The outer world in its eternal laws as well as in its most ephemeral appearances, like a magic mirror, doubtless reflects our highest and innermost nature in a thousand tender and sublime similitudes.1 But this happy imagery, the delicate charm of which should enliven and inform dull sensibilities as it plays upon them, is of no avail to such as disregard the plain demands of their own deepest feelings and do not hear the subdued sighing of their abused spirit. The true significance and inner purport of outward relations escapes them, even of such as their own genius has contrived and must repeatedly bring to light. Thus (in the reckoning of the calendar),2 we divide the infinite line of time into equal portions, at points determined arbitrarily by the most trivial circumstances, having no significance in our lives and determining nothing, since nought proceeds at an exact pace, not the structure of our work, nor the round of our emotions, nor the play of our destiny. And yet these arbitrary divisions are meant to be something more than an aid to the chronologer or a feast for the mathematician; to everyone they must inevitably suggest serious ¹reflections on the possibility of dividing life. But few are they who penetrate beneath the surface of this profound allegory, and understand to what truth this very natural⁵ suggestion points.
The average individual recognizes nothing but his transient existence, and its irresistible decline from sunny heights into a dread night of annihilation. He thinks some hidden hand draws the thread of his life along, alternately weaving and unweaving a web of sensations and ideas, pulling it together now loosely, now tightly, and that nothing more exists. The swifter the succession of our thoughts and feelings, the richer their variety, the more harmonious and intimate their combination, the more glorious and perfect a work of art our life is believed to be. And could men also explain in mechanistic fashion the entire nexus of such a life,⁶ they would regard themselves as having reached the summit of humanity and of self-comprehension. But in thinking thus they mistake the reflected image of their activity for the whole⁷ activity itself, those outer contact-points, wherein the energies of the self meet with external things, for their inmost being, they mistake the atmosphere for the world about which it has formed.3 How could such men, (watching the old year out and awaiting the new), with reflections no deeper than these, understand the challenge implicit in this very act of dividing time?4 The point which cuts a line is not part of that line; it is related to the Infinite as truly and more immediately than to the line, and anywhere along the line you can place such a point.5 Just so, the moment in which you cut the course of life and make a new division, should be no portion of your temporal existence; you should regard it otherwise, and in it become conscious of your immediate relations to the Infinite and Eternal;⁸ and whenever you will, such a moment can be yours. Seeing herein a sublime intimation of the Divine in me, I rejoice in its invitation to an immortal life outside the realm of time and free from its harsh laws! But those, who do not recognize a call to this higher life, while immersed in transient thought and feeling, will equally fail to apprehend it when, without really knowing what they are about, they resort to the measurement of time for the sake of marking off periods in their mundane existence. Better that they never even suspected the truth than that their vain energetic bustle should so painfully disconcert me when I strive to obey the divine invitation! Doubtless they too demand a point in time, which shall mean more than a merely transient present, but they have not the wit to apprehend it as Eternity. Often for a moment, sometimes perhaps for an hour or even for a day,6 they will actually absolve themselves from the obligations of assiduous industry, from the eager quest for knowledge and pleasure, warned as they needs must be of the transiency of their interests, by the reflection that the present is ever slipping into the past as speedily as it emerges out of the future. There follows disillusionment and disgust with all this useless pursuit of novel enjoyments, perceptions, or activities; they sit down on the bank of the river of life, and with a helpless smile let fall their tears into the dancing waves below. Like barbarous savages who kill the wives, the children, or the slaves beside a father’s grave,⁹ so at the close of a departing year they sacrifice the holiday, dissipating it in empty imaginings, a thoroughly vain oblation.