and the pleasure one tastes in
so short a space, dearly repaid with a long and tedious uneasiness.
_Ebrietas unius horae hilarem insaniam longo temporis tedio pensat._

I own that it is a very great misery, that our pleasures are so short:
and the shorter too, the more exquisite they are. And, perhaps, this may
be a kindness to us, since some are so superlatively so, that should
they continue a much longer space, mankind could not support themselves
under these ecstacies. But be this as it will, can we make them
otherwise than they are? We must therefore have patience, and take them
as we find them. In short, there is no present happiness in the world;
all we can do, is to be contented with the present, not uneasy at what
is to come, but sweeten with an equality of soul the bitter miseries of
human life.

[Footnote 1: Lett. xvi. sur la Crit. de Calvin, p. 516.]

[[Footnote 1a: Virgil, _Eclogues_ IV.5.]]

[Footnote 2: Fontenelle Dial. d'Elisab. et du D. d'Alencon.]

[Footnote 3: Fontenelle Dial. des Morts de Callirh. et de Paulin.]

[Footnote 4: Nov. Dial. des Dieux. p. 68.]

[Footnote 5: Poesies Pastor.]

[Footnote 6: Essais, lib. iii. ch. 9.]

[Footnote 7: Satire iv. M. la Vayer.]

[Footnote 8: Lib. ii. ep. 2.]

[Footnote 9: Lett. de Rab. t. iii. lett. 63.]

[Footnote 10: De l'Amitie, p. 2.]

[Footnote 11: Rep. aux Quest. d'un Prov. t. i. ch. 20.]

CHAP. XXII.

AN ANSWER TO THE OBJECTION, THAT ONE LOSES ONE'S REASON IN GETTING
DRUNK.

It is objected here, that reason ought to be the motive of all our
actions; and, of consequence, that we ought not voluntarily to lose it.

To this objection I answer several ways:-- First and foremost then,
I say, people do well to talk to us so much of reason, when almost all
mankind acts without reason, so that it may pass for a thing that has no
manner of existence but in the imagination. We shall prove this from
M. Bayle. "[1]We are defined," says he, "a reasonable animal. A very
fine definition indeed, when none of us do any thing but without reason.
I assure you, sir, that one may say of reason, what Euripides said in
the beginning of one of his tragedies, and which afterwards was
corrected, on account of the murmurings of the people. O Jupiter, for of
thee I know nothing but only the name! In relation to the faculty I am
talking of, we know nothing more of it than that, so that we may well
laugh at the