Between Thought And Feeling, And Amiel And Clough

Richard Holt Hutton, Chriticism on Contemporary Thought and Thinkers (MacMillan, 1894), vol. I., ch. XXI., Amiel and Clough, pp. 212-3:

Thought undoubtedly does correct, and correct with most salutary inexorability, the illusions of feeling. And, again, feeling does correct, and correct with equally salutary inexorability, the day-dreams of thought. The man who habitually distrusts his feelings is just as certain to live in a world of illusion as the man who habitually distrusts his thoughts. But undoubtedly Amiel, who allowed the illusion of his career much more absolutely than Clough ever allowed his faith in «the massy strengths of abstraction» to govern his career, made the greater mistake of the two. Had Amiel not been so sedulous to ward off the pressure of responsibilities to which he did not feel fully equal, he might doubtless have made mistakes, and entered into relations which he would have found painful to him and a shock to his ideal. But the truth is that those relations which are not all that we desire them to be in human life, which are not ideal relations, are of the very essence of the discipline of the will and of the affections, and no man ever yet escaped them, without escaping one of the most useful experiences of life. Amiel, like Clough, was far too much afraid of hampering the free play of his intellect. No man ever yet did a great work for the world, without hampering the free play of his intellect. And yet it is no paradox to say that no man ever yet had the highest command of his intellect who had not times without number hampered its free play, in order that he might enter the more deeply into the deeper relations of the human heart.