The key to utilizing such principles of faith and of imagination is to use them together with the known, the concrete sights and smells that can be touched and detected by the body. Doing so brings about a state of balance in perception that can help people tremendously throughout the course of their lives. This state of balance is implied in de Button's preceding quote in which the reader should be aware that von Humboldt left his "boring daily life" in Berlin to find a "marvelous" place in South America -- which is all a matter of perspective, and one which may be considered more stiff and rigid than De Maistre's imaginative conception of exploring his couch as though it were something new. Yet the reconciliation of both of these viewpoints indicates the balance that we have been looking for throughout this paper. Humboldt's viewpoint is not exchanged for De...
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