He lives in what he feels, more than in what he sees.
Creation may beset him, want may assail him, pleasure may tempt him, the beast within him may torment him, but all in vain; a sort of incessant aspiration toward another world impels him irresistibly beyond creation, beyond want, beyond pleasure, beyond the beast.

He glimpses everywhere, at every moment, the upper world, and he fills his soul with that vision, and regulates his actions by it.

He does not feel complete in this life on earth.

He bears within him, so to speak, a mysterious pattern of the anterior and ulterior world--the perfect world--with which he is incessantly, and despite himself, comparing the imperfect world, and himself, and his infirmities, and his appetites, and his passions, and his actions.

When he perceives that he is approaching this ideal pattern, he is overjoyed; when he sees that he is receding from it, he is sad.