nd aright the true sense and coherence of the text,
together with the moral it contains and all the subtle application of
which it admits.

Towards the close of life, much the same thing happens as at the end
of a _bal masque_--the masks are taken off. Then you can see who
the people really are, with whom you have come into contact in your
passage through the world. For by the end of life characters have come
out in their true light, actions have borne fruit, achievements have
been rightly appreciated, and all shams have fallen to pieces. For
this, Time was in every case requisite.

But the most curious fact is that it is also only towards the close
of life than a man really recognizes and understands his own true
self,--the aims and objects he has followed in life, more especially
the kind of relation in which he has stood to other people and to the
world. It will often happen that as a result of this knowledge, a man
will have to assign himself a lower place than he formerly thought
was his due. But there are exceptions to this rule; and it will
occasionally be the case that he will take a higher position than he
had before. This will be owing to the fact that he had no adequate
notion of the _baseness_ of the world, and that he set up a higher aim
for himself than was followed by the rest of mankind.

The progress of life shows a man the stuff of which he is made.

It is customary to call youth the happy, and age the sad part of life.
This would be true if it were the passions that made a man happy.
Youth is swayed to and fro by them; and they give a great deal of pain
and little pleasure. In age the passions cool and leave a man at rest,
and then forthwith his mind takes a contemplative tone; the intellect
is set free and attains the upper hand. And since, in itself,
intellect is beyond the range of pain, and man feels happy just in so
far as his intellect is the predominating part of him.

It need only be remembered that all pleasure is negative, and that
pain is positive in its nature, in order to see that the passions can
never be a source of happiness, and that age is not the less to be
envied on the ground that many pleasures are denied it. For every sort
of pleasure is never anything more than the quietive of some need or
longing; and that pleasure should come to an end as soon as the need
ceases, is no more a subject of complaint than that a man cannot go on
eating after he has had his dinner, or fall as