s be ignorant thereof.

What is thought? where does it dwell? how is it formed? who gives me
thought during my sleep? is it by virtue of my will that I think? But
always during my sleep, and often while I am awake, I have ideas in
spite of myself. These ideas, long forgotten, long relegated to the back
shop of my brain, issue from it without my interfering, and present
themselves to my memory, which makes vain efforts to recall them.

External objects have not the power to form ideas in me, for one does
not give oneself what one has not; I am too sensible that it is not I
who give them to me, for they are born without my orders. Who produces
them in me? whence do they come? whither do they go? Fugitive phantoms,
what invisible hand produces you and causes you to disappear?

Why, alone of all animals, has man the mania for dominating his
fellow-men?

Why and how has it been possible that of a hundred thousand million men
more than ninety-nine have been immolated to this mania?

How is reason so precious a gift that we would not lose it for anything
in the world? and how has this reason served only to make us the most
unhappy of all beings?

Whence comes it that loving truth passionately, we are always betrayed
to the most gross impostures?

Why is life still loved by this crowd of Indians deceived and enslaved
by the bonzes, crushed by a Tartar's descendants, overburdened with
work, groaning in want, assailed by disease, exposed to every scourge?

Whence comes evil, and why does evil exist?

O atoms of a day! O my companions in infinite littleness, born like me
to suffer everything and to be ignorant of everything, are there enough
madmen among you to believe that they know all these things? No, there
are not; no, at the bottom of your hearts you feel your nonentity as I
render justice to mine. But you are arrogant enough to want people to
embrace your vain systems; unable to be tyrants over our bodies, you
claim to be tyrants over our souls.

_THE IMPIOUS_

Who are the impious? those who give a white beard, feet and hands to the
Being of beings, to the great Demiourgos, to the eternal intelligence by
which nature is governed. But they are only excusably impious, poor
impious people against whom one must not grow wroth.

If even they paint the great incomprehensible Being born on a cloud
which can bear nothing; if they are foolish enough to put God in a mist,
in the rain, or on a mountain, and to su