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The traits that distinguished these peoples in the past have been gradually extinguishing them ever since. Of these traits, stagnating influences upon their career, perhaps the most important is the great quality of impersonality.
Born in 1806 at Osnabrück, and at his death in 1881 a professor in Jena, Fortlage shared with Beneke an impersonality of character, as well as the fate of meeting with less esteem from his contemporaries than he merited by the seriousness and originality of his thinking.
Impersonality in art really means mediocrity. If you have nothing to tell about yourself, or if courage be lacking in you to tell the truth, you are not an artist. Are women without souls, or is it that they dare not reveal their souls unadorned with the laces and ribbons of convention? Their memoirs are a tissue of lies, suppressions, and half-truths.
What is the highest idea of God, excluding superstition, anthropomorphism, and vague impersonality alike, what is the fit and true utterance of the deepest and divinest heart to God, this, I must think, may well occupy the sublimest meditations of human intellect and devotion. Not that the entire Liturgy, however, should be the product of any one man's thought.
There reigns over Barbusse's book a specious impersonality. Despite the multitude and the sharp outline of the figures on his stage, not one of them has a commanding role. We see no hero of romance. Consequently, the reader feels less intimately associated with the hardships recounted on every page; and these hardships, like their causes, have an elemental character.
Impersonality, even in its strictest meaning, i.e., without "conscious separate existence as an intelligent and voluntary being," only partially expresses the conception of Buddhism. The full conception rejects not only personality, but also every other quality; the ultimate and the absolute of Buddhism we may not even call it being is the absolutely abstract.
I do not know; it has been thought that may have been merely a pretense, an artistic convention, to give a heightened value of impersonality to his marvelous prose: for it was he who wrote down the account of the death of Socrates for us: that tragedy so transcendent in its beauty and lofty calm.
We may not, however, leave the discussion at this point, for important considerations still demand our attention if we would probe this problem of personality to its core. Advocates of Japanese "impersonality" call attention to the phenomena of self-suppression in religion.
He had considered this, under certain circumstances welcoming it, or dismissing it with a creditable calmness, many times before; but then his attitude had been softened by the detachment, the impersonality, of his view. But at last the feeling of death was tangibly at his own throat; not today, nor tomorrow, probably; but inescapably.
"But," asked I, "am I to lose my individual existence, to become finally merged in a universal impersonality? What, then, is the object of life?"
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