s,--that 'men are so necessarily mad, that it would be to be mad by a
new form of madness not to be mad;'--that man is nothing but
masquerading, lying, and hypocrisy, both in what concerns himself and in
respect of others, wishing not to have the truth told to himself, and
shrinking from telling it to anybody else;[1] that the will, the
imagination, the disorders of the body, the thousand concealed
infirmities of the intelligence, conspire to reduce our discovery of
justice and truth to a process of haphazard, in which we more often miss
the mark than hit.[2] Pleasure, ambition, industry, are only means of
distracting men from the otherwise unavoidable contemplation of their
own misery. How speak of the dignity of the race and its history, when
we know that a grain of sand in Cromwell's bladder altered the destinies
of a kingdom, and that if Cleopatra's nose had been shorter the whole
surface of the earth would be different? Imagine, in a word, 'a number
of men in chains, and all condemned to death; some of them each day
butchered in the sight of the others, while those who remain watch their
own condition in that of their fellows, and eyeing one another in
anguish and hopelessness, wait their turn; such is the situation of
man.'[3]

It was hardly possible to push the tragical side of the verities of life
beyond this, and there was soon an instinctive reaction towards
realities. The sensations with their conditions of pleasure no less than
of pain; the intelligence with its energetic aptitudes for the discovery
of protective and fruitful knowledge; the affections with their large
capacities for giving and receiving delight; the spontaneous inner
impulse towards action and endurance in the face of outward
circumstances--all these things reassured men, and restored in theory to
them with ample interest what in practice they had never lost--a
rational faith and exultation in their own faculties, both of finding
out truth and of feeling a very substantial degree of happiness. On
this side too, as on the other, speculation went to its extreme limit.
The hapless and despairing wretches of Pascal were transformed by the
votaries of perfectibility into bright beings not any lower than the
angels. Between the two extremes there was one fine moralist who knew
how to hold a just balance, perceiving that language is the expression
of relations and proportions, that when we speak of virtue and genius we
mean qualities that compared