Not only was the life of imagination as real to him as the life of fact, but the life of fact was clothed upon by that of imagination; so that, on the one hand, daily events and common circumstances became a part of his spiritual experience in a far more intimate sense than is the case with other men, while, on the other, his fancies and his visions assumed the absoluteness and the literal existence of positive external facts.

The absolute or the logical Idea exists first as a system of antemundane concepts, then it descends into the unconscious sphere of nature, awakens to self-consciousness in man, realizes its content in social institutions, in order, finally, in art, religion, and science to return to itself enriched and completed, i.e., to attain a higher absoluteness than that of the beginning.

Having dared to think, then shall we use the expression "little sins," or doubt the terrible absoluteness of exactitude with which "every idle word which men speak" shall enter upon eternity of reckoning.

" Friendship is a favorite topic of the Eastern poets, and they have matched on this head the absoluteness of Montaigne.