I will endeavour to like
their very defects; I will endeavour to persuade myself, O Hippia,
that they are descendants of the horsemen who, aloft upon the marble
of thy frieze celebrate without ceasing their glad festival. I will
pluck out of my heart every fibre which is not reason and pure art.
I will try to love my bodily ills, to find delight in the flush of
fever. Help me! Further my resolutions, O Salutaris! Help, thou who
savest!
"Great are the difficulties which I foresee. Inveterate the habits of
mind which I shall have to change. Many the delightful recollections
which I shall have to pluck out of my heart. I will try, but I am not
very confident of my power. Late in life have I known thee, O perfect
Beauty. I shall be beset with hesitations and temptation to fall
away. A philosophy, perverse no doubt in its teachings, has led me to
believe that good and evil, pleasure and pain, the beautiful and
the ungainly, reason and folly, fade into one another by shades as
impalpable as those in a dove's neck. To feel neither absolute love
nor absolute hate becomes therefore wisdom. If any one society,
philosophy, or religion, had possessed absolute truth, this society,
philosophy, or religion, would have vanquished all the others and
would be the only one now extant. All those who have hitherto believed
themselves to be right were in error, as we see very clearly. Can we
without utter presumption believe that the future will not judge us as
we have judged the past? Such are the blasphemous ideas suggested to
me by my corrupt mind.
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