verbal convenience and in order to in-
dicate logical order:—ideal and extratemporal, because there
is not a moment and there is not an individual in whom it is
not all performed, as there is no particle of the universe un-
breathed upon by the Spirit of God. But the ideal, indivisible
moments of the ideal drama can be seen as if divided in em-
pirical reality, like an impure and embodied symbol of the
ideal distinction. Not that they are really divided (ideality
is the true reality), but they appear to be so empirically to
him who looks upon them with a view to classification, for
he possesses no other way of determining in the types the
individuality of the facts that have attracted his attention,