“Infinitely far from the world of flowers,” sighs Novalis. What about the world of stones! And where along the way do we pick up the idea that we know what we’re talking about?
Of course, the question only makes sense to those who believe that nothing around them can be in vain, that everything must somehow concern them; that a perception recurring infinitely from the morning to the night of life, like that of the object generically called stone, could not be purely self-contained and remain a dead letter. The learned classifications of mineralogists leave them entirely unsatisfied. Indeed, these scientists are to them only a category of those “eloquent naturalists” who cling to the visible and tangible and of whom Claude de Saint-Martin could say that “they disappoint our expectation by not satisfying in us this ardent and pressing need, which drives us less toward what we see in sensible objects, than toward what we do not see in them.”1
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