The Travel Diary of a Philosopher. Translated by J. Holroyd Reece

I bend an admiring gaze upon the naïve self-assurance of the shoots the intelligent pliancy of the creeping and climbing plants the insinuatingly tenacious wooing of the foliage for a place in the light: that wondrous tropical vegetative process which in its stillness yet conveys the impression of greater abundance of movement than the restlessness of a human crowd. [...] It is chiefly the light grey of the rotting trunks of the jungle giants that enables the eye to survey the immensity of the green. [...] What wondrous magic there is in the world of plants! The restful and as it were inevitable perfection the unquestioned harmony of co-existence the unconscious beauty of the plants their care-free existence in itself which yields withal a perfect solution of the problem of life invariably arouses in me the feeing of certainty that I too am winning my way towards my goal. [...] The intrinsic beauty of the ideogram unconsciously educates their taste all the more so as it is regarded as ill-bred not to have a beautiful hanwriting and the necessity of differentiating instantaneously a large number of such ideograms whose marks often consist of the tiniest details sharpens the vision of the eye. [...] 37 CANTON 35 the actual sufferer the absolute greatness of the pain soon kills the whole of his power of imagination and with it the possbility of relating the sensations of the moment with those of the past and the future; once this has happened once cosciousness is only filled by the present then the worst torture can hardly be felt to be worse than the treatment of a diseased tooth by