[00:05.25]042.True and False Simplicity [00:15.11]Simplicity is an uprightness of soul that has no reference to self; it is different from sincerity, [00:24.35]and it is a still higher virtue. We see many people who are sincere, without being simple; [00:32.87]they only wish to pass for what they are, and they are unwilling to appear what they are not; [00:39.95]they are always thinking of themselves, measuring their words, and recalling their thoughts, [00:46.22]and reviewing their actions, from the fear that they have done too much or too little. [00:55.03]These persons are sincere, but they are not simple; they are not at ease with others, [01:03.46]and others are not at ease with them; they are not free, ingenuous, natural; we prefer people who are less correct, [01:14.08]less perfect, and who are less artificial. This is the decision of man, and it is the judgment of God, [01:24.65]who would not have us so occupied with ourselves, and thus, as it were, always arranging our features in a mirror. [01:34.73]To be wholly occupied with others, never to look within, [01:40.13]is the state of blindness of those who are entirely engrossed by what is present and addressed to their sense; [01:49.53]this is the very reverse of simplicity. To be absorbed in self and in whatever engages us, [01:59.12]whether we are laboring for our fellow beings or for God - to be wise in our own eyes reserved, [02:07.08]and full of ourselves, troubled at the least thing that disturbs our self complacency, is the opposite extreme. [02:16.58]This is false wisdom, which, with all its glory, is but little less absurd than that folly, which pursues only pleasure. [02:28.85]The one is intoxicated with all it sees around it; the other with all that it imagines it has within; [02:38.35]but it is delirium in both. [02:41.46]To be absorbed in the contemplation of our own minds is really worse than to be engrossed by outward things, [02:51.56]because it appears like wisdom and yet is not, we do not think of curing it, we pride ourselves upon it, [03:01.56]we approve of it, it gives us an unnatural strength, it is a sort of frenzy, we are not conscious of it, [03:10.46]we are dying, and we think ourselves in health. [03:14.42]Simplicity consists in a just medium, in which we are neither too much excited, nor too composed. [03:25.31]The soul is not carried away by outward things, so that it cannot make all necessary reflections; [03:33.63]neither does it make those continual references to self, that a jealous sense of its own excellence multiplies to infinity. [03:43.71]That freedom of the soul, which looks straight onward in its path, losing no time to reason upon its steps, [03:53.73]to study them, or to contemplate those that it has already taken, is true simplicity.

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