I cannot help it, — in spite of myself, infinity torments me.

The speaker confesses an involuntary metaphysical anguish: even against his will, the idea of the infinite—endless time, boundless space, absolute being, or God—produces torment rather than consolation. The line captures a Romantic sensibility in which heightened consciousness and imagination become a source of suffering, because the mind can conceive what the self cannot contain or resolve. “In spite of myself” emphasizes compulsion: the yearning for ultimate meaning cannot be switched off, yet it yields no stable answer, only restlessness. The quote thus dramatizes the tension between finite human limits and the mind’s appetite for the absolute.