ring of some
hideous skeleton.

"However, they hang on to this life which they do not cease to
calumniate, and people of common sense are rarely found who will try to
reason with them from a common-sense standpoint:

"'Since life is so insupportable to you, why do you impose upon yourself
the obligation to struggle with it?

"'Only insane people try to prolong their sojourn in a place where they
suffer martyrdom.'

"It is true that when, perchance, this argument is placed before them,
they do not fail to reply by invoking the shame of desertion.

"'Well, is not then the interest of the struggle to which we are
subjected a sufficient attraction to keep us at our post?'"

And, always enamored with the doctrine, which we are now assiduously
maintaining, he concludes:

"Common sense is, at times, the unfolding of a magnificent force which
incites us to attune our environment to actualities.

"One must not, however, fall into excess and draw a huge sword to pierce
the clouds, which obscure the sun.

"If struggle is praiseworthy when we have to face a real enemy, it
becomes worthy of scorn and laughter if we attack a puerile or imaginary
adversary.

"But the number of people incapable of appreciating the true color of
things is not limited to those who enshroud them in black.

"There are others, on the contrary, who obstinately insist upon
surrounding them with a halo of sunlight only existing in their
imagination.

"For such deluded people, obstacles seen from a distance take on the most
attractive appearance; they would be readily disposed to enjoy them and
only consent to allow them a certain importance if they absolutely
obstruct the way.

"But until the moment when impossibility confronts them, do they deny its
existence or underrate its importance by attributing a favorable
influence to it.

"This propensity to see all in the ideal would be enviable if it did not
wound common sense, which revenges itself by refusing to these
improvident people the help of the reasoning power necessary to sustain
them in the crisis of discouragement which brings about irresistibly the
establishment of error.

"These unbalanced people rarely experience success, for they are unable,
as long as their blindness lasts, to mark out a line of serious conduct
for themselves.

"All projects built on the quicksands of false deductions will perish
without even leaving behind them material sufficient to reconstruct them.

"It